Chicanonautica: Dispatches from Artsy-Fartsy Cowboy Land

by Ernest Hogan 

Lately, the news gives me déjà vû. I feel like I’ve been whisked back in time, once again reading the new wave spec fic of my adolescence in the early Seventies, when a man named Nixon (not Mojo) was in the White House, the Vietnam war was grinding into a faded preview of the heat death of the universe, and the counterculture was imploding. 

Since Arizona politics as they affect those of us in the Latinoid continuum is part of my beat, I promised to cherchez le weird about it while my wife Emily and I took a quick jaunt to Sedona and Prescott. There’s usually some weird shit going on.

It used to be that during a presidential election, the Republicans started out screaming about the border, and brown invaders, then veered off into other issues. Now they can’t stay away from it. 

 

Trump has just defeated Haley in the South Carolina primary. And what he had to say: “They’re coming from Asia, they’re coming from the Middle East, coming from all over the world, coming from Africa, and we’re not going to stand for it . . . They’re destroying our country. . . We have languages coming into our country . . . they have languages that nobody in this country has ever heard of. It’s a horrible thing.”

The immigration bill failed because it was linked to aid for the Ukraine. And there is a surge of undocumented border crossings.They aren’t just bad hombres from Mejico any more. Bad politics are bringing them to the land of the free from Venezuela, Nicaragua, India, China, and others in a worldwide failure of democracy. Even Arizona’s Democratic governor Katie Hobbs wants to call out the National Guard, but to do what, help fill out forms? And yet, nobody likes Kari Lake, even the Republicans, who are advancing a bill allowing people to legally kill someone accused of “attempting to trespass or actively trespassing on their property.”

 

It’s been strange in a different way in 2024. Once you get away from the news feeds, it’s hard to tell that an election is going on. No bumper stickers, or signs. No declarations in public places. An eerie quiet.

As we left the Metro Phoenix area, it was the same, even though I was scanning the streets. The only mention of politics was some incomprehensible babble at a restaurant at breakfast. I couldn’t tell who the guy was for or against. He seemed to be influenced by conspiracy theories, but it was without form and vague.

It was the same on the drive up to Sedona, where at a store John Lennon's “Imagine” played and a little old lady sang along.

Little old ladies aren’t what they used to be.

But then, this was Sedona, a New Age Mecca. As I overheard someone say in a trendy thrift store: “We’re artsy-fartsy cowboy.”

However, amid the colorful shops, was this one place selling T-shirts proclaiming DONALD TRUMP MATTERS and LET’S GO BRANDON!

Later, while we were hiking on the Huckaby Trail, a California Trump fan with psychic tendencies sent me some texts. She was having dystopian dreams about oppression and militarization.

When we headed to Prescott, home of the world’s oldest rodeo, I was expecting things to be different. And they were more conservative, but still, no election signs or bumper stickers. The roadside sellers of flags, especially TRUMP 2024, had gone missing. The cowboys were becoming un poco más artsy-fartsy.

I contemplated that while sipping a mocha in the Art Deco splendor of the Hassayampa Inn and listening to old time jazz.

Biden and Trump won the Michigan primary. No surprise. Everything went as expected.

But I’ve learned to expect the unexpected.

Like the only political thing we ran into in Prescott, while Biden and Trump were doing political theater at the border, was a young black man on Whisky Row trying to collect signatures to get RFK, Jr. on the ballot for president.

The deadline to apply for Ernest Hogan’s online class on Gonzo Science Fiction, Chicano Style has been extended to March 12.