Chicanonautica: Arizona in a Battleground State of Mind

by Ernest Hogan

This was written a couple weeks before it goes up . . .

Arizona is cooking. We’ve had over 100 days of over 100 degrees Fahrenheit in a row, and there’s no end in sight. We’re set to break records again.

And that’s the weather, meanwhile, in politics . . .

I said that it was unusually quiet on that front. It’s a quiet we shouldn’t trust. Like in all those old movies I watched as a kid when the bad guys were lurking, and one young trooper would scream, “WHY DON’T THEY JUST ATTACK?”

Then he’d usually get an arrow or a bullet in the chest and all hell would break loose.

There were some signs of politics on that recent spontaneous road trip: 

In Flagstaff, there was an OLD JOE AND THE HOE GOTTA GO bumper sticker.

Then that shop in Sedona that was selling Trump T-shirts a few months ago now displayed fresh ones with the town’s name and flying saucers.

After a traffic jam, we ended up in Kari Lake territory. No mention of Vance, just TRUMP LAKE signs as if she were the running mate. Did we slip into an alternate universe?

In Prescott, there was a car emblazoned with COVID SHOTS KILL. One of those black, white, and blue flags flew over a “ Wellness Center.” The streets were full of neohipster-types and places advertising live music. I found myself speculating about Hipsters for Trump.

 

There were a few Trump flags in the ranch lands around Wickenburg. These were all in sparsely populated areas, and far less that we saw last summer.

Even with Harris’ surprise pop-up event that filled the Desert Diamond Stadium and raised a lot of money, you can wander all over Arizona, and not realize that there’s an election going on.

Plug into a news outlet, and it’s another story. Lots of stories.

 

Most change in a few days. Still, an electronic billboard in Phoenix flashed ARIZONA CONSERVATIVES FOR HARRIS. A Democrats for Lake rally was announced, but never materialized. Not much political talk in restaurants and on the bus.

Yeah, yeah, it’s kinda looking good for the future of democracy, but I keep remembering what Han Solo said in the original Star Wars movie from the Nineteen-Hundreds: “Great kid, now don’t get cocky!”

We keep hearing the same old racist border paranoia song the right has been singing since the Anglos invaded back in the Eighteen-Hundreds. There are young nonwhites who want Trump to set them free to asshole their way into being billionaires.

I hope that my gut feelings about the Project 2025 crowd–that they’re all a bunch of wannabe armchair fuhrers, with not enough junior stormtroopers to do the heavy lifting– are true, but I was so sure that Trump was going to lose in 2016. We need to be ready to navigate through chaos no matter what.

I’ve also realized that a president isn’t a human being, but an avatar of a deity that the country is evoking. 

Tezcatlipoca help me, I really need a vacation . . . 

Ernest Hogan, the Father of Chicano Science Fiction, is out searching for America again.