Corky Simpson and Jeff Smith

Once upon a town there was a time when folks around there had a pretty good idea what was up.

The town was Tucson and the time was the tail end of the 19th century through the better part of the 20th. Better indeed.

The folks knew up from sideways because – if they bestirred themselves to waddle onto the front lawn – they could pick up a hometown newspaper where they could read all about it.

The Tucson Citizen and the Arizona Daily Star had decidedly differing views. A grammar school dropout could tell which was which three grafs into their editorial pages – but they shared a fundamentalist approach to reporting those events:

You let the participants do the talking and the paper do the typing. The editorial page chewed the fat. News-side eschewed it.

The trick to maintaining incivility was for one paper to break a different story, or a different angle, when they could leave the competition looking asleep at the wheel.

What nobody did fiddle with was the facts, because then as now a small hometown like Tucson could tell when local coverage flunked the smell test.

You might run a story datelined Afghanistan and it might have a scent of barnyard here or there and you might get away with it, but a hometown paper better have the hometown news fair and square.

I am of the educated opinion, however, that even in these perilous times for print, an honest hometown paper that remembers its roots, and has the publisher to protect them, will survive.

The Citizen came first, in the last trimester of the 19th century, when all it had to fight was Apaches and politicians. Then the Arizona Daily Star hit the streets and the battle was joined.

As a mercenary whose checks have been signed by the publishers of both, from 1968 until the curtain came down on 2007, I’m here to tell you it was the kind of ride that keeps otherwise intelligent professionals working like short-handled hoers for money that would make a school teacher weep.

But we had the pride of knowing we were keeping the people up to date and armed with facts when the high and mighty were armed with sophistry.

My first encounter with hometown journalism was as an 8-year-old pal of Donald Thornton, son of Vic, managing editor of the Star. On weekends Donald and I would wander into the old Star/Citizen building on Stone Avenue and listen to the editors argue about whether Art Luppino was the best tailback in the country or just a fast frog in a slow pond. (For the record, Art was the greatest running back ever. You can read it spelled out in my scrapbook, in raw umber.)

In those days the Star was owned by the Ellinwoods and Matthews. The Citizen belonged to the Smalls. Those days were the ’50s. By the ’60s the feds had targeted Tucson newspapers in an antitrust action, which we were spared when the Failing Newspapers Act allowed the papers to keep publishing, leaving the housekeeping to a third party we still know as Tucson Newspapers Inc.

And they all lived happily ever after. Until the owners of the Star tried to sell but found no takers except a small-time outfit named Brush-Moore. So the Citizen’s owners, Bill and Bill Small, father and son, bought the Star, with the pledge to keep out of its internal affairs and find a decent buyer. Which it appeared it had – Pulitzer sounds like a decent newspaper name – until the wife of a Pulitzer made it a matter, for me at least, of quit or get fired.

Upon which my own purely personal opinion of selling a hometown newspaper to out-of-town interests experienced an epiphany. It blows.

So I began my career at the stupid end of a shovel.

A white knight rode to my rescue, in the person of William A. Small the younger. (Let me share this apology across the void to Bill: Scouts’ honor, Boss, when I referred to you as Bill Small the Lesser, it was an allusion to Homer’s Iliad, in which he identified Ajax the Lesser, thus to distinguish him as his father’s son. Not by any means to disparage you, or Ajax.)

Because in November 1976 I went to work for a hometown newspaper at the zenith of its powers. And circulation. The Citizen made money and spent money. It spent money to make money: I read somewhere that’s how smart money does it.

The Citizen reporting crew in the ’70s was three or four times its current staff, and its daily circulation was a similar bulge.

A veritable Ku Klux Klan of factors conspired to drive what was once a rabbit warren of glad-hearted hustle – curiosity inspiring phone calls, calls inspiring car keys, keys taking reporters all over Arizona, northern Mexico, to hell and gone and back again, in time to fill out our expense vouchers and then home for the weekend and gone again next Monday.

Bill Small did not bitch about the money spent to cover the on-beat and off-beat: He did the math and read the English, which sang of profitability.

There was money to be made in a hometown paper – the kind that made readers laugh and cuss and look forward to the next edition.

For Small it bought a newspaper sufficiently profitable that when he decided to spend his days pursuing the muse instead of news, his Citizen caught the eye of the biggest newspaper chain on the planet, the Gannett Co., of all the factors conspiring to stamp out hometown newspapers, the Mother Factor.

So after two blissful years working for an enlightened, penny- and pound-wise publisher, I thought, “Poop.”

And I was right. If Gannett allows this to see print it will be the most liberal editorial decision I have seen in three decades under the aegis of the people who brought us USA TODAY . . . and converted every hometown newspaper it could buy into one of its clones.

Old newspapermen joke that a good reporter could cover the Second Coming of Christ in 13 column inches. But a good feature writer could create a novella, and a good newspaper would dummy the room to run it.

My brother Dave wrote a feature on a kid from Mesa who walked into a beauty parlor, made five women lie face-down on the floor and then calmly shot each in the back of the head. The story ran roughly the length of a Louis L’Amour novel. It jumped from Page One of the Los Angeles Times Sunday edition all the way to the back, and then jumped from the back to the front again, turned around and ran until it ran out.

The Times got one of the best days of street sales in its history. The kid got life in Florence, and my brother got a VW vanload of Best of Whatever awards. Including one with my former publisher’s last name.

It was the kind of story Gannett never would even consider, not if every woman the kid murdered were every subscriber’s mother, daughter, sister or aunt; if the kid were every reader’s adopted son, and the town were home to the chief executive officer of Gannett. Maybe that’s a good thing, a savvy decision, but it is not the sort of policy that endears it to the antiquarian species that reads its paper on the porcelain pedestal of a morning.

Gannett ran an ad campaign for the Citizen a few years ago featuring a chorus of elevator-tenors chiming “. . . the Citizen is Tucson.” I had my doubts then, and as Gannett smothers Tucson’s oldest, once-hometown paper, like some bothersome bed-ridden uncle, I don’t think the Citizen is Tucson anymore.

Gannett sent one of its aparatchiki to announce the execution to the crew, lest they hear it first from the Star. There were people there – friends of mine, guys who have fired me three, maybe four times – who’ve put in 40 years or better at that newspaper. And this suit from east of the Potomac lacks the decency even to thank them for their toil and tears.

He was here to announce a successful hit, by an assassin with a long string of successful hits. These are propitious times for killers looking to end newspapers they’ve bled white.

Hit men don’t fly across a continent to thank the family and friends of the departed; they come to put the stink-eye on anybody who looks like he might make trouble.

The emissary just didn’t get enough stink on everybody. Pray that you live long enough to see the hometown newspaper make its inevitable comeback.

Mark, Billie have the last word

Jeff Smith is only mostly dead. Much like his muse . . .

Editor’s note: This is Jeff Smith’s final column for the Tucson Citizen. It is among features that are being cut under budget constraints for 2008.

T alk about your post- Christmas letdown. OK, there’s no Santa Claus: I got that before I even left high school and I’m coping. No Easter bunny, all right so long as there’s still chocolate.

I’ve seen most of the legends and heroes of my youth defrocked, I’ve struggled through the death of the Linotype and the birth of offset and found a new genre of hot lead to sustain me. But I wasn’t prepared when they told me that Jeff Smith – my secret hero, the champion of the English-lit major – no longer exists.

That guy used to break me up.

He practically invented the buried lede. And run-on sentences, hell, you could pass out from oxygen depletion and he still hadn’t got to the predicate – except for in a half-dozen subordinate clauses. You couldn’t diagram some of those strung-together- with-commas Gordian knot jobs unless you could do it in three dimensions. I know: I tried.

But you could tell the guy got a boot out of his work, giggled as he hammered at the keyboard.

Now he’s got the boot from his work, the laughter is fading. Who am I now?

Bummed is what I am, but that’s not a noun it’s an adjective, and neither is of much import now, or tomorrow really: All that matters is adverbs. “It’s all about the adverbs.” The very smart father of a woman I used to know said that. Think about it.

All about the adverbs, the words that modify your verbs.

All righty, what are your verbs, Smith? Weep? Let’s use a few adverbs on it:

Smith wept copiously. Smith wept piteously. Smith wept briefly and then got off his pathetic butt (your trusty noun/adjective combo) and wrote again, brilliantly.

Catch my drift? If you’re doing something with your life other than passively watching it expire, something like running, jumping, yodeling, shooting, it’s the adverbs that it’s all about – like faster, higher, hillbillyer, straighter.

Better.

But sometimes better isn’t good enough. Times like these, cheaper is generally the adverb the suits are looking for. They want a bottom line that is chubbier, so the investors will be happier, because they’re richer when the dividend checks arrive. Which shows you how many dividends I’ve got in my life (zero). They’re probably wired directly into your accounts in the Caymans. Or something.

Newpapers are having a bit of rough sledding this winter. The Arizona Daily Star laid off 11 of its newsroom staff a couple of weeks ago, and the Star, the morning paper, is the fatter of the two. The Citizen is making cuts as well, and as I hope you have been able to divine from the preceding, I am among the cutees. Cuties, yes – that, too.

This is a bitch to write. Cuteness only gets me part way. I blundered into the newspaper racket at a time when practically anybody with a pulse and a vocabulary in triple digits could get a job.

I barely could type my name, never had taken a journalism course, but I was willing to work for $120 a week (pretax) as long as they let me write news stories like novellas.

They did and I did and the rest was a happy tale interrupted periodically by a fit of principle – mine or theirs – or an offense-taking by a publisher or his wife.

Until now. Now it’s budgetary – cultural, actually. Post-literate America wants to watch the tube: television or the Internet.

Leave me tell you one: The nation ain’t gonna find out what the guys at City Hall, the State House or in D.C. are truly up to, down in the fine print, until newspapers make their inevitable comeback.

And, until that day, this nation will not be an informed, intelligent, participating force in our original government of, by and for the people.

Nor, and this is the scary part, will we be a free people. Men and women with bad intentions will be able to put it over on us. If you think I’m stretching a point, ask yourself just how much of what goes on in Tucson every day is reported live at 5. Or 10.

But – and this is the really scary part – I may be dead before print makes its comeback. Daily, at any rate. There comes a time when the boss says you’re out of a job, and it turns out to be the last time anybody says that

to you.

I hope this is not that time, but optimism sometimes runs into things.

It’s been a fun 40 years: Have a nice life.

Columnist Jeff Smith says Jeffyboy is a hell of a thing to call a man just a month shy of his 62nd birthday. But then immaturity has ever been his sustaining gift. He may be reached by calling (520) 455-5667 or by e-mail to jeffyboy@wildblue.net.

It’s OK to be a Jew. And if you’re black and proud, say it loud. It’s even acceptable (PC buzzword) under appropriate (ibid) circumstances to be a Christian – both the simple Catholic or Protestant kind or the new code-word definition meaning right-wing, crypto-Bush political flunky.

This here’s America, the land of the free and the home of religious weirdos of every denomination. As Tiny Tim said, “God bless us every one.” Atheists included. They shop the malls, too.

And isn’t that what the season is all about? Shopping for something to put under the tree or the menorah or whatever?

And it doesn’t represent ugly materialism; it represents paychecks for every Wal-Mart clerk from Boca Raton to that damp, dismal place up in Washington, the one that may actually be part of Canada. And the clerks in all the mom-and-pop stores in between.

Maybe if we get materialistic enough, Mom and Pop can keep their doors open one more year. With any luck they’ll pass away in their sleep, peacefully, before having to face another fiscal season in the red.

But enough frivolous happy-time sentimentality. What I want to talk to you about this Friday before Christmas (or as it is sometimes said south of the border, Chuy’s birthday) is honesty.

I am fed to the gills with this generic, politically generated Happy Holidays horse effluvium. True, this is the season of Hanukkah and Kwanzaa as well as Christmas, but does this necessitate any kind of one-size-fits-all, uni-creed fare-thee-well?

Is it too much trouble to offer a season’s greetings that is what you truly – and I mean truthfully – mean? If you’re standing at the cash register with a Red Ryder BB gun for your nephew and a Betsy Wetsy doll for his sister, a wreath for the Christmas tree and a fruitcake for their mom and dad, and if the check-out clerk has a crucifix on a chain at her neck, feel free to wish her a Merry Christmas.

And if an alarm sounds and the PC police charge at you with pepper spray and butterfly nets, let ‘em have it with the BB gun. Just be sure you don’t put anybody’s eye out.

But if the clerk is wearing a Star of David, urge her to have a Happy Hanukkah, or if she’s wearing a djibouti, offer her and her near and dear the best of Kwanzaas.

Just quit it with the neutered and neutral “Happy Holidays,” won’t you? Save that one for every Friday after 5, when 99.9 percent of Americans are looking forward to Friday night, followed by Saturday, followed by NFL football for 12 straight hours after they’ve returned home from the church of their chosen faith and slipped into something more comfortable.

After an unpadded wooden pew, a rocker-recliner with electro-massage, lumbar support, deep heat and quad cup holders would be considerably more comfortable. Then again, after the pew, a piano stool might suffice.

We get plenty of holidays through the year, and weekends come 52 times a year. Christmas comes just the once. As does Kwanzaa and Hanukkah. Which is as it should be: They’re very big deals, and I don’t mean in the retail sense of the term, which clearly they also are, but in the sense of celebration, of lifting your face and your heart unto the lord of you own divining, and saying a heartfelt and truthful: Whoopie.

I was raised in the Congregational Church in Maine. These parts these days, the Congregational Church is something of an evangelical group, but when I was a kid in Dover-Foxcroft, after the folks spirited me out of Tucson and moved the family back where they hailed from, you either were a Congregationalist or you were a Baptist. Aunt Hazel was a Baptist, but that’s as far as it went. I never felt ashamed to be a Christian, a Protestant by the blueprints of the place and people who raised me up.

But over the past couple of decades, lots of limp-wristed ideologues have done their best to make me feel ashamed. And I ain’t having any of it.

So Merry Christmas, damnit. Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Kwanzaa. I will kneel to alphabetizing, but to no other graven image that denies me my First Amendment freedom of speech and religion rights.

Jeffygoy wishes you a Happy Holiday of your choice, but especially Merry Christmas, despite whatever tragedies may befall you. He may be reached at (520) 455-5667 or jeffyboy@wildblue.net.

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WHAT’S THE PROPER GREETING? WHAT YOU THINK
Here are some responses to a recent letter to the editor by Tucsonan Mike Waling, who wishes people “Happy holidays” unless he knows that they’re fellow Christians. “It’s about consideration and respect for others,” he writes.

• “It’s polite not to force your religion on others. . . . Be polite instead of intolerant.” – Jared H.

• “The only people who are offended by saying ‘Merry Christmas’ are the radical ACLU nuts who want to force no religion on the rest of us and get God out of everything because it will be easier to push the radical liberal agenda.” – Brian H.

• “There are many holidays this time of year, and . . . it’s common courtesy to not assume everyone is Christian and celebrates Christmas.” – Talulah M.

• “Where in the world is the world that was depicted in “It’s a Wonderful Life’? The true grinches in the world are the PC fanatics.” – Dewey B.

• “Any time anyone wishes me well, it makes my day. The words – or even the language – doesn’t matter. The acknowledgement and the smile are what counts.” – Steve H.

Shopping in Nogales, especially during the holidays, is an experience like no other.

If you’re looking to make the Christmas dollar go further – whether your gift list includes a life-size skeleton carved out of palm wood, or a lifetime supply of human growth hormone – get a head start by sending that shopping dollar 60 miles south to Nogales.

Either side is a good beginning, but farther is further.

Or vice versa.

From the time we were old enough to shop without adult supervision, underwriting or transportation, our gang made tracks to the border to imbibe of el espiritu Navidad, which, Mexico being the laissez faire environment it is, engaged all five of the textbook senses plus one or more experimental numbers.

Linda Morse got her driver’s license while the rest of us were still 14, and we packed ourselves into her Corvair and embarked on a journey that still hasn’t touched the opposite shore.

The tastes and smells of the Mexican marketplace, the feel of December air another 1,500 feet into the sky and that raucous palette of Christmas colors nobody else even tries to duplicate, all are cast in amber for me, a scorpion paperweight a kid gives his dad for Christmas.

Apropos of which, when my kids came along, they came along with their mother and me as we continued the tradition of buying by the kilo at Christmastime in Nogales.

Not what you think: I mean presents too big for a 5-year-old to carry but not to finance. A trick we learned to handle such exigencies: Buy Mom a 220-liter laundry basket, then hide Dad’s present inside it and get them to carry it to the car. Fools them both.

Right.

The years have sent the kids out of the nest, the nest out of existence and the old man two-thirds of the way from Tucson to Nogales as a drunken crow might fly, but much nearer to Mexico spiritually, especially this season of the year.

Nogales is where I go to buy a loaf of bread and a jug of milk, so when it comes to a Christmas tree, a truckload of frozen turkeys or a chain saw for little Debbie, of course I retrace my tracks toward the border – even if I don’t always make it across. Face it: If one’s in the market for a chain saw, even the Mexicans head for Home Depot.

And even the Nogales that lies north of the border – the 10 percent of the town that is officially Estados Unidos – is really Mexican. Like Tucson and everything south of the Gila, we look southward for our culture.

And southward, the Christmas lights ring the rooflines 12 months a year, and at Christmas, even at Wal-Mart and Home Depot, Nogales guarantees brighter lights, louder music and for me, stronger sentimentality. Which – ask my kids – is sentimentality that would gag a maggot.

So, as happens every Christmas here in the borderlands, I scratched the last line off my Christmas list, headed out into the twilight and the spitting sleet, loaded the tree into the truck bed, everything else in the cab, and pointed it north – homeward.

This part always tears me up: the part where the two-lane winds through the canyons south of Patagonia and off to the right on the hillside, candlelight flickers through the scrub oak and through the bars of a wrought iron door, where a mother kept a promise she had made when her two sons went off to war, a promise to light a candle for each of them and to keep them lit until they came safely home.

She did, they did, and with the help of everyone who climbed the steps to read the story, candles have lighted the way home for pilgrims like me ever since.

But even at 55 mph, they don’t flicker long, and then the lights of Patagonia surround you, and then they’re behind. Nine hundred people last pretty fast at a posted 30, and the last leg of the trip is like my dad used to say, solemncoly.

That’s where I see one special house, far away in the dark, defiantly casting off the blackness with a beacon of good cheer.

Merry Christmas to the breadwinner, chugging up the hill on the way home from a wearisome day.

And to anybody lucky enough to catch a glimpse on his own way home to Christmas.

Jeff reminds you there are only 10 shopping days until Christmas and just 41 until the Grinch requires you to have a passport or other government ID to cross the border to shop the following 328 days until the Christmas after this one. Homeland security. Humbug.

Deepti, a 4-month-old baby girl who is reportedly HIV positive, sleeps inside a cloth hammock at an orphanage in Chennai, India. She is one of more than 5 million Indians living with HIV/AIDS.

The giants of pharmaceutical drugs in the United States of America are committing mass murder, selective genocide, remote-control homicide on a monstrous scale.

But what the hell, the remote-control part puts it so far offshore it’s clear on the far side of the planet, on the shores of the Bay of Bengal, near where mobs of millions swim in the Ganges, whose waters you wouldn’t put in your own toilet.

And given the role of overpopulation in the myriad aspects of global epidemiology, one might make a case for casting a blind eye toward forcing the Third World’s sick and dying to shuffle off this mortal coil to make room for the sacred cows that share their living quarters and occupy an upper floor in the high-rise house of caste and higher holiness.

If I sound like a cynic with despicable disregard of human suffering, allow me a little slack. I’m a drug-addled addict. Not just any drug either, morphia, the storied syrup of the Amapola, pretty little poppy of your parents’ favorite song and your bad uncle’s opium, mother of morphine, father of heroin, source of every painkiller worth a damn and every needle in the arm that led to death . . .

. . . until cocaine came along, and then pharmaceutical designer drugs.

So you might have as much reason to mistrust my word as the propaganda of the pharma-giants, except that I have a legit reason to be hooked on opiates, and the pharmas are in it strictly for the green. The two sides are inextricably bound.

I had a motorcycle wreck and wound up crippled in my southern hemisphere and busted up in the north. I take enough OxyContin every day to knock a rhinoceros sideways. If I didn’t have the drug – an opium derivative – I couldn’t live with the pain. Fact.

When I graduated from straight morphine to OxyContin, my monthly cost for the scrip was upwards of $1,800. Just that one drug. OxyContin is the brand-name for Oxycodone ER, a generic opioid with an extended release coating that makes it dissolve over roughly 12 hours. A lot of cheap aspirin tablets come with the same coatings.

Plain Oxycodone costs $2.15 a month. That is not a typo: $2.15 for Oxycodone, $1,800-plus for the coating.

Hold that thought.

Half a planet away from here, Dr. Yusuf Hamied runs a pharmaceutical company called Cipla, one of the most financially – and one must add spiritually – successful operations in India. The doctor’s father started Cipla in 1935, was pals with Gandhi, and passed it all along to Yusuf, who didn’t miss a trick.

Under Yusuf Hamied, Cipla developed a generic “cocktail” of AIDS drugs, an anti-retroviral, that reduced the costs of treatment by more than 97 percent. A godsend for India’s sick and poor.

Cipla was able to sell its AIDS anti-retroviral for 3 percent of what U.S. and European sources were selling the same drugs for, in India and 170 other countries – including ours – and still make Dr. Hamied healthy, wealthy and wise.

Which makes you wonder why U.S. and European pharma-monsters still spend lavish sums of m-u-n-n-y lobbying elected officials to guarantee them patent protection, price protection, so-called “intellectual property” protection.

And why government goes along with this conspiracy.

And still does. India joined the World Trade Organization in 2005 and, as a condition of membership, agreed to change its laws regarding generic drugs.

Now Dr. Hamied’s company can no longer copy expensive patent drugs and sell them for pennies to the poor. Which means, literally, that India’s AIDS patients, 90-something percent of them, will die. Because they can’t come within cannon shot of affording the cost of prescriptions.

Same as Africa’s patients.

Same as Mexico’s.

South America’s.

Our own, many of them.

The pharma-killers could sell their anti-retrovirals somewhere near Dr. Hamied’s prices and still make big profits, but not the way they do today.

Today pharmaceuticals stand second only to petroleum in the Fortune 500 rankings of corporate profitability. They stand there on the bodies of millions worldwide who have died of AIDS for want of the price of the only medicine that can save them.

Bought any pharmaceuticals lately?

Jeff bought his own insurance policy before he sailed off Broke-bike Mountain. It was a stroke of luck, not of brilliance. Reach him at 520-455-5667 or jeffyboy@wildblue.net

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PEOPLE LIVING WITH HIV/AIDS
• South Africa 5,300,000

• India 5,100,000

• Nigeria 3,600,000

• Zimbabwe 1,800,000

• Tanzania 1,600,000

• Ethiopia 1,500,000

• Mozambique 1,300,000

• Kenya 1,200,000

• Congo 1,100,000

• U.S. 950,000

Source: CIA World Factbook

I have guns enough to withstand a rampaging herd of buffalo, maybe even fight off a gang of cattle rustlers, but if a carload of Colombians - their heads full of meth and their AR-15s full of armor-piercing ammo - kicks in my front door because their computer software got my address mixed up with the house next door, which is six miles away, I'm toast.

First you need to know what a brick is.

There is confusion over definitions because our own Tucson Police Department has been using two meanings of the word.

In a recent Tucson Citizen story by Ryn Gargulinski, a TPD sergeant cited masonry as a preferred building material if one lives next to a stash house.

“The only thing that can stop that ammunition is a brick,” said Sgt. Mark Robinson, anent brick walls as a defense against high-powered rounds from weapons used by drug dealers trying to invade a stash house full of marijuana.

And how is marijuana in those stash houses packaged?

In bricks. What drug dealers call the 2.2-pound (1 kilogram), plastic-wrapped bundles of pot.

So try to keep your terminology straight.

Say you’re starting a Neighborhood Watch to keep your barrio safe from Tucson’s alarming influx of marijuana in transit to far out destinations.

Dealers drop off the product in local stash houses until East Coast demand calls for shipment.

If you try to lighten up your presentation by using the example of the “Three Little Pigs,” bear in mind that a house made of bricks could be construed either – or both – of two ways.

Seriously though, as Ms. Gargulinski pointed out, with Tucson becoming a major drop-off point for Mexican drug cartels, many of which are now allied with Colombian drug runners, law-abiding citizens who have lived in the same neighborhood for decades may face a danger they aren’t ready to handle.

You can study for your concealed-carry permit and train to use your .45 automatic Colt pistol, but if the drug dealers wrongly hit your front door instead of the correct one – out of the 85 identical floor plans in your subdivision – they may be armed with the same guns and grenades as the Israeli army. What is worse, they are prepared to pull the trigger.

You aren’t. Neither am I. I have guns enough to withstand a rampaging herd of buffalo, maybe even fight off a gang of cattle rustlers, but if a carload of Colombians – their heads full of meth and their AR-15s full of armor-piercing ammo – kicks in my front door because their computer software got my address mixed up with the house next door, which is six miles away, I’m toast.

The best advice the police have for our self-protection is Neighborhood Watch programs.

So how about we hit the bricks (as in “take a walk”) and go Christmas caroling through the neighborhood? Sing a few bars of “Silent Night” to every one of the front doors whose new owners we haven’t met?

If a grumpy old Scrooge opens the door with a snarl on his lips, a surplus AK-47 on his shoulder and a living room stacked floor to ceiling with the 2.2-pound bricks we discussed earlier, take your leave, get on your cell phone and dial 911.

But what if nobody in the neighborhood wants to go caroling? What if nobody wants to start a Neighborhood Watch? What if you have a neighbor who already shows signs of illegal activity, say a backyard full of Rottweilers and pit bulls and cars full of strangers dropping by in the wee hours?

I recommend you sleep on the opposite side of the house, at least until you can put a wall of bricks between you and the drug dealers, and alert the police as to your rational and reasonable suspicions.

If you fear reprisal, ask police what they recommend to keep you safe from the bad guys.

It’s a hell of a state of affairs when the good guys are overrun by the bad. Sometimes your only real safety is in numbers.

Start a Neighborhood Watch. Keep your own arms safely at hand. And know how and when to use them.

ARNIE BERMUDEZ/Tucson Citizen

Jeff understands how trouble can find you when you’ve done nothing to invite it to visit. Reach him at (520) 455-5667 or jeffyboy@wildblue.net.

Your money can be methadone for heroic soldiers in the Hundred Years' War of Falling Profits. Mom and Pop need your help. Hell, they wouldn't be called Mom and Pop if they didn't have kids, and now their kids have kids and perhaps another generation, and every mother's son among them wants a bike.

Unless you have just sunk into your Bark-a-lounger and put your feet up to ease the swelling from a double shift in the retail wars, or you are scanning the editorial page on the off chance you’ll find a few kernels of moral coaching from a lay preacher with two millenniums’ experience in Christmas shopping before you hit the bricks on this most propitious day of those shopping days remaining before that Day of Days:

Get up off your butt and get to spending.

This is the biggest retail trade day in the American year. And no, I am not being jingoistic.

You can tot up the trade statistics for Cinco de Mayo, Simón Bolivar’s birthday or the drop of the puck on the first day of hockey season, and all others combined will not match your old-fashioned Yanqui Xmas.

And however repellent the X in Xmas may be, however you yearn for the bygone era of putting away the pumpkins and the cornucopia, the matching buckles on pilgrim hats and shoes, before you haul out the red and green of traditional Christmas decorations, know this one thing about today’s retail rodeo in honor of Chuy’s birthday:

It means money to make the rent and put food in the fridge for most of the wage slaves working for mom and pop stores from Caribou to Key West to Calexico.

The American economy depends on a free-spending Christmas to emerge from one year and embark upon the next with a happy heart and a firm tread, so rise, Lazarus, and do your part to keep Tucson green. After all, if all politics is (are?) local, the lesson was learned from retail trade.

All shopping should be, if it isn’t already, local.

Get away from that keyboard and computer monitor, avoid or evade anywhere that ends its name with a “mart” and get thee behind me, eBay.

Get up, get the car keys and get out in the sweet-scented autumn air with the smoke of mesquite and the sap of maple trees.

Go to Southgate, Amphi Plaza, Casas Adobes – any of those pioneering shopping centers that can qualify for the National Register of Historic Places – and give them a little injection of capital.

Your money can be methadone for heroic soldiers in the Hundred Years’ War of Falling Profits. Mom and Pop need your help. Hell, they wouldn’t be called Mom and Pop if they didn’t have kids, and now their kids have kids and perhaps another generation, and every mother’s son among them wants a bike.

Today’s slothful Santa spends his entire Christmas budget on Internet sales, which only accidentally enrich our local economy.

We live today in an utterly inside-out economy. Thanks to practically criminal, virtually immoral greed, and with the aid and abetment of our national government, American corporations have outsourced their parts and supplies, fired their domestic labor force and replaced it with little brown fingers in an archipelago of offshore sweatshops.

And the entire sellout is made possible by many marriages of political convenience and a handful of multinational trade treaties that enrich such a comparative few one can count them on one’s fingers and toes.

I urge you, as we all commence another shopping season, to remember the true meaning of Christmas, and then put it out of your mind and concentrate on keeping your children spoiled and your local retail stores solvent.

First, buy American. Then buy those American goods in Tucson, or at least Arizona – OK, Southwest – stores. Is that too much to ask? Too much to remember?

Tighten your focus down from the global to the local.

Citizen file photo. Photo illustration by RANDY HARRIS/Tucson Citizen

Jeffyboy might could get along with a puppy, as long as nobody would be offended if he named it Booger. He may be reached at (520) 455-5667 or jeffyboy@wildblue.net.

The Patagonia-Sonoita Scenic Road cuts through some of southern Arizona's prettiest landscape. News that mines are being proposed for southern Arizona is intriguing, encouraging or alarming.

My old dump is kindly disappointing from the air. I gaze out across the creek and canyon bottom to the ridge rising up to divvy Adobe Canyon from Wood Canyon and congratulate myself on the sound judgment and blind, dumb, good luck that conned me into buying this piece of ground back in ’77.

Today’s dirt market has bloated to 15 times what I paid three decades ago, sufficient to squeeze me right out of the neighborhood, if I were starting over. But here I am, luckier’n a skunk.

Then last Friday I was invited on an plane ride to peek at what we fortunate few call home, and suddenly the depth of field is translated from oak-mesquite-walnut-oak-sycamore-more oak-another oak-mesquite-walnut-Arizona ash ad infinitum to one of each, separated by drip-line, grassland and bare dirt.

What looks like forest when you peer up canyon through miles of every kind of tree morphs to a mighty thin skin of veggies from 5,000 feet.

But this perspective gives you a truer picture of the works of man and our often unloving caress on the face of Mama Earth.

We were the guests of Eco-Flight, a flock of folk out of Aspen, Colo., who were visited with great good fortune via American Old Money and are passing it on to our common posterity.

Which is to say, a wealthy woman gave them an airplane and they decided to use it to fly influential grownups and young people with potential over important places in the Western landscape that are threatened by industrial development in its various dangerous iterations.

Take mining – please.

Here in my backyard, and yours, a Canadian mining monster named Augusta Resource Corp. plans to dig an open-pit mine at Rosemont Ranch, in the Santa Rita Mountains. And in the Patagonia Mountains east of Patagonia and west of the San Rafael Valley, three mining companies are doing exploration work.

All of this is variously alarming, intriguing, encouraging and points hither, thither and yon on the politico-emotional spectrum, depending on precisely how near these potential eyesores are to your living room windows or how badly you or your kids need a job and think Augusta or some other entity might hire you.

But all these works of fiction fade in the glare of reality when you fly over the future sites and see exactly where the yawning pits and sprawling tailings dumps will be. Especially when five minutes ago you flew over the huge open-pit mines and mountains of sterile tailings that form a man-made Western horizon for Green Valley.

It’s scary when you get high enough in the air so you can see how the ankle bone’s connected to the head bone in the hills and dales that make our home.

A mine that may be out of sight (and out of mind) three ridges over from where you sip a gin and tonic suddenly is seen as directly connected by the watercourses your well drinks from – the watercourse that might someday carry toxic instead of tonic from a mine that uses groundwater to separate copper from rock, and then feeds that water back into the underground stream that proceeds toward your well.

As we ponder these weighty issues, the macro view from high above the sweating and straining of mining, border fencing and the political skirmishing for and against seems to be a tremendous benefit.

You can see the territory as an entire organism, connected in its vital parts to make up a functioning body that depends on being able to make use of its peaks and valleys, its pathways, watercourses and the transitional zones between them.

When you see it as a living thing, the big picture don’t look so rosy, Rosemont.

Of course, this is not to say that it ever did. From the sad day in 1872 the mining law was signed, the ore body Augusta hopes to yank out of the soul of the Southwest was never marketable. The concentration of copper is too low.

The market is up now, but when it dips again, even Augusta and its dreamy-eyed investors will come to see reason in what we opponents of the mine are now saying.

I suspect these foreign mining companies are mining for investors as much or more that for minerals, and it is our mountains, our wildlife and ourselves, living here, who are underwriting this scheme.

Jeffyboy’s stabs at poetry rarely rise above doggerel, which is a pitiable poet’s best friend. Reach him at jeffyboy@wildblu.net or 520-455-5667.

The eye of Big Brother is upon you: A photo enforcement camera patrols 22nd Street just east of Pantano Road this summer.

We’re on a slippery slope here, amigos, and you know what happens when you’re on a slippery slope? You begin sliding downward, faster and faster till you’re out of control.

Nature’s most powerful and surest force – gravity – takes over, and not you or anyone can slow, let alone stop, the inevitable.

Call a cop. See if he can be of service.

The greased runway I allude to is the mechanized eye of Big Brother. My generation, the boomers, children of the ’60s, were raised in the folklore of fearing Big Brother. With very good reason.

We read George Orwell’s “1984″ and its depiction – more prophetic than that Italian dude, it turns out – of our brave new world of police camera vans filming speeders, cameras on street corners snapping red-light runners, even random camera locations downtown, taking video movies in the random chance they’ll catch a bad guy in, after or before the act.

Is this the land of the free and the home of the brave we sing about when we stand to commence the World Series?

Hell no. But it is coming to be the reality in which we live, day to day.

That patriotic bushwa we serenade at the ballfield has come to be wishful, wistful thinking.

I had hopes of dying peace- fully in my sleep before my country turned this sour. But unless the rest of you get as alarmed and mouthy about this as I am, we all will cease being citizens and be turned into subjects in a nation, make that flock, of sheep.

The woolly-natured among you may feel safe and happy, but I ask you:

Who among you is truly safe when every outdoor move is monitored by a government, neo-police state actually, that does not trust you with that dangerous plaything the citizens of 1776 bestowed upon us?

Freedom.

Frightening thing, freedom, so disquieting that the countries of Europe do not truly embrace it. Africa? Forget about it. Truth to tell, only one country in the history of the planet truly has practiced the freedom our founding documents preached, and that of course is – was – us. U.S.

Do you honestly feel free when you know that every time you drive through the intersection of Tanque Verde and Grant, you’re being filmed by police surveillance cameras?

There soon will be other cameras at other intersections in town, crossroads where a high incidence of speeding and red-light infractions have been compiled over the years.

Those infractions were compiled by cops on motorcycles or in squad cars, in a fair and square contest between law and disorder.

You may accuse me of making light of speeding, running the light, lawbreaking that endangers life and property. And you’re right, I am making light of it. Because compared with our freedom to move about in our homeland, as free citizens in a free society, free to make choices that in a small percent of cases are lawless and dangerous, that freedom is worth our lives.

Go ahead and snicker. After all, it’s only a camera, taking snapshots of your face and your license plate. It’s only mechanized surveillance at a few busy crossroads, in the back of an unmarked van cruising I-10, hidden on a light pole downtown, flying overhead in unmanned drones, in a balloon on a tether over Fort Huachuca.

These are the ones I know of off the top of my head, the ones reported in the press. How many more do you suppose are out there?

Land of the free, my ass.

And Arizona was the state where this type of highway-cruising camera got its start. Let’s make Arizona the state where the end of it begins.

Jeffyboy is upset about something. He may be reached at (520) 455-5667 or jeffyboy@wildblue.net.

If you get a ticket, you'll also be sent a photo of yourself snapped by the system. Only your eyes won't be blacked, as they are in the above sample.

The El Conquistador Hotel defined "posh" in the first half of the 20th century.

All it takes is a memory with a half-century sleeve-length, and you, too, can recollect the grandeur that was El Con before El Con was El Con.

If your historic reach is sufficient to lay hand to the time when El Conquistador Hotel was the only thing the old-timers nicknamed El Con – 45 years or so will suffice, but half-century carries so much grandeur – you and I can share a memory at once pulsing with the warmth of fond memory and chilled by the shock of loss.

El Conquistador Hotel was old school when the architects of today’s old school were taking their first mechanical drawing classes. It was the kind of building nobody outside of OPEC can afford to erect.

For a glimpse of it, take a ride out Oracle Road and glance right at Casa Blanca Plaza, just north of Rudasill Road. The dome of the old porte-cochere sits atop a carpet store. Somebody got the deal of the previous millennium.

My rat pack of junior high and high school buddies used to go to the El Con for holiday dances, and the remainder of the calendar, trespass around the ground and back entrances, where the old hotel abutted the grounds of the Tucson Racquet Club – this, obviously, before Joe Tofel moved the Racquet Club to Country Club and the river.

Joe was married to Bill Selby’s mom, and thus Joe and the Racquet Club had to suffer the companionship of a large flock of declasse adolescents among which was yr. hmbl. svt.

We didn’t recognize it at the time, but change is not always welcome, even by those in whom change cannot happen soon enough. We were 14, yearning to be 16 and able to drive legally, yearning to be 21 and be able to drink legally, yearning to be covered in secondary body hair. Yearning to be covered in yearning for young women.

We welcomed the opening of El Con Mall, next to El Con the hotel. It was anchored by Levy’s Department Store, which was supplementing its downtown store.

One summer day, we lads strolled into Levy’s at its new home in El Con and bought Linda Ronstadt a 32AAA black lace bra for her 16th birthday. It was a joke, son, sizewise.

Linda showed up for the party in day-glo orange hair, the result of a peroxide job gone tragically awry. Another joke, son.

But it was no joke when they rolled in the wrecking ball and rolled away with the copper crown of El Conquistador Hotel. This was my first acrid, metallic taste of bitter loss to the powers of greed and change.

For a long time, the vacant lot where the old landmark had stood remained, a literal and figurative scar on the Tucson urban landscape. They had nothing better to do with the land then tear down one of the coolest places in town and just leave it.

(The same applies to the lot at 208 N. Stone where once stood the offices and press rooms of the Tucson Citizen, the Arizona Daily Star and Tucson Newspapers Inc.)

But soon enough, in real estate developer time, a large department store began to rise from the ashes of the El Con (who the hell among us wanted to be Phoenix-like?), and when the dust settled the name on the front was Levy’s.

The name on the now-abandoned store where Levy’s had begun the history of El Con Mall was Steinfeld’s, which meant yet another downtown landmark had disappeared. And then . . .

. . . a lot of stuff happened. Levy’s sold out to Sanger-Harris, which sold out to somebody else, which ibid, op cit, ultimately Macy’s.

Which announced Tuesday that it’s shutting down the El Con store. Not selling, not changing its name, but turning off the lights, locking the door and adios.

I have visions of that guy with the double-chin that starts at his belt buckle – the one with the two-gun salute and the scratch-and-dent appliance store – taking over the lease and turning the store into a theme park.

I just can’t think what theme.

How about an indoor shooting range? With paintballs? Straws and spitwads?

Howsabout free-for-all, no-quarter mixed martial arts? And the City Council and Board of Supervisors could hold their meetings there, rent-free, between rounds.

Columnist Jeff Smith is a local boy trying to make good. He may be reached at (520) 455-5667 or jeffyboy@wildblue.net