W hat the hell is the point of living in a free country, if a mob of vigil-nannies takes over and runs the place like the friggin’ Taliban?
“Billy, don’t forget to take your saltpeter pills before you go to the church social, and wear a condom in case the pills don’t work, and your helmet – don’t forget your helmet, you know how fast those bus drivers go.
“I’ve packed a Breathalyzer along with the macaroni and cheese and a can of sterno for the torch-lit march on the apartment of those two gay men Mrs. Johnson said were smiling at her little twin boys – they’re only 19.
“The Breathalyzer is for the bus driver. Make him stop every five blocks and blow this job here.
“Curfew is 9:30. We’ll be checking your blood-alcohol level, smoke on your breath, high-octane in your nostrils, lipstick on your collar and DNA in your undies. Have a wonderful time and remember, I’ll call your wife in the morning in case I can’t come tuck you in myself: I’ve got 12 other men in this block alone.”
Welcome to America 2007, the land of scared-straight and the home of the timid. Big Mother is watching you, and her greatest fear is that somewhere, sometime, somehow, someone is having fun. And she is, by God, determined to put a stop to it.
I read with deep concern the reports this week of Arizona’s new, newsmaking and mean-as-New Mexico DUI law.
Hey, if we can’t compete with the rest of the country in education, health care or median family income, at least we can make life miserable for anybody who tries to have too much fun.
Think I’m kidding? The scrap of parchment signed in May by Gov. Janet Napolitano, says if you have even one, even most minor, incident of driving under the influence, you will be assigned a breath analyzer that is wired into your car’s ignition system and will not let it start if your breath shows alcohol in your blood above 0.03 percent.
Compare that with the legal limit of 0.08, and you see that if you have a bite of Aunt Em’s rum cake, you can forget driving home to the wife and kids.
Of course the poor are hit hardest, since the only escape they can afford, from lives of misery and slavery, is a couple of cold ones after the whistle blows on Friday.
And if you blow the Breathalyzer after that, I guaran-damn-tee you will be legally drunk. That’ll be a thousand bucks for fines, a few lost days at work, then another hundred to install this Big Mother Machine in your pickup, and another $80 a month to maintain it – for 12 months.
Take your typical “land-scaper” sweating in the sun and dreaming of that ice-cold brew after work, and these fines and that harassment – designed to put a self-satisfied smirk on the lips of all the MADD-women in Arizona – will kill any plans for a summer vacation, Christmas gifts, even dessert after tonight’s Hamburger-Helper.
Everybody knows that the cops who arrest the two-beer day laborer, the lawyer who prosecutes him, the jury who convicts and the judge who sentences the poor guy, all of them drink and drive.
Through our nation’s history, we have witnessed periodic fits of morality such as the current mania, Prohibition most infamous of the lot, and every one of them ultimately was exposed for its hypocrisy and futility.
Mammals are driven to get sideways, whether by sticking plants in their mouths and setting them on fire or glutting themselves on decaying fruit.
Life is messy, freedom is risky. Get used to it. And get off my back.

Jeffyboy reminds you all to keep off the grass. Call him at 520-455-5667 or e-mail jeffyboy@wildblue.net.

Not with a bang, but a whimper. After seven years of arguing about, fretting over and lawyering back and forth, up and down with the once mighty Teamsters union, the once virtuous Sierra Club and the not anything in particular Public Citizen, the government of these United States has thrown open its borders to freight trucks from the Republic of Mexico. NAFTA, y’know.

It kicked off Thursday. Did you notice?

Me neither.

Truth be told, you’d have to have been in that crazy cross-hatched road map that is southern California, or the uttermost barrens of south Texas, to have seen any of the traffic jam that attended to grand opening. Only two truck companies from Mexico were eligible to take part in the fiest-tivities: one from Tijuana and one from Monterrey.

This is, after all, a pilot program, as the Bush administration argued to that most left of Left Coast judicial benches, the way-liberal 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

And even the legendary 9th could not see its way clear to side with the unionists and tree-huggers and whatever it is that Public Citizen carries water for.

The Teamsters clearly are giving their last and their all to try to regain some of the economic and political clout the blue-collar American worker once had.

And the Sierra Club is the protector of trees and rocks, especially when those trees congregate into forests and the rocks pile themselves into mountainous wonders like Half Dome and so forth.

So where does the Sierra Club fit into North American free trade? Well, the SC thinks Mexicans are messy, and it doesn’t want them cluttering our North American landscape with disposable diapers and plastic water bottles.

Similarly snide and frankly bigoted objections were thrown up by the extra- judicial crowd of public citizens, lower-case.

Mexican drivers are careless and couldn’t

operate a semi-truck’s controls beyond mashing

the horn button. Mexican trucks are rolling

accidents, dingle-balls, fuzzy dice and bronze

horse hood ornaments, looking for a shot at a

school bus full of nuns and orphans to force off

a bridge over a bottomless canyon.

They couldn’t master the intricacies of the

English language sufficiently to cipher S-T-O-P.

And so on, disregarding the fact that your average Mexican is 99 times bilingualer than you or I. And neither of us can drive a 16-speed stick shift. (I don’t know about you, but I’ve forgotten what little I once could do about backing up a trailer.)

Be that as it may, and casting a blind eye toward the company I keep here, ask me about NAFTA and I’ve got to tell you, I’m agin it.

To commence with the trucks that commenced touring our highways Thursday, I hate it because the Bush administration (as did the Clinton crew before it) is kissing the nether-cheeks of the Mexican administration, lest they get cranky over our slowness in admitting their freight trucks to our innermost byways.

And when may we expect full reciprocity on the open-door policy which is supposed to be the very heart of the NAFTA being? Like – never.

Can you picture American trucks breezing through Mexican checkpoints with a cheery wave as they pass the platoons of heavily armed paramilitarians waiting, disappointedly, for their mordida? That’ll be a cold day in hell.

NAFTA has one master and two slaves. Its master is the transnational, globular moneymaker, the captain of commerce who feels at home in Prague as in Paris, in London and Washington and whatever the capital of Sri Lanka is. He has an apartment in every commercial center on the planet and a ski chalet in Dubai. Which is a sin against everything.

Its slaves are the brown fingers of sweating laborers, working for peanuts and desperately grateful to serve rather than starve, and the price-conscious, shopping-obsessed women of Wal-Mart and men of Home Depot, sellouts who buy Chinese and Mexican.

NAFTA and those Mexican semi-trucks we will be seeing in increasing numbers are bringing the low-ball prices for the low-quality goods we crave, right to our doorstep. They’re eliminating the middleman’s profit – and his family’s living. The American unions and the blue-collar middle class that built this country now are being sold down the river.

The Mexican trucker is simply a pawn in a very large game that is turning Middle America into a Third World in the midst of the First. Does either coast know or care?

Can you say, “¿Quieres papas fritas con ese?”

Another view: About time Mexican truckers on U.S. roads, Ruben Navarrette Jr. says.

Columnist Jeff Smith drives a loud, smelly diesel truck, too. He may be reached at (520) 455-5667 or jeffyboy@wildblue.net.

This country is on its way to a train wreck. Hell, we have been since the day we were born; we just didn’t know it. But sleepy-headed old Tucson got there ahead of the crash and has devised a way to save us. Some of us.

Our parents – the Greatest Generation – proved pitifully susceptible to life’s omnipresent drive to repeat itself, and the outcome was us. The baby boom, commencing in 1946 when Johnny came marching home and immediately jumped in the sack.

Like all parents who made it the hard way, they spoiled us. Horribly. We are the largest generation in history and have the grossest sense of entitlement. We’re especially fixated on cradle-to-grave health care.

But the richest of us, who can afford the best insurance (I doubt that even Bill Gates pays his medical bills out of pocket), don’t seem to feel they ought to help the poorest.

They do, through whatever pittance of their income winds up paying taxes, but those taxes don’t translate to very much health care, or very good health care.

The wealthy, and employees of huge corporations that have swell health insurance, can live and die without much worry. The impecunious don’t worry, either: Their health care is free, just not real good.

Everybody else is screwed.

Middle- to upper-middle-class slaves either work for small firms that pay exorbitant premiums for mediocre insurance or they’re self-employed and self-insured, which mirrors what small businesses do. Or they go without insurance, as they slide from upper middle to lower middle.

The worst off are the upper lower, who aren’t poor enough to qualify for insurance jokes such as the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System (AHCCCS – or AAACCHoo, where you go to an office on South Sixth Avenue and a guy who flunked chiropractic college says you have a cold and to take two aspirin and call Oprah in the morning).

The result is that cagey veterans of Our Mother of Holiness (even the best of nets – and the health-care safety net is arguably the worst – is way more hole than hemp) go where treatment is free: the emergency rooms or dial 911.

Eric Sagara of the Tucson Citizen had a hell of a piece Wednesday about a new, common-sense approach toward coping with this new reality of ERs and fire departments.

They are the default interface between the poor sick or sick poor and America’s health-care system. That’s no way to run a railroad. You might be headed for a train wreck.

Tucson does not send a locomotive on a 911 call from an old man who stumbles and falls with his pants snarled around his ankles: We send a pickup truck.

That was the start of Eric’s story: A 90-year-old guy, living all alone, falls trying to hike up his trousers and is just lucky enough to be able to reach the phone, so he dials 911 and the Tucson Fire Department sends two men in an “alpha truck.”

That’s what they call the two pickups they’re running trials with. It wasn’t any armed robbery, house fire or sucking chest wound, but what choice does the man have? Dial 911 for a nonemergency or lie there and starve to death?

The TFD has two pickups, operating on the North Side for now, with two more in the plan for the city’s four battalions. Each of the pickups, outfitted with all the medical and mechanical gear necessary, costs a quarter of a million dollars less than the next most compact and economical vehicle in the fleet.

Tucson, and all of the USA, is about to watch the biggest generation in history turn old and, shall we say, diminished. Diminished in health and strength, in mental acuity, in fiscal phatness and in human connection, whether family or friends.

Everybody we know is dying off. As we stumble into our dotage, we are going to need something relatively low-tech and inexpensive to get us to some kind of health care, before a simple slip in the shower turns into Code Blue.

Columnist Jeff Smith dialed 911 one time, and the operator didn’t speak English. Call 520-455-5667 or e-mail him at jeffyboy@wildblue.net.

Eighty years ago, the late Larry Cheek (perhaps a better word would be “tardy”) wrote a piece in the Tucson Citizen about Eloy in which he answered a question that had bugged many of us but which our sloth had dissuaded anyone from researching:

What does Eloy mean?

Cheek said it came from the Armenian explorers who first stumbled onto the place. Their reaction, as they surveyed the half-vast expanse of expansiveness, was a muttered, “Eloy,” which Cheek said meant, in their tongue, “My God.”

The queen of Eloy, along with the rest of the literate citizens of the place, wrote a letter to the editor to convey the consensus that, “We are not amused.”

They should have been; it was probably Cheek’s best line, and it was meant in jest. Whatever.

I took a drive through Eloy a couple of days ago, south to north and back again, and look who’s got the last laugh now: To the sophisticated eye of the professional (who’s been reading the clips), Eloy has the look of a town about to boom.

Indeed, all of Pinal County is fast-tracking its way to fulfilling the prediction that all the way from Cave Creek to Nogales would be one megalopolis by 1960-something. Yuk yuk.

A few days and countless millions of dollars short, but better than never to the greedy eye of the developer, Phoenix is the fifth-largest city in the country and growing its way toward Tucson, which in turn is growing its way toward Marana. I never drive through Marana without misting up thinking of my Dad, who made his living in Marana and places like it.

Places such as Marana, when Dad was alive – pre-1978 – were like Eloy when the Armenians happened upon it. Desert. Interrupted by cotton fields.

Marana was a cotton gin, a welding shop, a couple of lunch counters and Dale Gladden’s farmhouse. No town hall, no Gracie Mansion equivalency.

Marana was a place like the Avra Valley was a place. A place to do the business of agriculture. After Gladden there were the Wongs, the Kais, the Anways and that was enough to form a quorum for any kind of argument you could promote.

Now Marana is a big city, if you think square mileagely. Like Casa Grande: Wait two weeks between your trips up I-10 to Phoenix, and you will find yourself uttering an involuntary, “Holy cow!”

Dad would pass out cold.

Dillard’s, right next to the highway in Casa Grande? And that means even tonier stores have the quieter locations in this humongous shopping mall.

Well, Dad, the prediction is finally right. The thing about it that knocks me out is how, if you build it – even if you build it in the sphincter of planet Earth – they actually will come.

I never thought they would come to Eloy. Dad never thought they would come to Eloy. But then, Dad didn’t live to see Rancho Mirage.

Rancho Mirage, east of Palm Springs, Calif., recently held title as the richest city in America. And it borders Indio, one of the ugliest, nastiest places, which did not grow to cover the land where Rancho Mirage now sits because at the time Indio thought that land wasn’t up to Indio standards.

It has Santa Ana winds that make the native shrubs grow sideways. The winds are too strong for anything native to grow to tree height. It has electric high-voltage towers and wires running everywhere. It has those electricity-generating propellers. It runs 125 in the shade every summer.

But it also has subdivisions with identical $10 million tract houses, so the rich folks from the rust belt flock there like lemmings to the sea.

See?

Eloy is not the next, but it’s the next after the next after eventually the Next Big Thing.

My God.

Columnist Jeff Smith would be willing to go halvesies with somebody on a 40-acre piece of ground just 79 miles from the heart of downtown Eloy. He may be reached at (520) 455-5667 or jeffyboy@wildblue.net.

It took me a long time to get shanghaied into the position that illegal immigration is a problem, and I’m still not very worked up over it.

But it looks like everybody else is, so I find myself searching for the loose ends that wind – or wend – their way back to knots that tie this factor to that factor to another, and eventually you have yourself an issue. We used to call them problems.

I’ve long seen a parallel between the gutsy fathers and mothers who risk death in the desert to make money for a better life for their families back home and our own pioneers who took a long chance on a long trip across what was then called “the great American desert” – actually, Nebraska.

But drug smugglers sneak in among the bunches of illegal immigrants seeking jobs, which is bad. Now they have the brass to start turf wars with live ammo, which is worse.

And illegal immigrants strain some school and hospital budgets, and so forth and so on. They keep Lou Dobbs on the TV screen for hours every day, and that’s pretty sorry, too.

I’ve been pitching the tactic of tracking the fruit-picker to the foreman to the farmer to the corporation that owns him and others like him to the CEO somewhere in New York City, and busting him. Handcuff the big boss. Alert the media.

Eventually the jobs would dry up and the flood of immigrants would likewise. I fear I might be labeled a bigot for suggesting Nicaraguans are best housed in Nicaragua, Hondurans in Honduras, Mexicans in Mexico and so on down to Patagonia, but it’s true.

I know it can be miserable living in a country run by a gang of rich Ivy League grads with Hispanic accents, but if the campesinos would stay home for the elections, maybe they could throw the rascals out.

Simple.

Not really. Nothing ever is.

The trouble with my great idea about arresting the truly guilty at the top of this big ol’ heap of trouble is that Congress won’t really, really do anything about it. So naturally the folks at the front, in the trenches, pick your favorite battlefield cliché, took up the sword and shield and took action. Like our Legislature did here, and our governor signed it.

And those of delicate sensibility said it was unconstitutional, with undertones of accusation that the ayes had it. “It” being xenophobia or racism.

Actually I think your Mexican is a nationality, not a race. Actually I think race is a fiction, like a unicorn. Species is as fine a distinction as science takes us. You could look it up.

The constitutional issue is a veritable Gordian knot (Gordo, if you prefer a Latinate spin) of contrasting truths. True, immigration and international borders are federal turf. But true, too, it is local and state governments that are dealing person-to-person with this putative federal issue and paying – taxpayer to city, county, state, school district, volunteer fire department, etc. – what should be a federal bill. Meaning nonborder states, nonaffected states, should cough up their share.

But they aren’t.

And don’t hold your breath until they do. So cities and states will keep passing laws to try to get a grip on this huge, shapeless, boundless, mess of a heartbreak. Some will be bigoted and mean; others will be sensible and just. Most will test the frazzled border between constitutional and non.

And Congress will sit on its hands until finally it recognizes that with all the middle-class jobs we’ve shipped away on the slow boat to China, and – good Lord, these illegal immigrants are now doing jobs the union crews and their sons and daughters used to make a middle-class living on – they damn well better risk their political futures and do something, before the disappearing middle class reappears on the steps of Congress – driving a tumbrel.

Columnist Jeff “Jeffyboy” Smith has a yoke of burros just about stout enough to pull a tumbrel. He may be reached at jeffyboy@wildblue.net or 520-455-5667.

TPD officer John Dudek in 1972

First, you have to understand that it’s not about motorcycles; it’s about style: Cops are bigger slaves to fashion than almost anybody except bikers.

At least the police force officially goes clothed in uniform. Since the invention of the wheel, your outlaw biker has made noise about being the last of the nonconformists. But check one out and he will inevitably be wearing blue jeans, a trucker’s folding wallet secured by a chain to a belt-loop, a red bandanna on his head (for collision safety), black leather jacket in winter, blue denim in summer. And, of course, he’ll be riding a Harley-Davidson. Or as I call it, Hardly-Ableson, but I’m a notorious cynic.

Last of the nonconformists. Right.

They dress alike so we civilians will know that, and they ride Harleys because these bikes are slow, leak oil, break down with comforting fre- quency, make this sound like “potato, potato, potato,” and they’re American.

Next to bikers, police look like pinko-commie-grad students, which is a hell of a thing to say about patriots like police officers.

Red, white and true-blue Americanism is another thing the cops and the bikers share, like being fashion victims. As a matter of fact, throw lawyers in with them, and you have a veritable trilateral commission.

By character and value system, lawyers, bikers and cops are distinguishable only by annual earnings.

And for that reason, more lawyers ride Harleys, per capita, than do bikers or cops. But that is about to change.

After a 30-year failed marriage to Kawasaki, the Tucson Police Department is going back to Harley-Davidson for its motorcycle patrols. And anybody who tells you it’s because they’re superior machinery to the BMW or the Honda police scooters they tested is fibbing.

Oh, Harley has made light-years of advancement over the bowling balls of the company’s dark ages, but they have done it in spite of themselves. The company decreed that first its bikes have to look like the the old days, sound like the old days, ride like the old days.

And then if they’d go down the road, around the corner and stop when the light turns red, that would be nice.

And the baby boomers ate ‘em up. My generation is so smitten with the rebel image – from James Dean to Sonny Barger – that Harley is now one of the world’s largest franchiser of logo-branded apparel. Spendy apparel, to ride your World’s Most Expensive Custom Painted If-It-Don’t-Go-Chrome-It Motor Putter.

Each of the 65 Harleys the TPD is buying over the next four years will cost a little bit north of $23 grand.

“My stars and garters, Ethel, the last motorbike I had cost me $2,000.”

Yes, but that was many years ago.

Fifty-three years ago, when I saw my first Harley, it was being managed by my first sight of a motorcycle cop, and his name was John Dudek, and the sight of him almost set me back to bed-wetting. Officer Dudek had an air of menace and a great big mustache. He was terrifying.

John Dudek was beloved of the police force, the city of Tucson, the press and me. He served 22 years and never rode anything but a Harley.

As far as the TPD was concerned then, nothing went on two wheels that wasn’t a Harley.

What goes around, comes around, no?

Columnist Jeffyboy Smith is a motorcyclist, biker, whatever. He rarely rides these days, but it’s like with the Marine Corps: There’s no such thing as an ex-Marine. He may be reached at (520) 455-5667 or jeffyboy@wildblue.net.

Allow me to say Tucson’s Tuesday monsoon was the damnedest downpour my 62-year-old eyes have witnessed – here.

There was the time I was heading south from Springerville on my motorcycle in a gentle summer rain, a rain that got less gentle the closer I got to the Salt River Canyon. About the time the road seems to drop from under you like a roller coaster ride into the bowels of hell (if you’ve driven it, you know), the clouds opened and, as God is my witness, I couldn’t see my front wheel. But that was Mogollon Rim country, not Tucson.

Having plied the trade here for going on 40 years, I have grown eerily prescient on when and where news is going to break: Witness my recent visit to the Little Bighorn Battlefield, and (dare one call it luck?) it happened to be June 26 – 131 years to the day after Crazy Horse whipped Custer.

To a froth.

Or the first time I drove into New York City to visit my son in his new digs on the 11th day of the month. The month of September. The first anniversary of 9/11.

Another day I drove to Florence to pick up a buffalo hide in August, and the closest shade was in front of this large Victorian building. And it happened that at that very minute, on the steps of that very Victorian, this muscle-head in a fresh white shirt was orating to very sweaty civilians who, I learned when the speech concluded, were what you call constituents.

They were the kind of people who put the telegenic talking head in the dry shirt into the U.S. House of Representatives. Guy name of Rick Renzi.

See what I mean? I have this idiot savant thing, like the Rain Man of journalism. There it goes again – rain – which wasn’t even happening when I swung off state Route83 onto I-10 westbound Tuesday.

You could see rain falling on the South Side of Tucson, 20 miles away, but it was a two-dimensional view. The third dimension, visible to weather radar and nervous pilots on approach to TIA, would have shown me another front bringing beaucoup water from the west and persuaded me to turn around and head for home.

Maybe. I’m one of those 10-feet-tall-and-bulletproof thinkers who may not try a bank-to-bank arroyo but ain’t scairt of curb to curb.

Besides which, I was on my way to Country Club Road and Ajo Way to buy a water tank. And for another 10 bucks, a rain barrel.

I am not making this up: They had these 55-gallon drums that Pepsi and Mountain Dew syrup is shipped in. Cut the top off and set it under your downspout or, like me, store bulk lead for casting rifle bullets. No end to farm, ranch and household uses.

Assuming you don’t get drowned en route. I was just east of the Triple T Truck Stop when the skies opened in earnest. I saw on TV later that two storms, moving in opposite directions, butted heads pretty much on top of me and my truck as we approached the Irvington Road exit. Like the papers said, the rain was coming down at better than a 2-inch-per-hour clip – sideways, on a 55-mph wind.

This is not the Tucson monsoon you brag about to your buddies back East, with your feet up on your foothills flagstone patio wall, watching a half-dozen lightning barrages splitting the greasewood-scented air and towering black cumulus here and there dumping rain on grateful ground.

No time or peace of mind to spend in reverie. I have all available synapses trained on what Mother Nature is up to and what the long-haul truckers are doing to deal with it.

I’m with them, at around 20 in the right-hand lane with our lights on, watching your average black Escalade with the 20-inch rims and the 8-inch lift streaming past in the fast lane, lacking only 50 feet of rope and a water skier to make the picture perfect.

Only it wasn’t the fool in $70,000 worth of SUV who made the front page; it was a granddad in a grandkid retriever who dipped his toe in the water and got swept to his death. Drowning on Irvington Road.

Try to make sense of that.

Columnist Jeff Smith got his truck stuck in the mud last week. In his own driveway. He may be reached at (520) 455-5667 or jeffyboy@wildblue.net.

Frenchy IOC to ax a great sport after ’08 Games, unless 13-year-old’s crusade succeeds

SOON TO BE FORMER OLYMPIC SPORT: Former University of Arizona star Jennie Finch throws a pitch in a World Cup of Softball game against Canada in Oklahoma City in July.

I’d have written this sooner but last week Michael Vick stepped into it clear to his sinuses and brought the wrath of the civilized world down on him, putatively (only on account of I’m weary of using “allegedly”) pitting man’s best friend in mortal combat, and you ought to know by now that bad news trumps everything.

About 10 days ago, Jones was surfing the satellite and came across a pixie-ish countenance, which slowed him long enough to catch the windup and delivery of a pitch that spun a pretty fair country batter like a weather vane in the middle of Oklahoma in tornado season.

Which it happened to be – the middle of Oklahoma in tornado season.

The ballgame was the finals of the World Cup of international women’s softball, the field was in Oklahoma City, which is prone to blow left, right and straight up during this part of the summer (with particular frequency around trailer parks; no one knows why). The pixie on the mound was Cat Osterman, who pitched college ball in her home state of Texas.

Two pitches later, the befuddled batter sat down, and her country girl in the on-deck circle stepped up and took her cuts: three, to be precise, to no effect but to give her a place on the pine with her predecessor.

And so it went, seven strike-outs in a row, 13 in sum (which broke Cat’s own World Cup record of 11), giving Osterman the win and giving Team USA back-to-back titles in this post-collegiate, international venue of women’s fast-pitch softball.

And I’m here to tell you – since Jones lacks my professional credential and is a one-fingered typist – that we witnessed one of the best-executed, most-thrilling stick-and-ballgames either Jones or I had ever sat clear through in front of a TV screen.

And don’t think Team Japan was any ham-and-egger gang of amateurs. They didn’t get to the championship game by walking over an assortment of stiffs. The Japanese approach softball with the same sort of high seriousness that so surprised the U.S. Navy at Pearl Harbor.

But all the seriousness they could muster was no match for the woman staring at her catcher’s signals as each Japanese batter tried, and failed, to comprehend her command of the horsehide sphere.

(Do I sound like I could have made it in the sports department? I’ve always wondered.)

And whenever the camera was not on the little-girl face of Osterman, it panned across a lineup of familiar faces: Jennie Finch, cover girl, former University of Arizona pitcher, ESPN regular; Monica Abbott, the 8-foot Tennessee pitcher who nearly stole Arizona’s last Women’s College World Series championship; and Mike Candrea, UA head softball coach, USA Olympic coach, and coach of this USA World Cup team.

Candrea’s a busy man with all of this, but he’s planning to pull back from his noncollegiate coaching chores, not that he is all that burdened.

How come? Because the the International Olympic Committee has decided to knock women’s softball out of the Olympics after next year’s quadrennial show in Beijing.

Brilliant. Take the ax to one of the best team sports on the planet – regardless of gender, venue, or how many countries the size of Cochise County they play it in – and keep foolish frippery like rhythmic gymnastics – that goof they do on a gym mat whilst twirling batons trailing ribbons.

I’ve never understood the IOC, and I still don’t. They operate with all the logic and genteel good manners of French presidential politics.

I only hope they can read. A crusade, for want of a better word, has been launched by a 13-year-old softball ace named Jamie Gray. She’s from Boca Raton, Fla., and has been a serious butt-kicker in both girls softball and boys baseball. Her dream is to play for her country in the Olympics.

Do the math and you’ll understand Ms. Gray’s heartbreak over the IOC’s Frenchness. Next summer’s Olympics in Beijing catch her too young to play for Team USA.

What we need to aim for is 2012. The International Softball Federation has a Web site – Savesoftball.com – and at the top of this site Jamie Gray tells her story and asks for your computer name on a petition to be sent to the IOC, with sufficient signatures, speedily gathered, to arrive as the IOC meets during the 2008 Olympics.

Get off the couch and plant it in front of the computer screen and surf your way to Jamie’s Savesoftball.com petition.

Then get back to the couch and, with luck, catch a ballgame. A women’s softball game.

Columnist Jeff Smith loves a fast pitch from an athletic woman. He may be reached at (520) 455-5667. E-mail: jeffyboy@wildblue.net

OLYMPIC SPORT: Stephanie Sandler of South Africa competes in rhythmic gymnastics in the Athens 2004 Olympic Games.

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OLYMPIC SOFTBALL FACTS AND FIGURES

THREE Olympics (1996, 2000, 2004) in which softball has been contested

THREE Gold medals in softball won by the United States

TWO Sports eliminated from Olympics, beginning with the 2012 Games. The jettisoning of baseball and softball marks the first time a sport has been removed since 1936, when polo was axed.

FIVE Sports considered as replacements for baseball and softball. But the International Olympic Committee rejected golf, rugby, squash, karate and roller sports.

Source: Los Angeles Times

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FOR MORE INFORMATION

International Softball Association: www.savesoftball.com

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2008 SUMMER OLYMPIC SPORTS

Number in parentheses is number of events to be contested in each sport

Archery (4)

Athletics (47) (track and field)

Badminton (5)

Baseball (1)

Basketball (2)

Boxing (11)

Canoeing (16)

Cycling (18)

Diving (8)

Equestrian (6)

Fencing (10)

Field Hockey (2)

Soccer (2)

Gymnastics (18)

Handball (2)

Judo (14)

Modern pentathlon (2)

Rowing (14)

Sailing (11)

Shooting (15)

Softball (1)

Swimming (34)

Synchronized swimming (2)

Table tennis (4)

Taekwondo (8)

Tennis (4)

Triathlon (2)

Volleyball (4)

Water polo (2)

Weightlifting (15)

Wrestling (18)

Timing is everything, right? If you were going to defend your life from a large, angry man shouting that he’s contemplating beating you to death, while his two large, angry dogs snarl and snap at you, it would be politic to have done it after April 24, 2006.

Harold Fish ran into the aforementioned brace of canines and the one angry man out in the woods north of Payson on May 11, 2004. After firing a warning shot into the ground near the dogs, which aroused the dog owner’s ire and sent him charging toward Fish in a quite frightening and threatening manner (according to Fish), Fish shot him three times.

The deceased was Grant Kuenzli, who had a history of mental illness and violent, aggressive episodes. Kuenzli also had a screwdriver in his back pocket.

Neither of these were known to Fish when he decided to use his weapon against Kuenzli, but both circumstances, he and his attorneys argued at trial, had a hell of a lot to do with Kuenzli’s behavior leading up to (and causing) the shooting.

Kuenzli was acting like a madman armed with a dagger, the defense contended. Oh, and an aggressor with a pair of four-legged accomplices.

The concept of disparity of force is an accepted issue in trials involving arguments of self-defense: I don’t know to what degree Fish stressed that Kuenzli and his dogs appeared to outweigh and outthreaten Fish – minus his pistol – but if it were me, I’d hammer the factor like a railroad spike.

But in Fish’s case, as the law read at the time, he couldn’t raise the history of the dead man’s aggression and mental illness, or being armed with a weapon that helped set Kuenzli’s state of mind, though Fish could not see it.

And to sum it up, the burden of proof lay with Fish, to prove he acted in self-defense.

“Whoa up there, Bunky,” you say, “ain’t the accused presumed innocent until proven guilty, and don’t the burden of proof rest with the accuser?’

Your grammar sucks, but you make a strong point. And the bill that Gov. Janet Napolitano signed into law in April of last year corrects that very injustice.

But it does Harold Fish precisely zero good. Despite efforts by Fish and his legal team, the NRA and yours truly (day late, dollar short, and timing is everything), subsequent bills that have passed the Legislature and lit on Janet’s office furniture have been vetoed, thus failing to retroactively shift the burden of proof and win Fish a new trial.

The battle has become one of judicial precedent and public policy: Should legislation be passed to retroactively exonerate one man or a dozen, in defiance of then-extant law, notwithstanding that law having subsequently been replaced?

Convoluted, no? But it boils down to the legislative branch trying to trump the judicial, and Napolitano, a muscular ex-prosecutor, has made it plain where her judicial sympathies lie.

As for Fish, poor old Harold, who is out more than a hundred grand and facing 10 years in durance vile, he’ll probably still be filing appeals and responding to denials when he finally gets sprung for good behavior.

●

Most of us would be lucky to know even one peg-legged man in a lifetime.

Outside of R.L. Stevenson’s fiction, the subspecies pretty much doesn’t exist: The peg leg itself is termed a prosthesis, and the wearer is defined as physically challenged or some such load of hooey.

I had the good fortune to know a man with a peg leg named Gordon Blohm (pause for the awful old joke to sink in . . . “And what was the name of his other leg?”), and old Gordon was one of the best-humored gents you’d meet. Except that you’d be too late: Gordon Blohm was killed in a car crash in Missouri late last month.

Gordon was one of a life-affirming, I-caught-a-fish-this-big storytelling, mildly hell- raising flock of folks I’ve come to know on the target-shooting ranges of the American West.

He lived out in Marana, built and fixed rifles for friends, and worked like a field hand running shooting matches at Three Points. His name never appeared in the papers until now, which perhaps was a small mercy. Gordon was a fine, fine man.

By the way, his peg leg was aluminum.

Tucson Citizen Editorial Board blog: “Sicko”: There’s nothing wrong with Michael Moore

Columnist Jeff Smith’s timing is so pitiful he was born in the wrong century. Contact him at 520-455-5667 or jeffyboy@wildblue.net.

Day before yesterday, Paula Wittner threw a party within a party in Patagonia, where they know how to put on an old-fashioned Fourth of July birthday party for the United States of America and from 5,000 to 10,000 of its Americans. Plus a flock of Mexicans who come up from Sonora to whoop it up with their carnales.

Paula invariably has the cleverest float in the Independence Day parade, being a true patriot and student of liberty; she has a terrific backyard and draws a fine crowd of potluckers who put thought and action into their contributions to the table, and she’s Jewish.

On this birthday of America in particular, Jewishness makes a nigh-perfect counterpoint to another important faith: Catholicism.

Once enough revolting – better make that rebellious – Americans declared independence from mother England, which happened 7/4/1776, and after they succeeded in making this stick by winning the war of independence (and thenceforth requiring capital letters on the preceding clauses), the founding fathers and mothers had to write a constitution to conduct the nation’s official life.

Foremost among resulting system of laws is the First Amendment, which recognizes our inherent freedoms of speech, press, assembly and religion and the right to petition.

You might be inclined to believe the religions we are so free to pursue would in themselves be models of personal freedom.

But the Catholic Church’s Tucson Diocese lately has imposed a pretty narrow code of conduct on all who minister to the flock, priest or parishioner, hired hand or volunteer.

Unless you’ve had your head in the sand, you know the Church of Rome has been rattled to its roots by sexual misconduct of priests, who have taken vows not only of piety and good, law-abiding behavior, but also celibacy.

You may have noted that their counterparts in the Jewish faith, who aren’t so constrained from the natural urges of the species, have no such history of sexual misconduct.

I bought a painting of Paula’s, which shows a Jew arriving on America’s shores, his face strained with uncertainty over leaving the old country and old life and facing the new and unknown in the land of freedom of religion.

Peeking out from behind the lapel of his jacket, there’s an old rabbi carrying a candle to light the pilgrim’s way and keep him connected to his god and faith.

I had to leave Paula’s party early because Wednesday night is my workweek, and I had to get home to my keyboard.

Some of the folks asked what my topic would be, and I told them I’d gotten a phone call and then a bulky envelope from a former volunteer who had spent the previous decade and a half making music for Catholic churches all across Tucson.

But no more. Now the Tucson Diocese has requirements for its “ministers” – all who work, for pay or for karmic credits toward the way into heaven.

And all of these so-called ministers, right down to the volunteer guitar-picker who plays at Mass or for informal get-togethers amongst the flock, have to fill out the kind of background report you’d expect of your party’s candidate for president.

As in Social Security number, employment history (and reason for leaving any employer), education, criminal history, personal references, history of church and/or volunteer service and reasons for leaving, history of contact with children and what is termed “vulnerable adults,” and finally . . .

. . . fingerprints.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph: I’m surprised they aren’t asking for mug shots, front and side, with numbers across your chest like I got when I was thrown in the drunk tank back when I was a foolish 20-year-old.

Well, too much was enough for our heartsick guitar player. His principles trumped the joy and satisfaction he felt from giving his time and love of music to the church and its parishioners.

He’s done. As is the woman who asked me what I was rant-ing about this week. She used to volunteer to teach kids the catechism, but she’s had it to the eyeballs with this kind of intrusion into her private life.

If this kind of vetting had been done for the priesthood, there would be no public stink and none of the church cover-up that kept shuffling guilty priests from parish to parish and town to town, compounding their sins and the church’s complicity.

If you ask me – or our guitar-picker and small-town catechist – the Diocese of Tucson is trying to take the glare of suspicion away from its priesthood by stripping innocent volunteers of the rights warranted them in the Constitution.

Shame on ye.

Columnist Jeff Smith knows a bad shepherd when he sees one. He may be reached at (520) 455-5667 or jeffyboy@wildblue.net.

Monday was the 131st anniversary of Custer's Last Stand, on June 25-26, 1876, and the sons and daughters of those who killed Custer and his command on that blackest and most infamous day in U.S. cavalry history are not in the mood to repeat the unintended consequence of their people's greatest military victory.

LITTLE BIGHORN BATTLEFIELD NATIONAL MONUMENT, Mont. – For the first time in 131 years, on this windy hilltop in southeastern Montana, the Indians outnumbered the white men.

That is, if you count white men in the white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant way, excluding your pellucid china teacup-white English and New Zealand tourists, Asian visitors with Nikons and Hispanic guest workers on extended weekend holiday.

Today as this event unfolded, native Montanan, native Wyomingite, native Dakotan (North and South), Native Americans all, of Lakota, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho tribal affiliation, had the whip hand over their pale-faced former adversaries here on the Greasy Grass – what white men call Custer Hill – if only they chose to wield it.

Monday was the 131st anniversary of Custer’s Last Stand, on June 25-26, 1876, and the sons and daughters of those who killed Custer and his command on that blackest and most infamous day in U.S. cavalry history are not in the mood to repeat the unintended consequence of their people’s greatest military victory.

They are here – in force – to re-create unity and create diplomatic and political strength.

Eugene Little Coyote, tribal chairman of the Northern Cheyenne, presides over the afternoon’s program. He stands near the bottom of the hill where George Armstrong Custer and the last few fighting men of his command fell.

Little Coyote’s words are interrupted now and again by the cries of Indian riders on a hilltop to the north and by the approving trilling of Indian women.

This and the pounding of horse hooves is eerily reminiscent of what filled the air on the afternoon we all are here to fix in our memories.

Eugene Little Coyote and his counterparts from the Lakota and Arapaho tribes have a more public purpose in being here and in a ceremonial fashion, re-creating that historic meeting between Indian and Anglo-Saxon in 1876.

These tribal leaders are here above the winding Little Big Horn River to declare a renewed sense of unity among their tribes, for the purpose of bending American political will to the will of Native American spiritual wishes and wants.

Note the missing hyphen in the previous sentence. I’m not talking about “Native-American,” as we term these people today, diplomatically, timidly. I see them as native to this place, and I see their spirituality as native to the stones, the grass, the sky that arches over it all. It ain’t the Sonoran Desert; it’s Big Sky Montana and the tall-grass prairie. Or maybe short-grass.

But these natives to what we call America are as rooted to this part of America as the mountains that surround the Little Big Horn. They hold these mountains and prairies sacred, and all they seek today, through this reaffirmation of unity, is to get back a little of what was taken from them unfairly, probably unlawfully, in the days when Custer still breathed.

They want back Bear Butte, a place that is sacred to the spirit of all three of their peoples. It was lost to them when the Black Hills in South Dakota were lost to the Plains Indians, when gold was discovered there and trumped all Indian religion and all American treaties.

You watched “Deadwood.” You know what happened. The dirt worshippers lost everything.

On Monday, I listened and watched as one frail and very damned impressed member of the minority, as a powerful force of latter-day dirt worshippers made the case for getting a pile of the dirt they worship returned to their stewardship.

I admit to a strong streak of sentimentality, but I defy you to defeat their arguments with whatever logical, legal or political weapons you possess.

Bear Butte is today a park in South Dakota. Hell, it isn’t even making cash from concessions. So let the dirt worshippers who once could claim it – as we still claim Jerusalem as birthplace of several of our faiths – have it back.

They aren’t going to keep it. Nobody owns Mother Earth, after all. They’re only going to use it in their prayers for as long as they live.

For as long as the grass shall grow.

Columnist Jeff Smith is a would-be Apache and somewhat of a pantheist. He may be reached at (520) 455-5667 or jeffyboy@wildblue.net.

The last flowing river in southern Arizona is being sucked dry by the town and next-door neighbor Fort Huachuca, but that could stop soon

Water gurgles through the San Pedro River, the last flowing river in southern Arizona, in February.

There’s a scene in the movie “Lawrence of Arabia” where Prince Saud grills Lawrence, who looks like a surfer dude thanks to Peter O’Toole’s youth in the first starring role of a long and illustrious career.

The prince – who in a few years will become King Saud, grandfather of the current monarch of Saudi Arabia but at the time of the events, World War I, not yet acquainted with the Bush family of Kennebunkport – tells Lawrence how he and his Bedouin kin love greenery and running streams such as those Lawrence left to find his way to the desert.

“I fear you are another desert-loving Englishman,” Saud says. He asks Lawrence what draws him to the desert.

Lawrence says: “It’s clean.”

Deep. Very.

I wrote my honors thesis in English about Thomas Edward Lawrence and his love affair with sand, his hatred of the Turks who preyed upon the Bedouin homeland and his ultimate disappointment with his countrymen, who did a faster if more genteel job of skinning the Arabs out of Arabia.

No one at the time seemed aware of what lay beneath the sand. All oil meant to Lawrence was lubrication for the motorcycle that carried him to his death.

What matters to us, for our weekly sermon, is that one man stood for his nation on its little green dot in the Atlantic, and the other spoke for desert dwellers everywhere who go ga-ga over greenery.

We here in rural southeastern Arizona have somewhat more greenery than those in Tucson and Phoenix.

But some of us seem to have grown so blasé about running streams that we may lose the last, best such rarity to rapacious development.

Fortunately, political clout may yet save the star of our show, the San Pedro River, running south to north, just below the horizon east of Sierra Vista.

The Legislature has passed a bill that would give the Cochise County Board of Supervisors final say in a project to help Fort Huachuca reach an agreed-upon use of water from the aquifer that feeds the San Pedro and thus sustains the plant and animal life in and along it.

If the fort cannot achieve a “sustainable yield” by 2011, it will have to cut back its work or shut down altogether. This would damn near shut down the city of Sierra Vista – or seriously slow it down.

Sierra Vista is as big a culprit as Fort Huachuca in the overdraft of groundwater that threatens to kill the last flowing river in southern Arizona.

I don’t live there, so I feel free with my criticism.

Sorry Vista started as a red-light district for an Army base. It grew into a strip mall for real estate hustlers and their families, along with the soldiers.

Today it is a pretty little town, thanks to its natural surroundings. Ironically, the city folk don’t seem to give a rat’s behind about the beauty that is free thanks to Mother Nature and that keeps the place from looking like a Superfund site.

If they keep pumping groundwater to support one huge subdivision after another, they will destroy the best thing Cochise County can claim.

The San Pedro River does not belong to the city of Sierra Vista; it belongs to us all. Unfortunately, us all ain’t in a position to let the river live. Sierra Vistans and Fort Huachucans are.

Do the right thing, y’all, and I promise to say several kind words about you and the place you call home.

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

A ladybug dances on a flower growing near the San Pedro River. If Sierra Vista keeps pumping groundwater to support one huge subdivision after another, it will destroy the best thing Cochise County can claim.

Don’t bobtail Bob’s run; let’s ‘reign’ him in

What can we anticipate by way of upward and onward, municipally speaking, with so many of the races contested by so few heavy hitters?

There’s an old chestnut in the lore of the sport of kings that claims racing improves the breed. That’s how they put it: “Racing improves the breed.”

You can Google it and come up empty, but take it from one who has spent a half-century in thrall to the many venues of who gets there firstest and fastest: Racing, indeed, improves the breed, and the saying traces its own breeding to the ponies.

Racecars do not reproduce sexually, and while 100-yard dash men do, one doesn’t suggest a breeding program for human athletes.

They do actually breed ducks to race in New Mexico, but as a rule in the world of animal athletics, nothing less than horses are worthy of serious attention.

So we’ve got this wonderful metaphor in all manner of human endeavor, the message being that the rigors of competition bring out the best in us.

OK, now consider the looming elections for City Council seats and the Mayor’s Office, and worry:

What can we anticipate by way of upward and onward, municipally speaking, with so many of the races contested by so few heavy hitters?

I guess we’ll have to get along with fewer grandiose promises from candidates trying, for their first time, to win a great big honorific in front of their names when they’re being introduced at public meetings.

What do they call City Council members anyway: Your Highness? The Right Reverend Whatshisname? I know mayors are called His (or Her) Honor, but the council member tag eludes me. Maybe it’s Your Popularity. In Chicago a lifetime ago, it could have, should have, been Your Corruption.

Much as I have prized the contest as an end, not merely a means to an end, as time has taught me the value of the contemplative life, I’ve leaned more to the middle – if you can picture that – and come to prize entropy in officeholders.

Which puts me squarely at odds with two key classes of person in this debate: politicians and journalists.

Particularly neophyte politicians seeking office in their debutante stage try to wow the crowd with the utter newness and fresh thinking of themselves and the platform they introduce.

Of course nothing is more cliché than the “new broom sweeps clean” approach, but few are the candidates who dare admit it. Because vehemently as the voting public swears to be waiting and wishing for the politician who keeps his promises because he makes no promises, just let one step to the podium and do it, and watch the crowd scurry to the shadows like cockroaches.

Then you’d expect at least the gimlet-eyed realists of the press to applaud the candor and courage of such a man of simple honor, but of course you would find yourself disappointed.

Whether the pundits truly believe the usual load of cowflop from candidates, and damn the man who fails to deliver it with a barn shovel, or if they just enjoy covering a classic political mud-wrestling match, the result is the same:

Everybody and everything encourages the candidate to offer the new and untried program and write new bills so the lawbooks will forever carry their bylines.

And you wonder why government at the grass roots, where the rulers and the ruled come eyeball to eyeball, is operated by the bureaucrats, and the rules by which the latter comply with the former are dizzying in their complexity and conflict.

It stands to reason: Every election offers the promise of new guys in office, and if every new guy sees the job as making new law, quite often the new laws are going to butt heads with the old.

So dull as it sounds, I like the idea of having such an old shoe as Mrs. Walkup’s boy Bobby in the Mayor’s Office for a third go-round.

He faced the best the Democratic Party had to offer in his maiden effort and then his sophomoric in Molly McKasson and Tom Volgy, respectively. This time he’s up agin a couple of ham-and-eggers with no political credentials and nothing much to say. About as much challenge as running against, say, me.

As Walkup put it to my boss, Mike Chihak, he takes the surgeon’s approach to public office, as in the oath of Hippocrates,

“First, do no harm.”

Or as I might put it,

“Don’t just do something; sit there.”

If we can’t achieve the democratic ideal of utter gridlock, leaving us with the Constitution, as originally penned, and maybe the Ten Commandments (omitting, as Mel Brooks did playing Moses, the Eleventh through the Fifteenth), the next best thing is a pretty good guy in his incumbency, with nothing much to do except hold down the fort.

Yay Bob.

Photo by The Associated Press. Photo illustration by Arnie Bermudez / Tucson Citizen

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

———

MAYOR, COUNCIL CANDIDATES
MAYOR

Dave Croteau, Green, painter, church caretaker.

Robert E. Walkup, Republican, mayor since 1999.

Ward 1 (West Side)

Ken Green, Democrat, minister and president of the “A” Mountain Neighborhood Association.

Regina Romero, Democrat, Pima County neighborhood reinvestment coordinator and former aide to Councilwoman Karin Uhlich.

Note: Democrat José Ibarra, who has held the seat since 1995, is not seeking re-election.

Ward 2 (Northeast Side)

Rodney Glassman, Democrat, former legislative aide for U.S. Rep. Raúl Grijalva.

Lori A. Oien, Republican, interior designer and acting chair of Governor’s Highway Traffic Safety Council Legislative Subcommittee.

Robert Louis Reus, Democrat, cable television producer for Access Tucson.

Note: Independent Carol West, who has held the seat since 1999, is not seeking re-election.

Ward 4 (Southeast Side)

Shirley Scott, Democrat, council member since 1995.

Daniel L. Spahr, Republican, financial planner.

Wildcat softball women wow ‘em on successful blond ambition tour

Taryne Mowatt took the MVP trophy for the College World Series, and gave her teammates and coach a natural and legal high to last until graduation.

At the risk of sounding like exactly what I am, they certainly are blond, aren’t they? Except for the ones of darker tresses.

And at the risk of sounding far too much like the author of the previous, they certainly remind one of the classic California girl. (I was 16 when surfing music hit it big.)

Apropos of which – hitting it big – how about that Chelsie Mesa in the bottom of the fifth, putting it over the fence to drive in three runs and ice the game – and the NCAA softball championship, the UA Wildcats’ second consecutive and eighth overall? (Believe it or not, there was a question somewhere near the beginning of that run-on.) Also head coach Mike Candrea’s eighth.

Sound journalistic principles would dictate that a good deal more specific information be freighted along in the lede and second paragraphs, but be real: Anybody within earshot who doesn’t know the Wildcat women won the college softball championship Wednesday night in Oklahoma City ought not to be let out of the house without somebody at the smart end of the leash.

That ought to comprise a majority of the literate males and females in Tucson – and a majority within the first majority probably saw at least a few innings of the Cat-clawing road to the top.

It was not easy.

I allude to watching that final game because I am a nervous wreck when my team is on the field, and I carry the luck of the albatross to every team I root for, in person or via cathode-ray tube.

Jones is the same way, perhaps less high-strung, but every bit as much bad luck. We watched bits and pieces of the weekend games and during every bit or piece, our team went in the tank.

When it finally emerged that they’d be playing the menacing Tennesseeans, best of three for the championship, we quit watching altogether.

Which meant we missed Tuesday night’s extra-innings heart attack when Tucson High School alum (and third-string pinch-runner and birthday girl, hubba hubba) Danielle Rodriguez scored the sole run of the game and put the Wildcat women into the final game for the championship.

It was very damn cool.

Wednesday night, we flipped between the game and a History Channel treatise on instruments of torture designed for, built for and sold to Queen Isabela and the Catholic Church so they could conduct the Spanish Inquisition with gay abandon.

I’d punch up the softball game, and the Wildcats would have the bases loaded.

Three minutes later, Tennessee pitcher Monica Abbott – 7 feet 5 with a 96-mph rise ball, very intimidating – would retire the next three batters.

It was all our fault, Jones’ and mine, so we’d go back to the Iron Maiden and give the Cats a chance to get ahead. It was during one brief visit back to the ballgame that Mesa hit that tall can of corn over the right field fence.

That was all Taryne Mowatt needed to cement the win, take the MVP trophy for the College World Series, and give her teammates and coach a natural and legal high to last until graduation. Theirs, not his.

It appears likely Candrea will be tapped to handle the next USA Olympic softball team, and without doubt, several Wildcats will number among the nation’s best.

So, too, will Tennessee’s towering inferno, the dreaded Ms. Abbott. Talk about your ironies: Abbott was on the latest U.S. Olympic team and Candrea coached that crew, too. So if Tennessee had whupped the Wildcats, some small part of him might gnaw at Candrea for coaching Abbott to victory.

And some small minds such as mine own might hold a grudge agin him for that.

Thankfully we all are spared that angst. There’s no angst in softball.

Columnist Jeff Smith is a natural blond. Reach him at (520) 455-5667 or jeffyboy@wildblue.net.

University of Arizona softball coach Mike Candrea

Compromise Senate bill a smart way to deal with guns at public events

I can hear the shrieks of the gun-phobics: My God, letting in nuts with guns in their waistbands! We'll all be murdered by intermission!

Shelby Foote, the best of Civil War historians, had an eerie ability to say more with fewer words than a haiku poet.

Foote’s episodic commentary in the Ken Burns documentary on the war between the states placed him head and shoulders – and hips, knees and feet – at the top of the 25-words-or-fewer school of punditry. Not an “um” or an “ahh” from Fort Sumter to Appomattox.

Foote observed that the Civil War was caused by the failure of North and South to compromise.

He said we like to think of ourselves as unbending champions of our beliefs, but our real gift is for compromise – the willingness to find a middle ground we all can live with.

But as we careened toward the Civil War, like the Wreck of the Old 97, our knack for compromise failed us.

Or we failed it.

It seems to me matters of emotional heat are those that trigger the bullishness beneath our better nature: matters such as slavery and states’ rights, religion, sexual orientation – and guns.

This business of individual rights to keep and bear arms defies all efforts even to shut up and listen to what the other side has to say, let alone reach any compromise where the quirks of modern civilization require us to fit them to the outlines so clearly drawn in the Constitution.

But just when and where you least expect it, a ray of light comes beaming out of the murk, so stark it like to blind you. Compromise. On the matter of deadly weapons in public buildings and at public events.

Compromise between factions as polarized as Peary and Amundsen, and right up the road in Phoenix. At the Arizona Legislature.

Where most often one despairs of ever seeing the better angels of our nature.

From the day Arizona’s concealed carry law was signed, a fundamental conflict has troubled those who support it, in principle and in practice.

While the law manifests the state’s recognition of the right to self-defense, and to bear the means to make that right a reality, almost every building and function of the same government is off-limits to lawful carriers of weapons.

While the law clearly spelled out the right of private business to prohibit weapons being brought onto their premises, it seemed to meander around the issue of government doing as government said.

The law wound up somewhat iffily allowing as how public buildings might have a few lock-boxes around where a fella might check his iron whilst he was occupied within.

You know, like Wyatt Earp required of Ike Clanton: Leave your Hog Leg behind the bar till you’re ready to ride out.

A new bill, which has passed the Senate and House and now is being rehashed into final form, clarifies the state’s legal and, let us say, spiritual position on lawful carry of weapons.

It comes to us as an example of what compromise can accomplish, even in the most emotionally charged of public issues.

At one end of the spectrum – debate, argument, catfight – lawmakers were singing the sad old refrain, “Don’t take your guns to town, son, leave your guns at home.”

At the other end, the strict constructionists would rather keep them in their cold, dead fingers than lock them up like you would your undies and socks at the YMCA. (I never could fathom where they expected you to put the key.)

Well, be relieved to learn that under the compromise reached on SB 1251, you’re still left with your pants to tuck away your key. That key and the locker it fits are provided by the owners and operators of the public building or event, and if they run out of locker room, you can go on in with your piece on you.

I can hear the shrieks of the gun-phobics: My God, letting in nuts with guns in their waistbands! We’ll all be murdered by intermission!

But think for a minute: If these people are law-abiding enough to attend classes to earn a state permit to carry a concealed weapon, pay money, pass legal muster and pay money – I already said that, didn’t I? – to demonstrate their respect for the law and for the serious responsibility of carrying the means to defend their lives, isn’t it obvious these are not the sort of people one need be concerned about?

If you can’t grasp the obvious in the previous paragraph, you’re the nut job we need to be watching.

Read why State Rep. Steve Farley, D-Tucson, opposes the legislation.

Columnist Jeff Smith is armed but not particularly dangerous. He may be reached at (520) 455-5667 or jeffyboy@wildblue.net.