The Truth About History
(by unidentified passerby)
ASU Downtown near 2nd St. / Taylor St.
A college student sharing unsolicited opinion upon seeing our crew pass through downtown campus between classes.
ASU Downtown near 2nd St. / Taylor St.
A college student sharing unsolicited opinion upon seeing our crew pass through downtown campus between classes.
A couple blocks south of the Westward Ho, you’ll find the Arizona State University Downtown Phoenix Campus. ASU started as a college for public school educators in 1885. When it opened it was one large Victorian style building in a relatively wide open part of Tempe, a town founded in the shadow of Oidbaḍ Doʼag (Tempe Butte or “A Mountain”) a few miles further up the Salt River from Phoenix in 1892. It’s named after the Vale of Tempe, in Thessaly, which according to legend was carved by Poseidon’s trident and was the place where Eurydice, wife of the iconic musician Orpheus (namesake of the Orpheum Theatre at 2nd Ave. and Adams St.), was bitten by a snake and died after being chased there by one of the sons of Apollo., God of the Sun. ASU has grown into a uniquely vast institution, with nearly 80,000 students on various campuses around the country, including four in the Valley, and nearly 20,000 employees. The ASU Downtown Phoenix Campus began in 2006 in the converted office buildings adjacent to the Arizona Center, near 3rd St. and Taylor. It has grown dramatically over the past twenty years and now hosts classes for more than 10,000 students, who come from across the country and all over the world to participate in any of more than a dozen programs, including an elite journalism school. ASU’s music-related programs, however, are almost exclusively hosted at the original Tempe campus. As a result, students or professors who hope to connect with the larger Phoenix music & arts community must go through extra effort compared to if they were already living and working blocks away from the cultural districts in Midtown and Downtown. This situation is reflective of, and perhaps partly responsible for, trend throughout the Valley. Each community seems to have its own competing version of a Downtown and cultural districts and centers for the arts. While smaller communities in other metro areas are fueled by the success of the city that represents their region’s urban core—and so they collaborate with that larger city’s institutions for the sake of the success of all the communities in the area—in the Valley of the Sun you’ll find the Wild West is alive and well. At least half a dozen towns are habitually competing for the fictitious title of Main St., Arizona. Rather than a smooth flow from a dense urban core to smaller suburban communities, to the rurals; Phoenix has a pale shadow of an urban core (comparable to the City of Frisco, Texas) and is surrounded by a bunch of overgrown small towns that have never coalesced into a cohesive metropolitan community. With Phoenix at its center, the Valley’s smallest radius is a little less than 15 miles, to the Southwest where it is bounded by the Sierra Estrella (Komaḍk), and the last few miles before the mountains in that direction belong to the Gila River Indian Community. Some might say that South Mountain (Muhadag Du'ag) is the closest boundary, just seven miles south of Downtown, or North Mountain or the Phoenix Mountains about 9 miles to the North and Northwest, but the growth of the Valley has long since passed beyond these mountains. To travel from Pegasus Airport in Queen Creek (Southeast of Phoenix) to the Spring Training stadium where the Texas Rangers and KC Royals play their home games in Surprise (to the Northwest) you would cover about 75 miles—and the truth is that it’s 75 miles of suburbs. Ahwatukee, the town that grew up in the triangle between South Mountain, Chandler, and the Gila River Indian Community and was fully annexed into Phoenix by 1987, used to be called “the world’s largest cul-de-sac” because it was only accessible from the Southeast prior to the completion of the stretch of the 202 that passes between South Mountain and the Sierra Estrella. Well, the Valley of the Sun is the World’s Largest Suburb. There is no city here. Phoenix, Tempe, Cave Creek, Buckeye, Scottsdale, Glendale, Sun City West—they’re as far apart from each other as Globe, Safford, and Duncan, in the glittering golden mountains of Southeastern Arizona. You can look at it romantically and say they’re like oases dotted along the desert road, but you can also look at it and think maybe it’s time we become one big oasis. Maybe we’re better off when we voluntarily work together for the good of us all, and maybe the best medium for teaching ourselves and future generations how to work together is the arts. This recording is of a person we believe to be an ASU Downtown student. When our team was walking through the campus with our recording equipment, he demanded that we record his opinion on our research (he had not yet inquired as to what our study was about) lest he accuse us of silencing his voice. We went ahead and gave him the mic, if only just for the fun of it.
(Some of the information in these liner notes is fictional, presented here in the attempt of satire)
(Some of the information in these liner notes is fictional, presented here in the attempt of satire)
LYRICS
Well, you see the truth about history is that ever since the beginning of organized human society, there’s been this gradual decline in the widespread silent acceptance that violence is simply the way of things, signifying a gradual transition from people acting according to their base natural instincts towards a collective consideration of the wellbeing of larger and larger human communities, eventually resulting in globalist and environmentalist philosophies becoming relatively mainstream. It’s a shift from an every-person-for-themself mentality to a mindset that centers cooperation.
But as this transition has taken place, at a glacial pace, over the course of millennia, the measure of societies’ abilities to cooperate within and between each other has fluctuated dramatically. Numerous environmental and cultural factors have influenced these fluctuations and in recent centuries a primary motivator has been economic disparity.
You know most of us in the U.S. today aspire to a life where we spend a third of our day working, a third of our day sleeping, and a third of our day living for five out of seven days each week. The other two days we sleep and live and often we do some more work. We do all of these to get digital money, which just represents physical money, which used to represent a portion of the U.S.’s gold, but it’s now just a fraction of a measure of trust between national governments.
You have to spend this representation on electricity and on internet connection so that you can get online to find out how much of it you have. And if you live in Phoenix, you also have to pay for A.C., because if you don’t, your computer’s gonna overheat before you’re even able to log on to the bank’s website.
Now there are some people - thanks to their ancestor or thanks to something that they done here in their lives - they have so much of this money that they will never, ever have to work another day for the rest of their entire lives. But there are almost, you know, three thousand billionaires in the world today - well there’s forty million people, here in the U.S. alone, who are living in poverty.
You know the darkest days of the French Revolution saw crowds of middle- and working-class Frenchpeople looking on, daily, as members of the aristocracy were executed – daily, you know? The U.S. Civil War began when our politicians had denied the issue of slavery and its cruel abuses for so long that they came to believe the only language fit for discussing it was the language of violence. They let canes and cannons speak when their words failed.
But there is another language. A language that has existed almost since the beginning of time. A language so shrouded in mystery that only the most focused, the most disciplined, and the most blessed may master it. It’s called Flemish. Comes from Flanders. Out East.
[Ahem] Well I thought maybe you were going to say that music is the alternative language.
Huh?
Through music we can reconcile when our words fail us, instead of resorting to violence.
Hey, that’s a really good thought. Instead of spending so much money on war and tech and finance, we can spend more on education and the arts, so that future generations ae wiser and make better use of the resources available to ‘em, instead of further draining the environment. But if everybody’s wise and intelligent, will they have to raise minimum wage.
We’ll just cut that last part out and end with this:
Well, you heard it right here in Phoenix, Arizona. Through music we can reconcile when our words fail us, instead of resorting to violence. Through promoting arts and education, we can ensure that future generations are wiser and healthier, and better able to make use of the resources available to them. Music and the arts - creating a more sustainable society.
But as this transition has taken place, at a glacial pace, over the course of millennia, the measure of societies’ abilities to cooperate within and between each other has fluctuated dramatically. Numerous environmental and cultural factors have influenced these fluctuations and in recent centuries a primary motivator has been economic disparity.
You know most of us in the U.S. today aspire to a life where we spend a third of our day working, a third of our day sleeping, and a third of our day living for five out of seven days each week. The other two days we sleep and live and often we do some more work. We do all of these to get digital money, which just represents physical money, which used to represent a portion of the U.S.’s gold, but it’s now just a fraction of a measure of trust between national governments.
You have to spend this representation on electricity and on internet connection so that you can get online to find out how much of it you have. And if you live in Phoenix, you also have to pay for A.C., because if you don’t, your computer’s gonna overheat before you’re even able to log on to the bank’s website.
Now there are some people - thanks to their ancestor or thanks to something that they done here in their lives - they have so much of this money that they will never, ever have to work another day for the rest of their entire lives. But there are almost, you know, three thousand billionaires in the world today - well there’s forty million people, here in the U.S. alone, who are living in poverty.
You know the darkest days of the French Revolution saw crowds of middle- and working-class Frenchpeople looking on, daily, as members of the aristocracy were executed – daily, you know? The U.S. Civil War began when our politicians had denied the issue of slavery and its cruel abuses for so long that they came to believe the only language fit for discussing it was the language of violence. They let canes and cannons speak when their words failed.
But there is another language. A language that has existed almost since the beginning of time. A language so shrouded in mystery that only the most focused, the most disciplined, and the most blessed may master it. It’s called Flemish. Comes from Flanders. Out East.
[Ahem] Well I thought maybe you were going to say that music is the alternative language.
Huh?
Through music we can reconcile when our words fail us, instead of resorting to violence.
Hey, that’s a really good thought. Instead of spending so much money on war and tech and finance, we can spend more on education and the arts, so that future generations ae wiser and make better use of the resources available to ‘em, instead of further draining the environment. But if everybody’s wise and intelligent, will they have to raise minimum wage.
We’ll just cut that last part out and end with this:
Well, you heard it right here in Phoenix, Arizona. Through music we can reconcile when our words fail us, instead of resorting to violence. Through promoting arts and education, we can ensure that future generations are wiser and healthier, and better able to make use of the resources available to them. Music and the arts - creating a more sustainable society.
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