The Day Is Coming When Fife Will Get His. By Jeff Smith I'M GOING TO hate to see Ol' Fife go; he's been such a reliable source of column fodder. When his second term expires, or he takes his toothbrush and eyebrow pencil to the House of Many Doors (whichever comes first), the journalists of Arizona are going to lose one of the richest targets of opportunity ever to thrust himself upon the public consciousness. Pity. But the job description that goes with my chores here at The Weekly nowhere treats with self-interest or self-pity. It is the sworn duty of myself and others of my calling to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, and seldom is it given to any newspaper essayist to afflict anyone as smugly comfortable, anyone who has afflicted more uncomfortable and innocent civilians, as J. Fife Symington III. So the real reason I am loath to see Fife exit--escape might be the better term--the public stage, is that he's got a huge reckoning coming, and it would be morally instructive to him and to the wider world, to have it happen in front of witnesses. Like a public hanging. Aside from all the indictable offenses for which Arizona's White-Boy-in-Chief has been charged but not yet tried, the greatest harm he's inflicted upon the afflicted has been to widen and deepen the gulf between rich and poor. I doubt there has been a more devoted acolyte of the economic gospel of Ronald Reagan than Mr. Symington. He's made it his mission to lower taxes for the rich while at the same time lowering opportunity for the poor. We've seen this made manifest in the series of tax cuts that have earned Fife a lot of media attention, saved thousands of dollars annually for the most wealthy taxpayer, and amounted, for the statistical average household, to: A cheeseburger, a six-pack of beer, and a bucket of chicken from the Colonel. But J. Fife's latest gift to Arizona may prove to be his most cynical and ultimately most harmful. Last week Fife and his lackeys in the Legislature railroaded through a supposed education finance reform bill, calculated to get the courts off their backs for unconstitutionally depriving poor school districts of the means to provide as good an education as the rich kids get. Now Fife and the current Legislature did not devise the property tax-based system of paying for school books, buildings and teachers, but they are the persons who were told by the Arizona Supreme Court in 1994 that the system was unconstitutional and must be replaced. And Fife and the legislators are the folks who have been dicking around ever since, first ignoring the court mandate, then pretending to reform the system while avoiding anything that would discomfort the wealthy, and finally last week creating a new system they believe will squeak by judicial review, with minimal impact on the cozy situation enjoyed by school districts with high assessed valuations and low property tax bills. Perhaps we shouldn't say "finally," because I think there's a good chance the courts won't buy the plan, and an even better one that the folks at home--school board members, regular old moms and pops--won't be fooled either. At Fife's urging the Republic majority in the Legislature hid out behind closed doors, out of sight of the Democrats and the press, and even a number of fair-minded fellow Republicans, and hustled up a bill to provide about $32 million a year for capital improvements in the poorer school districts, and to create a mechanism whereby fast-growing districts could borrow money from the state to keep pace with increasing student population. The most cursory study of the numbers shows the $32 million to be ludicrously short of the financial needs, and the device for lending money to the fast-growing districts virtually ensures that those districts seldom qualify for it. So we've got a new law that sort of looks like an answer to the problem, but really isn't. Because face it: Fife Symington and people like him really don't have any use for public education, nor for the people who depend on it, and they don't give a rat's ass if those people stay ignorant and poor and miserably unhappy, because deep down inside, men like Fife believe poor people are morally and in most other ways inferior, and that the wealthy are wealthy because God likes them better. When was the last time you heard of a heavyweight champ with a name like J. Fife Symington III? I'd just like to be around--and have Fife and an audience of millions there--when Arizona's afflicted take to the streets, like 20 million Frenchmen who were not wrong when they put the chop on Louis XVI and Miss Marie. In the interests of justice and the immutable, eventual goes-around/comes-around, I think J. Fife Symington III should be the first to receive a right hook to the snotbox from somebody name of Buster, whose children have been struggling to learn their ABCs in a hot, leaky, asbestos-polluted schoolhouse so far out on west Buckeye Road that it's practically in Orange County. When it gets really ugly--and I believe someday soon it will--I'd like to see the men and women who made it ugly have to pay.

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