Arizona's Split Reality

Ground zero for the rigged-election conspiracy, the border state could decide both the fate of the Senate and the presidency.

- Olivia Nuzzi

ONE THOUSAND NINE HUNDRED and fifty-four miles, from the Pacific to the Gulf, where people live and work. Where they commute between Mexico and the United States like they commute between New Jersey and New York, passing through a security checkpoint as they would a toll outside the Holland Tunnel. Where you may look in the distance to mountains and valleys and ask where one country ends and the other begins. Where you may start to wonder about the nature of such distinctions, about the nature of separateness, about the nature of self, about borders between men, between man and state, between civilization and disorder. Where you may appreciate just how young a species we are and how tribal. If you have never stood on the banks of the Rio Grande in Texas or the Colorado River in Arizona, if you have never come face-to-face with the wall, 30 feet high, that looms multiples higher in our national psyche, if you have never put your hand through its steel tines and reached into Mexico, if you have never thrown away your bubble gum in Juárez because you cannot chew gum and walk into the United States at the same time, per the signage at Customs, the boundary between countries can seem ominous and alien, an uninhabitable space somewhere between the end of America and the end of the earth.

And then you get there and there’s a Starbucks.