New Mexico Mercury

Nicaragua, Part 3:  Blessed and cursed by geography

During our trip to Nicaragua, we spent a night on Las Brasiles, a narrow 5-mile-long barrier island off the northern Pacific coast. The island is entirely owned by its only inhabitant, an eco-hostel called Surfing Turtle whose mission is to help endangered turtles survive.

Employees aided by volunteers and guests rescue, feed and protect baby turtles and then set them free en masse on the beach for their march to the ocean. It is a trip for people and turtles alike. We had to help steer the tiny babies toward the ocean when they periodically lost their direction and wandered in circles...

No News is Good Snooze

You want to become a master of multitasking? Boy, have you come to the wrong place!

But you can still better yourself by reading this column, because I am indeed a responsibility-juggling virtuoso. For example, I absorb the daily news through my radio alarm while still sleeping.

I set out to translate this knowledge of world happs as a courtesy to my dear readers when I saw a web link that declared I Would Not Believe What Happens Next!!! I never did find out what happened next, but I eventually accumulated these even more fascinating internet news tidbits for your edification...

A Ship of Fools

A ship of fools is adrift. The crew is filling the sails with lies, ignorance and innuendo – fueled by religiosity, ignorance, racism, resentment, misogyny, homophobia, hate speech, class discrimination, ethnicity, fear, distrust of government, disparagement of anyone and everyone not like them and, not the least, unbridled political ambition funded by billionaires. No person, no institution is safe from their depredations, not even the sitting president. Fear of truth also fuels this taxonomy of dysfunction, deception and destruction...

La Cabalgata

“We’re tired from the dancing, not the cabalgata,” one of the horsemen says. It’s Saturday morning, March 7 and I’m in the stockyards in Palomas, Mexico where dozens of Mexican riders—men, women and kids—are saddling their horses and preparing to cross the border, join American riders and parade into Columbus, New Mexico.

This is the sixteenth annual Cabalgata Binaciónal Villista or Binational Villa Cavalcade, a very different experience than that day ninety nine years ago when General Pancho Villa’s troops attacked members of the US Third Cavalry Regiment...

Oil and gas industry ‘run amok’ on New Mexico’s highways

Route 285, which runs near our home south of Eldorado near Santa Fe, is a big part of my life.  Last week, my wife and I looked forward to traveling home on it from its southernmost point, a small Texas town called Sanderson, 20 miles from the Mexican border. We expected a beautiful drive through sparse cattle country. Instead, we found ourselves in a Western version of Mad Max meets Dante’s Inferno meets L.A. freeway at rush hour. The culprit: our oil and gas industry run amok...

Exploring Nicaragua, Part Two: Emerging from a brutal past

On a volcanic island in vast Lake Nicaragua, a team of oxen slowly trudges along a dirt road pulling a cart laden with large logs. Driving the cart is a young man with only part of his mind on his task. The rest of his attention is devoted to his conversation on a cell phone.

Hundreds of kilometers and a week later, a heavily set, elderly woman makes her way slowly and painfully through the cloud forest and up a dirt track in Parque Arenal high in the mountains in northern Nicaragua. She, too, is talking on a cell phone.

In the second largest hotel in the small city of Somoto, gateway to what is sometimes called the Grand Canyon of Central America, I am awakened before dawn by a rhythmic pounding...

Fool’s Gold: Time Crunch

Have you noticed lately how everyone but me shows up an hour early? It’s not like I was competing for any Mr. Punctual awards—one of the perks of being a writer is that folks expect such eccentricities as me arriving late, or on a unicycle, or not at all. But this latest trend really had me wondering whether I was the sole punctual person in an Early World.

So I did some research. And, yes, I am the only conscientious person in America today, outside of Hawaii and Arizona.

The Politics of Insanity

In the Politics Aristotle says, “ The mere establishment of a democracy is not the only or principle business of the legislator, or of those who wish to create such a state, for any state, however badly constituted, may last one, two, or three days; a far greater difficulty is the preservation of it.” Today we are confronted with the preservation of American democracy in the face of an ongoing political assault on behalf of oligarchs and assorted religious zealots. Something has gone terribly wrong in a society when elected representatives of the polity are hell-bent on destroying that polity’s social contract on behalf of sociopathic billionaires...

El Machete: Head Hunters

Head Hunters

Fool’s Gold: Back to My Future

I have taken a real liking to myself. That’s why I am thankful for throwing out my back, despite depending on others to tie my shoes.

The pain is really not so horrible; it can’t be much worse than a shark bite, or getting run over by a garbage truck. It’ll get better. Either that, or it’ll kill me.

Just kidding! That’s what we back-pain survivors call “sciatic humor,” which is intentionally not at all funny because laughing sets our recovery back another two to ten years...