New Mexico Mercury

Television and the Ghost of Washington Irving

Fifty-three years ago FCC chairman Newton Minow made a speech to the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) in which he called television a “vast wasteland” accusing the industry of an endless procession of game shows, formula comedies, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, private eyes, and more violence. And endless commercials. Although Minow’s speech was rated one of twenty-five “Speeches That Changed the World,” today it doesn’t seem that the electronic landscape has changed that much. More networks, more profits, same drivel...

Fracking Fights Loom Large in Mexico

Mexico is emerging as the next big battleground in conflicts over hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, as the method of extracting natural gas is commonly known.

While Mexican lawmakers consider regulatory legislation to put into practice the 2013 energy reform that opened up their county’s oil and gas reserves to private investors,  anti-fracking forces are mobilizing for a moratorium or an outright ban of the controversial practice from the Mexican Congress...

The Journal, Guatemalans and American Exceptionalism

Atop their dusty perch, the Albuquerque Journal’s editorial board adjusted their monocles last week, put on their flag attire, and took a stab at defining patriotism.  The piece was entitled, “Why celebrate the Fourth? Try asking a Guatemalan.”  While the piece neither quoted, referenced, or made any attempt to include the voice of an actual Guatemalan, it did spew forth a surreal, Bush-esque view of American Exceptionalism that equates to ‘Shut up and wave the flag'...

The guilty children

Let me start by telling you that my children are guilty.  Guilty of being born to middle class, not wealthy, parents, guilty of having special needs, guilty of being the kind of poor test takers who falsely convict their teachers of being bad at their jobs.  Most of all they are guilty of being children living in New Mexico...

Leaving the world to find it

For a vast, remote and harsh expanse of southwestern desert, the Kaiparowits Plateau has seen a lot of life, from prehistoric Indians to migrating Mormons to adventurers that, during the Memorial Day weekend, included my son and I. Just as this seemingly inhospitable area helped save earlier travelers, so it redeemed our own trip that otherwise could have gone off the tracks. Sometimes, it would seem, you have to leave the world behind in order to find it...

The outrage over Kendall Jones - What’s really going on here?

Via social media (Facebook) and one of our more sensationalist online dailies, we recently learned the story of Kendall Jones, a Texas Tech cheerleader whose penchant for hunting and killing exotic animals for sport has outraged many of those she hoped to impress. The Huffington Post article, headlined “Meet Kendall Jones, The Texan Cheerleader Whose Exotic Animal Hunts Outraged the Internet,” appeared on July 1, 2014. Jones’ Facebook post was probably uploaded around the same time. It is no longer available. Either FB or Jones’ herself removed it from public scrutiny.

This narrative raised a range of issues for me, some of them uncomfortably contradictory...

Dodgy Art Bar Finally Shuttered

All of us who are educated to Susana New Mexico standards and who have proudly displayed our third grade reading proficiency certificates know that art is exceptionally dangerous. We should avoid ahtsy fahtsie and those who create it as much as is humanly possible. That means on seeing a known artist, one should smile politely, lower one’s head, and without dispatch, cross to the other side of the street.

Think, if you will then, how really menacing and perilous art is when mixed with demon rum...

Value-Added Scores Finally Explained by NM Education Department

This summer, an ongoing action by New Mexico teachers is to send in Inspection of Public Records requests (IPRAs, for short), asking the Public Education Department (PED) to send evidence that backs up teacher evaluation reports received this year, and the means used to calculate the scores.  We’ve waited.  We’ve waited some more.  Finally, some of those teachers received notices that the request is “burdensome,” and it would take the PED longer than expected.

Which is silly, since the PED happily reported the results of teacher evaluations to the press long before teachers were allowed to see them (and, of course, none of those press outlets thought to ask for substantiation).  You’d think PED would have access to the reports quickly, since they just finished them up...

A Prescription for New Mexico’s Children

As a physician, I know that when you have a cure for an ailment, you use it. You don’t waste time, because you know that delay only makes the condition worse. New Mexico has a problem. We’re at the bottom of nearly every indicator of child well-being. We know what works and we’re actually giving the right medicine to a few lucky kids. But most are not getting the cure, even though we know it works and we have the resources to get it to them.

Kids need more than health care. They need a comprehensive set of services that promote healthy development. High-quality early care and education is the prescription...

El Machete: The Unjustices

The Unjustices