New Mexico Mercury

Lock him up.

Lock him up. The dead guy did it. Lock him up.

Trayvon Martin’s murder

A 17-year old African American, child of divorce, was walking to his father’s house after taking a half time break in a ballgame to get some candy at a local store.  He was wearing a hoody in a gated community in which his father had a house. He was unarmed. An armed man, a sort of self-styled neighborhood-watch vigilante, confronted the youngster out of the blue, with no plausible provocation and shoots him dead.

All the rest of what happened that night is a tangle of interpretations, justifications, obfuscations., and a lawyer’s bag of tricks...

Hannah Arendt’s Banality of Evil

I wish I had gotten it together to write this while “Hannah Arendt” was still playing at The Guild, our city’s only remaining and consistently heroic arts theater. Then I could have urged anyone who hadn’t yet seen it to do so. Unfortunately, this brilliant film is no longer being shown. Perhaps popular demand might bring it back. “Hannah Arendt,” even for those who missed its Albuquerque showing, has a profoundly important lesson for us all: heinous crime is not only the province of the Hitler’s, Pinochet’s, and Bashad al-Assad’s of this world. The banality of evil is one of human nature’s least understood components...

Malala: ‘our hero, our champion’

The mission of a columnist is to tell stories as he sees them through his own eyes, but occasionally someone else tells a story so well that there is nothing left for me to add. Such is the case with a story published July 12 in the Guardian. Although it is by far the smallest of the seven national British newspapers, it has become, to my mind, the best newspaper in the world, with the strongest writing and the most fearless reporting.

This story, about the struggle of one teenage girl, is dramatic on a personal level but also of the utmost importance on the grand level of human aspiration. It deserves to be told as well as possible, and so I turn the rest of this column over to Ed Pilkington, the Guardian’s correspondent in New York...

Muy calentito for Hanna!

As most of you know, I am muy calentito for Hanna Skandera. In her fervent desire to determine the Final Measure of education, the perfect test that would for all time determine whether a student is edumuhcated to New Mexico standards, Hanna has gone to near super-human lengths in discovering and tracking down the Great Exam written by the finger of God on adobe tablets that exist somewhere south of the seventh sphere...

All American family

When the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus wrote 2600 years ago that “character is fate,” he set the conditions for centuries of intense introspection on the part of perhaps millions of people. What is character? How is it formed?  How does it direct one’s life? Are we born with it?  Does it grow in us through the direction of wise and loving parents and friends?

Zach Wahls, a sixth generation Iowan, told the Iowa Legislature a few years back when it was contemplating banning same-sex marriage, that “not once” in his l9 years had he “ever been confronted by an individual who realized independently that I was raised by a gay couple. And do you know why?” he asked the legislators.

“Because the sexual orientation of my parents has had zero effect on the content of my character.”...

When everything tastes like chicken

My wife and I aren’t regular movie goers.   We catch a few of the big new releases during the summer (especially Science Fiction-Superhero releases (I’m a sucker for that)), but we’ll miss a lot of movies and opt to put them on our Netflix queue or just forget about them.   So, seeing Hangover Part III, being released recently, we bumped the first movie in the trilogy up to the top of the queue. 

Yesterday, we watched it.

We didn’t laugh at all during the whole movie. Yet Roger Ebert (actually a critic I agree with a lot of the time) pronounced, “Now this is what I'm talkin' about. The Hangover is a funny movie, flat out, all the way through. Its setup is funny. Every situation is funny. Most of the dialogue is funny almost line by line.”  So why did Ebert’s pronouncement not agree with our experience?   Why did we not find the movie funny? ...

The End of Checks and Balances

El Machete

New Mexico’s tempest in a teapot

The 15 New Mexico behavioral health provider organizations that have been accused of Medicaid fraud by their Human Services Department have been put in an impossible position. The state has tried them and found them guilty in the press and the patients they serve and the staff they employ are understandably frightened and angry.

The accused agencies have been defunded, meaning they are no longer reimbursed for providing care for the most vulnerable in their communities — persons with serious mental illnesses and substance use disorders. These persons, as well as the staff are worried, demoralized, and uncertain about the future. All as a result of a process that seems to be designed to deflect accountability from the state...

Alimentando el Alma Nuevo Mexicano

Who says there aren't anymore tortilleros? In this video feature, Alimentando el Alma, Andrew Herring demonstrates various traditional Nuevo Méxicano recipes and throws in a memorable cuento for added measure.  Andrew produced this piece as a student enrolled in my New Mexico Villages and Cultural Landscapes course...