New Mexico Mercury

To Find Oneself, Get Lost

What I would not give
to be lost again
in the gold, hot summer woods
of my eleventh year,
when my parents took me
to go out picking blueberries;
I walked too far
into the woods by Echo Lake,
away from the cool of their voices...

“The Seven” - a fusion of theatrical treats

So this week they closed the national forest, state trust lands and county open space. The Rio Grande is a dry arroyo for much of its length, and most of the rest of the river is too shallow for recreation. The lakes are remnants of themselves, and some are not even usable. In the East Mountains, we watch the terrible wildfires in the Jemez and Sangre de Cristo Mountains and wonder if we are next.

So in these hot, windy days of early summer what are New Mexicans to do to escape?

I suggest The Seven, a collection of 10-minute, one-act, two character skits performed by the Fusion company at the Cell Theater in Albuquerque.

A tsunami of peeping toms

Whatever else happens in this degrading age of universal surveillance, let us as New Mexicans make sure that if we’re stopped in a speed trap for going ten miles an hour too fast that our entire genetic identity isn’t taken from us by some guy with a swab, blue gloves, and a gun.

It’s bad enough that Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy in his majority opinion last week declared that seizure of DNA is a “reasonable search that can be considered part of a routine booking procedure” in serious crime arrests. But then the AP reported that New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez was considering proposing to the Legislature next year a bill to make DNA a reasonable search in misdemeanors as well as felonies...

Immigration Update: Arizona border deaths detailed

As the hottest time of year descends on the borderland, a new report sheds fresh light on the mass deaths of migrants crossing the deadly Sonora-Arizona desert. Co-authored by the University of Arizona’s Binational Migration Institute and the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner (PCOME), the study examines the deaths of 2,238 migrants in the Tucson area between 1990 and 2012.

The researchers document the dramatic rise in border crossing deaths beginning in 1990, when the bodies of 8 undocumented migrants were recovered, and culminating in 2012, when 171 migrant deaths were recorded...

Deconstructing the media

When I went to work as a copy editor for the Baltimore Sun in the 1960s, I was informed of its explicit policy of crime coverage. If a crime occurred in the black ghetto of West Baltimore, we ignored it unless at least two people died, but any serious crime in the middle-class or wealthy areas of North Baltimore rated a full story, sometimes on the front page.

This kind of media bias, which used to be accepted with little more than a cynical shrug, has become the focus of a social movement called media literacy.

A small but notable Albuquerque organization, the Media Literacy Project, has been pursuing such issues for 20 years during which it has spun a widespread web that has taken executor director Andrea Quijada to such far-flung outposts as Venezuela, Tunisia and, most recently, Uganda...

Attacking Chaco Canyon

Imagine traveling to one of the world’s greatest and most desolately beautiful monuments to human genius and finding when you get there that drilling equipment, jack pumps, truck dust, back up beepers, and road noise have been allowed to destroy the mysterious solitude of such a singular and magnificent place.

That’s what will happen to the Chaco Culture National Historical Park if the state of New Mexico and our congressional delegation doesn’t insist upon an extensive buffer zone around the 53-square mile monument where drilling and other extractive process are prohibited. This is not only a buffer zone, it’s a zone of respect...

Book Review: Khaled Hosseini’s “And the Mountains Echoed”

Beautifully wrought, with rich dialogue and painterly evocation of the landscape, Khaled Hosseini’s And the Mountains Echoed  (2013) follows not only in the tradition of his own excellent work from the Kite Runner (2003) on, but in the literature about Afghanistan. The book follows in the grand tradition of Rabindranath Tagore’s Kabuliwala (1892) which  like this one, tells, the story of the diasporic Afghan, impoverished, travelling for work, separated from his own daughter and another he attempts to make his own. Both books tell of the unhappiness of late life reunions...

Farming and water in New Mexico

Living in New Mexico, it is obvious that we have a water issue. Our largest river turns to a stream during the winter and our lakes are at the lowest point in recorded history. A lot of the problem is the drought that the southwest has been experiencing for the past ten years. With these two together, New Mexico's already limited water supply has taken a turn for the worse. The situation is now threatening New Mexico's economic and environmental sustainability.

As threatening as the State’s situation may sound, New Mexico can still cut down on its wasteful water use. The largest culprit in water consumption, according to the New Mexico state government, is agriculture...

Caught Spying

El Machete

New Mexico uranium and mini-reactors

Mention nuclear energy in New Mexico, and many of us get a cold shiver. Despite all the claims that nuclear energy is clean and safe, what it means to New Mexico is a long history of dirty – very dirty -- uranium mining and processing and the cancer that it brings.

So the thought of the federal government subsidizing the development of hundreds of mini-reactors to stimulate a new American nuclear industry that could generate thousands of portable nuclear power plants for export around the world, and use in our own backyard, has unnerving reverberations here...