New Mexico Mercury

Paseo en El Paso, 1945

Pushing the dark blue baby carriage
Miriam strolls through the Plaza Central.
Olive toned hands firmly grasp
the warm metal handle.
Black hair gently caresses the red peonies
embroidered upon the collar
of her beige linen suit.
Engorged breasts strain the buttons
of the jacket.

The hot Texas spring
challenges this midwestern bride...

Jose Domingo Sandoval: A film by Natalie Brigance

The spiritual essence of place and people through a resolana conversation with the filmmaker's father at his home in his native village of Truchas, NM.

Lessons from water - Never enough

I’m a student of water. I’ll never graduate because water teaches more than a lifetime can absorb. I’m trying to figure out New Mexico water — the projects and compacts and acequias and districts and adjudications and Pueblos and diversions and groundwater, and I’m marveling at how water disputes take forever and cost a fortune in legal fees. Words like dysfunctional and maladaptive come to mind.

One thing is clear. There isn’t enough water, and odds are there will be less of it as the years go by. Then what happens? ...

Disaster’s false dichotomy

We differentiate between human-made disasters and those caused by nature. I believe this is a false, and ultimately misleading, distinction.

If a building housing sweatshops collapses in Savar, Bangladesh, killing more than a thousand workers, we assess blame to the architect who approved the plans (undoubtedly for monetary gain), a government that cannot establish building codes or, if it has them, refuses to enforce them (plenty of kickbacks there as well). We can blame the clothing brands in the US and other Western countries, which reap exaggerated profit and have never been serious about improving the facilities where their clothing is made...

400 parts per million

As New Mexico becomes the sun’s anvil, and carbon dioxide rises past 400 parts per million (PPM) in the planet’s atmosphere trapping heat and drying out the American west, the haunting question is: Have we reached the tipping point?

Not five years ago, 350 PPM was said to be the outer limits of CO2 saturation before we’re reached the point of no return. All the warnings, of course, went unheeded. The use of fossil fuels grew enormously all over the planet. Renewable energy was drubbed in the marketplace by its government subsidized opposition...

Weekly Poetry: For Daniel Berrigan

become
as name:
              willows descending
or building another
of longevity
some call fast in

*

a prison first
or lent’s regrets of carrying on –

Social Security and the brat named Sequester

One of the greatest and most intractable problems we face these days is what to do about our exploding population of oldsters.  Some Progressive nitwits have suggested things are just fine and Social Security will not run out of money anytime soon. Conservatives know better and they have always raised the cry of alarm striking fear into the hearts of God-fearing people everywhere.

“The trust fund will go bust in the next few months if we don’t make radical program changes in the next fifteen minutes!” They intoned. “God wants us to do the right thing for future generations.  Amen." ...

Who’s surprised by the AP phone records seizure?

The recent seizure of Associated Press reporter’s phone records by the Justice Department has raised a modicum of virility in an agency that covered civil liberty breaches by the last two administrations with a distant gaze.  Gary Pruitt, AP president and CEO, stated in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, “I am writing to object in the strongest possible terms to a massive and unprecedented intrusion by the Department of Justice into the newsgathering activities of The Associated Press.”  Indeed that spirit of objection would have been welcomed by the millions of Americans caught up in dragnet digital surveillance by a national security state run amok for more than a decade...

The rape of a five-year-old

Almost lost amidst the terrorist attack on the Boston Marathon was the news a few days later of a five-year-old girl raped and left for dead in New Delhi, India. Only four months earlier, a young Indian woman was gang raped on a bus; she died of her injuries. Much of the world’s attention focused on that faraway country, on its startling number of sexualized power crimes against women and girls, and the failure of its authorities to take such crimes seriously.

But this is not an Indian problem. There is really nothing unusual about men raping or otherwise sexually abusing women and young girls...

Governor’s terrible indiscretion revealed

The scandal has gone on almost a year. Gov. Martinez and her super minions in state government were exchanging state business, but doing so in private e-mail apparently to avoid public scrutiny.

Just recently Attorney General Gary King, who will run against Martinez in the upcoming gubernatorial election, seized these communications. And guess what: a hideous breach of trust has been revealed in one of the gov’s communications. Yes, Susana Martinez has been caught red-handed e-mail ordering undergarments from some Internet purveyor...