New Mexico Mercury

“56 Up”—Life is for living

“56 Up,” a movie that recently played at Albuquerque’s Guild Cinema and widely available online, is the latest installment of director Michael Apted’s ambitious lifelong TV project that began in 1963. 

Some of the original participants dropped out, one left and returned 28 years later. But the others have continued, for reasons that defy even their own understanding, to allow their lives and psyches to be probed in public every seven years.

The great Mancos boom

Senator emeritus Pete Domenici and I are getting all charged up about oil giant BP and their industry buddies moving in on New Mexico to take part in the Great Mancos Shale Oil and Gas Boom.

I don’t know about you, but personally, I can hardly wait. These oil and gas folks have their own little sense of cosmically uproarious practical humor...

Brutal and subtle violence

Vice President Biden was right when he said that the issue of violence against women transcends politics. It was Biden, himself the master politician,  however,who authored the l994 Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), and who spurred its reauthorization by Congress last month...

Small-scale chicken-keeping in New Mexico

I knew I wanted a coop and flock the very first time I read about Albuquerque’s zoning codes for poultry. For most of the city, this policy equates to “don’t have a rooster, thanks”— making residents of central New Mexico luckier than suburban dwellers in many an elsewhere, where residents battle city codes prohibiting even the smallest farm animals...

Weekly Poem: A day in the life of Las Cruces

The heat of Las Cruces begins
somewhere
deep in the bones underground,
out near Mt. Robledo and ends
south of the border in the desierto looking
for a
better life.

Backtracking

The Central New Mexico Community Collage (CNM) administration must have realized that its impulsive and, as its sister publication the Daily Lobo called it, “authoritarian” censorship and closure of its student newspaper, the Chronicle, had caused them a tsunami of negative PR.  It backtracked and reversed itself in a day, returning the confiscated “Sex” edition, reopening the paper for business, and waxing on about  how student journalists had to be better trained and overseen.

Greed and hypocrisy: Ingredients of a foolproof recipe for violence

Here in the United States, I would argue that the single most influential idea fueling extreme violence is greed. The profit motive. It is every bottom line.

Our national nuclear mausoleum

The National Museum of Nuclear Science & History presides in isolation over a barren field half a dozen blocks south of Eubank Boulevard in Albuquerque. On each side of the gray, utilitarian building a rocket stands guard. Behind the building a score of military aircraft and missiles fill a 30-acre dirt lot. At the entrance to the museum building,  the only ornament is a huge model of a beryllium atom...

Things That Want to Be Counted

Someone on earth is counting—
night stars,
rooms in a honeycomb,
snow geese descending, wild
lilies, grain spilled from a bushel basket,
bubbles rising up from the Blue Hole.

U.S. drones come home to roost

The pushback against drone strikes on presumed enemies of the United States is to be encouraged considering the inherent legal, moral, and even strategic questions involved in remote-controlled killing within nation states not officially at war with this country.