New Mexico Mercury

The Christmas Truce 100 Years Ago and Today

A century ago on the holiday’s eve, weeks of miserable rain gave way to the stillness of a freeze. Tiny ice crystals held the earth, and, with the sun long retired, warm breaths condensed into motion.

“English soldier, English soldier, a merry Christmas, a merry Christmas!” Frederick Heath, a British private, wrote in a letter home as he remembered hearing the greeting in his trench along the Western Front. “Come out, English soldier; come out here to us.” Heath’s 1914 letter continues describing what is known as the First World War’s Christmas Truce...

Fool’s Gold: The Unsinkable Friendship

So I hear that adult-aged people have a ton of trouble finding other adult-aged people for romantic and/or sexy times. While I sympathize with the plight of the lovelorn, I think the whole can’t-find-a-date-for-Friday-night problem is overblown. Unlikely people fall in love in movies all the time. But I never see movies where people fall in friendship...

The Best and the Worst Economic News

Due to the vicissitudes of our flailing media, the best and the worst economic news of the year, both released over the holidays, seem to have gone entirely unreported. The explanation is that the media are short staffed over the holidays. But so what? News is news.

First, the worst. It has been repeatedly reported that the state’s long term population growth has slowed sharply. This downturn is due to the fact that more people have been moving out of the state than into it. But it had also been repeatedly reported that due to natural population increase—the excess of births over deaths—the population was still growing. Now we know that comforting thought is a fiction...

El Machete: Dino-Policy

Dino-Policy

Forever Gov Chooses Tourism Head to Run CYFD

Our once and forever governor has once and forever shown the brilliant executive smarts to tap State Dept. of Tourism head Monique Jacobson to run CYFD because Monique knows two things: how to market stuff, how to bleed more money from Nuevo Mexico to feed vampires from out of state who seem to be Monique’s and Susana’s best friends...

Trolls of Yuletide Carols

Last year, I journalismed an exposé on the Krampus. He’s this man-goat-demon who accompanies ol’ St. Nick and whips the naughty children. No one had ever heard of him, because mothers generally don’t approve of an eel-tongued creature scaring you so severely that you don’t sleep for a month. But once I unveiled him for the world, Krampus lost his chompers. Now, even everyday people like you can make Krampus cards for Christmas.

You’ll never hear me say this again, so take note: I was wrong. I should not have limelighted the Krampus. He is just a front to cover up an even nastier demon running among us...

When fiction meets life: “Last Night of Ballyhoo”

On Saturday night, I sat in an Albuquerque theater as actors discussed the hospital in which I was born, the street on which I lived, the store that my father managed—and it was all transpiring in my native city within eight months of my birth. As assimilated, non-practicing, non-believing Jews living in a city notorious for earlier incidents of antisemitism, my family could have been the subject of this play—except for the fact that unlike the play’s characters, my family never discussed Judaism. For two hours, the parallel tracks of fiction and life did indeed seem to meet, even if in the far distance.

Such was the moving but rather unnerving experience I had watching Last Night of Ballyhoo, an effective and affecting comedy being staged by Mother Road at the Tricklock Performance Laboratory...

The Lingering Near-death Experience of the NM Corporate Income Tax

While profitable corporations require roads, police protection, and other public infrastructure and services as much as the rest of us, New Mexico has ensured that they will be paying much less of the cost to maintain them. The tax cuts for corporations enacted by the state Legislature and signed by the Governor in 2013 are proving to be much more expensive than originally estimated. So much so that within the next few years we will lose 60 percent of our corporate income tax revenue...

Which Way for Cuban Sovereignty in the Wake of the Obama Opening?

The United States and Cuba are set to re-establish diplomatic relations. Someone pinch me. I didn’t expect this. I long ago concluded that it would never happen in my lifetime. I am elated that I have lived to see this moment.

Now then comes the really hard part, and I have two questions. Will the United States unilaterally end its draconian economic embargo of Cuba, in effect since the early 1960s and roundly condemned throughout the world? Or will it set unnecessary barriers to full normalization by demanding concessions from Cuba that are linked to the lifting of that embargo?...

El Machete: US Helping Drug War

US Helping Drug War