New Mexico Mercury

When the Tail Wags the Dog

Going where even New Mexico angels would fear to tread, Bernalillo County will place two potentially controversial measures on the November ballot, one raising taxes and the other opening the door to replacing elected county officials with appointed ones.

Drought: time to pay the piper

The long 21st century drought seems finally to be catching up to the East Mountains. For years we’ve managed to avoid its worst consequences. Life has gone along, year after year, pretty much normally. But now it may be time to pay the piper.

The wells of my local water co-op are running dry. A large, well established and ably managed utility with several hundred members, it has long had four deep wells. One, however, has just run dry and another is imperiled. A letter to co-op members last week pleaded for major voluntary conservation efforts, including a total ban on outdoor watering; if these efforts are insufficient, mandatory conservation is in the offing. This is the direst situation in my 24 years with the co-op...

Gary King: Too nice to win?

In 2002, Gary King made his first run for governor. In the Democratic Party’s preprimary convention, he garnered a bit over 19 percent of the vote, just shy of the 20 percent he needed for an automatic place on the ballot. His failure was due to a typically scorched-earth campaign by Bill Richardson to garner massive support at the convention and prevent any opponent form getting easy access to the Democratic primary ballot for governor.

Twelve years later, King proved he had learned the lesson of that bitter experience. Again running for governor, he didn’t count on support from this year’s preprimary convention, and he didn’t get it...

Response to open primary piece

The flowing exchange of emails between Fred Nathan and me transpired as a consequence of a column I wrote last week about the ways the political parties control the political process and disenfranchise many voters, especially by excluding independents from the primaries...

Not invited to the party

Yesterday, New Mexico threw a big party, but the overwhelming majority of the state’s residents didn’t attend. They can claim, with varying levels of plausibility, that the candidates who emerged from the Democratic and Republican primaries don’t represent them.

Those who have the most plausible case, an incontrovertible case in fact, are the 239,151 independents. Under state law they are technically people who, when they registered to vote, declined to state a party preference. Independents are so marginalized in New Mexico that we don’t even allow them to call themselves independent, merely those who declined to choose a major party...

Running: A Life

An ending is often a beginning, which is why school graduations are called commencements. When my marriage, my suburban life in Maryland and my job in Washington ended in 1974, I began running.

Running day after day, I discovered the city I had never known, a different city from the newspaper and government offices where I had spent my working life, a city of mixed races and a babel of languages, of cheap restaurants and parks that unspooled forever. I discovered, too, a life that was different from the one I had lived and left. Running helped me figure out how to fill the hole that was left when that life evaporated...

Women Without Choices: Two plays in ABQ

Americans tend to think of the pursuit of happiness as one of our inalienable rights, but the phrase means not that society gives us happiness but that it offers choices that allow us to seek it. But what if we don’t have choices?

Two new plays in Albuquerque focus on young women whose choices are foreclosed, whose destiny is tragedy. That these stories occur nearly a century apart merely shows that the prison bars of ethnicity, gender and social milieu are endemic in America...

Policing problems don’t end with APD

“It’s not just the Albuquerque Police Department,” the caller told me before narrating his own tale of a violent encounter with law enforcement. This caller was not looking for money or publicity or revenge or even justice. He did not tell me his name or the name of the deputy, and he has not filed a lawsuit or a criminal complaint.

He just wanted me to know that he had read a column I wrote recently about the U.S. Department of Justice investigation of the Albuquerque Police Department and that the problem of excessive violence did not stop with the Duke City. “It’s everywhere,” he told me...

Hualapai Canyon: A hard paradise

The preposterously vivid green-blue river flows wide and fast. Lush groves and gardens fill the canyon between red ferrous walls rising nearly vertically for thousands of feet. Two horses leisurely bathe and play in the river. Butterflies flit among purple aster, red penstemon, giant white cholla blossoms, orange globe mallow, purple lilac and yellow prickly pear blossoms, and large feathery yellow plants I can’t identify.

Life in paradise is not easy. The scenic beauty of Hualapai Canyon, part of the Grand Canyon, is about as close to paradise as you are likely to find in the United States...

‘Tribes’: When no one wants to listen

Fusion’s new production of Tribes at Albuquerque’s Cell Theater is all about deafness—not just the inability of some people to hear but the unwillingness of everyone to really listen.

None of the members of the family at the center of this award-winning play by the young British playwright Nina Raine listen to each other, sending a potent message to the audience that our private preoccupations prevent us from ever knowing even those closest to us.

The “tribes” of the title are families, especially one family, but also communities—intellectuals and “hierarchies” of those with varying types of hearing impairment...