New Mexico Mercury

Mountain love affair

Who is there in New Mexico who does not love mountains? Our love affair with our mountains may be because aside from the mountains the land is more drab brown than vivid green, more desiccated than lush. There is not a lot to be said for our flatlands, the Chihuahua Desert landscape of rocks and brush, where what we call rivers are really streams and what we call streams are more often seasonal arroyos.

This mountain love affair has spawned a lot of books, of which the newest, and one of the most lavish, is the just-published, New Mexico’s High Peaks: A Photographic Celebration, by Michael Butterfield (UNM Press, $39.95, 188 pages including 134 color photographs)...

Who is to blame for the APD scandal?

The U. S. Justice Department investigation of the Albuquerque Police Department had three tasks. The first was to determine if APD habitually uses excessive force. For this, it gets a grade of A: In 46 damning pages, it detailed in gruesome and horrifying detail the misdeeds of APD, ranging from shooting and Tasering to kicking and punching civilians, many of them unarmed, elderly, handicapped or mentally ill.

The second task was to determine why the cops are so violent. For this it gets a grade of C: It looked carefully at the internal APD factors promoting “a culture of aggression” at APD but failed to examine the external factors.

The third task was to describe how to fix the problems. For this it gets a grade of Incomplete:..

‘The Gin Game’ lights up Vista Grande

In the program notes for the East Mountain Center for Theatre’s terrific new production of The Gin Game at the Vista Grande Community Center, actor Tim Reardon comments that he is “of an age when there is likely more experiences behind me than in front.” The same is true of the two characters in this drama, Reardon’s Weller Martin and Georgia Athearn’s Fonsia Dorsey (as well as of this reviewer), which, as Reardon says, “brings a certain perspective"...

Is Albuquerque Dying?

Cities, like people, are works in progress. They have life cycles. As Jane Jacobs elucidated in her path-breaking book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, they may fail or succeed. They are born and grow and thrive. And they shrink and wither and die. Once the process of disintegration gains momentum, a city may reach a turning point and its fate may become irreversible.

Has Albuquerque reached that turning point? Has it arrived at an irreversible point of disintegration? Is it dying? It is almost impossible to be certain of a turning point until it is in the rearview mirror. There are ample signs, however, that Albuquerque may be there...

Spring Awakening

Spring in the mountains reminds me of a woman awakening after a good night’s sleep. She yawns and stretches lasciviously. She comes slowly to awareness of the new day, the new season. She turns over and is tempted to sleep again as momentary snow storms speckle the evergreens, gentle reminders of the past winter, of sleep. She periodically dozes and awakens, as chill and warmth alternate, as clouds drift in and away, as winds torment us and then bring blessed serenity...

What the New World Taught Putin About Land Grabs

What Vladimir Putin is doing today in the Ukraine has a wealth of historical precedent in the New World. To understand how a few hundred—or a most several thousand—Russian soldiers succeeded in seizing Crimea without firing a shot, you could hardly do better than go back to the early 16th century and take a look at how Hernán Cortés’s 550 soldiers conquered the 25 million citizens of the Aztec Empire and how a decade later Francisco Pizarro’s 168 soldiers defeated the ruler of the Inca empire, the world’s largest country, without suffering a single casualty...

What Happened to Democracy?

In 1917, the United States entered World War I, because, in the words of President Woodrow Wilson, “The world must be made safe for democracy.” Today, however, the more pressing issue is whether democracy can be made safe for the world.

The essence of democracy has been reduced by its advocates to a series of ritual formalities and frozen institutions—political parties, elections, written constitutions...

Feminism revisited on the Albuquerque stage

A full-throated debate over women’s equality might seem to be a pointless rhetorical replay of the arguments of our parents or even our grandparents. But that turns out to be hardly true.

As illustration recall the passage from Just Fly the Plane, Stupid, the new memoir by our own congressman, Republican Steve Pearce, in which he said he and his wife agreed to follow a biblical injection that a woman would follow her husband and be subordinate to him.

A similar theme is debated in Rapture, Blister, Burn, a thoughtful new play at the Aux Dog Theater in Albuquerque’s Nob Hill, which will have its last performances 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, and 2 p.m. Sunday after a three-week run...

Hibernating in the Roundhouse

When the temperature drops, snow covers the ground, food disappears and life becomes hard, most of the squirrels, prairie dogs, bears and other animals in my neighborhood disappear. They hibernate. When winter blows itself out and spring blooms, they will reemerge; maybe then life will be easier. The New Mexico Legislature has just done the same thing as the animals in my neighborhood; it hibernated through the long cold days of January and February in the hope that life will later be easier. It may—but will probably not...

Common Core, Common Commotion

A standards-based, one-size-fits-all approach to improving American education continues at the state level amidst criticism by those on the left and right.