New Mexico Mercury

Our avuncular mayor has just made a pronouncement of the most profound significance about the James Boyd incident, “It’s a game changer,” he said.

Relief flooded every sinew of my being when I heard that. The mental health and social services game in New Mexico is about to change. Because it’s just a game, see—

Big Government should be Big Business.  And then Little Government should be brought to its knees and then be beheaded, please. Companies should be running our schools, our social services, our mental health services. Efficiency. Efficiency. Efficiency. Private companies, especially the governor’s friends from Arizona, their interests come first.  Let’s be clear about that.

These Arizona folks are far wiser than stupid New Mexicanos. They are superlative managers who can squeeze a nickel out of a cholla even or an agave, for that matter.

Arizona provider wunderkind, Agave Health is a great example of ecstatic insufficient productivity that has, at great taxpayer expense, been wooed and coaxed by our beloved Susana into New Mexico, so that Agave can run mental health treatment programs in a dozen counties including our own blessed Bernalillo Province into the ground. Gosh, seems like the Governor’s Agave buddies are dropping people’s salaries left and right to attain even greater efficiencies. They’ve had to cut back on Champaign lunch breaks and now it’s nothing but beans—all to prove the marvels of the totally amazingly bankrupt private company efficiencies that evil and depraved big government can never attain and never will attain. Yesiree. Best to destroy Big Government at every opportunity, even in your sleep.

Thankfully, the recent audit recording the transition from HSD to the governor’s business friends proved these exceptional new ramshackle private enterprise efficiencies. There are now 23 percent fewer leachunits receiving mental health services in Nuevo Whatchamacallit! That’s good news, even if it is unexceptional or “simply inaccurate,” as the Grand Administration put it. I say this went just according to the governor’s Grand Game Plan to privatize all government services in the next two and a half weeks.  That’s the efficiency we’re talking about here.  

Way back when in 2013, the dumb legislature wanted to create Dept. of Health community engagement teams to work with people like James Boyd and foolishly avoid standoffs like the one that ended Boyd’s life and that are so damned entertaining, just like a Cops show. The Governor, in her great insight, laser focused on these wondrous new flailing private enterprise efficiencies. Naturally, first things first, Suze wanted her dear associates from Arizona to get in on the action. When her exceptional idea didn’t seem to be panning out, the governor was more than absolutely justified in vetoing this crummy initiative. I’m all for Susana, even if she does go off and sulk in her tent occasionally.

Meanwhile it continues to be great fun to play the new New Mexico public and mental health privatization game. The game is all about just how amusing the homeless mentally ill really can be when they walk down the street raging, when they wander out into traffic against the light screaming, “Fuck you!” …When they are shot down, and when they are run over, when they are arrested and carted off to the hoosegow raging, always raging. Why are they so angry, I wonder? They are free spirits, these homeless vagabonds. They should be thankful.