Why, Pancho, Did You Invade New Mexico?
There are many lessons in the pages of our nation’s history, which we seem unable to assimilate, so we must repeat them in an endless cycle of disillusionment and destruction. We appear arrogant in our dealings with other nations, unilaterally deciding what’s best for the world, at the same time endlessly proselytizing about democracy. When foreign nationals feel that their internal lives are being manipulated and disrupted by U.S. intervention through military and monetary power, a blowback is inevitable. The infamous outlaw and revolutionist Pancho Villa raided the United States in 1916, his actions being an example of this backlash; we may extrapolate this lesson to September 11, 2001...
The Age of Lies
If there is human life one hundred years from now, and analysts refer to our time, it may well be dubbed the Age of Lies like the Age of Enlightenment or the Age of Reason. Going much farther back into the mist of prehistory, they may call it the Period of Lies, like the Cretaceous or Jurassic. Of course for this to happen those analysts would have to retain some understanding of what constitutes truth and how to sort impressive advertising from what really was. This may be difficult because lies beget lies and the habit of truth is (sometimes permanently) eroded...
An Open Letter to Bernalillo County Commissioners on Santolina
Dear Commissioners,
I am writing to urge you to NOT approve the Santolina Master Plan and hope you will vote against this Proposal. Some of the most compelling reasons for rejecting this expansion include:
1. The geographic expansion that has dominated the County’s growth pattern over the past several decades has contributed substantially to the economic stagnation and quality of life erosion for Bernalillo County citizens. The benefits that have accrued to private developers have been at the expense of essential urban infrastructure development. Approval of the Santolina Master Plan will further dilute our already scarce resources...
Paws Button
A while back, I promised to tell you the story about the dog who was afraid of flies. This golden retriever mix—let’s call her “Sugar,” because that is her human name—exemplifies how people are wonkier than Willy’s chocolate factory when it comes to training their pets. This story will butcher you; I myself narrowly evaded death, but it has a happy ending with, as you might recall, the great Kevin Spacey.
Speaking of Mr. Spacey, Sugar springs more leaks than the prematurely released third season of his Netflix show, House of Cards. Leaking is Sugar’s primary mode of communication. It’s how she indicates hunger, joy, complex arithmetic, and especially the presence of houseflies...
Home Part 2: Where the body is
This is the second of two columns on the idea of home.
Home, it is said, is where the heart is, but it is also where the body is. During my childhood, my body was at an address I still remember—1624 Peachtree Street in Atlanta, Ga.—while just about all of my subsequent addresses have totally disappeared from my memory.
That early home was on the northern fringes of a small, relatively isolated town that was not yet a metropolitan area and mostly lacked suburbs. The house had been constructed and expanded in bits and pieces, like many an old house built when times were hard during the Great Depression...
Mercury Poetry: Two poems from Joan Logghe
Sweet name for a new place.
I cruise your supermarket with poetry
in my heart. I finger the Pendleton,
spend a lot of time at the Pendleton blankets,
and if time is money I own a Chief Joseph.
If time is money I sleep in a Best Western
with metal stallions rearing out front...
Gone Fishing — New Works by Heidi Pollard
Local artist Heidi Pollard has seventeen new gouaches at The Outpost Performance Space, 210 Yale Blvd. SE. The show opened February 6th and will be up through the end of March. The small but alive and evocative images shouldn’t be missed; viewers are welcome from 2 to 5:30 p.m. Monday through Friday or during the Outpost’s regularly scheduled performances.
In contrast with most spaces that are not designed specifically as galleries, The Outpost is a good place to see art. It shows this work off to its best advantage, the pristine gray walls really popping the luminous colors....
The Mimbres-Paquimé Connection
I’m with a group of officials and participants in the cross-border economic development project started by Mayor Philip Skinner of Columbus, New Mexico. The first meeting took place in Columbus on September 13, 2014 and I wrote about it in the article “Rebuilding Economies on the Border.” I missed the second meeting but attended the one in Deming on December 6, a meeting that was much more heavily attended than the first and included a number of private sector representatives like the Deming-Luna County Chamber of Commerce, the Deming Visitor’s Center and managers of Deming hotels...
Numbfecu Forever
It’s been a couple of weeks since my credit union, Numbfecu became Nusenda, and praise be, I have survived the name change. Yes, this is one of those delightful and quirky kind of New Mexico stories that always leave you laughing and never leave you numb, not like yesteryear, not like say the day Susana came swooping down like a Cooper’s hawk on our social services and shuttered places like Hogares in the North Valley, places that had been operating for forty years. All these local providers who had been serving New Mexico communities for so long were all criminals. In fact so heinous were their crimes, that they had to be driven away before anyone could assess their evil, which was disclosed by a Grand Audit showing just how crooked all these social services really were...
Fool’s Gold: Ps and Queues
I received some kickback over a disparaging comment I made about Hotmail a few weeks ago. Hotmail is technically an email provider that was all the rage for about four days in 1997. It is the communication service favored today by young Russian singles looking to marry a kindly Amerikan gentlemen, as well as, it turns out, one of my publishers.
I believe my exact words were—and I’m paraphrasing—that Hotmail is a quaint anachronism that deserves special consideration when it is finally tossed into a dumpster fire and destroyed forever...