The negative spin on the new Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument suggests we’ve thrown the door open wide to terrorists and narcotraficantes while stomping all over New Mexico’s already abused cattle ranchers. That’s easy to believe, too, if you see no good in anything Barack Obama does or only watched the Fox network covering the story.
The moon rises at sunset over the Organ Mountains and Las Cruces, N.M. © William P. Diven
(Click to enlarge)
See yourself in this guy riding the pole flying a Grateful Dead flag when the band played Santa Fe? Maybe if you launched your acid trip in the 1970s with no landing field in sight as the ’80s slipped in.
Or maybe you’re reminded of a free-spirited friend or the uncle about whom your parents stayed cagey, the one who “took a trip to Taos, and then we lost track.” No matter. Even without LSD, music can do this to you.
It’s a wonder more of Pharrell Williams’ fans aren’t locked up. Or John Philip Sousa’s. Continue reading
Justin Weddell arrived in New York City as a newly minted graduate of the New Mexico College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts Class of 1908. No Aggie hayseed, Weddell sprang from Chicago and came of age in the rowdy Progressive Era replete with yellow journalism and muckrakers stirring up scandal and busting monopolistic and rapacious corporations.
NMCA&MA Class of 1908. Justin Weddell far right second from top. (The Round Up, June 2, 1908, New Mexico State University Library, Archives and Special Collections.)
At the time New Yorkers read about 20 daily newspapers, not all in English. Feuding news barons like Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst battled for readership creating their own headlines and perhaps their own wars, if you credit Hearst’s Morning Journal and its million-a-day circulation with pushing the McKinley administration into the Spanish-American War.
Weddell took all that in as he wrote back to A&M Professor Elmer Ottis Wooton in June 1908 describing his new surroundings:
I find everything and everyone in the East concerned in some form of reform. I’ve read so much of it, and heard so much of it that almost am I persuaded to be an ardent foe of any reform movement. One can’t turn around without encountering a new graft and its attendant muckrake. I prefer the spotless Southwest–where reform is almost impossible. — Justin R. Weddell, Ballston Spa, N.Y., June 15, 1908. Courtesy Hobson-Huntington University Archives, New Mexico State University.
A lot has changed in New York City since then. Too bad the same can’t be said for New Mexico.
Normally New Mexico points to Mississippi as the negative example keeping us from being the bottom feeder of all manner of quality-of-life rankings. When a Republican legislator who didn’t get New Mexico’s Latin state motto tried to change it, the derisive reaction included jettisoning “Crescit Eundo” in favor of “Gracias a dios por Mississippi.” That’s all just noise, of course, which doesn’t obviate our beloved and beautiful state being worst in the nation for child well-being after Mississippi moved up to 49th in the Kids Count Data Book last year.
Now, however, it’s time to thank Arizona for reminding us what’s right in New Mexico. Yes, Gov. Jan Brewer yesterday vetoed the bill enshrining as public policy religious discrimination against gays and anyone else, but students of New Mexico history recognize our neighbor’s roots running deep into the 19th century. There, but for the grace of politics and the Spanish language, our two states would look like today’s Republican Party, a single body enjoined in a fight for its soul between panicked moderates and snarling radicals.
To understand this requires a rapid and much simplified recap of local history:
Amtrak’s Sunset Limited crosses the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, into New Mexico nearly on the Mexican border. Bill Diven photo.
The United States, for myriad reasons — Manifest Destiny, spreading slavery, lust for a rail route to California — invaded Mexico in 1846. Two years later we owned the Southwest, or thought we did. We botched the survey drawing the border too far north for the rail route, but instead of sending the dragoons back in, we bought what is now much of southern New Mexico and Arizona. Continue reading
Interstate 25 during the morning rush to Santa Fe intimidated the woman in the VW enough she couldn’t make up her mind about the 75 mph flow in the right lane. So she opted to speed up, slow down and randomly apply the brakes, slowing and braking just as I started to pass her by shifting into the 85 mph left lane. I barely dodged her and squeezed into the faster stream as a pickup grill quickly filled my rear-view mirror. What surprised me about the pickup driver wasn’t the on-my-bumper tailgating but his inattention when I turned on my blinker. I really expected him to speed up in an attempt to plug the hole in his lane before I could dive into it.
I-25 near Santa Fe. Rail Runner tracks on left.
By Tuesday morning enough time had passed I’d almost forgotten how much one risks life and limb in the morning stampede from the south into the capital. Last time I checked the numbers a few thousand commuters from Rio Rancho came east across the Rio Grande each morning struggling to get through the town of Bernalillo to reach the interstate and turn left into the northward wave from Albuquerque. At Bernalillo three lanes become two, and Death Race I-25 begins. Continue reading
The hype and hoorah surrounding the 50th anniversary of the Beatles invading the United States takes us back to a simpler time. Their arrival came a scant 11 weeks to the day after the assassination of President Kennedy. Yes, the country 
was still in shock, but the deep distrust of the official explanation for the Kennedy killing had yet to set in, and the government’s deceptions about the war in Vietnam were still in the future as were most of the nearly 50,000 American combat deaths (plus a quarter million North and South Vietnamese civilians, the low-end estimate). Continue reading
The movement to reform the country’s marijuana laws already was well underway when Bob Randall smoked legally supplied government-rolled joints in a Capitol hallway before testifying at a legislative hearing early in 1977. 
I stood nearby that day in Santa Fe trying to breathe deeply, but today I’m reaching for the keyboard instead of another brownie. Yeah, marijuana use shouldn’t be a crime, but peddling pot legalization the same way we did the New Mexico Lottery as a source of tax revenue for good purposes just promises another cash stream ripe for perversion. (Funny how university tuition outpaces lottery sales to the point the pyramid scheme verges on collapse, no?) Continue reading
My mother and I view the world differently, which is not surprising. Her birth came barely a year after the end of World War I and a week into the failed 12-year political experiment in alcohol Prohibition. I arrived on the anniversary of Prohibition launching a massive criminal underworld and a few months after Chinese troops chased us out of North Korea during the Korean War. (Funny how this country measures time by its wars, but that’s another topic).
Mom’s attempts to keep me on the straight and narrow began early, kept me from becoming a derelict or a Democrat but not a free-thinking journalist and continued last Christmas with the gift of columnist-pundit Charles Krauthammer’s new book “Things That Matter” (Crown Forum, New York, 2013),
a collection of past writings from the psychiatrist who morphed into an inside-the-Beltway espouser of all things conservative. He’s a regular on the pages of the Albuquerque Journal, which plops daily onto our gravel road, and his screeds mesh with the paper’s conservative/libertarian/antiunion editorial slant that flavors not only its opinion pages but taints its news columns as well. To oversimplify Krauthammer but a little, his columns in recent years sum as: conservatives good, liberals bad, Obama is the antichrist. Continue reading
Since the humans in the chattering classes tend to yell past each other, maybe the animal world should take up the cause.
The big meeting of folks trying to keep Amtrak’s Southwest Chief running through northern New Mexico and Albuquerque has come and gone with nary a peep in the state’s biggest city.
There’s a mayoral election here in three weeks, so you’d think the prospect of Albuquerque losing rail passenger service would be an issue. Well, think again. It’s called a nonpartisan election although that thin veneer peeled off several elections ago. The all-business Republican incumbent is silent on the issue, perhaps in part so as not to stir up trouble for the Republican governor, and the openly Democratic challenger and a third candidate, both well behind in the polls, seem unable to recognize an issue when it’s handed to them. Continue reading