Columns

All dirty tricksters know about the indelible damage wrought by making false accusations. Our trickster-in-chief is a master at it. As the predominant “birther,” he falsely accused his predecessor of being an alien and therefore illegitimate as a president. He falsely accused his opponent in the last election, “crooked Hilary,” of being a criminal. And […]

When President Trump appeared recently to take the side of rigorous gun control advocates and opposed the GOP’s long history of kowtowing to the gun industry and the NRA, sensing the political spoils in public fury over yet another school massacre, the prospect of even acknowledging the president’s seeming prudence unsettled large parts of the […]

Have you ever gone into the market, or bank, or movie theater, or even your classroom, and felt that queasy wondering of “what if” some crazy guy with an automatic weapon just happens to take it into his head to start shooting in here? We normally dismiss such dark musings as soon as they show […]

When the national political scene becomes so rancid that not even news junkies can stand to pay too much attention to it, the disgust factor can infect one’s attention to local issues, too. In fact, local issues suffer from almost any conflict with national news, especially when national news is vile, loathsome AND packaged as […]

Albuquerque, the major city of the poorest state in the nation, does not seem to be actively preparing itself for what now seems likely to be the inevitable advance of desiccating global warming in the Southwest. We seem to be suffering from a kind of future shock, a disease of change that takes the form […]

I wonder what Rachael Carson, biologist, nature writer, truth teller and mother of environmentalism in America, would make of the “post-truth” era of Donald Trump and the Trumpian Republican Party? She’d probably say it’s no different than the corporate propaganda that attacked her so viciously when she first published “Silent Spring” in 1962 and revealed […]

What are the signs of a culture coming unglued? Can American culture deconstruct and reconstitute itself with a different, healthier national personality? Are President Trump, #MeToo and the Woman’s March this year and last, along with our climate catastrophe economy and the American pollution industrial complex, signs of an impending cultural breakdown — at once […]