The city elections in Albuquerque this October might seem to some like a tedious distraction from the gripping horror show playing out on the stage of national politics this year. But the sink hole of Radical Trumpism is widening and threatens to swallow the country up. That threat gives local political culture in America a […]
Columns
2018 Gubernatorial Election: Life and Death for New Mexico
The 2018 New Mexico gubernatorial election has every chance of being a turning point referendum on the future of our state. Will we elect a powerful and outspoken Tea Party extremist, Trumpian apologist, and climate change denier who will promise prosperity if we drink the poisoned Kool-Aid of dismantling the EPA, keep our economy running […]
How Does a Corroded Democracy, Like Ours, Get Cleaned Up and Working Properly Again?
In the slave-state of ancient Athens if you were an enfranchised free male (but not a woman, foreigner, or slave) and didn’t participate in the democratic process you were called an idiot. If you didn’t want to go to the Assembly where self-governing decisions were made by direct, simple majority vote, something like a sergeant-at-arms […]
Will We Wake One Morning and Find Our World Has Become What We’ve Most Deeply Feared?
Even though we witness major historical transitions building like thunderheads on the horizon, we can never actually see them for what they are until the storm of change has come and gone. This year, 2017, feels like something deep and fundamental is overthrowing the predictable world as we know it. And it is both gloomy […]
The Brutal Right, the Amorphous Other Side—What Do We Do Now?
After Democrats lost special elections for the House of Representatives in Georgia, South Carolina, and blew a close one earlier in Montana, old school blue-collar lefty filmmaker Michael Moore tweeted last week that the Dems don’t have a “friggin clue.” “No message, no plan, no leaders.” Who can blame him, especially after losing again and […]
Can a National Culture Go Insane?
In the wake of last Wednesday’s shooting in Virginia at a Republican workout for the bipartisan Congressional Baseball Charity game, the murder of four UPS workers in San Francisco on the same day, and now a mass killing of five people in Northern New Mexico around Tres Piedras and Abiquiu, many of us are left […]
Does Our Constitution Still Work?
Obstruction of justice, nepotism, conflicts of interest arising from refusing to put his business empire in a blind trust, attacking the judiciary, flapping loose lips over top-secret national security issues, conspiring with the nation’s Cold War nemesis and adversary to fix our national elections – what more do you need in the way of probable […]