Two Hak-Ku*
This first haiku is for a forthcoming book of haiku, I am publishing. However, current events have recently made this short poem very popular and very potent. Thank you to poet and friend Susana Rinderle and organizer, childhood friend and mother Tangi Lancaster for asking to use this poem as their mantra to grieve and get something that at least resembles justice in the Trayvon Martin case. The haiku that follows Black Poem for America is brand new, and titled Only in America...
Trayvon Martin’s murder
A 17-year old African American, child of divorce, was walking to his father’s house after taking a half time break in a ballgame to get some candy at a local store. He was wearing a hoody in a gated community in which his father had a house. He was unarmed. An armed man, a sort of self-styled neighborhood-watch vigilante, confronted the youngster out of the blue, with no plausible provocation and shoots him dead.
All the rest of what happened that night is a tangle of interpretations, justifications, obfuscations., and a lawyer’s bag of tricks...
Hannah Arendt’s Banality of Evil
I wish I had gotten it together to write this while “Hannah Arendt” was still playing at The Guild, our city’s only remaining and consistently heroic arts theater. Then I could have urged anyone who hadn’t yet seen it to do so. Unfortunately, this brilliant film is no longer being shown. Perhaps popular demand might bring it back. “Hannah Arendt,” even for those who missed its Albuquerque showing, has a profoundly important lesson for us all: heinous crime is not only the province of the Hitler’s, Pinochet’s, and Bashad al-Assad’s of this world. The banality of evil is one of human nature’s least understood components...
Malala: ‘our hero, our champion’
The mission of a columnist is to tell stories as he sees them through his own eyes, but occasionally someone else tells a story so well that there is nothing left for me to add. Such is the case with a story published July 12 in the Guardian. Although it is by far the smallest of the seven national British newspapers, it has become, to my mind, the best newspaper in the world, with the strongest writing and the most fearless reporting.
This story, about the struggle of one teenage girl, is dramatic on a personal level but also of the utmost importance on the grand level of human aspiration. It deserves to be told as well as possible, and so I turn the rest of this column over to Ed Pilkington, the Guardian’s correspondent in New York...
Muy calentito for Hanna!
As most of you know, I am muy calentito for Hanna Skandera. In her fervent desire to determine the Final Measure of education, the perfect test that would for all time determine whether a student is edumuhcated to New Mexico standards, Hanna has gone to near super-human lengths in discovering and tracking down the Great Exam written by the finger of God on adobe tablets that exist somewhere south of the seventh sphere...
All American family
When the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus wrote 2600 years ago that “character is fate,” he set the conditions for centuries of intense introspection on the part of perhaps millions of people. What is character? How is it formed? How does it direct one’s life? Are we born with it? Does it grow in us through the direction of wise and loving parents and friends?
Zach Wahls, a sixth generation Iowan, told the Iowa Legislature a few years back when it was contemplating banning same-sex marriage, that “not once” in his l9 years had he “ever been confronted by an individual who realized independently that I was raised by a gay couple. And do you know why?” he asked the legislators.
“Because the sexual orientation of my parents has had zero effect on the content of my character.”...
New Mexico’s tempest in a teapot
The 15 New Mexico behavioral health provider organizations that have been accused of Medicaid fraud by their Human Services Department have been put in an impossible position. The state has tried them and found them guilty in the press and the patients they serve and the staff they employ are understandably frightened and angry.
The accused agencies have been defunded, meaning they are no longer reimbursed for providing care for the most vulnerable in their communities — persons with serious mental illnesses and substance use disorders. These persons, as well as the staff are worried, demoralized, and uncertain about the future. All as a result of a process that seems to be designed to deflect accountability from the state...
The Coconut Massacre
Mexico’s long bout of violence has introduced many new words into the popular vernacular. Among the linguistic additions is the word “youthcide,’ meaning the systematic, mass killing of young people. A recent slaughter in the southern state of Guerrero could be a textbook example of the ongoing loss of young lives from violence.
On Friday, July 5, an estimated 200-250 people buried seven young boys and men in Coyuca de Benitez, a rural municipality located about a half hour’s drive from Acapulco in the Costa Grande region. The victims were all found shot to death in a local coconut orchard the previous day...
A kerfuffalo revisited
Thank you to all my many kind readers who have sent extravagant gifts and money orders to my secret offshore post office box in the wan hopes that I not write about you, which brings up UNM Psych. Prof Geoff Miller who posted the immortal tweet, “Dear obese PhD. (sic) applicant…”
Remember him? He was conducting research, when he twitterooed that fat slobs need not apply. The University was disturbed because Geoff was not following procedures and getting the appropriate prior approvals for his research.
Turns out the tweet was not the giant kerfuffalo I feared, but another minor academic tremor...
Dr. Feather and too many pina coladas
During prancercise this morning I happened to be thinking obsessively about former New Mexico senator-to-be Dr. Feather Wilson. Dr. Feather plays a rather tepid banjo.
During her candidacy she aired a TV spot that appeared every fifteen minutes for three months. Dr. Feather was seen strumming about two chords after which the camera panned in on her big folksy smile, so the viewer knew-- Dr. Feather is not just an expert in schmoozology and international hoi palloi, she’s a bona fide country fried human being...