Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
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I went to see “Brokeback Mountain” last week, mainly to prove to myself that I could. This was after reading a New York Times piece by Larry David of “Seinfeld” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm” fame in which he wrote that, though he loves gay people and supports both gay marriage and gay divorce, he does not plan to see this critically praised movie about gay cowboys. David said he’s discomfited by the idea of watching two men fall in love and fears it might make him gay by osmosi...
Apparently, Brownie wasn’t the only one. You remember the grief that fell on Michael Brown, former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency last month after the release of some embarrassing e-mails. They revealed that as Hurricane Katrina was submerging New Orleans and shredding Biloxi, Brown and his aides were exchanging e-mails on trivial matters, including the question of which clothes would make him “look more hard-working” on television. The e-mails were relea...
Let me begin by speaking the forbidden words. Merry Christmas. There, I said it. So did the sky crack? Did the oceans turn to blood? Is a horde of angry Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and atheists storming the gates, demanding a retraction? Or does the world look much the same as it did before? I’m betting on the last. So forgive me if I don’t take up arms in the so-called War on Christmas. In case you hadn’t heard about it — in other words, in case you have a life — let me bring...
Do u lk bks? I lk bks lotz. Dats y dis sux. OK, I’ll stop now. The copy editor is giving me the stank eye. If you are below a certain age, the foregoing is probably clear as Aruban seas. If you are above that same age, it is likely as murky as Mississippi mud. For the benefit of the latter, what you’ve just read is a few words written as a text message — or at least, my best approximation thereof. I can only be so fluent after all, given that I am of middle age and this quasi...
Perhaps you remember white flight. That is, of course, the term for what happened in the ’60s when African Americans, newly liberated from legal segregation, began fanning out from the neighborhoods to which they’d once been restricted. Traumatized at the thought of living in proximity to their perceived inferiors, white people put their houses on the market at fire sale prices and took flight. Well, something similar is happening now in Northern California. Similar in the...
“And the Lord did look with discontent upon the town of Dover in the province of Pennsylvania. For Dover was a wicked and prideful place and had turned its back on God. Its people had voted out school board members who tried to introduce intelligent design into schools as an alternative to the theory of evolution. “And the Lord was wrathful and said, I will smite them with burning coals from the sky. Their fields I will make barren, their rivers I will cause to rise in flo...
As Hurricane Katrina raised a watery fist almost 30 feet high and shook it at Biloxi, as a nightmare of wind and ocean took shape off New Orleans, as millions of people fled for their lives, huddled in fear or made peace with God, Brownie sought fashion advice. “Tie or not for tonight?” he e-mailed an aide. “Button-down blue shirt?” You remember Brownie, of course. Former Federal Emergency Management Agency chief Michael Brown — forever Brownie after a few ill-fated words of...
I have a crush on the president of the United States. Perhaps more accurately, I’ve had a crush on Geena Davis, the woman who plays her Tuesday nights on ABC, ever since she guest-starred on “Family Ties” back in ’84. Those lips! Those legs! That height! Point being, I’m happy to talk about Davis anytime you want. But something’s being missed in all the discussion that surrounds her new show, “Commander in Chief,” which casts her as Mackenzie Allen, the nation’s first...
I am trying to feel Marcus Camby’s pain. I am also trying to keep a straight face. I cannot do both. Camby, for those who never read the sports page, is a very tall man who is paid $8 million per annum to play basketball for the Denver Nuggets. You’d think life would be good, but Camby is feeling put upon. This is because last week the National Basketball Association instituted a dress code for its players. No more sunglasses worn indoors, no more sleeveless shirts, no mor...
In a way, you can’t blame the Bush Administration for turning the conversation to Harriet Miers’ religion. What else are they going to talk about? Her qualifications? Those, as we have learned in the two weeks and counting since President Bush nominated her to the Supreme Court, are a trifle thin. The woman who would become one of the nine most important judges in the land has never been a judge before. Worse, she lacks significant experience in constitutional law. But on the...
Ten years later, more than 65 percent of our children are still born out of wedlock. Ten years later, we are still five times more likely to die of homicide. Ten years later, still fewer than half of us own our homes. Ten years later, we still marry less, go to jail more and die sooner. Ten years later, the promises we made that crisp Monday in October lie fallow and unredeemed. On Sunday, it will be a decade since African-American men descended on the Mall in Washington,...
I am not myself these days. I don’t know who I am, but I am definitely not myself. A lady on the phone as much as told me so. This was after she had given me a test to prove that I am me. I failed. Do you know how frustrating that is, to fail a me test? Would you fail a you test? All I was trying to do was place a phone order, using an existing credit account open in my name, for a new computer. But first the lady on the phone had to administer a test designed to detect and t...
The women were on the roof of the hotel, calling for help as floodwaters rose. Then a motorboat full of policemen came by. “Can you help us?” the women cried. The policemen replied, “Show us what you’ve got!” and motioned for them to lift their T-shirts. The women said no. The policemen left them there. I figured that story for an urban legend when one of my students wrote about it in a class I teach. Too crazy to be true, I thought. But the tale turns out to be an eyewitnes...
Respect yourself — The Staple Singers Fair warning: This column will use the N-word. And I’m not going to call it the N-word. The term offends my eyes, but I’ll have to move beyond the shelter of euphemism for you to see what David Sylvester saw. He’s 40, black, a personal trainer in Philadelphia. On Sept. 11, 2001, he lost a friend, Kevin Bowser, who was in the World Trade Center when the airplanes hit. Sylvester wanted to memorialize his buddy, so he set up a scholar...
“What town is this?” I ask the young man standing on the lawn with arms folded. “Waveland,” he says. “Or it used to be.” “It will be again,” I assure him. “I hope so,” he says. His tone suggests his expectations aren’t particularly high. It’s hard to blame him. In Waveland, railroad tracks are ripped from track beds and twisted like plastic bag ties. Cars are stacked in piles and neighborhoods have been stomped flat, peaked roofs sitting atop mounds of rubble maybe 5 feet hig...
Leonard Pitts, Jr. Does it really matter? The city is flooded, people are homeless and hungry and scared and dead. Shouldn’t this be a time for giving money and saying prayers? Should we really care about the color of the people looting in the hurricane zone? Or that Louisiana is a red state? Or that some of the dead are gay? Apparently, that kind of thing matters to some of us. It matters, for instance, to a black man who posted a note in an online forum saying he is e...
“Why is there an Ebony? If some white guy started a magazine called Ivory, you blacks would riot in protest.” Give me a dollar for every white guy who ever asked me that and I’d be too rich to write columns for a living. The point of the question, of course, is that white folk are oppressed by pernicious double standards. It’s a silly argument and I’ve explained why many times in this space. But today, rather than answer the issue behind the question, I’d like to answer the...
It began with the Magnificent Montague. He was a disc jockey on KGFJ, 1230 on your AM dial, back in the days of Supremes and Miracles, Sam Cooke singing “You Send Me” and James Brown testifying about papa’s brand-new bag. KGFJ was the very heartbeat of black Los Angeles, and Nathaniel Montague one of its signature voices. He was an excitable type and when a record hit him just right, when rhythm met blues in that sweet spot that makes you close your eyes and snap your finge...
Last week, fear killed Jean Charles de Menezes. He may or may not have been dressed suspiciously, as London police say he was. May or may not have jumped a subway turnstile, may or may not have ignored commands to stop. What is beyond question is that de Menezes, a Brazilian, was a man with swarthy skin at a time when men with swarthy skin were being hunted for a series of bus and subway bombings that left dozens of people dead and millions of nerves frayed. British police,...
What would you wear if you were invited to the White House? My daughter, all of 14, got this look on her face like I’d threatened to take her to a Motown concert. “Ew,” she said, “do we have to go to the White House?” No, I said. I just want to know what you’d wear if you did go. “Well,” she said, “I’d want to be comfortable, so I’d probably wear jeans and a T-shirt.” Figuring she didn't quite get the question, I pressed her. “Let’s say they were honoring you. What would yo...
Ronnie Paris and I had the same father. At least, that’s the way it felt reading the news reports out of Tampa last week. They told of how Ronnie’s dad — his name is also Ronnie Paris — used to hit the boy, throw him around, bang him up. According to testimony from the man’s wife and sister-in-law, he did this to toughen the boy up, make a man out of him. Paris’ fear was that otherwise, his son would grow up to be “soft,” a “sissy.” Or gay. There are only three differences bet...
So now we say goodbye to Sandra Day O’Connor. In the process, we say goodbye to the one justice on the Supreme Court who did not belong body and soul to either the liberal or conservative wings, who could not be considered in the pocket of either political extreme. In other words, she was willing to listen to the facts before making up her mind, as opposed to the other way around. Imagine that. As a result, her votes hacked off conservatives, vexed liberals and — not coi...
What is it with Mexico lately? When did it hire David Duke as an image consultant? I can't imagine what else might explain that nation's recent blundering into not just one but two racially charged controversies. The first, of course, was President Vicente Fox's remark in May that Mexican immigrants in the United States take work “not even blacks” are willing to do. Fox's comment outraged many in this country and bestirred the readily bestirrable Al Sharpton and Jesse Jac...
Malcolm X used to speak of the need to get freedom “by any means necessary.” Apparently Gov. Jeb Bush feels the same about the need to get Michael Schiavo. Two weeks ago, Bush directed the state’s attorney to open an investigation into whether Schiavo delayed in calling paramedics when he found his wife Terri passed out in their bathroom before sunrise on Feb. 25, 1990. The pretext for this is that over the years, Schiavo has given conflicting estimates of the time he found...
We were in Poland talking about Africa. It seemed fitting. Last month, I joined an interfaith pilgrimage to the killing places of the Holocaust years, a handful of the sites where homosexuals were slaughtered for being homosexuals, communists for being communists, Jehovah's Witnesses for being Jehovah's Witnesses and, most infamously and most prodigiously, Jews for being Jews. Six million Jews, 5 million others. And the world, 60 springs ago, struggled with the sheer magnitude...
