Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
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Ordinarily, I am not conflicted about apologies. I’m for them. But the feelings are more complex with last week’s Senate apology for decades of inaction while an estimated 4,700 Americans, most of them black, were lynched. As they died, skinned alive, burned alive, dancing at the end of ropes, as white people gathered to watch mob murder with the same festivity you would a county fair, as souvenir postcards of mutilated corpses were traded and hearts, bones and testicles har...
Is it just me, or does the mayor seem conflicted? Granted, James West has a lot to be conflicted about. Last month, the Spokane Spokesman-Review reported it had caught the city’s chief executive, a social conservative who has long opposed gay rights, in a gay online chat room making a date with a computer expert hired by the paper to pose as an 18-year-old male student. West is alleged to have used the perks of his office to lure men into sexual liaisons. What’s worse, he’s al...
WARSAW, Poland — Allen Iverson is looking down on me. The tour bus is rolling along a busy street here in the Polish capital when suddenly there’s the Philadelphia 76ers star, staring with attitude from an athletic shoe ad on the side of a skyscraper. Welcome to the United States of Poland. At least, that’s the way it feels sometimes, what with all the Pizza Huts, McDonald’s, Mars bars, J.Lo, Levi’s, and billboards of American pop icons like Iverson and rapper 50 Cent. And...
Dear President Bush: I see where your administration took Newsweek magazine to task last week over a report alleging that U.S. military personnel at Guantanamo Bay defiled the Koran by flushing it down a toilet. Your spokesman declared you outraged. Who can blame you? The item led to protests across the Middle East and rioting in Afghanistan that reportedly left at least 15 people dead. The Muslim world was infuriated at the supposed mistreatment of their holy book. Frankly,...
It happens every time. Every single time I think I’ve seen the absolute bottom, the skankiest, stinkiest behavior of which human beings are capable, along comes a Clarence Stowers to prove me wrong. In fact, from here on in, I think “Clarence Stowers” will be my synonym for all that is vile and low. As in, “Man, I'm having a real Clarence Stowers day.” Or, “Dang, I just stepped in some Clarence Stowers.” So, OK, now you’re wondering who Clarence Stowers is and why I’m heaping...
At the end of April, five explorers reached the North Pole. Bone tired and bone chilled after 37 days and 475 miles, they set up their tent and tried to get some rest. Then visitors came calling. Three Russians and a Czech who had followed them the last 50 miles of the way turned up outside their tent. At which point the helicopter landed. It disgorged a group of tourists who walked around taking pictures of the explorers. Finally the Russians, the Czech and the tourists got... Full story
Gay Holocaust? That was the subject line of an e-mail I received last week from “Chris,” a lawyer in a red state. He wanted to know if anybody else sees a similarity between the beginning of the Holocaust — the nibbling away of rights and personhood that ultimately led to the attempted extermination of a people — and what is happening to gay people in American right now. He knows it’s far-fetched. “But,” he says, speaking of the conservative element that is pushing hardest aga... Full story
The always-entertaining Most Backward State in the Union contest took an interesting bounce last week. With Kansas having gone three or four whole days without trying to teach creationism in science classes and Florida having neglected to botch an election lately, plucky little South Carolina shot to the head of the pack. Amazingly, it achieved this feat without even mentioning the Confederate rag. Sorry, flag. No, South Carolina’s leadership in backwardness comes courtesy o...
It was a sunlit moment. For the last couple of weeks, I’ve had students in my pop culture class talking about black images in entertainment media. As part of that discussion, I showed them a movie — Spike Lee’s 2000 satire, “Bamboozled.” It is in some ways a deeply flawed film. But it derives an undeniable power and poignancy from its evocation of a century’s worth of black stereotype. A bad-taste parade of Aunt Jemimas, Sambos, pickaninnies and minstrels shuffles across the...
It was about 25 years ago that a magazine article first called to my attention something called the Christian right. The story depicted a movement of religious fundamentalists who sought to radically restructure American life — mandating school prayer, creationism and censorship. I remember thinking the article was a little alarmist. Actually, it was prescient. That realization crept over me much as Christian fundamentalism has crept over American life: steadily. The m... Full story
There were no network news bulletins when Sun Hudson died. No army of protesters keeping vigil outside the hospital, no statement from the president, no comment from the House majority leader. Instead, he died quietly, resting in his mother’s arms. This was on March 15. Had he lived 10 more days, Sun would have been 6 months old. Doctors say he had a genetic deformity, a lethal form of dwarfism in which the lungs do not grow large enough to support life. Doctors felt that f...
I just visited the Web site that fascinated Jeff Weise, the 16-year-old who shot up his high school on the Red Lake Reservation in Minnesota. There, I learned that the tribes of humanity must be separated or risk destruction by assimilation. That Jews are a “fanatical religious-ethnic” group conspiring to control communications media. And that for all the dubious talk about a “Holocaust,” you never hear about the good things Adolf Hitler did. I also read the posts that We...
So, what might a smarter man have said? Put aside for a moment the fact that a smarter man would have backed away from the subject as though from a live grenade. If forced at gunpoint to respond, how would a smart man have analyzed the performance gap between male and female science students? Lawrence Summers, it must be said, was not a smart man. The president of Harvard University, speaking at an academic conference in January, suggested that women lag behind because of...
I was in Michael Jackson’s bedroom once. This was long enough ago that he still had brown skin and God’s intended nose. Contrary to the allegations that have surfaced in his child molestation trial, Jackson offered me neither “Jesus Juice” nor pornography. I remember only a rattan chair and shelves full of movie memorabilia, including Disney, the Three Stooges and a likeness of Jackson himself as the scarecrow from “The Wiz.” His room was the last stop on a tour of the fami...
“Smiling faces show no traces of the evil that lurks within.” — from a song by the Undisputed Truth Did you search for murder in Dennis Rader’s eyes? I certainly did. He looked disheveled and disgruntled, as anyone might in his or her mug shot. But did you see anything else? An unsettling gleam like the one in Charles Manson’s eyes? The remote coldness that lurks in Theodore Kaczynski’s? Did you see murder in Rader’s eyes? It’s a judgment call, of course, but I didn’t. He look... Full story
Dear Ariana Schanzer: I hope you won’t mind being called out like this. It’s just that I saw your picture last week in The Miami Herald and it made me want to talk to you. In the photo, you’re smiling a giddy smile, dancing cheek to cheek with this equally delighted older man who looks to be about 60 but who is, the caption tells us, actually 90 years old. Which makes your grandfather, Samuel Schanzer, exactly 80 years older than you. It would have been a touching image under... Full story
Mary Kay Letourneau and Vili Fualaau have set a date. Middle of April, according to their online wedding gift registry. You can search it out on macys.com. Among other things, the kids would like a Delonghi Retro 4-Slice Toaster Oven — $99.99, in case you’re feeling generous. There is speculation that the couple — both unemployed — will sell television rights to the ceremony in order to pay for it. Fualaau also has expressed interest in writing a book about their affair. Noel...
To understand the world that produced Raiford Chatman Davis, it is perhaps enough to understand how he got his name changed. It happened when his mother went to register his birth certificate. She told the man at the counter that her son was known as R.C. Davis. The clerk misheard her, but she didn’t correct him. He was white, she was black, and this was Georgia. So R.C. spent the rest of his life under the name that resulted from an uncorrected error: Ossie Davis. He died F...
This falls into the category of being careful what you wish for. Me, I have long wished the Republican Party would offer black voters a credible alternative. For years, I have tweaked the GOP for its inability to attract black voters. Especially since the black community, though often derided as ultra-liberal by people who don’t know any better, actually contains a deep core of conservatism. But the Grand Old Party never even bothered to make a case to black voters. It was t...
An open letter to African-American kids: The other day, I used a big word in this column. The word was brobdingnagian; it’s from a book called “Gulliver’s Travels” by Jonathan Swift, a fantasy about a man whose adventures take him to a number of strange lands. One of those lands was Brobdingnag, where the people were all giants. Thus, “brobdingnagian” is a big word that means, well ... big. (I like using it because it’s odd and kind of ugly-sounding.) Anyway, some guy e-ma...
Yes, his civil rights were violated. He was held without access to an attorney for 10 days. Lawmen threatened his life. His interrogation was filmed and then televised, tainting the small-town jury pool. They did it because it was 1961, because it was Louisiana, and because he was a black man accused of killing a white woman. But Wilbert Rideau was not innocent; he had in fact committed the crime of which he was accused. Nor was it some minor offense. He robbed a bank, took... Full story
Jack Johnson was a black man who often spent his days beating up white men and his nights making love to white women. This, in the first years of the last century. So you can understand why he was a polarizing figure, why newspapers inveighed against him and the government conspired to bring him down. Of course, chances are good that you’ve never even heard of John Arthur Johnson. As filmmaker Ken Burns pointed out to me in a telephone interview, we are a nation of great h...
Makgatho Mandela died last week of illnesses related to AIDS. We know this because his father, Nelson, announced it to the world Thursday. As you surely know, Nelson Mandela won a Nobel Prize and international acclaim for a struggle against South African apartheid that included 27 years of incarceration. He is a world hero. But in some ways, this announcement may be the most courageous thing he’s ever done — both for Africa and for the United States. That’s not meant to trivi...
Torrie was buried on a Friday. The day was cold and clear and there must have been a couple hundred people packed into the church. Most of the mourners were unbearably young — in their teens and 20s, I would guess. One was a woman who had to wait out her tears while delivering a eulogy. Another was a pallbearer who dissolved into a shuddering heap. And then there was a man who came hesitantly down the aisle, stopping short of the casket and turning away. A moment later he w...
Granted, it is not the sexiest subject in the world, not the kind of thing that gets people het up enough to write letters to the editor. Yet there are few things more vitally important to understanding the world and our role in it. I’m talking about history and the teaching thereof. And if you keep rolling your eyes, your face is going to freeze like that. Not that I’m surprised. We are a historical people, a nation of short memories and cherished myths. For us, history doe...
