Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
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Call it the revenge of Milli Vanilli. You remember them, right? The pop music duo that came out of nowhere to score one of 1989’s biggest hits, an album called “Girl, You Know It’s True?” But “true” is one thing Rob Pilatus and Fabrice Morvan never were. One year, 7 million albums and a Grammy Award later, we learned they had sung not a note. Milli Vanilli was a fraud. I was a music critic then, and I made Pilatus and Morvan (along with New Kids on the Block and a few others)...
Some people are going to think I’m insensitive. I refer to the news out of the suburbs of Tacoma, Wash., that three teenagers were arrested last week for allegedly plotting a Columbine-style massacre at their high school. It is unknown how serious the alleged plan was. Authorities say the students — an 18-year-old female and two males, ages 16 and 18 — had amassed no weapons and were a long way from carrying out the purported plot. Nevertheless, the trio had allegedly fille...
I can’t imagine what Edward Kennedy must feel. I mean, I know it’s traumatic to see your brother shot in the head and killed. But what must it add to your pain to see that tragedy become a video game? It happened last week. The game, available online, is called “JFK Reloaded,” and it was released to coincide with the 41st anniversary of John Kennedy’s assassination. Download “JFK” at a cost of $9.99 and you find yourself on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Deposito...
I wish I was offended. So many other people are that it feels lonely not to be. So I’ve tried to channel the anger I’ve seen in Internet postings. Tried to agree with Tony Dungy, a black football coach who says he was racially insulted. But all I see is a naked chick and a football player. Meaning, of course, actress Nicollette Sheridan, Philadelphia Eagles receiver Terrell Owens and a “Monday Night Football” promotional skit that had folks gathering three deep at the water c...
Leonard Pitts Jr Let me share with you the daydream that gets me through to Friday. I retire. I move to a house on a wooded acre from which I cannot see my nearest neighbor. My new house has a media room with a state-of-the-art sound system and plush recliners. When I am not there, I am lounging on the screened-in porch out back, watching the river travel past. Swell as all that is, here is what makes the daydream lovely: There are no children in the house. They have all grown...
I have to thank Jimmy Carter for saving my sanity. Granted, his was not a presidency one looks back to with fondness. Gas lines stretched forever, Iran took our people hostage and there was disco, besides. But Carter’s ex-presidency has been a model of that unofficial institution. He has built homes for the poor, mediated wars, helped feed the hungry in Africa, fought disease in Latin America. In so doing, Carter, a deacon of Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Ga., has obeyed...
Let me tell you about Greg. I met him in 1985, back when I was still a pop music critic. A guy named Paul Hardcastle had a hit that year called “19,” all about the toll the war in Vietnam exacted on a generation of American soldiers. It inspired me to visit a vet center and interview some soldiers, one of whom was Greg. He was a black man with a whispery voice and a leg that scraped uselessly behind him, an unwanted souvenir of his time in Southeast Asia. Doctors wanted to amp...
I threw down the newspaper in disgust. God, who was sitting in the recliner next to mine watching the baseball playoffs, glanced over. “Relax,” he said, “the campaign will be over in a few days.” “It’s not that,” I said. “Then what?” I handed God the newspaper. He put on his reading glasses and spent a few minutes studying the page. Finally, He shook his head. “Oh,” he said as he laid the paper aside. ‘“Oh?’ Is that all you can say? Didn’t you read the story? These rebels...
I’ve written this column before. I really don’t know why I’m writing it again. After all, there’s little that you or I can do to change things. No letter to a congressman or threat of boycott that’s likely to do any good. So I guess I’m writing just because it would feel wrong not to, immoral to walk past in silence. Two Nigerian women were recently sentenced to death by stoning for the crime of adultery. They were convicted under Sharia, a harsh form of Islamic law. The me...
You might have missed it amid other headlines, but the Supreme Court came down on your side last week. Granted, it’s not your side if you’re one of those folks who spend the day on the phone pestering people to change their long-distance service or buy vacation timeshares. If you are in fact one of those people (hereinafter referred to as “them”), let me offer a few words on behalf of the people you pester (hereinafter referred to as “us”): Good-bye. Sayonara. And don’t let t...
Evidently, there are two Iraqs. One exists here on our Earth, the other occupies a parallel space-time continuum perceivable only by a select few individuals, one of whom is the president of the United States. If you’ve got a better theory, I’m open to it. All I know is that in recent weeks, we’ve seen that nation go from awful to whatever comes after awful. Yet, to hear the president talk, the situation is actually a lot better, more hunky and/or dory, than anybody really kno...
You could tell he’d had enough. I’m talking about Ibrahim Hooper. If the name is familiar, it’s because Hooper, spokesman for the Washington, D.C.-based Council on American-Islamic Relations, has become the news media’s go-to guy on issues related to Islam and terrorism. This particular morning, he was being interviewed on an all-news radio station in Washington when the anchor asked a pointed, predictable question: Why don’t we ever hear Muslims and Muslim leaders condemn t...
My daughter started high school last week. We took her to orientation, which she entered with a face full of boredom and sighs of long suffering. That’s pretty much the way she goes everywhere these days. At least, everywhere she is accompanied by her mother and me. Needless to say, she is 14. So anyway, halfway through the half-day program, I spotted a poster in a hallway. “Thirty years from now,” it said, “it won’t matter what shoes you wore, how your hair looked, or the je...
Leonard Pitts: National Columnist What would it take to get you to stand up for me? Let’s say I’m routinely discriminated against and in some cases outright despised. Let’s say I’m often used as a scapegoat, and there’s an ongoing debate over what rights I do and do not deserve. Under what circumstances would you be willing to break with the pack and speak a word on my behalf? Would it be enough that you simply saw a wrong being done? Or would you need to have some emotional...
Leonard Pitts Jr. Save your pity for McGreevey family James McGreevey is not a hero. That’s the first thing we need to get straight. To the contrary, press reports on the embattled New Jersey governor detail an administration so steeped in corruption that one feels a distinct need to wash one’s hands after reading them. We’re talking allegations and indictments on a range of extortion, blackmail and conflict of interest charges involving the governor’s supporters and members...
Leonard Pitts Jr. I have nothing against Tom Ridge. Granted, his color-coded threat alert system seems nearly useless as a way of spreading anything but anxiety. And his advocacy of duct tape as a security measure was one of 2003’s great moments of unintended comedy. For all that, though, the homeland security secretary strikes me as a man doing the best he can with a thankless job. Complain all you want about his incessant warnings of attacks that never come. Let it be d...
Wherever we go, a parade follows. It strings out behind us, a march of gangly 10-year-old boys, dusty toddlers clad only in panties, shy girls with watchful eyes, all laughing and reaching and chattering at once. Makes it harder for us to work, for photographer Sarah Glover to frame her pictures, for me to conduct my interviews. But neither of us complains. There are worse things than being followed about by children. They trail us, I suppose, because with our cameras and...
Chances are you remember it well if you came of age in the ‘50s or ‘60s, that era when everything was “modern,” “space age” or “new and improved,” and we looked forward with awe. The future was where people would zoom around on jet packs and plan weekend getaways by lunar lakes. The future was where everything would be made better. Technology would see to it. Better living through chemistry and all that. In the future, a woman would clean her house at the touch of a butt...
Leonard Pitts: Syndicated Columnist Enough, it said. No more. That was the subject line. When I opened the e-mail, I found myself gazing upon a severed head held aloft by an anonymous hand. I had intended to spare myself such images. Viewing them felt too much like submitting to terrorist manipulation. But I should have known better. Technology being what it is, you don’t have to seek stuff out. It finds you. “Enough, no more!” The exclamation point is an attempt to add empha...
Ten years later, it feels like a fever dream. There is to it a sense of unreality. You want to say, did that actually happen? But you know it did. You saw it. You were there. Ten years ago, O.J. Simpson was arrested for murder and the whole country went nuts. Not all at once, granted. In the beginning, there was just amazement at the unfolding drama. Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman found savagely butchered and then, a low-speed police chase of a Ford Bronco, a...
I’ve chosen not to see the video of Nicholas Berg’s beheading. I made the same decision two years ago when a clip of Islamic terrorists decapitating a reporter named Daniel Pearl surfaced online. My reasoning is the same now as it was then. There’s something obscene about watching from a desk chair as a man’s head is sawed off for your ... what? Benefit? Entertainment? I decline to be manipulated by the animals who killed these men. So perhaps you can understand why I find re...
Maybe somebody spiked his Jell-O. I bet the audience seriously considered the idea when Bill Cosby performed recently in Washington at a commemoration of Brown v. Board of Education. According to the Washington Post, Cosby’s routine ridiculed “lower economic people” in the black community for their values, their mannerisms, their dysfunctions. He described them as “knuckleheads,” complained that they’ll buy $500 sneakers — “and won’t spend $200 for ‘Hooked on Phonics.’ ... Th...
Leonard Pitts Jr. I have not looked forward to this column. To be perfectly candid, I’m only writing it because I feel obligated. Monday marked the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark Supreme Court ruling that ended the doctrine of “separate but equal” and helped shatter American apartheid. What else is a black columnist going to turn his pen to? Tax reform? My problem is that an anniversary is usually a time for celebration. But where Brown is conce...
Spider-Man 2 is coming. I know this because I am a big Spider fan and have been waiting for this sequel ever since the closing credits on the original. I also know it because Major League Baseball entered into an agreement to place the movie’s logo on the bases in its ballparks. Also, the pitcher’s mound and the on-deck circle. At least that was the plan until baseball purists started whining last week about the damage this would do to the sanctity of the game and the lea...
Leonard Pitts, columnist What is it with student journalists lately? First you had the white kid at Oregon State who wrote a column calling black people immoral. Then you had the one at the University of Massachusetts who opined that Pat Tillman, the former NFL player killed in Afghanistan, “got what was coming to him.” But the one that really stops me comes out of Rutgers University. I don’t single it out because of the transgression per se, even though it was egregious. For...
