Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
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Let’s talk about Foxitis. That, as you may recall, was the explanation attorney Joseph Hurley offered this month at a court hearing for his client, accused Capitol insurrectionist Anthony Antonio, who is facing five federal charges for his role in the attack. “You want war?” he reportedly yelled to police. “We got war! 1776 all over again!” But as it turns out, the fact that he allegedly broke into the Capitol and threatened police wasn’t Antonio’s fault alone. As Hurley tol...
Its Constitution fixed the value of African Americans at three-fifths that of other humans. Its bloodiest war was over whether they should be enslaved. It has no institution — not one — that is free of racial discrimination. Yet, we are supposed to take seriously those who now ask if America is a racist country? It seems to have obsessed many of us, this shallow question with the obvious answer, since it was raised by a recent speech from Tim Scott, the only black Rep...
An open letter to the children: We owe you an apology. Meaning all of us in the generations above you. We had one job where you were concerned, and that was to keep you safe. “Save the children,” pleaded a man named Marvin Gaye a long time ago. But we didn’t. We failed. And for that, I’m sorry. You deserved so much more. I offer this apology in the names of more of you than there is space to list. It is in the name of Sherdavia Jenkins, who was 9 and Jacob Hall, who was 6....
I sat there trying to remember how to breathe. I suspect I had that in common with people — particularly African-American people — all over the country. Didn’t we all hold our breath as we awaited the verdict in the trial of Derek Chauvin? Then that verdict was read. The former Minneapolis police officer was found guilty on all three counts in the death of George Floyd and was promptly handcuffed and led off to jail. On television, people shouted and prayed, cranking their...
There is nothing sacred about nine. The number was not carried down from a mountain on stone tablets, nor did it appear in a burning bush. In fact, before the Supreme Court contained nine justices, it contained six, the number fixed when the tribunal was established in 1789. Then, in an attempt to hobble his successor, President John Adams reduced it to five. Then there were six again. Then seven. Then nine. Then 10. Then seven again. Since 1869, there have been nine. So what...
America is on trial. Or at least, that is the conviction of many observers as Derek Chauvin, a white former Minneapolis police officer, faces judge and jury in the death of George Floyd, a 46-year-old African-American man. America on trial: It’s a headline in Time, the Toronto Star and Agence Marocaine De Presse, a news agency in Morocco. It’s the considered opinion of CNN’s Don Lemon, the Rev. Al Sharpton and of a group of black barbers in Washington, D.C., who were interview...
Dear Republicans: Let’s just say this plainly. You are a people lacking integrity and honor. And you have not a thimbleful of respect for one of this nation’s most sacred principles: Meaning equality under the law. One person, one vote. That harsh appraisal is necessitated by your response to losing the 2020 election. First, you pretended you didn’t, embracing the anti-fact hogwash your craven leader spewed like a broken sewer pipe. Then a mob of your voters breached the U...
Alexis Knutson doesn’t want to see her friend reduced. That friend, she told The New York Times, “had the biggest, brightest smile. She always just had these dimples that, especially when she got excited about something — her smile was just huge.” “I always had a rule,” Knutson said. “She couldn’t call me before 9 a.m. because I like my sleep. She would always call me at 6 a.m.” Of course, she did. Because that’s how friends do one another. And Knutson hates the idea of s...
On the issue of guns, John Kavanagh has a record unblemished by sanity. Indeed, a scroll through Vote Smart, the nonpartisan, nonprofit voter information clearinghouse, suggests the Arizona state lawmaker has never met a pro-gun measure he didn’t like. That includes bills authorizing concealed carry in public buildings, firearms sales without background checks and even one prohibiting the state from keeping records on gun owners. So, yes, the man loves guns. The man thinks e...
My brother-in-law died of hogwash. Another brother-in-law, a sister-in-law, two daughters-in-law, two cousins and several grandchildren are all recovering from hogwash. My wife spent a week in the hospital with hogwash. I tested positive for hogwash, but had few symptoms. “Hogwash,” you may recall, was the word a grocery-store owner in Naples, Florida, used last month in dismissing the seriousness of the COVID-19 pandemic. This, after a viral video showing his patrons and emp...
No, Dr. Seuss hasn’t been “canceled.” Granted, you’d never know it from the ruckus that erupted after Theodor Seuss Geisel’s estate decided to stop publishing six lesser-known titles by the celebrated children’s book author because they contained offensive racial stereotypes. We’re talking Asians with “their eyes at a slant,” and ape-like Africans in grass skirts. In a statement, Dr. Seuss Enterprises called such portrayals “hurtful and wrong.” Meantime, in his proclamation l...
You're not reading this on a smartphone or tablet, are you? I hope not, for your sake. They say the government can use imperceptible fluctuations in the light to reprogram your brain waves, giving them complete control over your thoughts and actions. You'll be Joe Biden's zombie and you won't even know it. You think that's crazy? Shows what you know. You probably think the moon landing was real. You probably think Kennedy was killed by a lone gunman. Heck, you probably think...
Let’s try an experiment. For 30 years, let’s require that young people are taught nothing about the moon. Let’s scrub Earth’s satellite from books and online articles. Let’s rebuff kids’ questions and discourage them from asking. Then, let’s assess the result. Does it change the moon? No, it doesn’t. Does it change the Earth? No, it does not. The only thing it changes is millions of us. At nighttime, there is a light in the sky that waxes and wanes, but they can’t explain i...
Uh-oh. Joe Biden is talking unity again. It came last week at a CNN town hall in Milwaukee in response to a question about how he will bring Americans together. “I take issue with what everybody says about the division,” he replied. “The nation is not divided. You go out there and take a look and talk to people, you have fringes on both ends, but it’s not nearly as divided as we make it out to be.” Regular readers will be familiar with my take on unity, last offered in January...
“You think we’re bad for America?” Sean Hannity of Fox “News” asked that question of Ted Koppel four years ago as the latter was interviewing him on “CBS Sunday Morning.” Yes, answered Koppel, “because you’re very good at what you do and ... you have attracted people who are determined that ideology is more important than facts.” Thus dressed down, Hannity smirked and made a face. He later asserted that Koppel — 1992 inductee into the Television Academy Hall of Fame, winner of...
An open letter to African-American people: February marks the 95th observation of what started as Negro History Week and later became Black History Month. I wanted to use the occasion to talk about what being Black means, about how it feels, being us. Hearing that, you’re probably braced for a litany of depressing statistics, indignities and cruelties. But that’s not why I’m here. No, I want to talk about community. Lately, I find myself thinking a lot about Shonda Rhime...
What is it going to take? For years, that question has weighed upon the rest of us — and even some of its own members — as we watched the Republican Party slide ever deeper into a morass of political extremism, screwball conspiracies, alternate facts and ambient rage incompatible with responsible governance. Every time Republicans obfuscated, equivocated and rationalized, every time they broke rules they once swore to uphold, every time they folded, spindled and mutilated val...
And so we reach the end of an unpresidented era. The reference is, of course, to one of Donald Trump’s many Twitter misspellings, this one found in his 2016 description of the seizure of a US. Navy drone. He meant to call it “unprecedented.” But Trump’s mistake gave us a coinage perfect for this moment. For four years, America has been an unpresidented nation — in some fundamental sense, a nation without a president. Yes, I know. Trump was in the Oval Office, duly elected and...
So I had myself an epiphany. Actually, that’s not quite the right word. An epiphany is a moment of sudden clarity, but mine rolled in slowly, like dawn on a crystal morning. I’m not sure when it began. Maybe it was in 2012 when Trayvon Martin was killed and much of America held him guilty of his own murder. Maybe it was in 2013 when the Voting Rights Act was eviscerated and states began hatching schemes to suppress the African-American vote. Maybe it was on Election Day. May...
A few thoughts on the lonely death of Naika Venant. As you may have heard, Naika, a Miami teenager, hanged herself in the dark hours of a Sunday morning. She did this live on Facebook. We'll likely never know why she chose to do it that way. Perhaps she felt invisible. Perhaps she wanted to be seen. Her self-destruction drew attention, all right, but surely not the kind she wanted. To read the report by The Miami Herald's Carol Marbin Miller and Alex Harris is to cringe with...
This one is for Mike. He is a Houston reader who shot me an email after my recent column equating the GOP push for voter ID laws with voter suppression. I agreed with Attorney General Eric Holder who called that a modern-day poll tax. Mike did not. "You have to have an ID to write a check," he wrote, "use a credit card and most other things in life. Saying poor blacks cannot easily get IDs is ridiculous. .?.?. Comparing this to the poll tax? C'mon, be serious." Actually, I...
This will be a futile column. Experience dictates that it will change no minds, inspire no reconsideration among those who disagree. It will sit on the computer screen or the newspaper page taking up space, affecting nothing, until another column replaces it. It will be a useless essay, written for one reason only: To protect the writer’s mental health. If the writer did not write it, you see, there is a great danger his head would explode. Last week, these things happened: (1...
Call it the myth of inevitability. It is the mindset that says enlightenment and progress are the inescapable byproducts of time. As in a reader who asked last week during an online chat how I thought slavery would have ended had the South won the Civil War. That it might not have ended at all did not enter his calculations. Slavery would’ve ended, he assured me, through slave revolt “or the onslaught of time/world justice.” It is a common enough conceit, this idea that time...
This column finds its genesis in one which was recently written by Mr. Leonard Pitts, whose syndicated work appears in this newspaper. Mr. Pitts, an African American male, is around my age and writes from the slightly, but not overly, conservative side of the spectrum. Though I frequently find myself agreeing with Mr. Pitts, I do feel that we should not read only those pieces of writing with which we agree. Growth emerges from encountering, and engaging, different ways of...
Yes, I know the comments left by readers on our Web sites are sometimes unfair. I know some of the statements posted are probably not even true. And I know our Web site’s credibility has been called into question because we allow readers to say anything they want without revealing their identity. I also know, as Leonard Pitts explained in his commentary on the same topic last week, “they don’t have this problem in Cuba.” I’m not happy that a few of our readers are misinform...
