Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
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For New Mexicans, COVID-19 hit in March. It may be named after the previous year, when it first turned up, but the first confirmed case in the U.S. hit the West Coast in January, and in New Mexico it hit less than two months later. From there, COVID spread like a fog over the entire year, distorting our lives and livelihoods in innumerable ways. In hindsight, it’s easy to see how 2020 was destined to be a year of great disruptions. We were barely into the new year when President Trump was impeached by the House. Before his a...
With a pandemic bearing down, Christmas is a bit subdued this year. That makes it a good year to curl up in bed with a Christmas book or plop down on your couch for a magical Christmas movie. I must admit I’ve read very few Christmas books, except as a young daddy. That’s when I delved into certain children’s classics such as “How The Grinch Stole Christmas” or one of the many Berenstain Bears’ holiday stories out there. Of the few Christmas-centric “chapter books” I remember reading, Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” is...
COVID demands the occasional distraction, for the sake of our sanity. I thought Virgin Galactic’s touristee launch into space from New Mexico’s Spaceport America would be a welcome diversion, but the first attempt was an aborted disappointment, not the milestone we’d hoped it to be. So instead, let’s turn to New Mexico filmmaking for our entertainment. Like the space industry, it has a long and storied history in New Mexico. Filmmaking here goes back to the silent picture shows. The original Las Vegas in particular was a h...
Bill Clinton didn’t even come close to winning a majority vote in his first run for president. He got only 43% of the vote in a three-man race — but he won with a heavily lopsided 370 electoral votes. His successor, George W. Bush, didn’t even win a plurality of the votes as Clinton did. Instead, he fell about a half-million votes short of the vote for Al Gore. But he won in electoral votes, despite the majority of votes going against him. And Donald Trump was a good 2 million votes short of a popular vote win in 2016, but he...
Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. It’s a shame it’s being canceled this year. But of course, it isn’t. Sure, the big family gatherings are being called off, but that’s not altogether the reason for the season. It’s better as a time to count our blessings, which might just be the most important thing we can do at this moment. Presently, we are a divided people, all the way down to our families. If we were to gather for that big family feast, we’d try our best not to talk about politics but we would anyway, and somebody wo...
As goes New Mexico, so goes the nation. You might even say we’re leading the way, on a number of fronts. We’re what the rest of the country is slowly becoming — multicultural to the point at which white folks are no longer running everything. Maybe that makes us a bit of a cultural leader, and perhaps it was reflected in this year’s election. Here in the Land of Enchantment, 68.48% of registered voters statewide actually voted. That may be unimpressive in some fresh young democracy where people don’t take their right to...
Let’s catch up on New Mexico’s space exploration. Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic is getting close to its first bona fide commercial tour of space — probably early next year by the looks of it all. It’ll be launched from our own taxpayer-funded Spaceport America in southern New Mexico, on State Trust Land that’s adjacent to the White Sands Missile Range. Hopefully, the revenue generated inside Branson’s financial orbit will show a good return for New Mexico as well, since the spaceport itself has cost taxpayers som...
Some final notes as we pass this election through our systems. Two things I don’t quite get: Why are money and yard signs so important in an election? This year, the money has been rolling in. Biden has been out-raising Trump in amounts so great that I’ve heard the talking heads wonder how they can even spend it all. Meanwhile, having signed up for or landed on just about every candidate’s listserv, I think I’m safe in saying that no one puts out more email appeals for money than Donald Trump’s campaign. Our nation’s...
So here we are, entering another wave of COVID-19 infections. Dramatic increases are returning to most states, including New Mexico, where the number of daily infections has been setting records. It’s going to be a long winter. Hopefully, we’re better prepared for this latest wave of infections. Our president is still in denial so he’s of no use, but I’m cautiously optimistic that fewer people are actually listening to him now; surely our collective IQ is higher than that. As for the “herd immunity” idea being bantered ab...
Joe Biden says we’re in a “battle for the soul of our nation.” I think he’s right. Never in my lifetime have the differences been so stark and threatening. But what about New Mexico? Is this an epic election year or just another round of status quo electioneering? Personally, I’d say it’s the latter but for one issue in particular — climate change. Less than two years ago, the state House and Senate passed and Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham signed into law one of the most ambitious green-energy plans in the nation. It ca...
No need to worry about an October surprise this time around. It’s already happened. You guessed it, I’m talking about President Trump contracting COVID-19. It’s the barn-burner that changes everything. Or, nothing. There’s so much uncertainly to this moment in history that it’s hard to keep up, and even harder to predict where it’s all going. Consider last week: It started with the debate over Amy Coney Barrett, the president’s nominee to the Supreme Court. It’s an appointment of incredible importance because it will create...
For years, I had an editorial cartoon posted in my work area that showed a panhandler on a street corner with a sign that read, “Will work for health insurance.” Our healthcare system stifles American ingenuity. It’s the reason some would-be entrepreneurs never venture out on their own; they need to stay on somebody else’s payroll to keep their health insurance. Let’s say you’re a single man, maybe a little over 60 years old. On the open market, you’ll be lucky to find a decent health insurance policy for $700 a month. And...
This is a terrible year for deaths. We might just hit a quarter million American losses to COVID-19 by the end of the year and, somewhere, someone is mourning every one of those losses. My family has been fortunate not to have suffered a COVID-related death. Thousands of others haven’t been so lucky. I suppose the COVID-related death that hit closest to home for me personally was John Prine, who died in April. I felt a kinship to him and his music, with its mixture of humor, sentiment and cultural commentary, which is why I...
In case you haven’t noticed, we’re in a climate emergency. If you haven’t been impacted by extreme weather conditions yet, you will be. Stick your head into the sand if you want, but the evidence is overwhelming: • The West is burning like never before, choking on the smoke of wildfires raging from the states along the Pacific to as far east as Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico and Texas. Here in New Mexico, we’re battling blazes in the Gilas, in Lincoln National Forest and a little north of Santa Fe, all of which seems...
Last time, as a great escape from the troubles of our times, I started out writing a funny column about comedy, but it turned out to be about comics instead. This time, I'm just going to make you laugh. In googling around the internet in search of jokes (with a Rolling Stone magazine article from 2017 listing “The 50 best stand-up comics of all time” by Matthew Love as my cheat-sheet), I've gathered up several one-liners with no political or cultural agenda in mind, except to keep it cleaner than some adults might be use...
We need some comic relief. It’s hard to find humor in the year we’re in. Hardly anyone’s laughing, except inside their own little political and cultural echo chambers. I guess you have to turn to the Disney channel or Nickelodeon to find innocent and noncontroversial humor anymore. My early years started with “innocent” entertainment. Bill Cosby may be known as a lowdown sexual predator now, but as a young comedian he was clean and hilarious, with albums like, “To Russell, My Brother, Whom I Slept With” to keep us laughing....
When Joe Biden began to lay out, in his Democratic remote convention acceptance speech, the “four historic crises” America is now facing, my first thought was that “Donald Trump” would be one of the four. But he wasn’t. Instead, Biden named the pandemic, the economic crisis, our great national reckoning on racism, and climate change. Trump, I suppose, is just a side show. If you missed Biden’s speech, it was either fake or great, depending on your partisan preferences. I thought it was an excellent speech, substantive and wel...
If you haven’t filled out your census yet, please do it sooner rather than later. Same with voting this fall. I suggest you vote early or in-person, despite the pandemic. The deadline to fill out your census form, so you and your family can be counted and your community can benefit, has been moved up a month. There’s no acceptable justification for it, just another lowdown attempt by the Trump administration to give privileged white people the majority advantage for just a little longer, as America becomes a more col...
As you get older, you get more used to death. You become familiar with seeing your elders pass on. Death can be painful, especially, for the ones left behind. It’s a tragedy when a loved one’s life is cut short; and for parents, the loss of a child must be the worst. Thankfully, I haven’t gone through that, so I can only imagine how incredibly heart-wrenching it is. I’ve lost people who meant the world to me — friends, mentors and family members. I lost my parents, Charles and Lois McDonald, several years ago and still mis...
Past behavior predicts future behavior. We’re creatures of habit but we’re also capable of learning from our mistakes and improving our behavior. Right now, with this pandemic, we could go either way. We could learn from our missteps and do a better job containing COVID-19 through mask wearing, social distancing and other precautionary behaviors, or we could ignore what’s been working in other countries and continue to allow it to spread across the U.S. until a vaccine is developed and publicly distributed. Dr. Anthony Fauci...
Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham made it official: New Mexico’s public schools will not physically open until after Labor Day. That’s in line with what a lot of school districts, faced with COVID-19 outbreaks in the communities they serve, were already moving toward; the governor just made it an across-the-board directive. It’s easy to understand the school closures in communities where the virus is spreading; reopening schools in Bernalillo, Doña Ana, McKinney and Lea counties would only make matters worse for those “hotsp...
Change is in the air. So is resistance to change. And in the tug-o-war between these two opposing forces, I’m hanging my hopes on change. The idea that we will return to the normalcy in place before the COVID-19 pandemic and George Floyd’s death is foolish. They are tipping points, not anomalies, and now that we’re over the cliff there’s no turning back. Once we get control of the virus — and we will, eventually, though it’s looking like later rather than sooner — we should expect another pandemic to follow. And another, and...
Stop signs are an infringement on my freedom as an American. There are four of them between my house and my work, along a half-mile stretch of neighborhood streets through this little town of Santa Rosa. It’s almost always safe enough to coast right through those four-way stops; the risk is minimal. So I would consider it a serious injustice if I were ticketed for such behavior. After all, it’s my right as a free American. Right? If, however, you think I should be cited for such an infraction of the law, well then, you...
Independence Day is a time for celebrating the birth of these United States. Here in the state of New Mexico, we have the history, heritage and diversity to do it up right. At first, Native American tribes shared this harsh and enchanting landscape, but they were overpowered and “assimilated” into the Spanish and Mexican ways that ruled the region into the mid-1800s. Then came U.S. troops to conquer and exploit the land and its peoples, and New Mexico became an untamed territory in an expansionist nation. But “Am...
While hindsight is 2020, this year is moving so fast it’s a blur. It’s hard to keep up — and yet, if we focus on the bigger issues that have enveloped us, we can get a pretty good glimpse of what’s coming. So here I am, looking down the road: A look at national and world trends tells us COVID-19 is not going away anytime soon. In fact, here in the U.S. it will probably get worse before it gets better. Here in New Mexico, we topped 10,000 cases and 450 deaths just before Juneteenth, with the worst outbreaks in Navajo country...
