An Interesting Week

Good-bye to Chris Jans, an excellent college basketball coach. A small blip in his career led to a five-year diversion to NMSU, not a top-tier NCAA program. Jans succeeded. He also seemed a stand-up guy.

Teamwork and speed are essential to basketball. Players move fast, and need to sense where their teammates are and where they’ll move, making split-second decisions on the run. A coach today has to build that teamwork fast. Players aren’t here four years. Many start elsewhere or move on after a year. Each year, Jans had to meld into a team guys who had talent (and sometimes problems) but were new to each other. He did well.

Teddy Allen, a redshirt junior, got NMSU its first official NCAA Tournament win since about 1970. (Back when I was a young fella, friends with several players.) I hope Allen returns,  A deeply appreciative au revoir to Johnny McCants: a local kid with miles of heart, a great beard, and a month-old son. Taking over NMSU’s second NCAA game, with Allen double-teamed, McCants did everything: made his shots (including a thundering dunk and a key three-pointer), took about five charges, blocked a shot, passed and defended well, and kept NMSU close. You could see this committed young man will his underdog team nearly to victory.

Speaking of local kids, it was great to see Bill McCamley back for a short visit. A great guy who represented us ably in the Legislature, then got a raw deal from some folks when he tried running Workforce Solutions during a pandemic. (Like herding cats through an aviary?) We miss him.

Meanwhile, the white male Republicans attacking Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson are exposing their intellectual limitations. Lindsay Graham threw a tantrum because they didn’t pick his Black woman. Another embarrassed himself by asking (with feigned outrage) why she hadn’t written something in a decision, only to hear her point out, “if you read down two more sentences, Senator, that’s what I do say.” (“Wanna get away?”) They asked all about 1619 and Critical Race Theory, because, well, what else ya gonna ask a Black woman, after you’ve discussed fried chicken? North Carolina’s Thom Tillis hit a new low, saying (in attacking Roe v Wade) that whether to allow Whites and Blacks to marry each other should be left up to the states! Tillis knew the cases, but didn’t care. The disbelieving reporter kept offering him chances to climb out of the hole he was digging, but Tillis doggedly kept clutching the shovel. I’ve heard he’s now trying to deny he meant what he said.

Are these questions for an experienced federal judge who was a star at Harvard? Or racist ones? Sure, those guys are cynically playing the roles they think will maximize their political popularity; but they’re racist, too.

Thursday our Progressive Voters Alliance held its first in-person meeting since February 2020. I saw some wonderful folks, heard from state and local officeholders and younger folks running for office, and heard about worthy local causes.

Leaving, I stood in the Munson Building entryway, staring at the portrait of Bob Munson. Recalling Bob and Diana, with love. He looks so incredibly young! How very many years life has gone on since that plane crash, years Bob never got to experience! He’d have loved PVA.

That’s this moment. Can’t say it matters. But I’m sure grateful for it.

                                             - 30 -

  

[The above column appeared this morning, Sunday, 20 March, 2022, in the Las Cruces Sun-News, as well as on the newspaper's website and KRWG's website. A related radio commentary will air during the week on KRWG (90.7 FM) and KTAL-LP. (101.5 FM – http://www.lccommunityradio.org/), and will presently be available on demand on KRWG’s site. Algernon D’Ammassa also wrote this week about the Judiciary Committee’s embarrassing performanceabout the Judiciary Committee's embarrassing performance. One point I had to drop for space reasons is that both parties waste everyone’s time with speeches rather than questions, praising or maligning the nominee according to their own party membership.)

[One weird feeling I had at times all week was that, as Yossarian repeatedly screams in Catch-22, “I see everything twice.”

> I’d noticed a news article that Las Cruces has plans to procure grants and make something of its airport. One of my first El Paso Times stories in 1974 was about how the City planned to make something of its airport.

> Of course the Aggies NCAA appearance, and win, brought back memories. When I arrived in 1969, I got to know some of the players, and also filmed games. The Aggies reached the Final Four, losing to eventual champion UCLA, with Lew Alcindor, coached by John Wooden. Thereafter I worked intermittently with the Athletic Department. In 1974-1975, they went to the NCAA again. I went with them, ‘cause I was shooting a recruiting film for Lou Henson. First game was in Charlotte, North Carolina – against either University of North Carolina or North Carolina State. Never heard more noise. The lost by a bunch. Afterward, news surfaced that Lou was leaving for Illinois. It was kind of a shock – as the news this week of Chris Jans’s departure was not. I always knew we had him for just a few years. Then as now, the players (and I) pushed for the Assistant Coach [Rob Evans, then] to get hired to replace his boss. NMSU went in a different direction, then. Rob Evans did coach for a long time at Arizona State.

Anyway, at times I couldn’t shake the feeling that stuff from the past was repeating itself. Communing with Bob Munson’s photograph in the Munson Building Foyer fit.]

I turned in the column Friday. A few hours later, the garden was quiet, and I wrote a bit of a poem:

  THE MAYOR

One Thanksgiving he invited me,

the young reporter. His wife

was reluctant. I had

criticized him.

As I leave a meeting today,

his portrait catches my eye.

I pause in the entryway.

The automatic door keeps

opening and shutting, confused.

Bob looks so young!

I remember when I won something

he took me and my wife

to dinner, a magical night

with an old-lady artist. I remember we talked

as he fixed his sailboat in the back yard,

after my wife left me.

Were we ever so young

as he looks in that portrait?

After he lost, we talked

on my TV show, the whole hour,

one on one. Next morning,

one city official beckoned me, closed

his door, and said, “Thank you! Bob is

such a wonderful man, now

everyone’s seen it.” Next office

someone called to me, then said,

“Close the door, please.” He got up

and shook my hand. “Thank you

for nailing that sonofabitch.

Showing what a fraud he is.”

I remember the night

I ran into his daughter somewhere.

Their plane was overdue, Bob,

Diana, the pilot, and a scientist I knew.

The weather was bad, but Bob

wanted to get home

from Santa Fe.

Silently, I eye the portrait. The door

keeps complaining. I have not forgotten

I loved these people. Suddenly I feel

the weight of all those years –

45 by now – since then, years

Bob never got to see.

                                                                   © Peter Goodman

 

Watching the Flames Reminds Me of Dangerous Fires Closer to Home

Russia’s attempt to obliterate Ukraine, Ukrainian courage, and another “pardon” for the corrupt, right-wing populist Alberto Fujimori (Peru’s former president) trigger thoughts about our democracy.

Vladimir Putin is what happens when we allow one man or small group to amass such power. His information blackout is what happens when reporters aren’t free to report the truth. This war illustrates the difference between patriotism and nationalism.

But let’s not get too proud. Most everything Putin has done, we’ve done, helped allies do, or turned a blind eye to. The U.S. has a long history of bullying smaller nations and toppling democratic governments in favor of dictators who were friendly to us – as Putin does in Ukraine and Georgia.

The excellent How Democracies Die discussed Fujimori at length. Elected President, he abused the office to enrich himself and his pals, while usurping additional power. He’s still popular with some Peruvians, just as some here retain blind loyalty to Donald Trump, another “populist” who tried to remove checks and balances restricting his power.

In my youth, our racism and our imperial conduct (exemplified in the senseless Viet Nam War) appalled me. Although we had “democracy” and “a free press,” those were limited. Blacks effectively couldn’t vote in the South; many urban voters were still controlled by “machines”; and because everything was so vast, information was somewhat controlled by rich folks’ ownership of newspapers and TV networks. Our free press freely helped the government gull the American people about Viet Nam and other blots on our national character.

I experienced some persecution for our views. In the South, I feared the police, for good reason; at college in Pennsylvania, after citizens beat up participants in the town’s first antiwar “vigil,” the cops driving one victim to the police station stopped in an alley and warned him, “You’re the ones we ought to be getting. And we will;” here, an LCPD detective filmed our demonstrations, and law enforcement carefully watched political dissenters. Antiwar advocacy cost some folks jobs. The U.S. didn’t feel all that democratic. Yet there were grounds for hope, including our Constitution.

Our democracy was under fire during my father’s youth, during the Depression, Extremists left and right argued persuasively that our system had failed. Lindbergh, America’s hero, was a pal of the Nazis. The world was engulfed in wars. My father signed the Oxford Pledge, never to go to war. When we were attacked, he enlisted as a Marine pilot, fighting Japan.

Putin reminds me to cherish our democratic values and relatively free press. Some friends insist we’re no different from Russia. Our billionaires get fat even during a pandemic, and we too abuse our international power. But I see significant differences. I’m also sensitive to the threats our democracy faces, as well as to its many warts. That’s why I’m saddened by that blind loyalty to the racist and corrupt Mr. Trump; but it’s also why some well-intended restrictions on free speech concern me. And why it seems important to try to tell the truth to our kids about our beloved but imperfect nation.

To me, the way through seems to be to keep our eyes open, think for ourselves, and reject uncritical belief in anyone or anything, including our government. As my favorite bumpersticker says, “Don’t Trust Everything You Think.” True loyalty looks out for missteps and seeks to correct them, lovingly, as we would with friends and family.

                                               – 30 --

 

[The above column appeared this morning, Sunday, 20 March, 2022, in the Las Cruces Sun-News, as well as on the newspaper's web sit, sub nom "Imperfect Democracy Deserves our Care and Criticism" and KRWG's website. A related radio commentary will air during the week on KRWG (90.7 FM) and KTAL-LP. (101.5 FM – http://www.lccommunityradio.org/), and will presently be available on demand on KRWG’s site.]

[It’s interesting to note similarities between the above column and Algernon D'Ammassa's column on the same page the same day.]

[Most in the U.S. have likely forgotten Fujimori; and he’s just one of many fallen dictators who got rich with his boot on the necks of his people. (I’d forgotten that Fujimori also instituted forced sterilization of indigenous women. But have we treated ethnic minorities so much better, at times?) But I spent more than six months in Peru a few years ago, and loved the place. So Fujimori’s pardon, just as Putin is committing unpardonable war crimes, seemed relevant; and the spectre of some folks blindly loyal to him, saying he’d helped the economy, reminds me of blind loyalty to a corrupt populist former president here. (Fujimori had been pardoned in 2017, for “humanitarian” reasons, but after intervention by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the pardon was overruled as “political” by Peruvian courts. The president who had granted it had to resign, and is under house arrest pending trial on his own corruption charges.]

[The two comments on the Sun-News website so far this morning on my column both mention that I mention Donald Trump. Once he was defeated, I resolved not to mention him again. I’ve failed to keep that resolution, for sure! He’s a pathetic critter hungering for attention; but, as with Fujimori, his lack of conscience or a feel for democracy, and the blind loyalty some feel toward him, still endanger our democracy. So there’s a reason he come so often to mind. However, on balance, I do mention him too much, and will try to stop!]

 

The Lives of Others - if Texas Would Only Allow Folks to Live Them

Think about all the unnecessary pain human beings are causing each other.

Putin is wantonly killing civilians, destroying a promising democracy, and enforcing laws that make love a crime if your feelings differ from the official norm.

Florida and Texas are not only finding clever ways to undermine democracy, but persecuting those who differ.

Growing up is hard. Harder when you don’t fit in. It must be especially hard when your deepest feelings don’t match those of the other kids, or your skin color seems to be a problem. Discussing, acknowledging, growing to understand who you are, that must be like heaven. Must help you feel you’re as good as anyone.

I’m saddened by the huge overreaction to schools’ efforts to face up to the persistently racist aspect of our history and national character. (Persons of color see daily that racism hasn’t disappeared.) I’m appalled by states’ efforts to control women’s lives, and criminalize those helping women who need to abort a pregnancy. If your body and heart/mind disagree on your gender, you might need counseling; and your medical treatment should be decided by you, your parents, and your doctor – not some political ideologue; but states want to outlaw such counseling and treatment, labeling it “child abuse.” But they permit “programming” you back to “normal.” (Putin would love our recent anti-gay measures!)

I’m sad to see people being punished for trying to be who they are, without hurting anyone. I’m also sad for the folks who live in such constant fear of anything different that they have to act like Putin or Paxton or Desantis. How must it feel to hold such fear of people with different sexual orientations, ethnicity, or opinions that you lash out against them? What’s the fear? Just the unknown? Or do folks fear that if we were truly free, they might sometimes love someone their conscience and upbringing says they shouldn’t?

Fear engenders strange behavior. Folks who identify as “freedom-loving” trample all over other folks’ most personal and essential freedoms. They rage against intrusive government while passing incredibly intrusive laws. Folks who can’t abide the slightest restriction on owning weapons of war are the most eager to extinguish others’ freedoms to be themselves. Requiring masks is Hitlerian, but your insides are state business.

A deeper contradiction is the apparent belief that Jesus would somehow approve of harassing some poor girl outside a health clinic, denying kids in need the counseling and empathy they deserve, pretending that our society isn’t rife with racism, or kicking gays out of restaurants.

Jesus was inclusive. He told us even Samaritans were okay. He said whatever we did to poor folks and strangers, we did to him. That’s not an invitation to quiver in fear and throw people in jail. It suggests we withhold that first stone if we ourselves have ever sinned, and be courageous in meeting people where they are, even fallen women. Maybe we should try to imagine how we’d feel if criminal law forbade loving whom we love. Just as Jesus would have been appalled by people invoking him to justify slavery, He’d be pulling out his hair over how folks in Texas and Florida are misusing his name and words.

He’d invite us to walk along with those “others,” see our common humanity, understand them. He’d say, again, to accept and love.

But it’ll snow in Las Cruces before his followers even hear him.

                          - 30 -

[The above column appeared this morning, Sunday, 13 March, 2022, in the Las Cruces Sun-News, as well as on the newspaper's website and KRWG's website. A related radio commentary will air during the week on KRWG (90.7 FM) and KTAL-LP. (101.5 FM – http://www.lccommunityradio.org/), and will presently be available on demand on KRWG’s site.]

[Texas’s law allowing private citizens to sure for $10,000 anyone who assists a Texas woman in getting an abortion, even in a neighboring state, is clever but vicious. The idea is that if Texas police aren’t actually enforcing the law, there’s no one to sue for a violation of her Constitutional rights. (Some conservatives opposed the law because they wondered if a more progressive state could do the same with the carrying of guns in public.) Even an uber driver can be sued by someone for the $10,000 reward.

Equally vile is the law urging that if a family tries to help a child whose gender identity isn’t what Texas says it should be, by counseling or medication, the family should be investigated for child abuse. Meanwhile in many states families who want to program their son’s or daughter’s gender identity out of existence can use means that amount to torture.

Two Texas Supreme Court decisions this week bear on these issues.

Friday, the Texas Supreme Court closed a narrow window for possible challenge to the law by holding that although state medical-licensing authorities normally had the power to discipline doctors or clinics who violated the law, since this law didn’t let them do that, they couldn’t be sued either.

I hope sanity will prevail once a Texas court awards some snitch $10,000 for “privately enforcing” the law. Texas courts are instrumentalities of the government, the Texas State Legislature passed it, and the Governor signed it. Legally, since at this point it flatly violates the U.S. Constitution, how is it different from a state law saying that citizens can sue a Jew or a Black person for walking in the wrong neighborhood? Or a law setting a $10,000 “reward” for proving someone had burned the flag, gone to a mosque instead of a church, or failed to get vaccinated against a communicable disease? Could Texas argue there too that since the law is privately enforced, there’s no Constitutional violation?

The other decision was more welcome, but hasn’t reached the Texas Supreme Court yet: a Travis County (Houston) judge halted enforcement of the law calling for investigations of families with transgender kids for possible child abuse for using medically-accepted forms of treatment. The decision enjoins such inquiries until after trial of the case (currently set for July), and is effective statewide. Such decisions include a finding that the law is probably (there’s a “substantial likelihood”) unconstitutional. The State immediately appealed. The Texas Supreme Court may or may not agree. (At this stage, it could not make a final decision on constitutionality, but could reverse her order and allow the investigations pending trial.)]

 

   

 

Rooting for Ukraine

Bees are essential to pollination for 90% of wild flowering plants, and much of our food. Bees are rapidly disappearing, because of human activity. One nation is so intent on maintaining ancient bee-keeping methods that 1.5% of its population is involved. It’s the largest country in Europe, and had a flourishing civilization when Moscow was a mud village.

Ukraine has a young democracy that its people are also desperate to maintain. While we poison our democracy with partisanship and conspiracy theories, Ukrainians have fought to wrest theirs from corrupt authoritarian pals of Vladimir Putin.

Russia is in a difficult and dangerous position: steadily sinking to a minor economic role in the world’s economy, with privation at home, while possessing powerful weaponry. Historically, most major wars have been started by a once-proud failing state.

For most, this war is a rude surprise. After centuries of terrible wars, Europe seemed settled. (Our world is now so interconnected that when Russian drivers with electric cars stop at a Ukrainian-made charging station these days, they get no juice, but an on-screen message urging Putin to perform an anatomically impossible obscene act, solo.)

Those earlier wars were long, bloody and costly. Russia and Ukraine suffered far more than we did in World War II. So Putin is telling Russians that Ukraine is a Fascist nation persecuting Russians. Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelensky’s paternal grandfather was the only survivor among four Jewish brothers fighting the Nazis.

We’re seeing a nation of heroes. I respected Zelensky telling the U.S. he didn’t need a ride, just weapons. “Why does it matter to us?” ask a few isolationists, saying they “care more about our southern border than about Ukraine.” Gee, so do I; but I can almost see the border, and there ain’t 90,000 Russian troops massed there.

Unlike many foreign situations we’ve manipulated for the profit of U.S. businesses, this distant crisis matters because peace and democracy, after growing for decades, are threatened by Mr. Putin and other authoritarians. (Even our country elected a fellow who thinks Putin’s just swell.) Ukraine keeps grabbing at that brass ring, freedom, and repeatedly pays the costs. If a larger neighbor can simply swallow it, the world as we know it is endangered. And, although leaders shouted, “domino theory” to the point of idiocy during the Cold War, Ukraine might not be all Putin wants of the old Russian Empire.

This won’t be pretty. How will it end?

Will the Ukrainians remain resolved, and persist in armed resistance if the Russians occupy their cities? I believe they will. But in cities of rubble, with most civilians dead or fled, how do you blend in to fight on?

Will NATO and the U.S. continue strong sanctions, despite inconveniences? I hope so. Russians accepted Putin because he seemed a shrewd, savvy guy returning Russia to prominence while avoiding war. Severe economic pain and frustration could make everyday Russians and Putin’s fellow oligarchs ask hard questions.

Can Putin’s propaganda keep citizens blindfolded? Soldiers call home and describe what they see. Russian control of the Internet is less complete than China’s, but Putin’s pressuring big tech to help him lie. A few brave Russian news outlets have spoken truth; but this week Putin shuttered TV Rain and Echo of Moscow.

If all of us are resolute, oligarchs and popular discontent could oust Putin. Here’s hoping Ukrainians won’t already have disappeared, with the bees they strive to save.

                                                        – 30 --

 

[The above column appeared this morning, Sunday, 6 March, 2022, in the Las Cruces Sun-News, as well as on the newspaper's website and KRWG's website. A related radio commentary will air during the week on KRWG (90.7 FM) and KTAL-LP. (101.5 FM – http://www.lccommunityradio.org/), and will presently be available on demand on KRWG’s site.]

[I started this column a week early, before the invasion. The draft from the day before I turned it in was more positive: Ukrainians holding out; sanctions working; and some combination of Russian body bags, shocked soldiers calling families, and internet posts perhaps cluing in clue Russians. (The disappearance of TV Rain, Echo of Moscow, and Novaya Gazeta should tell folks something.) But the next morning the news seemed all worse. More of Ukraine in rubble, Russian progress, and the muzzling of the last vestiges of Russian press, plus stronger pressure on Facebook, Google, and the rest. But as soon as I sent it in, news seemed sunnier: Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman said the sanctions were working; Russia’s second biggest gas company, Russian chess grandmasters, and others spoke out, breaking with Putin. Meanwhile, retired Lt. Col. Alexander Vindeman called the invasion the beginning of the end for Putin. And the U.S. population seemed to realize that the Biden Administration had done a masterful job of building consensus with allies. (Positive views of Biden jumped 8 per cent after the State of the Union, an unusually large change.)]

[So I’m no expert. And can offer no very well-founded predictions. And I can’t stop reading the latest news, but that news twists me around like a flag in the wind.]

[I do find that I care, greatly. I’m rooting for the Ukrainians the way I rooted for the Dodgers and Jackie Robinson at 9. Like Lindsay Graham, I keep hoping some set of oligarchs will take Putin out, now that he’s kind of a liability. I can say that. Senator Graham shouldn’t. But he’s right.]

[Rarely, I think, has such a war been so clearly the madness of one man. Even Hitler had a lot of Germans behind him, feeling he would make Germany great again. Putin has few supporters. Not only are those who can distancing themselves from him, Russia’s silent majority would prefer peace and stability, and is only silent from fear and because they’re told Putin’s saving Russians in Ukrainia from a fascist regime. “What a hypocrite! He says he’s coming to save us but he’s slaughtering us,” said one Russian-speaking Ukrainian. Hell, Zelensky grew up speaking Russian. But maybe Jews don’t count.]

[I’m glad most Republicans are not taking the isolationist view on this. I’m sure glad Trump isn’t in office. I can’t help contrasting Zelensky’s character and courage with the superficial egotism of Trump, who saw Zelensky and the Ukraine as simply a possible tool to smear Joe Biden with. Both Trump and Putin have now tried to intimidate the comedian, and found him stronger than expected. I wonder if much of that comes through to good U.S. citizens who believed Trump.]

[A recent Foreign Affairs article, also citing Russia’s mistaken assumptions and tactical blunders, notes quotes Roman historian Tacitus, “They made a desert and called it peace.” So may the Russians, if they destroy much of Ukraine but still can’t govern it.]