A Visit to the Bosque - October 2012

In January, we visited the Bosque del Apache.  There were still plenty of sand-hill cranes and snow geese, and a surprising number of eagles, and a coyote pacing around at sunset, frustrated by the birds' habit of bedding down out in the middle of a pond, beyond his easy reach.  

At dawn, with the full moon falling toward the horizon, we watched the birds awaken.   At first they slumbered.  Then the snow geese made an incredible racket, while the sand-hill cranes miraculously appeared to sleep on.  Eventually, as the moon disappeared, the snow geese swept into the sky, in a great cacophany of flapping wings and screeches, covering the sky almost completely.   Enthralled, I shot the whole thing on videotape.  I was hooked.  (The January post has the video, unedited -- fast-forward to about the two-minute mark and watch the last 50 seconds for the fly-off.)

I resolved immediately to be there every full moon from September 2012 to January 2013.  We skipped September because bad weather up in the Bosque would have made videotaping pointless -- and moonless; but we made it in October; and although mostly I was shooting video, this post contains stills from 28-30 October, mixed in with a travel tip or two.


Autumn lent the scene a special richness.



 

Full Moon Rising - 28 October



Morning - 29 October


Four consecutive exposures of these guys taking off.

When we returned in the afternoon,
this fellow was watching the snow geese



Moonrise - 29 October

Cranes Flying - Morning of 30 October

Flying Cranes Reflected

Road Trip to Marfa

We finally got to Marfa not long ago.

Our friend Noam (whom I've known since his birth in Las Cruces in 1975, but who now lives in London) is there as a sort of "artist in residence" at a gallery run by some European foundation. 

We were there only about 18 hours, and most of the time when we weren't asleep we were walking and talking with Noam, shooting pool and talking with Noam, dining in a fancy restaurant and talking with Noam, or sitting around at the gallery space where we all slept. 

Nevertheless, I did shoot pictures, mostly while walking and talking, or at least walking and listening.
Marfa has a population of about 2100, and is very far from anywhere, unless you count Valentine, which has about a third of that population, or Alpine (the home of a team that plays against the Las Cruces Vaqueros in an independent minor league no one outside West Texas or southern New Mexico has heard of), or Fort Davis to the north on state highway 17 -- or Big Bend, which we'll visit next month, I hope.

Yet it has some galleries and restaurants you'd be more likely to find in San Francisco or London than in a wide spot on Texas State Highway 90.  My sister and brother-in-law have even read of Marfa in the New York Times.

Anyway, I carried my camera.

. . .

The last picture show flickered off here a long time ago . . .



. . . and this modern art is on the fender of a pickup truck
that left Detroit early in my childhood



On closer examination Marfa might be a strange place, with its mixture of artsiness and small-town Texas.  Noam lives in London, and the folks who run the gallery he's at are European; but when we walked passed the football field he noted that he'd attended a Friday night football game that could have come straight from the television series.

We didn't see much of the arty side, but thoroughly enjoyed the two bars in which we shot pool.  One even had shuffleboard.

We did hear the train come through at about two or three in the morning.

Saturday after breakfast we hit the road again, returning by a less direct route to take a look at the countryside north of Marfa.

Barely beyond the city limits we paused to photograph a distant windmill -- and noticed, as you can see in the closer shot below, the Border Patrol blimp that sits above a section of Highway 90 watching the border.  We'd passed under it the

previous day.  It must be an odd day's work, hanging around up there looking through binoculars, or whatever they do!

On the other side of the road, up a slight grade, a horse grazed on the horizon.   Later it seemed more elemental as a pseudo-painting than as a photograph, though. 

This was just hanging on the fence as we neared Fort Davis

She was a rancher's wife (and professor of mathematics) who
paused to chat with us when we stopped by the skeleton



Fort Davis turned out to be a strangely evocative little place, at least in the strong winter sunlight that day.  Trees.  Craggy cliffs overlooking part of the town.  More than a few old places, some of them in disrepair and some nicely done up for the tourists, with several looking as if they had interesting stories to tell.

Surrounding the courthouse, the constable, the court reporter, and other functionaries all had their parking spaces clearly marked.

The street then came to a dead-end at a cliff, and in that setting and that light the church looked so inviting I might have gone in and prayed awhile if it had been Sunday.

Then we made our way through town and out the other side, where Fort Davis itself -- the national historical site -- boasted a set of huge cottonwoods so old that they were roped off and a sign warned folks that branches or trees could fall at any time.

Fort Davis is in Jeff Davis County, in the Davis Mountains, but the pretty countryside more than made up for the local lack of imagination about place-names.

New Mexico Should Legalize Marijuana Now

During my first year of college I knew slightly a kid named Bennett Hertzler. A gentle, harmless sort of guy. In a police search of dormitory rooms, he was caught with three or four marijuana seeds in a desk drawer – and sentenced to years in jail. While the rest of us continued our college educations, Ben languished in prison. It destroyed his life.

Could have been me. I smoked marijuana when I was young. Liked it fine. Then one evening, as I smoked, I became convinced that I was dying. In fact, I was fine physically, but I was sure I was dying, for about a half an hour. Thereafter, whenever I smoked the same thing happened. The pleasant high just wasn’t worth the miserable fear I had to go through first, and I was busy with professional tasks and obligations anyway, so I stopped. But I have friends who continued smoking for decades without any apparent problem, and still do so. Some are grandparents. 

Should marijuana be illegal?

Marijuana is relatively harmless. It doesn’t make people violent or, so far as I can discover, cause them serious medical problems.

Studies show that driving a car while high on marijuana is far less dangerous than driving while high on alcohol. Alcohol abuse over decades leads to serious illness and even death.

It is said that marijuana use by kids leads to use of stronger and more dangerous drugs. That can be true, primarily because the society that prohibits marijuana (a) tosses kids who want to smoke into the company of people who also sell other illegal drugs and (b) does so with propaganda that undermines our credibility when we tell kids about the very real dangers of more powerful drugs. It’s like telling kids that masturbation causes blindness, then expecting to be believed when we explain later why it’s important to avoid unprotected casual sex.

The Alcohol Prohibition didn’t work. While perhaps a noble experiment, it made drinking alcohol more fun, killed or injured people who drank bad booze, decreased respect for laws, increased corruption, enriched criminals, and generally caused new problems while failing miserably to solve the original one.

The Marijuana Prohibition doesn’t work. It leads to broken lives like Ben Hertzler’s, decreases respect for law, costs society an amazing amount for enforcement, trials, and prison space, enriches criminals, and prevents people from smoking marijuana that’s either homegrown or grown by someone licensed and inspected. It also keeps people who live in pain from easy access to marijuana’s ability to lessen that pain.

This is what we said decades ago and were thought crazy.

More recently, these thoughts have become more acceptable. A blue-ribbon panel of former public officials from all parties reached the same conclusion about the War on Drugs. Fifteen states have decriminalized marijuana. Three states voted this year to legalize it.

Here’s the choice: spend vast sums of money in bad economic times to arrest, try, and imprison people for something they do in their own homes, or legalize marijuana – and perhaps regulate it and tax sales.

Why do we choose one way regarding alcohol and differently for marijuana? Why do we do so even though alcohol causes greater driving impairment, a deeper addiction, and harsher medical issues than marijuana?

Initially, prejudice was part of the reason: our parents and grandparents had drunk alcohol, but marijuana was associated with blacks and later with the 1960's "counterculture."

The inequity persists because people with money like it that way: alcohol is big business; and selling marijuana illegally is far more profitable than selling it legally. Ending the marijuana prohibition would be devastating to cartels, which could no longer charge a "danger premium" to customers for something folks could grow it in their own homes.

Thus it’s heartening to see that a bill to lower penalties in New Mexico will be introduced soon.

It’s disheartening that if it passes Governor Martinez might veto it. That would be one more reflexively bad choice by our governor, who’s rapidly increasing her chance of serving only one term.

Martinez’s "defense" of her position sounds like an admission of misconduct.

Her press secretary says stiff marijuana penalties are good because "the vast majority of people convicted for possessing small amounts of marijuana are diverted to treatment programs, and those who are sentenced to prison are individuals with long criminal records with convictions for things like assault, burglary, and other crimes."

That is, these laws are great tools to put away folks with bad records against whom we can’t prove anything serious right now. For folks we approve of, it’s like driver education classes for speeders. Folks we don’t like could go to jail for several years.

That’s like criminalizing coffee and tea so that when you suspect someone of a crime but can’t prove it, or just don’t like someone, you can punish people you suspect of real crimes but can’t catch.

There was a time when students who questioned the wisdom of the war in Viet Nam or associated with folks of different "races" were thought dangerous and unpatriotic, but they had free speech rights. Small-minded district attorneys could do little. Conveniently, though, a lot of those rebellious young folks smoked marijuana, and could be imprisoned for that when the real complaint was their thought and speech.

That ain’t justice.
                                       -30-
[The column above appeared in the Las Cruces Sun-News this morning, Sunday, December 9th, under a headline chosen by the newspaper.

Of course, there's more to say:

First of all, some more specifics on the proposed bill, as reported very recently in the Sun-News and elsewhere:
-- an interim committee heard details of the proposal last Thursday;
-- a major supporter is New Mexico Drug Policy Alliance (Director Emily Kaltenbach);
-- the bill would eliminate the penalty of up to one ounce, and reduce possession of 2-8 ounces from a misdemeanor to a fine.
-- as yet, no state legislator has stepped up to sponsor the bill, although a few have spoken positively about it.  Those included Vietnam veteran State Rp. Eliseo Alcon (D-Milan), who said that "part of our world is opposed to anything that might make someone happy", and State Sen. Richard Martinez (D-Espanola).
Fiftenen states have decriminalized possession of small amounts of marijuana.


Secondly:

While no cogent argument against legalizing marijuana use by adults outweighs the clear benefits of doing so, marijuana use by minors raises significant issues.  Marijuana and certain other drugs can produce scary moments (as my own experience, related above, would suggest); rather obviously, marijuana can lead to temporary confusion, fear, or paranoia, or can undermine judgment; and marijuana use can also be so delightful that it's hard to resist toking up more often than one should, and kids are particularly ill-equipped to interpose judgment and restraint.   Obivously kids don't have the context and maturity to handle many emotional situations that adults should have. 

The state has a legitimate interest in keeping grass out of the schools. 

But how best to do so is a legitimate question.  Certainly the current efforts are a miserable failure, in that grass is readily available to kids and smoked by many in schools. 

I'm no expert, but my guess is that if legalizing marijuana made much difference it might actually improve the state's ability to discourage marijuana use among kids.

First of all, once kids no longer believe in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, I think we do better with them by explaining honestly the dangers of certain conduct.  Lies and gross exaggerations may work in the short term with some kids; but in the long run even those kids will see through you -- and, being kids, conclude that you're probably being equally fatuous in many of your other warnings and proscriptions. 

Secondly, to the extent that legalizing grass would lead to regulated growing and selling of the stuff, those businessfolk who grew and sell might be as vulnerable as bartenders and liquor store owners to stiff penalties for selling to minors.  A store-owner selling marijuana has an investment s/he would prefer to protect, and fines and suspensions might, as with alcohol sales, have at least some positive results. 

Third, to the extent that other and much more dangerous drugs are our real concern, separating sales of those from sales of marijuana might slightly decrease their use among kids. ]

Larry Hagman - A Las Cruces Appreciation

Larry Hagman, who died Friday, arrived in Las Cruces in 1970 to make a Hollywood movie.

When he showed up on the set and spotted the red sports car that would be used a lot in the film, he immediately suggested we go for a ride around the county in it. A lowly assistant to the director, I worried that we didn’t have permission. But he was one of the film’s stars.

We had a great ride. And toward the end, when he learned that it was my girl friend’s birthday, he gave me a joint for later. Recreational use of marijuana was a bigger illegality then than now, so I appreciated the gesture.

The film, spawned by an uneasy marriage between sexploitation studio and a serious and talented director named Ted Flicker, the movie made little money and was soon forgotten.

At the time, though, it featured two of the era’s biggest TV stars, each playing a character best-known for viciousness, greed, and dishonesty: Hagman, then known for "I Dream of Jeannie" but soon to be mega-famous as J.R. Ewing on "Dallas," played the conservative president of a southwestern university, and Joan Collins, later star of "Dynasty," played his wife.

(In the film, young man angry at Hagman because of a lost scholarship gets back at him by seducing his daughter, wife, and mistress. Initially called "High in the Cellar," the film’s name got changed by the studio first to "Up in the Cellar," to avoid such a brash reference to drugs, and later to "Three in the Cellar," to take advantage of the greater success of an earlier but utterly forgettable film by the studio, "Three in the Attic.")

The Hollywood cast and crew kept Las Cruces amused for a month or so; And I got to know and enjoy Larry Hagman and his wife Mai.

Larry was truly funny; and although he often played somewhat nasty right-wing figures, he was about as liberal, tolerant, and generally relaxed as anyone could be. The first time I saw him, he was telling a story about someone accusing him of being gay, and the punch-line was him telling the would-be gay-basher, "Well, if you are and you think I am, then come and give me a big kiss. Otherwise, it’s none of your business."

I’ve seen a few other stars on location. Many have their own trailer, and hide there from everyone else except when needed on the set. Larry and Mai had a trailer – or, more precisely, a Volkswagen bus or Dodge van with a great sound system – but he was always out throwing frisbees with NMSU students.

The van sticks in my mind because of the many evenings on which we rolled out to La Posta in it, smoking Larry’s good dope. The food there never tasted so good. Too, in those days there was still a pretty strong distaste among most folks for dope-smoking young rebels; and as one of those, I enjoyed the irony of sitting around a big table in the restaurant, stoned out of my mind, while various conventional citizens came up and introduced themselves to the famous actor, who managed to act suitably un-stoned.

[Disclaimer: I’m not suggesting anyone smoke marijuana, particularly anyone young, although certainly the stuff should be legalized before Prohibition helps bankrupt us and further enriches the drug cartels. Forget working for the Chinese, we’ll be working for the drug cartels in a decade or two.]

Larry was a talented actor and a wonderfully candid and funny man. I not only enjoyed our talks, but I appreciated his "un-Hollywood" nature. Mai, who was a wonderful woman, was as non-Hollywood-Glamour as anyone could be. If Larry had a big ego, I never saw it. He was just a regular guy.

Ironically, while he was as unlike his character as could be, Joan Collins – from my more limited contact with her – seemed every bit as bitchy as her on-screen character. I remember driving her to the El Paso Airport, in a Winnebagos we had rented for the shoot, listening to a steady stream of complaints about the director (whom I liked and respected), the conditions, and other members of the cast.

But Hagman was a delight, to everyone he met or worked with here.

                                                       -30-
[The foregoing appeared in the Las Cruces Sun-News today, Sunday, 2 December. ]

What I probably didn't manage to say clearly enough was that Larry Hagman, aside from being the consummate professional, was just a wonderfully warm, fun, imaginative, caring, curious, creative, and tolerant human being.   That made it ironic that he so often played complete S.O.B's such as J.R. Ewing (and President Camber in the film made here).

Thanksgiving Thanks

Thanksgiving Week reminds me to be thankful for people in our community quietly doing good things.

Three I’ve run into recently are "Rags to Britches," Crossroads Border Project, and Jardin de los Niños.

Mountain View Co-Op not only sells healthy food but a small collection of colorful clothes for women and kids. Women in Juarez make them.

The business is called "Inspired Imports", and includes furniture, flags, and other items. The clothing line, "Rags to Britches," features mostly "hippie/patchwork designs - comfortable and fun," according to Rosario Escobedo at Mountain View.

Her mother, Siba, volunteers with the Proyecto Santo Niño, a clinic run by the Sisters of Charity for special needs children in Anapra, Mexico.

Siba, who lives in La Union, "got very acquainted with the families and their needs" and wanted to help. When Rosario wanted some clothing, and had a design in mind, her mother said she knew several seamstresses. The seamstresses made Rosario various items, those items garnered compliments from friends and acquaintances, and soon there were special orders. After less than half a year, those add up to enough to support several families in a more benign and child-care-friendly way than working twelve-hour days in a factory.

They can make "anything you can envision," Rosario says. Prices are quite moderate. The clothes are quite colorful. There’s also hand-crafted furniture, entirely from recycled wood. Another woman makes paper-mache altars for the holidays.

You can contact them at inspiredimports@yahoo.com. Clothes are sold at Mountain View and various outdoor events. The ladies hope other local businesses will soon step up and carry some of the items.

"Juarez is a bleeding city," Rosario notes. "A war zone, right in our backyard. This is a way to help. These are incredibly resourceful women, extremely industrious, just trying to get a leg up."

So thanks to Siba and Rosario for making it happen, to Mountain View for providing rack space, and to any of you who drop by and buy.

We also visited Ryan Bemis’s acupuncture clinic at Greenworks. One thing we liked immediately was the sliding scale for payments: treatments cost between $16 and $41 per hour, depending on what you feel you can afford. Talking to Ryan we learned of an interesting project.

A U.S. organization that has trained volunteers to provide something like acupuncture in war zones has started a program in Ciudad Juarez. Widespread violence there has traumatized survivors, many of whom can’t sleep and suffer panic attacks. Twenty Catholic parishes in Juarez now run servicios comunitarios, open to everyone, where volunteers administer an ear therapy technique known in New Mexico as acudetox. (It’s not full-body acupuncture.)

Ryan says the model has been used "in refugee camps on the Thai-Burma border, Uganda for Kenyan refugees, and the Gaza Strip, as well as after natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina." He’s helped train the volunteers who provide the therapy in Juarez.

Juarez lawyer and human rights activist Maria Elizabeth Flores says the results have been good. "People say they feel better and sleep better."

To raise funds, the group also sells hand-crafted piñatas made by Juarez artisans. They’re available at Ryan’s clinic at Greenworks.

Further information on the project is available at www.crossroadsacupuncture.com/borderproject

.
Finally, we visited Jardin de los Niños to drop off an electronic image we’d donated as a Christmas card. Jardin provides nurture and care for kids who are homeless or nearly so, and is conveniently located adjacent to City of Hope and other facilities.

We were impressed with what they’re trying to do there – and with the idea of a single "campus" where those truly in need can address a lot of their food, shelter, child-care, and spiritual needs. Whatever you may think of homeless folks – and I get it that many feel "it’s their own fault," etc. – their kids deserve love and a little exposure to sources of hope and education.

The one sad thing I noticed was a lonely piano standing there, with no one to teach the kids a few notes. The piano appeals to them. They bang on it now and then, but right now there’s no one to teach them anything. (Made me regret again that I lacked the patience to keep taking lessons a thousand years ago.) So if you have the skills and a little place in your heart for homeless kids, please call Jardin de los Niños.

Their web-site is www.jardinlc.org
. You can make a donation or ask questions there– or order cards, by clicking on "Holiday Cards." There are several fine images to choose from.
The image we contributed, by the way, is a combination of two photographs taken on a snowy day last winter. We spotted a Santa, all dressed up in the customary red, riding an extra-tall red bicycle past the old Las Cruces city hall, and shot his picture. Then I tossed in a shot of the Organs from an hour or so earlier. It’s cheerful and seasonal. (And I don’t get any of the money from sales.)

Anyway, my version of "Black Friday" will be to buy one of the piñatas, get the ladies to make me a colorful shirt and some gifts, and buy some holiday cards with a bicycling Santa on ‘em.
                                            -30-
[The column above appeared in the Las Cruces Sun-News this morning, Sunday, November 25th.]

With regard to the Bicycling Santa photograph: an earlier post (on Christmas Day 2011) describes the circumstances.  (There's also a shot of Mrs. Claus in that post.)  I'd forgotten that I'd taken it December 24th.  I was happy to donate it to Jardin de los Niños.  I'd personally have chosen this version,

because it approximates a crayon drawing of Santa, and crayons are a kid-thing; but maybe the photograph has more impact.  If the image is a tree or a car, a kid's crayon drawing of it might have more impact under some circumstances; but with stuff we don't usually see close enough to photograph, like a unicorn or Mr. Claus, the photograph might be a better choice.  Anyway, Jardin has several fine images available from a variety of local artists.


What I liked about the "Rags to Britches" was that it's simple, direct, and sensible.  You can see some of their stuff at the Co-Op, or e-mail inspiredimports@yahoo.com

Further information on Crossroads Acupuncture is readily available on-line. 

some thoughts from tuesday morning

I drafted this column before the polls closed, not knowing how things would play out Tuesday; but naturally I can’t resist updating it to acknowledge the results.

What I saw most clearly, thinking Tuesday morning about the future, was that whichever party won the Presidency shouldn’t get comfortable. The U.S. still faces some very real problems, some of which may not have widely acceptable solutions.

Our economy has not fully recovered, the deficit remains dangerously high, and we’re rapidly approaching a deficit-related "cliff." Longer-term problems include: past inattention to education and infrastructure; the aging of our population combined with rising health-care costs; climate change; energy costs and dependence on foreign oil; and the fact that we spend vast sums to protect military bases and interests around the globe.

If Republicans won, they’d lose in 2016.

The party has moved too far to the right to stay relevant in the 21^st Century. That point was clear before the election; but Election Night illustrated it neatly, as networks intercut between the largely young and ethnically varied supporters waiting for Obama and the older, mostly white group supporting Romney.

A Romney victory would have given us several more far-right U.S. Supreme Court justices. With their help, President Romney could have delighted the Tea Party and angered many women by making abortions illegal, and could pursue the fight against gay marriage, which is laughable to the young and loses support among older folks every year. Election Night illustrated this too: in two states, voters for the first time voted their approval of gay marriage, while two other states voted to legalize recreational marijuana.

Romney’s economic promises were wholly inconsistent with each other. Four years would have revealed that unmistakably to the voters who believed in 2012 that maybe he could work magic; and after four years President Romney could no longer blame Obama for not getting us out of the Bush recession fast enough.

Meanwhile, just as Hurricane Sandy pushed climate change back into the electoral conversation, other extreme weather events are likely to make Republican denials sound even hollower.

Republican extremists, emboldened by success, would have pushed Romney to extremes unpalatable to the rest of us – forgetting that Romney narrowed the 2012 race only by denying at the last minute everything he’d said for two years. No etch-a-sketch would have been big enough to wipe four full years from the collective memory.

But the Democrats also have reason to worry about 2016.

Four short years after Bush left office, as we’re still struggling to dig our way out of the mess, the Republicans nearly won. They nearly won with a candidate whom even Republicans couldn’t make themselves like, advocating the policies that helped create our financial problems. Fair or unfair, by 2016 Democrats will own those problems in the public mind.

This was also the first presidential election since Citizens United. Nationally and locally, PACs used abundant, untraceable funds to say increasingly outrageous things without fear of liability. The 2016 elections may become even more determined by money and Madison Avenue’s creativity.

Republicans, controlling many state governments, will continue their carefully planned effort to restrict voting among the folks most likely to vote Democratic. Fewer early-voting opportunities, more photo-I.D. requirements, and other "minor reforms" will subtract from the Democratic vote totals in 2016.

On the national level, Tea Party Republicans (and party leaders who fear them) greeted Obama’s initial election by deciding that destroying him was more important than doing the best they could for the country. Will they greet his re-election as a warning to work with him toward solving problems? One hopes so; and one hopes that if they continue their obstreperous course their constituents will see them for what they are; but it’s more likely that Republican House members will automatically call the sky red if Obama says it’s blue, and then try to blame him for not getting a consensus on the sky’s color.

Republicans will again play "chicken" with the nation’s economy the way teenagers do with cars. They’ll gamble that Obama will drive off the road to avoid disaster – or that if he doesn’t the public won’t be able to see whose fault the disaster is.

Civility and compromise are at a pretty low ebb in the political world. That’s partly because of the Republican flight to the right, but also because we live in a time when every political sneeze is analyzed ad nauseum in cyberspace, and on talk radio and TV, before anyone can say "God Bless You." Gridlock will leave voters even more disgusted with both parties in 2016 than it did this year.

I didn’t have to know who won Tuesday to know that politicians in both parties need to relearn some manners, and be more flexible and creative in seeking practical solutions to very serious problems.

Part of that change needs to start with each of us. As I wrote Tuesday morning: "Wrongheaded as some of us will think he is, the next President is neither a traitor nor a devil. At some level he believes his policies are good for the country, although his view of the country may differ sharply from ours. We owe him frank but fair criticism and more respect publically than some of us will think he deserves."

"Could you do that?" someone asked. Had Romney won, I’d have tried.

                                         -30-
[The foregoing column appeared this morning, Sunday, 11 November, in the Las Cruces Sun-News, under heading "Either Side Would Have a Tough Four Years Ahead."]

Beyond the barebone facts -- that Obama won more comfortably than expected, despite the bad economy, and that Democrats picked up a few seats in House and Senate -- there are some grounds for hope.
One of those is the resistance voters showed to the heavy-handed tactics and generous financing of the "super PACs."   For example, casino billionnaire Sheldon Adelson, the largest single political donor in history, invested heavily in backing eight candidates, including Mitt Romney.  He gave tens of millions of dollars to super PACs supporting them.  None of the eight won.   All Karl Rove could say to the fat cats who invested $300 million in his two pro-Romney super PACs was that "Without us the race wouldn't have been this close."
In fact, Rove was beside himself.    He'd talked a lot of rich folks into parting with a lot of cash, making big talk about turning his Crossroads PACs into a "permanent presence in U.S. politics," working alongside the Republican Party.  His American Crossroads super PAC spent at least $1 million in each of ten Senate races, and saw its candidates lose in nine of the ten; or, as someone else calculated, when you counted its support for Romney and various others, just one per cent of the money the PAC spent accomplished its desired result.  No wonder Rove screamed at his Fox pals not to call Ohio for Obama!  Wednesday another conservative activist called Rove's PACs "ineffective" and  wrote that "in any logical universe he would never be hired to run or consult on a national campaign again."
In New Mexico, the super PAC run by a Martinez lieutenant and funded largely by Oil & Gas backed quite a few candidates, but in many instances voters seemed able to see through the misleading fliers and ads.  Martinez actively sought to retire several long-time Democratic legislators, and actually got rid of only one, despite heavy spending by the super PAC.
Unfortunately, we haven't seen the end of the super PACs.  With all that money, the Republicans will be able to buy a few brains capable of identifying better and more persuasive ways to spend.  (I won't offer any specifics!)  I'd like to think that folks will still shake off that shit like the proverbial water off a duck's back. 


One slight correction, or amplification, too:
I wrote that two states voted to legalize same-sex marriage.  A third, initially too close to call, also turned out to have done so; and Tammy Baldwin became the first openly gay person elected to the U.S. Senate.
During the campaign, her sexual preference apparently was the non-issue it should have been.

The other night at a political meeting, a white-haired gentleman got up to speak about the election; and after praising a progressive candidate who'd lost, he added that it was also wonderful that three states had approved gay marriage, Minnesota had rejected a DOMA, etc., and at that point it was clear that he was tearing up with emotion.   When he sat down, his white-haired companion put his arm around him, affectionately, and complimented him on his brief talk.  It was moving.  There was a certain sweetness to them.
I thought of a friend I'd known here in the early 1970's.  We'd been in the initially small minority strongly questioning the wisdom of the war in Viet Nam.  At some point in the 1980's, visiting NMSU, I ran into him in Corbett Center and we talked awhile.  He told me then that he was gay, and had been gay back then, but had feared letting even his fellow progressives know about it.  He spoke a little bitterly about watching me sit on the lawn at a meeting with a girlfriend, maybe holding hands or whatever, when he knew very well that if he did that with his lover someone would have stomped them.  It was sad that he had thought even we would reject him -- and sadder that some might have.   I thought also of a retired English professor I met again recently, a fellow I'd vaguely understood was gay back in the early 1970's, and whose long-time companion was and is a professor from a more conservative department.  I've never had to hide for decades a major part of my life, and undoubtedly can't fully appreciate the pain it would cause if I couldn't reveal my love for Dael to even many of my closest friends -- and if just turning on the TV or reading a newspaper, or getting a drink at the water fountain at work, could at any moment provide some zinging reminder that much of society thought we were somehow disgusting.

By the way, I heard that as of Satuday morning the race between incumbent Terry McMillan and challenger Joanne Ferrary is a tie.  It'll be certified that way, I'm told, but subject to a mandatory recount anyway because it was so close.  Should be interesting. 

Finally, congratulations again to Evelyn Madrid Erhard for running hard and well against a highly-favored opponent.  She carried the County, and made the final tally a lot closer than I'd have guessed when she started the race.   I called her this morning, just to thank her again for trying and congratulate her on running so well, with no initial name-recognition and not much money against the darling of New Mexico's oil and gas industry.  A reader called her "Don Quixote" in this morning's "Sound-Off" column in the Sun-News.  She deserves our thanks.





  

Morning after Election

Jeez, it feels good to be home.

Of course I'm pleased by President Obama's victory.  I felt fairly strongly that he would win, but thought it would be closer.   I did not expect him to win almost all the "battleground" states, and to do so by margins that were almost comfortable. 

I'm also pleased that New Mexico, and particularly Doña Ana County, as expected, gave the national ticket and Martin Heinrich very comfortable margins.

Obama won for three reasons, not including his significant advantage in the "ground game."  I saw a little of that firsthand.  I happened to be at Democratic Headquarters, and past 5 p.m., with the polls closing at 7, people were still doggedly calling voters, urging them to vote, thanking them for voting, or trying to arrange a ride if one was needed.  Not many people; but they were volunteers, not a call center.  They were neighbors and committed advocates, not folks making an hourly wage.  You could hear it in their voices, too.

Obama won, despite a difficult economy, because:
1. People could just not bring themselves to like or trust Mitt Romney;
2. The Republican Party has moved too far to the Right for a changing United States; and
3. People apparently did recall, as the Republicans urged them to forget, which party had contributed mightily to the economy's downfall.

A recent Doonesbury mocked the fact that the Republicans, just four years after Wall Street played a huge role in our financial crash, nominated a Wall Street guy, and at least one analyst on TV emphasized this; but more crucial, though related, was the fact that folks just can't warm up to the guy for more visceral reasons.  All during the Republican Primary Season, when the Republicans played "Anybody But Romney," it was not merely because his record as a governor had been somewhat moderate, but also because people just couldn't warm up to the guy for visceral reasons.  That was related to, but distinguishable from, their distaste for Wall Street guys.  George Bush was a rich guy who never had to work with his hands to make a buck, but people liked him and wanted to believe him.  With Romney as the obvious eventual nominee, Republicans in 2012 went through an almost weekly enthusiasm for an embarrassingly unlikely cast of characters such as Cain, Gingrich, Perry, and Bachmann.   Romney appeared wooden.  His lack of familiarity with the average person's life made for some howlers when he tried to cozy up to working-class folks; and although his handlers had urged him to smile more, he lacked a solid instinct about when to apply that principle, and sometimes smiled like a monkey as he spoke of the suffering of an unemployed single mother with cancer or something.  He didn't have what George Bush, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton had.  With Reagan or Clinton, people felt better listening to him, even if he was uttering something idiotic; with Romney, people felt his brittleness and absence of commitment to anything other than trying to gain the office his revered father had failed to reach.

The Republican lurch to the Right and the changing nature of the country were well-covered in the election  night TV stuff.  It was wonderfully on display in Senate races such as Indiana's and Missouri's, which by all rights Republicans should have won: they chose a Tea Party buffoon in each state, tossing out a respected long-time Senator in Indiana, and each buffoon behaved like one but still figured he could win.  It was also on display in the vast differences in age and ethnicity between the crowds at each party's Presidential Headquarters: Obama's supporters were young, lively, and multi-ethnic; Romney's were almost universally white, mostly middle-aged, and probably included a hgiher percentage of males.  Meanwhile, Maine and Maryland became the first states ever to vote their approval of same-sex marriage, which is anathema to the Republican stalwarts and Romney, Minnesota rejected a constiutional amendment banning gay marriage, and Colorado and Washington legalized recreational marijuana use.    (Sadly, physician-assisted suicide appears to have been defeated in a fairly close election in Massachusetts.  Particularly since my parents' deaths I've had strong feelings that terminally ill folks ought to be able to end their suffering if they choose to do so, as my father did.)

Finally, exit polls confirmed that folks said by wide margins that Bush, not Obama, bore primary responsibility for our poor economy.  To me, the Republican arguments against Obama always sounded like a guy who'd run up $100,000 in credit-card debt while he and his wife had a combined annual income of $80,000, then, after she confiscated his credit cards and insisted on keeping the checkbook, screamed six months later that she hadn't gotten them out of debt.  The Bush Administration was incredibly irresponsible.  Disaster followed.  Obama has made some of the right moves.  That he has not made more of them is partially Republican opposition and partially his own appointment of some "financial experts" of the wrong stripe, and probably also partially a failure of political will.  However, for the most part he's tried reasonable steps and probably saved us from a worse economy than we currently have.  Romney offered nothing except more of the Bush-Cheney policies -- and a mythical "Plan" he couldn't quite define.

Waiting for Romney to concede was tedious but interesting.  It became increasingly obvious not only that he was clinging to unrealistic hopes but that he and his folks had really drunk their own Kool-Aid and believed that his momentum and the poor economy were carrying him to victory.  That happens in campaigns (or in trials, theatre productions, feature film-making, and sports): you're so surrounded by your co-workers / well-wishers / supporters and your "kind of people" that the messages from outside that circle pale by comparison with the palpable enthusiasm your people are bestowing on you.  That Romney didn't understand he was still an underdog these past weeks may also have symbolized his major problem: that the America he sees is an extemely limited one, restricted by his privileged life and narrow world-view.

I'm pleased, but concerned: election night euphoria fades quickly, and the financial cliff hasn't moved.  We're still rushing toward a dangerous place with regard to the deficit, and the Republicans aren't sounding like folks who understand that survival will require compromise by everyone.

A few weeks ago I analyzed in my notebook why I was going to feel a good deal more depressed by a Romney win than I'd been by other presidential elections that had gone the wrong way.  I concluded that one factor was the extremely vicious nature of some contemporary Republican positions and another was Romney's conscienceless ambition.  To me, his combination of passionate ambition and whorish willingness to reinvent himself whenever it might garner a vote or two was a dangerous mix.  Meanwhile Obama was a genuinely competent President who'd started as a community organizer.  Finally, the prospect of spending the rest of my life watching an irretrievably right-wing Supreme Court stifle progress was uninviting. 

For the first time in years, having moved back to Las Cruces, I was also deeply interested in the local races.  I know some of the candidates, I know plenty about almost all of them, and as a columnist I took strong positions on some of the races.  Almost all the races went as I hoped.  In particular, the ones I'd spoken out about went well.   I don't assume or suggest there was any causal connection there, but mention it to explain how I feel.  When I lived in Las Cruces before, a lot of my beliefs weren't too popular.  With changes in the times and the town, Las Cruces has a quite progressive local government and voted quite strongly for Obama and Senator-elect Heinrich -- and even gave Evelyn Madrid Erhard a respectable majority against the incumbent U.S. Congressman.

I had felt particularly strongly about the three judicial races.  Governor Martinez (the former long-time District Attorney here, in case you're reading this outside New Mexico) appointed three cronies as judges here.  One in particular seems a somewhat spiteful sort, and a Tea Party darling; two of the three had lied to or about me; and their three opponents all seemed decent people who had good reputations as lawyers.  Further, the close alliance of Governor-Judges-District Attorney seemed unhealthy.  (A fourth Martinez crony was the District Attorney.)  We were surrounded by "Keep Judge So-and-So" signs, as if to suggest we had elected and expressed affection for the three (of whom one, by the way, seems a very decent sort of fellow).   I wrote a strong column on these races, but was not optimistic.  I didn't have recent experience with elections here, and knew Martinez was extremely popular.  The judicial candidates -- Marci Beyer, Mary Rosner, and Darren Kugler -- all defeated the Martinez "incombents" by several percentage points.

Similarly what I'd heard and seen of Amy Orlando and Mark D'Antonio convinced me that the county would be a lot better off with Mark as D.A.  Still, I feared his optimism might be a product of hearing so much from well-wishers and having far less contact with opponents.  I'd kind of expected to spend some time during the next two years writing columns trying to expose certain problems within the D.A.'s office.  Without getting into details, there was a certain nastiness and heavy-handedness to the Martinez-Orlando campaign to keep Ms. Orlando in office.  Mark is a capable lawyer with a great background for a prosecutor, and will bring a much-needed "breath of fresh air" to the D.A.'s office here. 

Most of the other local races went as I hoped they would too.  In one there's currently a twelve-vote margin, which may or may not survive provisional ballot counting and perhaps a recount.  Particularly because progressive or moderate candidates had been subjected to a barrage of ugly and misleading attacks by a PAC funded by Oil & Gas and run by a Martinez lieutenant, I'm heartened.  I hoped people would see through that garbage and make choices based on candidates and their actual positions; but I had no basis for predicting how these races would come out.

Sadly, but not unexpectedly, one key race turned out badly.  Our Congressional District includes Las Cruces but is weirdly cut to be primarily a Republican one.   Republican U.S. Congressman Steve Pearce is the darling of NMOGA and the Tea Party, but pays little attention to the needs or desires of the rest of his constituency, particularly progressives, environmentalists, and the like.  He doesn't have to.  Thus he's already voting to toss out the Affordable Health Care Act, and has consistently taken many extreme positions.  He'll likely be one of those unreasonable Republicans declining to compromise even to save the country's credit rating and possibility of financial recovery, and he snorts at the very idea that we might be contributing to climate change.

His challenger this time was a lady named Evelyn Madrid Erhard.  She had little political experience and less funding.  It was the classic David-and-Goliath battle, and Goliath was going to win; but Evelyn gave him a tough fight.  She dedicated her life to this race for the better part of a year, spoke energetically and well, and performed well in debates.  A newspaper poll a while back claimed she would win about 35 per cent of the vote.   She carried Doña Ana County and got about 41 per cent of the vote overall.  A fair way to put it would be that she lost in a landslide, but less of a landslide than most people predicted.  She ran heroically.  She deserves our thanks. 

I feel at home in Las Cruces; but it's still a little unsettling to a muckraking journalist to look around and notice that a high percentage of local office-holders are progressive, open-minded, and even environmentally-conscious individuals who also seem not to be motivated primarily by greed or political ambition.  Whom am I going to write about?