Happy New Year

Forty-four years ago Mark and I hosted a New Year’s Eve party at our crumbling adobe in Placitas. To get everyone to leave at 2 or 3 in the morning we had to let the fire go out so it was too cold to snort cocaine in the bathroom anymore.

Who were these folks enjoying themselves in the bathroom? Among many disparate Anglo communities in the village—in the sixties and seventies there wasn’t much mingling between the gringos and the Hispano land grant heirs—we were the so-called “intellectual” ones, made up of artists, writers, and academics. There was crossover between our cohort and the Dome Valley crowd, who considered themselves the hipsters of the day, and the hippies with a New Age mindset who didn’t vaccinate their children. But the New Year’s Eve Party was pretty much confined to the group we partied with, went to literary readings at the Living Batch Bookstore, and if we had the discretionary money, snorted coke with.

That night, most of the music was Motown and other R & B records of the day: Marvin Gaye, Martha and the Vandellas, Curtis Mayfield, the Isley Brothers, the Temptations. But we also had a pretty good collection of New Orleans mardi gras music of The Wild Tchoupitoulas, the Meters, the Neville Brothers, and Allen Toussaint, courtesy of our friends from down in the bayou (then a professor at UNM). I wrote a short story in my book Stories From Life’s Other Side called “Our Heart and Soul” that described a dance party at their house where we were told to leave our kids at the babysitter so we could smoke dope and get drunk with total impunity.

The house where the New Year’s Eve party took place was a four-room adobe with only three functional rooms: kitchen, living room, and bedroom. The bathroom was just a walled off room inside the living room, hardly large enough for more than a few coke snorters at a time. The year after the New Year’s Eve party the septic drainage pipes, made out of tarpaper, completely fell apart in the middle of winter and we had to dig up the leach field and replace them with PVC (we paid a $50 a month rent that didn’t include landlord maintenance). We started building a house on land I’d bought outside the village before I got together with Mark, but that took five years to be ready enough to move in. When I got pregnant with Jakob and my mother heard that we wouldn’t move into the new house before he was born, she burst into tears thinking about him crawling around on the mud floors of the rental.

Those were the days, my friend, but I only wish they’d never ended when I remember the fun we had that New Year’s Eve. Years later, after we moved to El Valle, we did get to go to a club on New Year’s Eve in Santa Fe to hear and dance to Joe King Carrasco play one of the best concerts ever, and we celebrated a few more at the casinos of el norte dancing to the Darren Córdova Band or Los Blue Ventures. Now, at the end of this 2021 year, full of much hardship and angst for all of us, I wish there was a great band playing in a great venue where I could go dance with Mark and all my friends once again. But at the ripe old age of going on 72 I have to find my joy in the fact that it’s finally snowing, with a major storm predicted, and tomorrow, New Year’s Day, I’m going to strap on my cross-country skis for the first time this year and head up the canyon. Happy New Year.

Revisiting the Vinyl

Mark and I gave away our turntable after the CD collection took over and everything got uploaded onto the iPod. The vinyl—everything from gospel and jazz to rock 'n roll and blues—remained in boxes in the loft. But once I told the boys they had to clean out all their stuff by the time they were 30, I decided it was time to clean out all the vinyl, or at least what I could manage to sell and give away.

Jakob went through the jazz to start his collection. I think I let David Correia take what he wanted. Then I found a collector in Santa Fe who went through not only the rest of the jazz but the rock ‘n roll, blues, and country. I can’t remember what he paid me—maybe $100 for the lot—but it was a relief to see it find a home other than the garbage bin.

I figured I’d never sell the classical, but after I put a notice in the Town Crier, our local newsletter, a man from Taos called to say he’d take all of it. I spent a nice afternoon with him at his sign making business and when I left he handed me fifty bucks.

I kept one box of records, which sat in the loft for another couple of years until I decided it was time to get another turntable and listen to them so I could figure out why these were the ones I’d kept. I found a used turntable at a thrift store, replaced the needle by ordering online, and was ready to go.

So here’s what’s in the box. Two records that Mark and I, respectively, brought to the relationship: The Loading Zone and Joy of Cooking. Both bands were from Berkeley and survived only a couple of years in the late sixties and early seventies. But they had some remarkable women in them: Linda Tillery of The Loading Zone, and Terry Garthwaite and Toni Brown, who led Joy of Cooking as guitarist (Terry) and pianist (Toni) as well as lead vocals (Terry’s voice is amazing). Tillery went on to a solo career, as did Toni and Terry, who in 1980 joined up with Rosalie Sorrels, another great vocalist, and monologuist Bobbie Louise Hawkins (former wife of poet Robert Creeley) to release Live at the Great American Music Hall. These albums represented a time and place for Mark and me as individuals and as a couple.

What else is in the box? I’m not sure why, as I prefer R & B, but the blues are well represented: the white guys who discovered black blues, like East/West, the Butterfield Blues Band (the first record I bought at Antioch); Blues Breaker, John Mayall with Eric Clapton; English Rose, the early Fleetwood Mac with Peter Green (Black Magic Woman); and the black guys they emulated, like I Need You, Elmore James; Trouble in Mind, King Curtis; Night Life, Luther Allison, and the really old time blues singers Billie and Dede Pierce and Jimmy & Mama Yancy.

The R & B I prefer isn’t as well represented, I guess because I have so much of it in iTunes and CDs. Laura Nyro’s Gonna Take a Miracle with LaBelle is a stunning revelation of the depths of her versatility as soul singer as well song writer (on her other albums). The other favorite is Pieces of a Man, Gil Scott-Heron. What could be better than The Revolution Will Not Be Televised? I gave a brand new copy of the record to Jakob for Christmas.

The only Grateful Dead music I’ve ever owned are the two albums in the box: American Beauty and Workingman’s Dead. Box of Rain and Uncle John’s Band are pretty catchy tunes, although Jerry Garcia’s vocal range is about as good as my baseball pitch, and I’ve never understood Deadheads. Some Dylan and Joplin rounded out the Rock ‘n Roll until I found The Best of the Everly Brothers at the thrift store the other day. Then Jakob gave me the Stones Let It Bleed for Christmas, with the best album cover ever produced and one of the greatest songs recorded: Gimme Shelter.

My other favorites represent the best of other genres: Black Snake Blues, Clifton Chanier of Zydeco fame; A Little More Faith, the Reverend Gary Davis of gospel fame; the Gypsy Kings of flamenco and salsa; and my all time favorite folk singer, Barbara Dane, who sings It Isn’t Nice with the Chambers Brothers. In fact, I’m going to put it on the turntable right now.

And finally, the most unusual album in the box has to be Grace Paley reading from her story collections “The Little Disturbances of Man” and “Enormous Changes at the Last Minute” in her nasal Bronx accent. My literary and musical worlds conjoin there.

So that’s the story of what’s in the box, which isn’t in a box anymore but is lined up below the many shelves of my CDs, which I’ve been wondering what to do about as I start downsizing. But Jakob just informed me that he’s starting a CD collection—I didn’t know CDs were the latest retro thing—so I gave him the start of his jazz collection: John Coltrane, Thelonius Monk, Miles Davis, Pharoah Sanders Archie Shepp, etc. There are still hundreds left. There’s also a box of barely audible 45s that Mark and I collected as teenagers. I also found them up in the loft, cleaned them up, organized them by genre—Rock ‘n Roll, Rockabilly, R & B, and played them one more time. Remember You’re My World, Go Now!, I Go to Pieces, Laugh Laugh, and The Lion Sleeps Tonight? RIP.

David Gilbert Released, at Last

David Gilbert was released from jail this month after serving 40 years and 15 days for driving the get away vehicle in the 1981 Brinks Armory botched robbery where a guard and two police officers were killed. The Black Liberation Army stole $1.6 million in cash from an armored car outside the Nanuet Mall near the Hudson River community of Nyack. Gilbert, a former member of the Weather Underground, was unarmed but charged with murder, along with his partner, Kathy Boudin, who was in the car with him. Boudin pleaded guilty and was paroled in 2003. She’s now a professor at Columbia University.


Friends of David Gilbert emailed this photo after he was released. That’s his son, Chesa Boudin, on the left, who is currently the District Attorney in San Francisco, and Kathy Boudin, in the middle. Chesa was fourteen months old when his parents were arrested and was raised by Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, two other well-known former Weather Underground members.

Much has been written about Gilbert’s time in jail, by his son and by other reporters who documented the work he did on AIDs education and prevention. Disgraced former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo reduced Gilbert’s 75 years to life sentence so that he would be eligible for parole, which was granted in October. This is what Cuomo tweeted about Gilbert: “He has served 40 years of a 75-year sentence, related to an incident in which he was the driver, not the murderer.”


Gilbert’s sentence was an obviously politically motivated one. He refused to plead guilty and was disruptive in court. And what he participated in was, like much of the Weather Underground and other radical groups’ activities of the 1960s, strategically stupid and ultimately a failure. But Gilbert represents far more than an unjust political sentencing. We are the only Western developed country in the world that keeps people in jail for 40, 50, 60 years, for life. According to a New York Times article “Let the Punishment Fit the Crime,” more than 200,000 people are serving life sentences of 50 years or more. In Germany, fewer than 100 people have prison terms longer than 15 years. In the Netherlands, they seldom serve more than four years.


But that doesn’t stop people calling for more blood. In the ABC online report of Gilbert’s release, they quote Rockland County Executive Ed Day: “Former Governor Andrew Cuomo and the Parole Board should be ashamed for allowing this domestic terrorist to walk free on our streets. There’s no reason that David Gilbert should not have to face the full consequences of his heinous crimes, no matter how much time has passed.”


So once “a domestic terrorist” always a domestic terrorist. Once an 18-year old gang member at the scene of a murder, always an 18-year old gang member despite the fact that you’re now 60 years old. In the NYT’s article, one of the authors was a contributor to a 2014 National Research Council report that “recommends a return to a principle of parsimony, the sensible idea that a punishment should be only as severe as is required to prevent future offending.”


Mark Rudd, another former Weather Underground member who has repeatedly abjured his participation in the group, wrote a memoir some years ago that talked about meeting David Gilbert at Columbia University when he enrolled there as a freshman. Gilbert was several years older, already heavily involved in political organizing, who Mark described as one of the smartest and gentlest men he’d ever met. So, ironically enough, maybe the twenty-something David Gilbert, who made a tragic mistake when he was 36, is essentially the same David Gilbert who’s now 76 years old, free to walk down the streets of New York for the first time in 40 years.

Henrietta

Henrietta spends a lot of time at the ReUse Center at the dump—or transfer station, as the county prefers to call it. While she’s not one of the official volunteers who oversee the donations and try to keep things tidy, she acts as if she is. When I’m there she lets me go through the bags and boxes that people bring in as donations but then goes around rearranging all the shelves of jeans, kids’ toys, shoes, household goods, and blouses. Which is fine with me except that she talks incessantly while she does it: “What do you think this thing is?” she asks about the ab trainer (it took me a while to figure out what it was), or “This is a really nice blouse but I don’t have any place to wear it,” and “This book looks really interesting but I can’t really see well enough anymore to read books.”

Up until last week she was still driving her car even though she can’t see well enough to pass the driver’s test (she has macular degeneration in one eye). Then another driver smashed into her car when she was turning into her driveway and dented the side and wrecked the alignment and she’s waiting to get enough money to fix it. He didn’t have insurance and she didn’t have a license. Now she gets dropped off at the ReUse Center by her caregiver or a friend and gets someone to pick her up or waits for Tommy, who runs the transfer station, to take her home at closing time. It’s a long day for someone who can’t sit down because she’s not strong enough to push herself up out of the chair. So she wanders around the center examining everything and telling whoever’s there what she’s observed.

She also tells us that she was born in Wyoming where her dad worked for the railroad but then he died and the kids scattered across the county and Henrietta ended up in New Mexico. She never married and never had kids and lives alone in a trailer in Peñasco where she brings all the stuff she takes home from the ReUse Center even though she tells me constantly that we all have too much stuff: “I have 25 pairs of jeans in my closet and even if I bring 15 of those pairs here for other folks to have I still have more jeans than I’m ever going to need.”

I’ve never seen her in a pair of jeans, just loose fitting pants that cling to her very skinny legs. Her hair is long and gray and she’s missing a bunch of teeth but her eyes are big and round and compelling. She gets shots in the one with macular degeneration (her caregiver takes her to Santa Fe to the eye doctor) and hopes that it will get good enough for her to get a driver’s license.

I’m afraid that Henrietta is hanging out with a tough crowd, though. She told me last week that the young man who was just arrested for running over another man with a truck and leaving the scene sometimes comes to her house and asks for rides or money or food. He’s known for wandering the streets even though he has a home in one of the villages. When Henrietta tells me that she doesn’t understand what happened, that he’s basically a “good boy,” she points at her head with a finger and says, “but there’s something not right up here.” The police came to her house looking for him after the murder.

Henrietta is 76 years old so she’s had a lot of time to learn to work the system. Life’s going to be even harder, though, without a car and probably push her further into the crowd of other lost souls. Henrietta believes that with God’s help she and the others will be taken care of no matter how difficult things get. In the meantime, at her home away from home, she sorts and rearranges and talks and talks and talks and the volunteer souls who aren’t really lost ones, just kind of annoyed ones, listen and glean what they can from “life’s other side.”

It Takes a Village . . . or It Should Take a Village

It’s been eight months now that the hounds across the road have been howling and barking and crying day and night, first in the horse trailer where they were born, then in the kennels where they’ve grown into full sized dogs. They’re owned by a thirty-something born and bred in the village who played with my son Max when he was three years old. A week ago, I confronted him, for the second time, that these hounds that he will sell to bear hunters in the fall were driving me and everyone else in the village crazy and we couldn’t take it anymore. About 30 minutes later he said, “OK, I’m taking them to Córdova. This conversation is over.”

How we got to this victorious moment reveals much about village life that dispels any romantic notion one might have of solidarity and community spirit—on both sides of the disagreement. The young man, whose grandfather was once the unofficial mayordomo of the village, able to navigate disputes and render solutions based on what was most beneficial to the community, thought he could do whatever he wanted to do in his own best interest despite its terrible impact on his neighbors. In turn, his neighbors let him get away with it for eight months because they were too wimpy for any kind of confrontation or too afraid of retribution. Yes, retribution. What form that retribution might take I don’t know, but the fact that they feared it is completely demoralizing.

Maybe they’re thinking of the mom of the hound owner and the daughter of the benevolent mayordomo. She hasn’t spoken to me since her dad died 12 years ago, until she came out and yelled at me while I was in conversation with her son that this was my entire fault because I’m the one complaining. Of course, she hasn’t spoken to just about everyone else in the village for almost that long. Who knows why, other than the just plain fact that she doesn’t like any body.

As for solidarity in the community, after my first request of the young man to move the dogs failed, several of us decided to start a petition, or “formal letter,” asking the hound owner to move the dogs up behind his house, off the road, where any activity set them off on an hour’s long howl. We already knew, after consulting county officials, that the owner was in violation of the dog control ordinance against incessant barking, and that he’d neglected to get the required permit to commercially raise hounds. We didn’t mention that in the letter, we just asked him to be a good neighbor and move the dogs. Contacting the county would be the fall back.

Then the village’s spinelessness emerged. After passing the letter around, some started questioning the efficacy of a petition, others said they wouldn’t sign, and others hemmed and hawed about not wanting to make an enemy of the young man. When the petition author (I edited it) wrote me to say she was reconsidering our action, I’d had enough. The next morning I found my neighbor out on his tractor and convened our meeting.

This isn’t the first time people in the village have demonstrated their deep-seated fear of confrontation. After the unofficial mayordomo of the village died, the dark side took control of the acequias and most everyone quit going to the meetings rather than challenge their governance. We muddle along, whining and moaning over decisions made without our input and without our endorsement. So the whining and moaning over the hounds shouldn’t have surprised me. I had my minor victory, so far without retribution, but it’s not much consolation for the lack of the proverbial “it takes a village.”

Burials, not Funerals

Yesterday, Jakob and I buried our 14-year old dog Benny—Jakob had him for four years, I had him for six—below the garden, under the willows. It was the fitting end to a gentle death at the vet’s: a sedative to go to sleep, then a lethal injection. I’m glad we physically dug the hole, laid him in it, gently covered his face with a sheet, and filled the hole. I’ve buried some of my animal friends before, and cremated others, but this felt especially right. Today, I went to the Catholic mass for a sweet neighbor named Teresita Montoya. Her death at 66 could have been avoided. She didn’t know how to take care of herself or how to navigate the medical industrial complex, and she died of a heart attack from an avoidable infection. But it’s her funeral I want to talk about. Over the course of my 30 years in El Valle I’ve been to many masses at the local church: funerals, christenings, confirmations, feast days, Christmas posadas. The latter are the only ones I enjoy, a festive recreation of the birth of Christ with carols and good cheer. But frankly, if I never have to attend another mass I’ll be happy.

This one, for Teresita, at the church in Peñasco, was especially depressing. I doubt the priest had a personal relationship with her. No one from the family spoke, no one delivered a eulogy (I did find out her daughter spoke at the rosary). It could have been a mass for anyone.

Twelve years ago I delivered the eulogy for my buen vecino, Tomás. He’d been the mayordomo of the El Valle church many times over the years, the priest was his longtime friend, and I got to tell stories about this wonderful but complicated man who accepted my family as the good neighbors we wanted to be when we moved here, only the second fulltime Anglo family in El Valle. Then we went to the camposanto and more people told stories and we laughed and cried and laid him to rest.

After Teresita’s mass, we went to the El Valle camposanto—at least they buried her here—where again, no one other than the priest and the funeral director spoke. They lowered her into the ground while the rest of us milled around whispering with friends and acquaintances we often see only at funerals. Teresita’s husband, my friend Nelson (they were still married but lived in separate houses and got along great) told me that the funeral cost him over $8,000: travel from the Burque hospital to the funeral home in Taos, care of her body, conferences with the staff, a fancy casket, printed handout cards, etc., etc. It made me think about Mark, whose care by the same funeral parlor cost around $2,000 because we cremated him and had a wake, not a funeral, where we talked about him—a lot.

I wish we could deal with our human deaths like we did with Benny: humanely, simply, personally. This blog will probably seem sacrilegious to many of those who were at the mass today, who are comforted by the ritual of the Catholic Church. For me, I found comfort in the gentle treatment of the vet, the ride home with the body, the quiet scene under the willows, and the time spent with my son. Hey guys, that’s what I want when the time comes.

Ya Basta!

I slept from 8:30 to 10:30 am, after getting up at 6, my usual time. Then later in the afternoon, I slept from 3:00 to 4:30 pm. I never sleep during the day unless I’ve got the flu or am felled by vertigo, which I’ve suffered for 40 years. I have to draw the conclusion that I am a wreck.

Why am I a wreck? Let me count the ways.

Number one: Things started off with a late night conversation with my friend whose son has been a meth and heroin addict for 20 years. Several months ago he fell off a ladder and ended up in the hospital in Burque with a severe infection from the injury that threated to turn to sepsis. I suppose his addiction was sustained by all the pain medication they gave him, but he developed other complications and several days ago escaped the hospital and ended up in the driveway of my friend, incoherent and suffering. Nobody knows how he got there. My friend’s ex-wife drove up from Burque to try to get him back to the hospital but he eluded them both for several days until they managed to get him back down to her house. What happens next is anyone’s guess. My friend, who is 80 years old, cannot do this anymore.

Number two: Later that night my 14-year old (that’s a guess) dog Benny was in crisis. He’s been in slow decline for many months now, losing control of his rear legs, becoming confused and disoriented as he stands stranded in a corner, unable to find his way out. So my son Jakob—who asked me to take Benny on six years ago because the demands of his job and young daughter denied Benny his full attention—finally told me on a disastrous camping trip when Benny fell in the river and wandered aimlessly around camp, that it was time to let him go, via the vet. I reluctantly agreed and made an appointment, although doubt still lingered until last night at 2 am when I woke up to Benny’s cries and came downstairs to find him unable to get up as poop landed on the floor (he’s been pooping on the floor for weeks). I got him up, let him outside, and hurriedly put on shoes and coat and headlamp to follow him around so he didn’t get lost. Getting him back in the house seemed to thwart his desire for free range, but I’d already been through that scenario with another demented dog who disappeared into the night, never to be seen again. So yes, we’re going to the vet.

Number three: When I finally made it back to bed I took a pill to alleviate my anxiety not only about Benny but about the fact that I had an appointment with a dentist the next day to have a tooth pulled. This was because many months before I’d had a permanent bridge fall out and couldn’t get my dentist, or the specialist he referred me to, to re-adhere the bridge because one of the anchor teeth was deteriorating. Then my beloved dentist quit, due to a disastrous year of Covid-19, and I was on my own. I ended up in one of those huge dental practices with multiple receptionists, dental assistants, dental hygienists, regular dentists, dental specialist, etc., etc. The dentist I saw told me I had to get the deteriorating tooth pulled, might have to get a root canal and crown on the other anchor tooth, then get implants, or just make due with a partial denture. All of this would cost anywhere from $3,000 to $4,000. But their dentist who pulled teeth only came to the practice once a month so they referred me to another dentist, who I was supposed to see the morning after Benny’s breakdown. I was terrified. So I cancelled.

Number four: After I cancelled the dentist appointment, went back to bed, and got up at 10:30, I called my friend who was in the hospital with an infection in a toe that has previously been amputated. She suffers from neuropathy, which causes a lack of blood flow to her feet, and had lost a previous toe as well. When I reached her on her cell phone, she was in intense pain waiting for a vascular treatment to help the blood flow to heal her latest amputation. The doctors insisted on giving her a pain med that she couldn’t tolerate and refused to give her what she wanted. I called her partner, who intervened, and got her what she needed.

Number five: I have to go to the funeral of my friend who died of a heart attack in the hospital after everyone thought she was getting better. It was a bizarre, quick illness in which an infection caused her heart to stop once, but she rallied, the infection was treated, and then one morning, she died. Married but living separately from one of my good neighbors, they cared for each other as friends rather than husband and wife, and also cared for their grandson, whose mother essentially gave him up. She brought me warm, homemade tortillas, gave me extra food from the food pantry, invited me to her grandson’s birthday parties, and was always kind and gentle. My neighbor grieves her loss and the loss of his grandson, who was returned to his mother by the “state.”

The background to all of this is the pack of hounds that live across the road from me, which I will expand upon in a subsequent blog post. Suffice it to say, for seven months now they have been barking and howling their heads off anytime anyone travels down the road by foot or vehicle, or just out of frustration at being confined in kennels with no room for exercise for what they’re going to be trained to do: tree bears. Everyone in the village complains about the noise but don’t say anything to the young man who’s raising them. Everyone, that is, except me, who finally called him out for a face to face about us and those poor dogs. I’ll fill in the details of that conversation and what, if anything, resulted. Stay tuned.

Knowing when to give up on a book

In 2018 I wrote a blog called “Thank God for Novels” about rereading Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls and loving it: “. . . that book blew me away: love, loyalty, the longing for freedom and liberty, betrayal, courage, friendship, women, politics, Communism, socialism, fascism, anarchism, terrorism, idealism, suicide, and death.”

Yesterday, in 2021, I quit rereading Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms about a third of the way through. The only reason I was rereading this book, which as I recall I didn’t like in the first place, is because I recently watched the Ken Burns Hemingway documentary and got really angry at one of the talking heads in the film, Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian novelist and essayist. In the film Llosa talks about how much he loved A Farewell to Arms—Hemingway’s “best novel”—and how much he hated For Whom the Bell Tolls—sentimental crap. I knew the real reason he didn’t like For Whom the Bell Tolls, but it still made me furious that he got to spew his prejudice out on camera. Llosa, who was once a “liberal” but became a “neoliberal,” didn’t like For Whom the Bell Tolls because he didn’t like its politics, not because of its love scenes.

So I decided to reread A Farewell to Arms to prove my case. It started out all right, with a beautiful description of the Italian/Austrian border town where the American protagonist is stationed as an ambulance driver in World War I for the Italian Army (based on Hemingway’s own experience). It quickly descended into Hemingwayesque: “I went down to the mess to eat. Then I went outside to see what was happening with the cars. The mechanics were working on them to get ready for the next attack.” These are my words, not Hemingway’s, but they could be his. Next the protagonist meets Catherine, the English nurse who turns the novel into a love story. Their conversation consists of nothing beyond themselves: getting to know each other (if you can call it that: there’s no background information about where they’re from, what they’ve done, except for her former boyfriend, who died in the war); falling in love (within a couple of days); getting pregnant; deserting from the army (Catherine does have a great line about that: “Darling (she always calls him “Darling”), please be sensible. It’s not deserting from the army. It’s only the Italian Army.”); dying in childbirth. Is this the precursor of autofiction?

I’d already set the book aside for a few days without a definitive decision about whether to continue. Then last night I was talking with John Nichols on the phone, whom I’d already talked with about the Hemingway documentary and Vargas Llosa, and told him I was reading A Farwell to Arms but was thinking of giving it up. He told me the only two pages he’d read were the first and last and then quoted from each: the dust on the tree trunks and leaves from the marching troops, on page one, and on the last page, “It was like saying goodby to a statue.” He gave me his blessing to quit.

John Wesley Harding

There was a post on Facebook the other day asking people to name the album that they listen to in its entirety, never skipping a track. What immediately popped into my head, but that I didn’t get around to posting (way too many Facebook group games) was Dylan’s John Wesley Harding. I’m sure there are plenty of other albums that I listen to—or used to listen to, including other Dylan albums—in their entirety, but that’s what came to mind.

Then, a few days later, I was going through Mark’s notebooks as part of my project to set aside a repository of his things for Jakob and Max and found a short entry talking about the first time he heard John Wesley Harding.

“He’d recently recovered from the motorcycle accident that almost killed him and hadn’t recorded anything for over a year after the incredible string of masterpieces: Bringing It All Back Home; Highway 61 Revisited; and Blonde on Blonde. There was an incredible amount of expectation after the long silence and the near death experience. A friend was living in a beautiful 19th century carriage house behind a stately mansion in downtown Buffalo. It was late November and chilly. The six of us huddled around the fireplace, which was the only light flickering on the dark wood paneled walls. We passed around a couple of potent joints and drank a bottle of wine. The album was a complete surprise coming after that succession of electrified dark nights of the soul. It was acoustic, folksy, countrified, mystical, and completely enigmatic. “Don’t go mistaking paradise for that home across the road.” “And if you don’t underestimate me I won’t underestimate you.” “Nothing is revealed.””

I Googled the release date of the album: December of 1967, so maybe he got the month wrong. This was a year before I graduated from high school. Mark, two years older, was already married and attending the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he grew up. Those years of hearing new releases from Dylan and all the 60s and 70s artists who defined our youth were themselves magical (especially when accompanied by drugs and alcohol). In a previous blog post called “Play That Rock Guitar” from 2014 I told of my “first” listens: “I was walking down the corridor to the common room in North Hall at Antioch College when I first heard the opening guitar strain of "Gimme Shelter" and I thought, “Oh my god, what is this music?” Years later, Mark and I were driving down the highway in northern California when “The Sultans of Swing” came on the radio and we said to each other, “Who is this, is this Dylan?” and then we heard Mark Knoefler’s guitar riff and we said, “This is not Dylan.”

Music was such a big part of our lives, and still is, although I’m in shock that I know so little about what is currently being produced. We inculcated the kids with our music and I get exposed to some of theirs—from Jakob, Leon Bridges and Black Pumas, from Max, Chris Stapleton—but my ignorance and lack of curiosity is astounding. That same blog post was essentially a rant about how once the years of rock and roll and R & B segued into pop, I gave up.

I found another entry in Mark’s journals about music that this time pertained to me. He said the fact that I worked as a fire lookout and brought the Mary Wells Sings My Girl album into the relationship sealed the deal for him. All the rest of it, from rock and roll and R & B and jazz and reggae kept us going for 36 years.

April, the cruelest month

This March, when the spring winds started to blow, I remember asking someone, “Is April really the cruelest month?” Then April arrived. And the wind continued to blow . . . and blow . . . and blow, without relent. Remember that other, more quotidian saying: “April showers bring May flowers?” We had no rain in April—though we had a day of snow. I’d get up every morning in my passive solar house where the sun quits shining through the windows around about April and argue with myself: Do I really need to build a fire this morning, or can I just put on another hoodie and another pair of wool socks and read my book while shivering?

At least in March there was still snow in the mountains and I went skiing, a denial of spring. I wasn’t out in the garden trying to spread manure while the wind whipped it from the bed of my pickup onto my hair and face. I wasn’t up at 6 am opening my compuerta while the wind froze my hands to the shovel. I wasn’t pruning my trees praying that the wind wouldn’t drop the temperature just enough to freeze the fruit blooms.

On the positive side, though, I’m really thankful I don’t live in Placitas anymore. There the wind was an assault on one’s equilibrium and sanity. In our tin roofed house the rattling drove us downstairs from our bedroom to the living room floor for sleep. Just last week one of my friends who still lives there told me she was on the edge of a nervous breakdown in her home on an exposed mesa top: rattled, both figuratively and literally, anxious, locked inside despite the beginning of our Covid freedom.

Next year I’m leaving New Mexico during April. I haven’t yet figured out where I’m going or who’s going to want to take care of my house while the wind blows. I’m willing to wait until May to plant a garden, I’ll prune the trees in the winter, and if it doesn’t rain I won’t have any hay or flowers. I don’t care. At the end of a long winter I want to be somewhere warm, somewhere calm, somewhere soothing. I’ve had 50 years of spring in New Mexico and I deserve a break. We all do. The thing is, though, we all know it’s only going to get worse. But if I can skip the month of April, maybe I’ll still survive the other eleven.

Bill Whaley, the Pesky Insect

Taos lost the “closest thing to a native son a gringo can be” on February 8, 2021. My friend Bill Whaley died of a heart attack while skiing at the Taos Ski Valley with his young granddaughter. This is the way he would have wanted to go, the inveterate ski bum that he was, but I wasn’t prepared for another friend’s death. Bill and I attended too many memorials for our Taos friends and colleagues over the last few years: Butchie Denver in 2012, Ron Gardiner in 2016, and Gene Sanchez in 2019. While I memorialized him in both La Jicarita and the Taos News, I didn’t write about him here, in Unf*#!ing Believable. But I thought about him today as I was working on an article about one of the acequias in the Abeyta water rights settlement. A couple of years ago Bill and I went out to meet one of the commissioners on the acequia to take a look, and then we drove around the Taos environs, from Valdez to Arroyo Hondo, with Bill showing and telling me in detail his history with these beautiful mountain villages. Now, another comrade-in arms is dead.

Pesky Insect, aka Horse Fly, was Bill’s monthly critique of politics, art, and culture that he published from September 1999 to September 2009 and where I first met him, recruited to write articles on water issues. After Horse Fly’s demise he went online with Taos Friction, which took the Taos politicos to task on an almost daily basis, parsing Horse Fly friend Flavio’s estimation of the town: “Taos is a great place to visit but you wouldn’t want to live here.”

But Bill did live in Taos for many years and became its notorious gringo. Arriving in the 1960s as a member of the National Guard to avoid Vietnam, he gravitated to the ski slopes of Taos, forging a contentious relationship with owner Ernie Blake. He moved on to became a mostly failed entrepreneur whose ventures included the Plaza Theater, Plaza Theater Bar, Cortez Theater, Old Martinez Hall, the Taos Community Auditorium, and KVNM-FM radio, the precursor of KTAO. While he often lost his shirt and his sanity during those years of terror, he gave the Taos community downtown movies ranging from Fellini’s 8 ½ to Blazing Saddles, lots of memorable bar experiences, an Earl “Fatha” Hines concert, and a rousing production of West Side Story.

All of this is documented in his book, Gringo Lessons: Twenty Years of Terror in Taos, about which our mutual friend John Nichols had this to say in his review in Taos Friction (and that I reposed in La Jicarita):

“This wonderful autobiography is as honest as the day is long, no holds barred, no punches pulled. It’s beautifully written, highly entertaining, truly wild and wonderful even as it also may make you cringe on every other page. This pilgrim’s progress is definitely not a stroll through a summer meadow. Whaley might have done better not to have gone AWOL from the National Guard, but to have punched his ticket to Vietnam instead.”

But Bill had another life plan ahead. He left Taos in 1987 to resume a college career in his home state of Nevada. Ten years later he was back, as an ABD (all but dissertation). Thus ensued the journalism years with Horse Fly and Taos Friction. He published all my articles about the impending water battles over the Taos Pueblo (Abeyta) water adjudication, and when I served as the chair of the Taos County Public Welfare Advisory Committee, he was right there to back up my attempt to get the commission to protest water transfers that were not in best interest of the citizens of Taos County, always in language that was uniquely Bill’s: “But, when you measure the risk of litigation against the potential dollars, some $130 million, which will begin flowing into the mouths of thirsty Taosenos from the federal mammary glands, well, what can you do.”

His love of language also flowered in a late-blooming academic career as a professor of English and philosophy at UNM-Taos. He also taught independent classes on Taos history, politics, and culture, a man of all seasons.

During the long, difficult 2020 year of the pandemic he continued to teach and published many a screed about the national political scene. Over the past few weeks he became especially outraged, with posts like “The Fascists are planning a Second Coup in Plain Sight”.

For the past several years Bill skied with his granddaughter Lili up in the Valley. Initially, he was thrilled that he could beat her coming down Al’s Run. As she aged, though, and her skills improved, that became more difficult and when he told me she finally beat him, it was with both chagrin and pride. I also ski with my grandkids, but they’re younger and I’m much less an accomplished skier than Bill was. I’m not going to be doing Al’s Run with them. I don’t know if that’s where he died, but anywhere on the mountain is a fitting end, I guess, although I wish his granddaughter hadn’t been there to witness this traumatic event. And I wish he was still here.

Efficiency

Naomi Klein was on Democracy Now! awhile back deconstructing what happened in Texas during the ice storm when the power grid failed. Apparently Texas is one of the few states that separated its electrical system from the national one—you know, the Lone Star State—using the rationale that it was made more efficient by reducing regulation and redundancy. But as Klein pointed out, when reducing redundancy, if that system fails it means there is no backup system to fall back on.

Oh, that nasty word, efficiency. It’s been the bete noire of the acequia system as well, which I’ve written about many times in La Jicarita. In my first article I wrote: “Ditch banks are cleared of all vegetation and more and bigger culverts carry the water more ‘efficiently’ despite the loss of riparian habitat and groundwater recharge. Ditch fees rise every year due to increased payments for cleaning, maintenance, and improvements that are decided and implemented by the commissioners, often without the approval or oversight of the rest of the parciantes.” In another article “Machine Dug Acequias” I was in a tither about coming home to find my upper acequia had been machine dug, rather than human cleaned, to a width of six feet and argued, instead of using machines, “What if we spent that money to hire folks in the community who need work and can still use a shovel?”

How does this relate to Klein’s redundancy argument? It’s all about labor and demographics. Without maintaining a work force willing to clean the ditches we have no backup system when we don’t get the funding to buy the machines and the bigger culverts that parciantes can’t afford in the first place. We’ve already experienced our kids’ mass migration from our small villages throughout el norte to Albuquerque, Española, and out of state, to find better paying jobs than their parents had. Maybe more of them would have stayed if more of their parents had themselves committed to digging the ditches instead of hiring peones to do it for them, impressing upon them that without establishing the viability of small scale agriculture we may lose the water rights parciantes have put to beneficial use for generations. Now, with no kids around and years of machine dug acequias we don’t even have the redundancy of peones who were rounded up every year to fill in the gaps.

But as author Anna Wiener in her deconstruction of the tech industry in Uncanny Valley so succinctly puts it: “Efficiency, the central value of software, was the consumer innovation of a generation.” You can substitute any number of things for “software” here: houses, cars, washing machines, books (Amazon), music, computers, all of our consumer hardware that makes our lives more efficient so we can become even better consumers. Neoliberal Reaganomics was based on the idea that the market’s only allegiance is to the consumer, that every encounter is a market transaction that makes things cheaper and more accessible. Efficiency makes sure that neither regulation nor redundancy can interfere in those transactions (like getting your package from Amazon Prime the next day). The end result, as Tim Koechlin puts it in his article “ Neoliberalism doesn’t care: “Neoliberalism is the neglect of the commons. Neoliberalism is the denial of the commons. Neoliberalism is the insistence that protecting the commons is wasteful and inefficient. Neoliberalism is the sale of the commons to the highest bidder (my emphasis).”

The Wokeness of Nomadland

Autofiction has now moved from literature to the movies. Nomadland, featuring the indubitable Frances McDormand (who redeemed herself in my eyes after the horrendous “Three Billboards Outside Ebbings, Missouri”), mixes up real life people with actors who drive around the west in their RVs and vans and school buses as nomadic refugees from capitalism. The movie doesn’t play up the class issue but it’s why they’re on the road “houseless” as Fern (Frances) calls it, looking for community.

Fern’s husband worked at the sheetrock plant in Empire, Nevada, where they lived for decades. After he dies and the plant closes in 2011, she’s kicked out of the company house and on the road in her outfitted van she names “Vanguard.” She works temp jobs at Amazon in Nevada, a campground in Badlands National Park in South Dakota, a sugar beet farm in Nebraska, and a restaurant cook, also in South Dakota. But the best parts of the movie are when she migrates to the Arizona encampment run by Bob, a real life nomad, where others come together to share information, food, and friendship with the likes of Linda May and Swankie, also real life nomads.

I was completely engaged throughout the movie where not much happens. It won awards at the Toronto and Venice film festivals and got glowing reviews from the LA Times and the New York Times. But then came the complaints. Now we’re all entitled to our opinions, of course, and Richard Brody in The New Yorker let it be known that he didn’t think the juxtaposition of real life/fiction worked and complained that the documentary part was hackneyed and in the fictional part characters weren’t fully developed, nobody got to talk enough, all the usual complaints about movies that don’t follow the accepted narrative of plot and character development. Talking to my friend Terri about his review she exclaimed: “Swankie is the classic old lesbian hippie. I’d know her anywhere. And Fern doesn’t need to talk. She listens.”

But then came the other complaints that painfully reveal how cancel culture and identity politics have diminished critical thinking about content and aesthetics (you’re so right, Jakob). First came the class issues: how could this movie portray oppressed people having a good time doing their own thing, finding spiritual support at the Arizona encampment, and actually wanting to be a nomad? What a betrayal of class politics.

Then came the complaint that while the movie shows Fern and Linda May working at dead end Amazon warehouses it doesn’t talk about the movement to organize a union that’s now playing out at Amazon in Alabama. Fern and Linda May are in the warehouse in Nevada. They’re trying to make enough money so they can buy gas and groceries to get to Arizona. They don’t know anything about union organizing, but failing to mention it is somehow class betrayal.

Next came the race card. Here we finally have a story centered on working class women, who yes, are white, but the movie is based on a book by journalist Jessica Bruder who wrote about the actual plant that closed in Empire, Nevada, that mostly employed white people because that’s the demographic of Empire, Nevada. So when Fern goes to the Badlands National Park in South Dakota to work as a campground host a Native American academic posts on Facebook that she immediately quit watching the movie that she “initially liked” because there weren’t any Indians in it. This is Indian Country and how can the director not make sure that Indians are part of the conversation? It reminded me of the same kind of criticism leveled at Kenneth Lonergan’s “Manchester By the Sea” that there weren’t any black people in it. The movie takes place in a working class town in upstate Massachusetts where the demographic is white. I thought the critique was a joke, but it wasn’t.

Scrolling through Rotten Tomatoes “Top Critics” reviews it looks like The New Yorker is the single negative mainstream review. The rest come in from the woke world out there, immersed in their bubbles of correctness.

Upstairs Maude

My cat Maude lives upstairs. That is, she never ventures downstairs where most of the action is: cooking and eating, working on my laptop, reading, listening to music, hanging with the dogs. The dogs may be why Maude remains upstairs, but there are other factors at play, I think.

I “rescued” Maude from my neighbor Matthew’s house, where she was contending with a puppy and a kitten by hiding under any furniture inaccessible to the puppy and kitten. Matthew had taken Maude in due to her previous owner’s allergies—no information beyond that as to age, previous tenure, etc. Seeing as how she has to claw the spread to climb up the beds where she spends most of her days, I suspect she’s an old gal. But once there, she’s an affectionate bedtime partner, snuggling up to convey warmth both ways.

Cats in El Valle are an endangered species due to coyotes and owls (and unfriendly dogs) so it’s good Maude lives upstairs. As a guilty enabler, I’ve had plenty of them over the years—both here and in Placitas, another dangerous rural environment—who had to navigate these dangers. It all began with Alley Cat, a little gray girl who facilitated my relationship with Mark, my partner of 34 years, way back in 1976. At the time I was working as the fire lookout on Mount Taylor and I took Alley with me to the tower (I also took my dogs Chani and Judge). She played on the catwalk surrounding my tiny little room and I tucked her in my jacket on evening walks. But one week when I left her home with my roommates, I came home to find she’d been poisoned, probably with antifreeze, and the vet couldn’t save her. Mark was with me at the vet’s and stayed with me while I grieved.

Mark had two cats himself, Belle and Pie, so when we moved in together in Placitas, we had a full household of cats and dogs. But it soon expanded. A young yellow tabby showed up one day and decided to stay. During one of her climbing forays she knocked over a bottle of salad dressing that drenched her, thus becoming her name. Next, a beautiful gray guy decided he preferred living with us rather than our neighbor, who graciously relinquished him. We named him Merle. While living in the village we started building a house out near Tunnel Springs. That’s where Cisco turned up one day, a short-haired gray tabby who we of course brought home.

No, we didn’t have five cats at one time. Belle and Pie were fairly old cats and we lost them to age as we accumulated Salad Dressing, Merle, and Cisco. And we didn’t get to have Cisco very long. He had a very weird habit of sleeping over the back of a chair, standing on his hind lets with his head and front paws hanging down. It turned out he had a tear in one of his heart valves and this position allowed him to breathe better. But the tear got worse and he struggled more and more to breathe, which resulted in one of those horrible situations most of us with animals have had to confront: whether to have the vet put him down. When the vet told us he couldn’t fix the tear, we had to say goodbye.

Fern showed up next. A long-haired gray tabby, she was one of my all-time favorites—sweet, affectionate, yet fearless and independent. When we moved out of the Placitas village to the new house, she’d go for walks with us into the forest, warily darting from tree to tree in case those coyotes or owls were watching. Neither Fern nor Merle did well with the move from the village to new house and decided numerous times to return to their home of origin. This is a fairly common occurrence with cats, but Merle took it to the nth degree: I think we drove back to retrieve him at least 10 or 15 times. He finally decided to stay.

While we loved living next to the forest, it’s probably why we eventually lost Merle, Fern, and Salad Dressing, who all disappeared without a trace. So by the time we gave it all up and moved from Placitas to El Valle—my book Culture Clash: Environmental Politics in New Mexico Forest Communities, documents in excruciating detail why we left—we had no cats. Alas, that was not to last. My friend Susan Larson, a veterinarian, gave us a going away present of two tortoise shell sisters whom we named Thelma and Louise. Thelma disappeared within months of our relocation, but Louise lived to a ripe old age of 15 because she, like Maude, liked living inside (though Louise did venture downstairs).

The tale of many cats continued during our almost 30 year residency in El Valle. Honus, named by younger son Max who was besotted with baseball cards (named for Honus Wagner, slugger for the Pittsburgh Pirates) showed up one day and became one of our favorites. He was also well liked by our neighbor Tomás, whom he would visit to hunt gophers, or “rattas,” as Tomás called them. We had Honus for a good number of years and were heartbroken when he, too, disappeared.

We also took in Blanche, a black feral cat that Mark’s sister-in-law dumped on us while visiting. She found her lurking around our friend’s house where she was staying for the visit and figured Blanche could be domesticated. She couldn’t. While she came in the house to eat and sleep, she basically lived outdoors and disdained human contact. She soon disappeared.

Then we took in Ernie, a black and white kitten who was sweet and playful, which extended to putting his head in our dog Django’s mouth as they rolled around the living room floor. But one day Ernie took sick and we took him to the emergency vet in Taos, who announced that he had cancer and was dying. The vet put him down and in shock we brought him home to bury. Max was completely caught off guard and distraught that we came home with a dead cat. It was probably one of the first times he’d been around a dead creature; he cried and cried.

After the kids left home we acquired an orange tabby named Mavis from a young friend who went off to work for the Forest Service. Mavis exemplified what is lovely about orange tabbies: affectionate, smart, independent, and quirky.

After Mavis disappeared, I swore off cats. I was by myself by then (Mark died in 2010) and didn’t need any more heartbreak. Suffice it to say, I ended up taking in several more cats for short term stays that I won’t go into detail about as it’s all too depressing. Maude is here, though, safe and sound upstairs. Even though she doesn’t come downstairs, the mice in the house seem to have sensed a cat is in the hood and have disappeared. And bird lovers can’t chastise me for having an indoor/outdoor cat. But reading back through this post I’m appalled: in my almost 50 years of rural residency I’ve had eighteen cats (OK, I’m admitting to the three I took in after swearing them off)! My friend Jan, who lives in town, has had two over the course of almost 40 years (long lived cats). My only defense is that I never actively solicited any of them. They came to me (and to Mark). While it means I have a soft heart, it also means that in the larger scheme of things the human population is not dealing very well with the cat population and should probably heed the bird lovers’ advice and stop domesticating them. In the meantime, I hope the universe does not send me any more cats.

On Getting the Vaccine and Being White

I was given the Moderna vaccine at Las Clinicas del Norte in El Rito yesterday because I’m old, immune compromised, and white. I’m not casting aspersions on the El Rito Clinic, as it has probably inoculated more Hispano and Native American people than just about any provider in New Mexico. We’re blessed with a relatively good rural health care system in el norte that reaches into many areas that suffer other kinds of inaccessibility. It’s just that I found out the clinic was vaccinating from my network of white friends.

I’m talking about being white in the world. This discussion has been in the crossfire lately between the pro- and anti- cancel culture crowds over the legacy of white privilege and the absolutism of first amendment and civil liberties. On the one hand, there’s a movement to chastise, censor, and fire white people who do stuff that’s reactionary, bigoted, racist, misogynist, or any number of things that are deemed denigrating to the liberal code. On the other hand, there are those who see the actions that big tech companies have taken to kick these people off their platforms, or newspapers that have fired columnists or editors for these “indiscretions,” is an abrogation of their first amendment and civil rights.

This is all quite complicated and I’ve written before about it, in my #MeToo Part 2, December 14, 2017, of the difference between Roy Moore of Alabama, a pedophile who ran for the U.S. Senate, and Al Franken, a sitting senator who committed stupid “sexual misconduct.” Then there’s the incident where Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton wrote an editorial in the NYT saying President Trump should invoke the Insurrection Act to put down protests across the country after the murder of George Floyd, that resulted in the editorial page director being forced to resign (I just saw where he was rehired by The Economist).

When you make a distinction between depravity/immorality, and misconduct, then you need to also figure out where to draw the line between what constitutes free speech and what constitutes incitement. I doubt that Cotton’s editorial rises to the level of “incitement,” but what about the Proud Boys in Charlottesville who chanted, along with other neo-Nazis and anti-Semites “Seig heil,” “blood and soil,” and “You will not replace us.” That’s the first time I remember thinking, as a card carrying ACLU member, that maybe there were limits to free speech. Here’s what the First Amendment guarantees: “The First Amendment guarantees freedoms concerning religion, expression, assembly, and the right to petition. It forbids Congress from both promoting one religion over others and also restricting an individual’s religious practices. It guarantees freedom of expression by prohibiting Congress from restricting the press or the rights of individuals to speak freely. It also guarantees the right of citizens to assemble peaceably and to petition their government.”

The Charlottesville protestors didn’t assemble peaceably. They beat up the counter demonstrators, they almost beat up Cornell West, and one of them killed a woman with a car. Was this protected free speech and if not, should the authorities have arrested all of them (the city tried to deny a march permit but they marched anyway)? Some ACLU folks raised this issue, but not Glenn Greenwald, former constitutional lawyer turned journalist. Writing in the Intercept, which he co-founded but has now left for Substack: “ . . . those who favor free speech suppression, or who oppose the ACLU’s universal defense of speech rights, will create results that are the exact opposite of those they claim to want. It’s an indescribably misguided strategy that will inevitably victimize themselves and their own views.” By exact opposites, he of course means the dangers of suppressing the free speech of the left.

Journalist Matt Taibbi is Greenwald’s partner in protest over the abrogation of free speech and the promotion of cancel culture. When YouTube announced in December of 2021 that it was removing any content that misleads people into thinking there was widespread fraud in the 2020 Presidential election, Taibbi claimed there wasn’t a “better way to further radicalize Trump voters.” Same argument for Twitter blocking Trump’s tweets. While they both acknowledge that Silicon Valley tech companies are monopolies that should have never accumulated the power they have to disseminate misinformation, it’s even more insidious if they are endowed with the power to suppress speech, no matter how misinformed or incendiary.

So where do you stand on this? Did kicking Trump off Twitter for insisting the election was a fraud help staunch the dissemination of propaganda? Was it too late? Should it have been done sooner? Did it recruit more crazies? We’ll have to leave it to the pundits to keep trying to find the answer.

Rightwing Populism, or Anti-Populism Writ Large

One hundred and twenty-four years ago the Populist Party collaborated with the Democratic Party and ran the young radical William Jennings Bryan for president of the United States on the Democratic ticket against Republican William McKinley. His platform: “There are those who believe that, if you will only legislate to make the well-do-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through to those below. . . . if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests upon them.” This, of course, turned out the entire business class against him—journalists, academics, clergy, and vast amounts of Republican money—and McKinley won the election.

In 2016 Independent Party member Bernie Sanders collaborated with the Democratic Party and was screwed by not only the entire business class but by the Democratic Party as well. Bernie’s platform: support the working class by unending an economic system that supposedly “leaks to those below”—in today’s parlance called “trickle down economics”—with one that yes, makes the masses prosperous.

In between, we had the New Deal with FDR, which conquered the Great Depression, discredited capitalism around the world, established a safety net, strengthened unions, and created a middleclass America, where auto workers and construction workers could afford to buy the things they built.

Today, the only time the word “populism” is used is to describe the populist right, signified by Donald Trump. Instead of reflecting a progressive economic agenda to empower the working class, it’s associated with authoritarianism, bigotry, anti-immigration, deregulation, and tax cuts for the rich.

On the campaign trail, Donald Trump was planning a similar game to the one Steve Bannon cooked up: citing the financial crisis and the bailouts as the “inciting incident” for the global populist rebellion he wanted to lead (Thomas Frank, The People, No: a brief history of anti-populism). On the issue of trade, for example, Trump took an unusual stance for a Republican, constantly criticizing NAFTA and trade with China, the bêtes-noires of organized labor, and reaching out to alienated white, working-class voters, the rank and file of so may historical protest movements. He said he cared so very much about the people of the deindustrialized zones and their sufferings. He claimed to feel for the victims of the opioid crisis.

And then . . . the working-class hero in the Oval Office delivered a landmark tax cut for the rich. Trump deregulated Wall Street banks, too. With his attacks on Obamacare, the president did his part to make our capitalistic system just a little more brutal and Darwinian for ordinary people. He turned over the judiciary to the elites of the Federalist Society. He turned over the economy to the Chamber of Commerce. He turned the EPA over to polluters. He ran the US government in a way designed to enrich and empower himself. The one leadership task to which Trump took with enthusiasm—rolling back the regulatory state—is essentially an attack on one of the few institutions in Washington designed to help working-class Americans. If this is populism, the word has truly come to mean nothing.

Now that Trump is banished to Mar-a-Lago we have senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz ready to pick up the populist cause claiming Republicans represent the “party of the working class.” It’s enough to make you an anarchist: Republicans and Democrats alike spinning their claims like Rumpelstiltskin spinning straw into gold.

Nineties Feel Good Movies

When the pandemic hit in March of 2020 my son Max, 31 at the time, was living in Santa Fe. Just as so many other Gen X and millennial livelihoods and lifestyles (I don’t like to use that word but I’m afraid it does kind of apply to many in these age groups) were severely impacted by the stay-at-home restrictions and shutdowns, so was Max. He made it through the summer, riding his bike, meeting a small group of friends at outside parties, hanging with Jakob, Lulu, Marcos and me in the park, and playing poker on a few websites that still exist (online poker was shut down in the U.S., forcing Max to play at casinos).

But as winter came on bringing renewed shut downs, he started coming up to El Valle to stay with me for a few days to decompress. Max, raised as was Jakob, in an environment where the main forms of entertainment were hiking and backpacking in the summer and skiing in the winter, substituted these activities as an adult with city ones: going to the gym, movies, parties, restaurants and bars. To my surprise, he discovered that he actually liked being here, walking my dogs, whom he loves (he desperately wants a dog of his own), bringing in the wood, then cross-country and downhill skiing with me once the snow fell (not enough yet).

We also found an indoor activity in which we could indulge: watching 90s feel good movies. I’ve often watched these movies, geared to a general audience before the onslaught of super hero movies (only Star Wars), as an antidote to the blues, with their familiar movie stars, their funny/sad narratives, their blur between the ordinary and extraordinary. Max, jangled enough by the events of the day, found that they worked wonders on his nerves as well.

We started with High Fidelity. There may be no greater comedic role than the one Jack Black creates as the clerk in the vinyl record shop who doesn’t let customers buy any music he thinks is crap. If he had his druthers, it wouldn’t be in the shop in the first place, but the boss of the shop is John Cusack, who also has impeccable musical taste but is a little less judgmental. Max kept calling him a jerk as he meets up with former girlfriends to explore the demise of their relationships as a means of parsing the one he’s just fucked up. But I love John Cusack, not only for the quirky roles he plays in the movies but the role he plays in real life: he went with Arundhahti Roy and Daniel Ellsberg to interview Edward Snowden stuck in Moscow after his release of National Security Administration documents revealing the extent of national surveillance and war crimes. The sound track of the movie, is, of course, straight out of my playlists, which Cusack makes endlessly, like I do, of songs that are the records of our lives.

We next watched Moonstruck, which apparently thousands, if not millions, of other people in America were also watching during the pandemic. There were articles in the New York Times Magazine (Wesley Morris) and in the New Yorker about the joy of watching Cher kick the can down the streets of Brooklyn after going to the opera with Nicholas Cage (they are both stunningly beautiful). It’s basically an Italian soap opera that plays fast and loose with reality: Cher agrees to marry Johnny Cammareri, whom she doesn’t love, and then agrees to marry Ronny Cammareri, his brother, after knowing him for two days. But it seeps right into your heart as scene after scene is exquisitely played by the likes of Vincent Gardenia, Cher’s father, who makes a very good living as a plumber by convincing clients they need copper pipes; Olympia Dukakis, Cher’s mother, who wants to know why men cheat on women (her husband is having an affair); and John Mahoney as the clueless NYU professor who keeps getting drinks thrown in his face by young students he’s trying to seduce.

We went onto the The Paper, Michael Keaton’s best movie, IMHO, with the wonderful Marisa Tomei, and Groundhog Day. There’s not much I can add to the latter’s position in the movie canon: “Fantasies work because at some level they act as a metaphor and help us relate to the real life. And the best way a fantasy could work is to be subtle and allow the viewer to make his own metaphor. Groundhog Day is in that way, a great movie. It plays like a comedy while giving a feel of philosophical undercurrents which resonate deeply within us.” (Nallasivan Valasubramanian). There are many more movies to be had: Crimes of the Heart, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and An Ideal Husband, to name a few. I have them all on VHS if you can’t find them on Netflix or Hulu or Criterion or wherever. There’s something to be said for keeping your own video library. Let me know if you want to borrow one.

Good Old Democracy Now!

Amy Goodman’s been at it a long time, and while lately she’s been driving me kind of crazy with sloppy editing (they always have to cut people off mid sentence when they run out of time at the end of the program), too much introductory talk that should be given to the interviewee, and a too strident tone, this week’s shows reveal how relevant and incisive she continues to be.

This, of course, was the week after the mob of white nationalists and neo-Nazis stormed the Capitol and set off alarm bells that have been ringing for years on deaf ears. The ensuing media frenzy had everyone and his or her uncle trying to put their finger on how this could have happened, too often ending with the sigh, “This isn’t who we are.”

Amy and Juan Gonzalez, her co-anchor, brought together the journalists, sociologists, and historians to contextualize and deconstruct our arrival at this stunningly complex moment. They started off with Allan Nairn, a longtime contributor to Democracy Now who covered the horrendous killings in East Timor along with Amy, who immediately addressed the “This isn’twho we are” meme: “Well, it’s always been the case that the U.S. establishment was willing to use terror and kill civilians overseas, either to do things like seize oil, seize political power, or basically on whim. The presidency of George W. Bush was a prime example of that.”

He also reminded us that as we take on the white supremacists who stormed the Capitol we can't let the establishment use this, as Bush did after 9/11, to further erode our civil rights, first amendment rights, and rationalize even more money for a bloated military budget: "don’t let this Trumpist movement coopt the idea of rebellion. Rebellion against injustice is a good thing. The problem is that they — and the U.S. system is indeed unjust and murderous."

A few days later the Filipino author Walden Bellow, whom I’d never heard of (Counterrevolution: The Global Rise of the Far Right), succinctly laid out the struggle between the left and right over late state capitalism, or a dying neoliberalism on a global scale. After the global 2008 financial crisis, the Dems failed to take steps to control the banks, save homeowners, and bring outsourced industrial employment back to the U.S. So the neoliberalism model continued to exacerbate economic inequality, and with the eruption of Covid-19, conditions were ripe for the ultra right to exploit them with racism and “dog whistle-type Republican politics that started with Richard Nixon with the Southern strategy.” The white working class could no longer see the Democrats as the party that represented their interests, but only as elites who were giving away what was theirs to minorities: “And let me just say that with respect to Trumpism, you know, that Trump is as much a creature as the creator of that base. There’s this synergy that’s taking place there." While the left was able to mobilize under the campaign of Bernie Sanders, it was never able to sustain a mass movement as the establishment Dems took over, once again.

Finally, Yale historian Timothy Synder was interviewed about the article he wrote for the New York Times Magazine, “The American Abyss: A historian of fascism and political atrocity on Trump, the mob and what comes next.” The white supremacists who invaded the Capitol were emboldened by Trump, who when he speaks about voter fraud essentially means allowing African Americans to vote, and Ted Cruz, who compared what he was trying to do in 2021 with 1877, when Congress essentially initiated a century of Jim Crow, or American apartheid.

Snyder also laid out the make up of the Republican Party and where its future may lay. The largest group is the gamers, the “ones who work the system with the gerrymandering, with the dark money, with the voter suppression, who are in favor of the, quote-unquote, ‘democracy’ that we have in America now, the unfortunately very limited democracy we have, because they know how to work it.” A smaller fraction, the breakers, is represented by the likes of Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, “who have understood that one could actually come to power in the United States by entirely nondemocratic means, by way of the mob, by way of throwing an election and lying about it.” And the smallest group is constituted “an honorable few who believe in the rule of law and telling the truth.” Snyder thinks—hopes—that a coalition of the “gamers” and “honorable few” will take back the party. I’m not so sure.

I’ve been somewhat surprised that Amy hasn’t had either Glenn Greenwald or Matt Taibbi on her show in a while. Both are frequent Democracy Now guests who recently left their media organizations and joined the new platform Substack. Throughout the Capitol attack fallout their focus remained on where it’s been for the recent past: intense criticism of the Dems for aligning with the cancel culture movement, which they see as an abrogation of first amendment rights (Greenwald was a constitutional lawyer before he became a journalist) and the censorship of far right sites by big tech, which they see as a harbinger of indiscriminate censorship. I don’t know if their absence reflects a judgment by Democracy Now on their journalism or just that they don’t see this focus as their priority right now. I guess we’ll see what the future brings, in more ways than one.