Of the “52 Places To Go In 2024” chosen by the New York Times Sunday edition, I’ve been to exactly four: Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota because an old Antioch friend lives in Minneapolis (fabulous); Kansas City, Missouri because my cousins lived there when we were kids; the Yucatan Peninsula and Costa Rica, which I actually traveled to on real tourist trips via airplanes. I came close to the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve on trips to Mexico City and environs, and the Baaj NWAAVJO I’Tah Kukveni, Arizona when I hiked down the Grand Canyon, but I guess that doesn’t count.
I read through the entire list of places to go knowing full well I’d never go to any more of them. Not that I particularly want to go to some of them: Baltimore, Maryland; Almaty, Kazakhstan; El Salvador; Montgomery, Alabama; or Craters of the Moon, Idaho. I’m too old to go to New Zealand or Ireland or Iceland even if I’d still like to.
But reading through the descriptions several themes emerged. One, these were promoted as locations that provide a less “traveled” and “crowded” visit for tourists, and two, will bring much needed “jobs” and “investment” to the locals. These are the Catch-22s of vacation spreads like this one in the NYT: turn these less traveled places into more traveled places and make more local places dependent on tourism for economic development.
When I was young and poor, the only places Mark and I traveled to were ones where we knew someone and had a place to stay or could take a bus or train instead of a plane. This meant a lot of trips to Mexico: 24 hours on a bus to Mexico City; 24 hours on a bus to Guadalajara; train trips to Mazatlan; car trips to Guaymas; and trips to Puerto Vallarta, Acapulco, and Oaxaca because Mark’s parents were already there and paid for our hotels. When I was older and had a little more discretionary money—and after Mark died—I went twice to Tulum and once to Costa Rica. After the second visit to Tulum I decided I couldn’t be a tourist anymore, even though it was wonderful to swim in the ocean and eat tacos on the street and drink margaritas every night. The cartels were already in Cancun, the developers were already pushing Tulum residents into slums so they could build hotels and expensive houses, and the sea turtle preserve had to be closed down before tourist pollution killed them all.
While I was reading through this NYT “bucket” list, friends of mine were on a month’s long trip to Southeast Asia bagging another of their longtime bucket lists (they travel all over the world). I have to admit I skipped over all their Facebook posts of Hanoi and Laos and Phnom Penh, not because of envy–the thought of all those airplanes and hotels and restaurants and speaking foreign languages made me very tired—but because I found the privilege of it, just like I felt about Tulum, so appalling. When I’m spending all my writing time and online time bearing witness to the genocide in Gaza, I can’t understand why everyone else isn’t. This is probably not fair to my friends, but it’s fair to demand the world’s attention (right after I read the NYT article I read another essay a man about my age wrote talking about his anti-bucket list of staying home and enjoying ordinary life).
The International Court of Justice just issued a ruling ordering Israel to do everything in its power to prevent acts of genocide against Palestinians. However, they stopped short of mandating a ceasefire while ordering Israel to take actions including punishing those who incite violence against civilians and allowing more aid into the Gaza Strip. If enforced, which is unlikely (the U.S. will veto in the UN Security Council) this would result in a ceasefire. As I’ve quoted Vonnegut previously: And so it goes.
Monday, January 29, 2024
Thursday, January 4, 2024
The John Nichols I know and love
My friend John Nichols died at age 83 on November 27, 2023. This is what I wrote about him in La Jicarita.
Many people were friends with John Nichols. His Hispano neighbors who shared the acequias that served the Lower Ranchitos area where he first lived in Taos taught him the ins and outs of getting the water from the ditches to his fields, how to fix his roof or plaster the house, and argued with him about whose responsibility it was to keep the horses or sheep or dogs out of his garden and chicken coop. When the bureaucrats came to town to persuade Taoseños that a conservancy district to impound irrigation water was a good idea, John teamed up with his wonderful compadres to let the state engineer know that the people of Taos thought it was a bad idea, and in the battle over the Indian Camp Dam he made life-long friends of the farmers and acequia parciantes who valued his courage and writing skills.
Those writing skills, which had already produced two novels published in New York before he left for Taos, took the New Mexico Review, based in Santa Fe, to new levels of muckraking, as he exposed the travesties of the Vietnam War, the plight of the miners fired at the Questa molybdenum mine, LANL and nuclear warfare, and the battle against the Dam. As he wrote in I Got Mine: confessions of a midlist writer, “[I] absorbed more information about my town—its history, politics, poverty and personalities—and Southwest water wars, water law, and government chicanery that I could have ingested at a top-ranked university over thirty year of scholarly research.”
His love was fiction, however, and while his political activism never took a back seat, he wrote 13 novels over the course of his life. His first novel published after moving to Taos, The Milagro Beanfield War, never made it to the best seller list (John would say that was an over statement at best), it did become a local favorite, and he became a New Mexico celebrity. His fans became his friends. He faithfully answered mail from people he’d never met, often maintaining correspondence with them for decades. He knew everyone at the post office where he stopped every day to get his hundreds of letters that always arrived snail mail (he never had an internet account although late in life he got a tablet so he could go online and do research and read La Jicarita!).
When people came up to him on the street, he’s stop and chat for however long they wanted to talk. People called him on the phone, even if he didn’t know who they were, and he’d always have a conversation. When people showed up at his modest house on Valverde Street he’d let them in and they’d visit for hours. He supported the literary organization SOMOS with numerous readings and introductions to many other authors’ readings.
He maintained relationships with all his New York friends, both political and literary. They came to Taos to visit and go fishing, grouse hunting, climb mountains or sit around and smooze while playing music. For years, every Monday night, he played music with a group of friends (Rick from Brodsky’s Bookshop and others) complaining that they played too much Val Morrison instead of fifties rock ‘n roll like Rock Around the Clock.
John was my friend, too. We had a long history before we even met in person. When I was living in Albuquerque I wrote for the alternative newspaper Seer’s Catalog. John sent down political cartoons from Taos for the same radical rag.
While he was writing for the New Mexico Review I was writing for another alternative paper Coatamundi and freelance articles for magazines (by then I’d moved to Placitas and written an expose on what the real estate developers were doing to this tiny land grant community). When we’d finally had enough of Placitas gentrification, my family and I moved to El Valle, in 1992 and in 1996 started La Jicarita News, a journal of environmental politics. John became one of our biggest fans. We caught him at a meeting and took this picture.
When my co-editor and life partner, Mark Schiller, died of pancreatic cancer in 2010, John sent me a photo triptych of his beloved mountains surrounding the Williams Peak Valley, where we used to run into him hiking or snowshoeing (Mark and I cross country skied). We both loved our outdoor adventures, but John had skills way beyond our skiing and hiking ones: fly fishing the Rio Grande, grouse hunting in the Rio Chiquito watershed, photographing the amazing wildlife at the ponds on Taos Mesa (he published several books of his photos).
When I published my first book, Culture Clash: Environmental Politics in the New Mexico Forest Communities, John sent me a wonderful letter of congratulations. From then much of our work efforts were conjoined. When he read my next book, Unf*#!ing Believable, a collections of my blog posts, he wrote me a 65 page letter telling me he loved the book but more importantly that ““much of what touched me so deeply is that you and I have shared many similar experiences in life, and your recounting of these experiences really struck home and triggered so many similarities in my own life.” I read and critiqued his manuscript of I Got Mine; he went over every chapter of my ¡No Se Vend! Water as a Right of the Commons.” I published the memoir, Goodbye, Monique, of his parents’ short marriage and his birth before his mother died of endocarditis in 1940, the same disease John suffered from for years (Acequia Madre Press). He read my novel and returned it with dozens of yellow stickies that said either “I like this” or “this is terrible.” I never published it. He wrote me hundreds of other letters, supporting my political battles with the powers that be, sharing information about our families, celebrating the good and commiserating the bad.
During Covid we often spoke on the phone and if the weather was nice we’d meet at Baca Park and walk around the grounds or through the new riparian area to look for birds. On a last hike part way up the Williams Lake Trail John took this selfie of us.
It was a very difficult time for John, whose health issues kept him separated from almost everyone except his family. But he persevered and finished up organizing and labeling the rest of his files headed for the UNM Center for Southwest Research (all told, hundreds of boxes). I suppose I should give my letters from him to the archive but for now, I’ll keep them as as my friend.
Many of John’s friends know that he was a master at writing obituaries, or memorials. The combination of his warm heart, comic sensibility, and impeccable timing made them unforgettable. He delivered them when neighbors and Hispano friends died, in Spanish. He delivered them for friends and family back East. I got to hear them when he read them for our mutual friends Ron Gardner and Bill Whaley. We joked about him writing his own obituary because no one else could ever do it as well. I’ll end this tribute to John with the story of the one he wrote for Bill but failed to deliver, in November of 2021.
We were gathered at the Farm House Cafe. John had written “A Few Words About My Friend, Bill Whaley,” but when the time came for everyone to get up and deliver their reminiscences, John started feeling unwell, handed the pages he’d written to me, and went home. As I waited to stand in place for him, my stomach started to rumble and I knew what was about to happen. I’d previously eaten some bolete mushrooms a friend had included in a stew, even though the last time I’d eaten bolete mushrooms I’d vomited them up three hours later. It was now three hours from the mushroom stew so I ran to the bathroom, threw up everything, and went back out and read John’s memorial:
“I loved and admired Bill for his chutzpah, his arrogance, his intelligence, his lack of fear, his gentle and compassionate sides, his stupidity and his screw-ups, his angels and his devils, and his ability to recover and try again during his complicated, often hilarious, often self-destructive, yet also courageous and humane existence.”
With a little revision, John might well have written this for himself. We’ve all lost someone we considered one of our best friends, because that’s what he tried to be to everyone he knew.
Many people were friends with John Nichols. His Hispano neighbors who shared the acequias that served the Lower Ranchitos area where he first lived in Taos taught him the ins and outs of getting the water from the ditches to his fields, how to fix his roof or plaster the house, and argued with him about whose responsibility it was to keep the horses or sheep or dogs out of his garden and chicken coop. When the bureaucrats came to town to persuade Taoseños that a conservancy district to impound irrigation water was a good idea, John teamed up with his wonderful compadres to let the state engineer know that the people of Taos thought it was a bad idea, and in the battle over the Indian Camp Dam he made life-long friends of the farmers and acequia parciantes who valued his courage and writing skills.
Those writing skills, which had already produced two novels published in New York before he left for Taos, took the New Mexico Review, based in Santa Fe, to new levels of muckraking, as he exposed the travesties of the Vietnam War, the plight of the miners fired at the Questa molybdenum mine, LANL and nuclear warfare, and the battle against the Dam. As he wrote in I Got Mine: confessions of a midlist writer, “[I] absorbed more information about my town—its history, politics, poverty and personalities—and Southwest water wars, water law, and government chicanery that I could have ingested at a top-ranked university over thirty year of scholarly research.”
His love was fiction, however, and while his political activism never took a back seat, he wrote 13 novels over the course of his life. His first novel published after moving to Taos, The Milagro Beanfield War, never made it to the best seller list (John would say that was an over statement at best), it did become a local favorite, and he became a New Mexico celebrity. His fans became his friends. He faithfully answered mail from people he’d never met, often maintaining correspondence with them for decades. He knew everyone at the post office where he stopped every day to get his hundreds of letters that always arrived snail mail (he never had an internet account although late in life he got a tablet so he could go online and do research and read La Jicarita!).
He maintained relationships with all his New York friends, both political and literary. They came to Taos to visit and go fishing, grouse hunting, climb mountains or sit around and smooze while playing music. For years, every Monday night, he played music with a group of friends (Rick from Brodsky’s Bookshop and others) complaining that they played too much Val Morrison instead of fifties rock ‘n roll like Rock Around the Clock.
John was my friend, too. We had a long history before we even met in person. When I was living in Albuquerque I wrote for the alternative newspaper Seer’s Catalog. John sent down political cartoons from Taos for the same radical rag.
When I published my first book, Culture Clash: Environmental Politics in the New Mexico Forest Communities, John sent me a wonderful letter of congratulations. From then much of our work efforts were conjoined. When he read my next book, Unf*#!ing Believable, a collections of my blog posts, he wrote me a 65 page letter telling me he loved the book but more importantly that ““much of what touched me so deeply is that you and I have shared many similar experiences in life, and your recounting of these experiences really struck home and triggered so many similarities in my own life.” I read and critiqued his manuscript of I Got Mine; he went over every chapter of my ¡No Se Vend! Water as a Right of the Commons.” I published the memoir, Goodbye, Monique, of his parents’ short marriage and his birth before his mother died of endocarditis in 1940, the same disease John suffered from for years (Acequia Madre Press). He read my novel and returned it with dozens of yellow stickies that said either “I like this” or “this is terrible.” I never published it. He wrote me hundreds of other letters, supporting my political battles with the powers that be, sharing information about our families, celebrating the good and commiserating the bad.
During Covid we often spoke on the phone and if the weather was nice we’d meet at Baca Park and walk around the grounds or through the new riparian area to look for birds. On a last hike part way up the Williams Lake Trail John took this selfie of us.
Many of John’s friends know that he was a master at writing obituaries, or memorials. The combination of his warm heart, comic sensibility, and impeccable timing made them unforgettable. He delivered them when neighbors and Hispano friends died, in Spanish. He delivered them for friends and family back East. I got to hear them when he read them for our mutual friends Ron Gardner and Bill Whaley. We joked about him writing his own obituary because no one else could ever do it as well. I’ll end this tribute to John with the story of the one he wrote for Bill but failed to deliver, in November of 2021.
We were gathered at the Farm House Cafe. John had written “A Few Words About My Friend, Bill Whaley,” but when the time came for everyone to get up and deliver their reminiscences, John started feeling unwell, handed the pages he’d written to me, and went home. As I waited to stand in place for him, my stomach started to rumble and I knew what was about to happen. I’d previously eaten some bolete mushrooms a friend had included in a stew, even though the last time I’d eaten bolete mushrooms I’d vomited them up three hours later. It was now three hours from the mushroom stew so I ran to the bathroom, threw up everything, and went back out and read John’s memorial:
“I loved and admired Bill for his chutzpah, his arrogance, his intelligence, his lack of fear, his gentle and compassionate sides, his stupidity and his screw-ups, his angels and his devils, and his ability to recover and try again during his complicated, often hilarious, often self-destructive, yet also courageous and humane existence.”
With a little revision, John might well have written this for himself. We’ve all lost someone we considered one of our best friends, because that’s what he tried to be to everyone he knew.
Monday, January 1, 2024
A Horrible Year
Twenty twenty-three has been a horrible year. Other than during the Vietnam War or the invasion of Iraq I don’t remember feeling this much grief and anger at the United States and all who are complicit in our disastrous foreign policy. In the 70s, as the Vietnam War raged on, I was young and living with a college cohort who felt exactly as I did and who went with me—along with 500,000 others—to the 1969 Washington D.C. anti-war march. In the 1990s, I had Mark and another cohort of activists who raged with me at George Bush and organized into grassroots coalitions like Occupy Wallstreet.
Today, older, more infirm—which I will delve into a little later—and more constrained, I’m overwhelmed with outrage and helplessness at the genocide being perpetrated in Gaza. Mark isn’t here so I’ve had to transfer my angst to Jakob, who’s actually been to Israel and seen the apartheid state. Mark and I interviewed him in La Jicarita just before Mark died in 2010 and I reran the interview a few weeks ago. Jakob turned me on to all the Instagram sites covering the genocide—middleeasteye, Shaun King (who was just blocked by Meta), jewishvoiceforpeace—while I turned him onto podcasts—Useful Idiots, Jewish Currents On the Nose. Reading and listening to voices like Gideon Levy, the Israeli journalist for the Haaretz newspaper, Ilan Papé, Israeli historian, and Masha Gessen, Russian journalist, help keep me sane by validating the insanity of those perpetuating and defending Israel’s massacre of Gaza civilians and escalating murders in the West Bank.
Most of my friends and political allies also provide validation but there are those whose attention remains so focused on Trump when all I want to do is prosecute Biden for war crimes that I can’t really have a conversation with them. This fixation with Trump has led us down many rabbit holes—Russiagate and Hunter Biden—and diverted our attention from the depravities of the Democratic Party, but none compares to what Biden is doing now in the Middle East (and on the Mexican border). Independent journalist and filmmaker John Pilger, who just died, had this to say about the failures of the left: “The obsession with Trump the man—not Trump as a symptom and caricature of an enduring system—beckons great danger for all of us.”
I was reminded today when reading Mary Gaitskill’s “Out of It” column on Substack about how “people of her generation” grew up as defenders of Israel—she’s only a few years younger than me—that I’ve always lived in a Jewish cultural and secular bubble where Israel wasn’t even on the radar. My parents sent us to the Unitarian Church where all the kids in LRY—liberal religious youth—were also Jewish and provided my political, musical, and sexual awakening. My mother-in-law, who lost her extended family in the Holocaust, referred to Israeli prime ministers as Nazis. The only deviation I recall was reading Leon Uris’s Exodus, which was published in 1958; I I was around 12 when I read it. I was completely enthralled and had to ask my mother to hide the book until I finished my homework (geez, what a studious little kid I was). But at least that wasn’t as bad as Gaitskill’s admission that she was enraptured of the Six Day War at 13.
To end this year’s tale of horror I’ll try to be brief about my infirmities. After a four-year remission my interstitial cystitis returned, which required more trips to the urogynecology center at UNM Hospital for treatments that didn’t work. While there, I was diagnosed with pudendal nerve entrapment, which is a condition that makes sitting a problem. An hour in the car is painful; anything more than that is tortuous. I had to drive two hours to the hospital in Albuquerque for treatments that also didn’t work. I’m waiting for the treatment of last resort: botox, which I learned is used for all kinds of conditions, including migraine headaches. Then six months ago my right foot began to hurt and after numerous trips to a foot doctor, six weeks in an orthopedic boot, physical therapy, and a cortisone shot it’s even worse now. That’s what it took to get to an MRI, coming up in a week. And last but not least, my right knee, which has been deteriorating for a while, took a decided turn for the worse and walking Paco every morning is challenging. Will this be another descent into the medical industrial complex of getting from the primary doc to the MRI that takes at least six months?
On our walk this morning Paco and I ran into neighbors taking a day trip to escape a year similar to mine. We commiserated that yes, it had been a horrible year. They expressed hope for 2024. I’m afraid that I, along with the world, am on a declining path where my own descent won’t make much of a difference but that of the world will bring a greater amount of suffering to a greater amount of people. That’s a tough bargain for hope.
Today, older, more infirm—which I will delve into a little later—and more constrained, I’m overwhelmed with outrage and helplessness at the genocide being perpetrated in Gaza. Mark isn’t here so I’ve had to transfer my angst to Jakob, who’s actually been to Israel and seen the apartheid state. Mark and I interviewed him in La Jicarita just before Mark died in 2010 and I reran the interview a few weeks ago. Jakob turned me on to all the Instagram sites covering the genocide—middleeasteye, Shaun King (who was just blocked by Meta), jewishvoiceforpeace—while I turned him onto podcasts—Useful Idiots, Jewish Currents On the Nose. Reading and listening to voices like Gideon Levy, the Israeli journalist for the Haaretz newspaper, Ilan Papé, Israeli historian, and Masha Gessen, Russian journalist, help keep me sane by validating the insanity of those perpetuating and defending Israel’s massacre of Gaza civilians and escalating murders in the West Bank.
Most of my friends and political allies also provide validation but there are those whose attention remains so focused on Trump when all I want to do is prosecute Biden for war crimes that I can’t really have a conversation with them. This fixation with Trump has led us down many rabbit holes—Russiagate and Hunter Biden—and diverted our attention from the depravities of the Democratic Party, but none compares to what Biden is doing now in the Middle East (and on the Mexican border). Independent journalist and filmmaker John Pilger, who just died, had this to say about the failures of the left: “The obsession with Trump the man—not Trump as a symptom and caricature of an enduring system—beckons great danger for all of us.”
I was reminded today when reading Mary Gaitskill’s “Out of It” column on Substack about how “people of her generation” grew up as defenders of Israel—she’s only a few years younger than me—that I’ve always lived in a Jewish cultural and secular bubble where Israel wasn’t even on the radar. My parents sent us to the Unitarian Church where all the kids in LRY—liberal religious youth—were also Jewish and provided my political, musical, and sexual awakening. My mother-in-law, who lost her extended family in the Holocaust, referred to Israeli prime ministers as Nazis. The only deviation I recall was reading Leon Uris’s Exodus, which was published in 1958; I I was around 12 when I read it. I was completely enthralled and had to ask my mother to hide the book until I finished my homework (geez, what a studious little kid I was). But at least that wasn’t as bad as Gaitskill’s admission that she was enraptured of the Six Day War at 13.
To end this year’s tale of horror I’ll try to be brief about my infirmities. After a four-year remission my interstitial cystitis returned, which required more trips to the urogynecology center at UNM Hospital for treatments that didn’t work. While there, I was diagnosed with pudendal nerve entrapment, which is a condition that makes sitting a problem. An hour in the car is painful; anything more than that is tortuous. I had to drive two hours to the hospital in Albuquerque for treatments that also didn’t work. I’m waiting for the treatment of last resort: botox, which I learned is used for all kinds of conditions, including migraine headaches. Then six months ago my right foot began to hurt and after numerous trips to a foot doctor, six weeks in an orthopedic boot, physical therapy, and a cortisone shot it’s even worse now. That’s what it took to get to an MRI, coming up in a week. And last but not least, my right knee, which has been deteriorating for a while, took a decided turn for the worse and walking Paco every morning is challenging. Will this be another descent into the medical industrial complex of getting from the primary doc to the MRI that takes at least six months?
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