It’s been a completely crazy few days, weather wise. On Saturday (March 23) we welcomed a warm day as our final ski with the grandkids at Sipapu. We’d had too many cold, windy, blizzardy days during their lessons at the Santa Fe Ski Basin so we liked the slushy snow and unzipped jackets. For most of the day we skied together: Jakob in the lead on his teles; Lulu next with her parallel turns; Marcos, who for the first time all year managed some parallel turns; Susu, who’s still in a wedge but can navigate almost anything in it; Yusuf, who’s only in Kindergarten, in his enormous wedge barreling down the slope in total abandonment; and finally me, ostensibly at the tail end to round us safely up but in reality so I can slowly wind down the mountain without a fall (I have a hard time getting up).
Then the snow came—for days. By Monday we’d had eight inches in El Valle—three feet at Taos and Santa Fe ski areas—but I fought my way out to see the orthopedic doc in Española about my knee. Been skiing and walking with a fucked-up knee all winter and finally decided to see what’s going on. I’m scheduled for an MRI and he suspects it’s the knee cap that can maybe be treated with a special lubricating fluid to soften the pressure. If not, surgery.
But I digress. The roads were clear as the temperatures were above freezing. But it kept snowing, off and on, all Monday night into Tuesday, when it snowed for 15 minutes, the sun came out, it snowed again for a half hour, the sun came out again, it snowed again, a pattern that kept up all day. When the sun came out my house was warm: I have six huge, passive solar windows downstairs and six more upstairs. When it snowed, I poked the fire to take off the chill. This went on and on and on, making a fire, letting it go out, taking off my sweater, putting it back on, such a conundrum.
Same situation the next day except without the snow, just clouds. Fire going, fire out, over heated, chilled. As April approaches, my solar gain vanishes as the sun rises in the sky so I’ll just be in the chill phase, which means I’ll keep a low fire burning. Every year I say I’m going to go somewhere warm and protected during April to escape New Mexico’s ever present springtime wind and every year I end up in El Valle, pruning my trees, planting seedlings, thinking about summer. Now with my knee issue, I’m obviously going nowhere this April. But at least we had a good winter and we’ll have irrigation water and maybe I’ll have fruit (see “Springtime in New Mexico” —2013—in the first iteration of Unf*#!ing Believable to see what a winter spring was like with no winter snow and no spring fruit).
I’d fantasized about a camping trip down to the Gila, which in most years is warm enough in April for such an excursion. I’d take my camper down to the hot springs, where years ago we backpacked in with the kids. This time I’d stay in the campground and enjoy the developed springs. Then I’d drive around to the west side of the wilderness and camp by the catwalk that takes you over falling water and steep canyons. I’d drive back north via Pie Town and Datil and see the grandkids in Burque before heading home. Even if I didn’t have a fucked-up knee this will remain a fantasy because more than an hour in the car is excruciatingly painful. I have this condition called pudendal nerve entrapment that makes sitting for any length of time a problem. As far as I’ve been able to figure out there’s no cure (after many trips to the university hospital for treatments that didn’t work).
So that’s the story this spring. I’d just as soon it was May.
Saturday, March 30, 2024
Monday, January 29, 2024
To Go or Not to Go, Not Really a Question Anymore
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.
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.
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?
Friday, November 17, 2023
Who Are These People?
In these heightened times of political turmoil—local, national, and global—two issues are painfully revelatory of how broken our political systems are: abortion and Israel/Palestine. The first, the anti-abortion movement, the front runner in the culture wars, and the second, the real war of killing Palestinians, are imposed by an American government that rules that reflects the will of institutional systems supported by the bottom line: money.
Who are these people sitting on the Supreme Court that overturned Roe v. Wade, the right to abortion? Who are these six people who voted to deny a woman the right to have purchase over her own body? The descriptions that come quickly to mind are: • They’re rich. They belong to the 1 percent. The have a guaranteed income for life. They use their positions on the court to accumulate more money from other rich people and corporations. • They’re mostly white. The only one who isn’t wants to be white. • They’re mostly men. • They’re mostly Catholic.
Who are these people sitting in Congress who want to send $14 billion more dollars to Israel to buy weapons to kill Palestinians? Other than the 18 U.S. Representatives, mostly women of color, who signed a Ceasefire Resolution for Gaza, these descriptions come quickly to mind: • They’re mostly rich. You have to be rich to run for Congress unless you have some secret PAC money that makes you rich by proxy. • They’re mostly white. • They’re mostly men. • There are way too many evangelical Christians for comfort, especially the guy the Republicans just elected as Speaker of the House.
So why do these people rule and legislate against women and Palestinians when more than half the country is comprised of women and over half the country supports a Ceasefire in Palestine? The Supreme Court six are just figureheads, doing the will of the minority who are desperate to opt out of modernity (equal rights, reproductive rights, economic equality, secularism, multiculturalism). The only way for them to do that is make sure the court recognizes corporations are people—Citizens United—so corporate money can rule against all these things that terrify them. With a totally dysfunctional Congress that fails to pass needed legislation to protect our rights, the Court is able to take them away.
The people in Congress responsible for this dysfunction represent the lobbyists of the military industrial complex and the Jewish right. Why would they vote for a Ceasefire and jeopardize all those campaign funds from Lockheed Martin and AIPAC? As Ali Abunimah says in his book, One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse: “Today, Israel remains a taboo subject and any politician who wishes to see his or her career flourish knows better than to speak out against its policies. Hilary Clinton learned that lesson the hard way. Castigated as first lady for expressing sentiments in favor of a Palestinian state, she has become one of the leading pro-Israeli hawks as a U.S. senator from New York.” Abunimah’s book was published in 2006. Just go on Instagram or X to see Clinton’s support of Israel’s massacre in Gaza in 2023.
It doesn’t matter who’s in the White House in terms of the power of these systems. Someone like Trump may do more short-term damage than someone like Biden, but women are still second-class citizens and the blood on their hands from immigrant children or babies in Palestine is the same color.
Who are these people sitting on the Supreme Court that overturned Roe v. Wade, the right to abortion? Who are these six people who voted to deny a woman the right to have purchase over her own body? The descriptions that come quickly to mind are: • They’re rich. They belong to the 1 percent. The have a guaranteed income for life. They use their positions on the court to accumulate more money from other rich people and corporations. • They’re mostly white. The only one who isn’t wants to be white. • They’re mostly men. • They’re mostly Catholic.
Who are these people sitting in Congress who want to send $14 billion more dollars to Israel to buy weapons to kill Palestinians? Other than the 18 U.S. Representatives, mostly women of color, who signed a Ceasefire Resolution for Gaza, these descriptions come quickly to mind: • They’re mostly rich. You have to be rich to run for Congress unless you have some secret PAC money that makes you rich by proxy. • They’re mostly white. • They’re mostly men. • There are way too many evangelical Christians for comfort, especially the guy the Republicans just elected as Speaker of the House.
So why do these people rule and legislate against women and Palestinians when more than half the country is comprised of women and over half the country supports a Ceasefire in Palestine? The Supreme Court six are just figureheads, doing the will of the minority who are desperate to opt out of modernity (equal rights, reproductive rights, economic equality, secularism, multiculturalism). The only way for them to do that is make sure the court recognizes corporations are people—Citizens United—so corporate money can rule against all these things that terrify them. With a totally dysfunctional Congress that fails to pass needed legislation to protect our rights, the Court is able to take them away.
The people in Congress responsible for this dysfunction represent the lobbyists of the military industrial complex and the Jewish right. Why would they vote for a Ceasefire and jeopardize all those campaign funds from Lockheed Martin and AIPAC? As Ali Abunimah says in his book, One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse: “Today, Israel remains a taboo subject and any politician who wishes to see his or her career flourish knows better than to speak out against its policies. Hilary Clinton learned that lesson the hard way. Castigated as first lady for expressing sentiments in favor of a Palestinian state, she has become one of the leading pro-Israeli hawks as a U.S. senator from New York.” Abunimah’s book was published in 2006. Just go on Instagram or X to see Clinton’s support of Israel’s massacre in Gaza in 2023.
It doesn’t matter who’s in the White House in terms of the power of these systems. Someone like Trump may do more short-term damage than someone like Biden, but women are still second-class citizens and the blood on their hands from immigrant children or babies in Palestine is the same color.
Friday, November 3, 2023
Not in my name but on my conscience
The Ceasefire Now movement is urging everyone to write their congressional representatives and ask them to either sign on to House Resolution 786 calling for an immediate cease fire in Palestine or draft a similar resolution in the Senate.
I wrote Representative Teresa Leger Fernandez, a Democrat from Las Vegas who thinks of herself as a progressive, asking her to sign the house resolution. She (her office) wrote me back a letter full of pablum about how horrible war is, that Israel has the right to defend itself, and that President Biden is doing everything he can to provide needed supplies to the Palestinians at the Rafah crossing.
This is what I wrote back: “Your response to my letter is quite pathetic. As an American Jew and a Mexican American, you and I share the heritage of being both a victim and a perpetrator. By not agreeing to sign the House Resolution 786 you’ve chosen the perpetrator side with your unequivocal support of Israel. As a Jew, I stand against Israel as the perpetrator of apartheid and genocide. Without any acknowledgment of the history of how the Zionist movement began and turned Israel into the authoritarian, anti-democratic, nationalistic state it is now, your position is based on propaganda and lies. I’m enclosing this letter that was written to the magazine Consortium News, one of the few American publications that tries to tell the truth in a distorted corporate media world that regurgitates the American government’s position on Israeli.”
The letter I sent her was by two people named Ace Thelin and Forest Knolls. I have no idea who they are but the reason their letter in Consortium News impressed me is that they focused on the fact that Israel is the creation of western imperialism and settler colonialism, just like our own country, the good old USA. The same Manifest Destiny that white Europeans imposed on Indigenous and Mexican peoples to “bring civilization” to them is exactly what the Zionists brought to Palestine, to the people the Israeli government has lately been referring to as “human animals.”
It didn’t have to be this way. I recently read Amos Oz’s memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness, about his upbringing in the city of Jerusalem in the era of the dissolution of Mandatory Palestine and the beginning of the State of Israel (his fiction book, Judas, also explores these themes). Oz’s family had emigrated to Palestine to escape Russian oppression and was living in close quarters with its neighboring Arabs. Many of the emigrant Jews were not Zionists: they were socialists, secularists, intellectuals, working poor, and a-political refugees who just wanted to live a quiet life. Although Zionism was actually founded by both secular and religious Jews, under the political machinations of Britain and the western powers, once the State of Israel became a reality, Zionism became an ideology, a national homeland with a national identity that to no one’s surprise is becoming a fundamentalist theocracy. And we know what happens when religious fundamentalism defines who is worthy and who isn’t: ethnic cleansing. Itamar Ben-Gvir, now the Israeli Security Minister was “convicted of incitement to racism, interfering with a police officer performing his duty, and support for a terrorist organization, Meir Kahane’s Kach Movement (he has also successfully sued the state for hundreds of thousands of shekels in compensation for wrongful accusations). Due to these convictions, the IDF thought it too dangerous to draft him when he was eighteen.”
And so the slaughter continues and the dangers of a full blown regional war increase daily. As a ground invasion impends, more terrorists will rise from the ashes. Benjamin Netanyahu and Joe Biden will share that legacy. And bear (remember the hug?) blood on their hands. Not in my name but on my conscience.
I wrote Representative Teresa Leger Fernandez, a Democrat from Las Vegas who thinks of herself as a progressive, asking her to sign the house resolution. She (her office) wrote me back a letter full of pablum about how horrible war is, that Israel has the right to defend itself, and that President Biden is doing everything he can to provide needed supplies to the Palestinians at the Rafah crossing.
This is what I wrote back: “Your response to my letter is quite pathetic. As an American Jew and a Mexican American, you and I share the heritage of being both a victim and a perpetrator. By not agreeing to sign the House Resolution 786 you’ve chosen the perpetrator side with your unequivocal support of Israel. As a Jew, I stand against Israel as the perpetrator of apartheid and genocide. Without any acknowledgment of the history of how the Zionist movement began and turned Israel into the authoritarian, anti-democratic, nationalistic state it is now, your position is based on propaganda and lies. I’m enclosing this letter that was written to the magazine Consortium News, one of the few American publications that tries to tell the truth in a distorted corporate media world that regurgitates the American government’s position on Israeli.”
The letter I sent her was by two people named Ace Thelin and Forest Knolls. I have no idea who they are but the reason their letter in Consortium News impressed me is that they focused on the fact that Israel is the creation of western imperialism and settler colonialism, just like our own country, the good old USA. The same Manifest Destiny that white Europeans imposed on Indigenous and Mexican peoples to “bring civilization” to them is exactly what the Zionists brought to Palestine, to the people the Israeli government has lately been referring to as “human animals.”
It didn’t have to be this way. I recently read Amos Oz’s memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness, about his upbringing in the city of Jerusalem in the era of the dissolution of Mandatory Palestine and the beginning of the State of Israel (his fiction book, Judas, also explores these themes). Oz’s family had emigrated to Palestine to escape Russian oppression and was living in close quarters with its neighboring Arabs. Many of the emigrant Jews were not Zionists: they were socialists, secularists, intellectuals, working poor, and a-political refugees who just wanted to live a quiet life. Although Zionism was actually founded by both secular and religious Jews, under the political machinations of Britain and the western powers, once the State of Israel became a reality, Zionism became an ideology, a national homeland with a national identity that to no one’s surprise is becoming a fundamentalist theocracy. And we know what happens when religious fundamentalism defines who is worthy and who isn’t: ethnic cleansing. Itamar Ben-Gvir, now the Israeli Security Minister was “convicted of incitement to racism, interfering with a police officer performing his duty, and support for a terrorist organization, Meir Kahane’s Kach Movement (he has also successfully sued the state for hundreds of thousands of shekels in compensation for wrongful accusations). Due to these convictions, the IDF thought it too dangerous to draft him when he was eighteen.”
Monday, September 18, 2023
The El Valle Fire
This is what I wrote in my June 4, 2022 blog post:
“El Valle spent two days on the Ready list for the Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire. The evacuation protocol goes like this; Ready, think about what you want to get out of your house if you have to leave; Set, put your papers, electronics, photo albums, and animal kennels if you have them by the door or in the car and be ready to Go, which means, get the hell out of Dodge. Then a cold front moved in, it snowed on the mountain peaks, and a few drops of rain fell in the valleys. The Taos County Sheriff took us off the Ready list and put the neighboring villages closer to the fire on Set instead of Go (through the grapevine I heard that not many of them had heeded “Go” and left).
"We dodged a (small “d” this time) bullet this time but it could just as easily been us, on the west side of the Sangre de Cristos instead of the east side in Mora and Guadalupita and Rociada and Chacon. Our ranger district could have lit a prescribed burn that got away in the very forest restoration project I’ve been working on for three years. Someone could have let a campfire get out of hand up in Las Trampas or Santa Barbara Canyon. Someone else could have thrown a cigarette out the window onto dry roadside grass.”
On Friday, September 8, 2023 it was us, although everyone was saying we again “dodged a bullet” because our houses didn’t burn, just the surrounding forest. In an ironic twist of fate someone set ablaze the large thinning project above El Valle on the ridge that separates us from Las Trampas. The slash piles were still on the ground. After the smoke cleared and I could see the thinned acres up on the ridge it looked like it had snowed: the piles were white ash. The next day, when the rains came, the piles were black.
It was a crazy three days. First, the fire erupted midday on Friday with huge billows of black smoke scaring the shit out of everyone. I was in Taos when my neighbor Marty called telling me El Valle was on fire. She was on her way home from Española. Whoever got there first would get Paco, my dog. Forty-five minutes later, in Peñasco, the state cops at the road block told me no one was allowed on SH 76, the highway you have to travel to access the forest road into El Valle. I yelled and argued that I had to get my dog. I called 911: “Obey the cops.”
No one got through this road block from Peñasco but somehow Marty got through from the other direction, got her animals, and stopped for Paco. He wasn’t there. Meanwhile, I was at the Sugar Nymphs Bistro in Peñasco using their Wi-Fi to talk to Marty and my other neighbors the Buechleys, who were in El Valle and got to Paco first. They took him to Ojo Sarco where they would shelter.
Along with other locked out El Valle neighbors, also using Sugar Nymphs Wi-Fi, we were constantly on our phones, talking to other neighbors, finding out who was in and who was out, telling our families that El Valle was burning, and fielding calls from other friends offering houses and help. I slept at the Sugar Nymphs house where Kai offered me some pot to try to sleep (no Xanax in my purse, my only possession). Instead of sleep I hallucinated for two hours on only two tokes. Marijuana has never been my drug of choice.
Early Saturday morning I got two texts: “We got into El Valle.” I threw on my clothes, left a note for Kai and Ki, and raced home. No one was manning the Road Closed signs. The helicopters and slurry planes were in full force: hundreds of water drops over burning trees with slurry laid across wide swaths of smoke. Those of us who made it back in packed up all the stuff we weren’t able to pack on Friday and waited to see if they (the county sheriff or state police) were going to try to throw us out. Once again they closed the El Valle Road but they didn't make us leave.
Then the rains came. It hadn’t rained all of July and August, our monsoon season. Several drenching rains put out all but the most resistant, deeply embedded embers that kept roots and rocks hot as hell. Dozens of fire fighters combed the acres, squelching the smokes, strengthening the natural boundaries that corralled the fire between the two villages.
It’s now a week later. The crews are still here, remediating the bulldozer lines that had to be laid at each end of the village, chipping all the trees they cut to create the fuel breaks, fixing fences, once more passing through the burned acres, just in case. We finally got our mail, a week after the road closure sign went up; we have to have a talk with the mailman, who unlike the UPS and Express drivers who barreled through, obeyed the admonition. I’m walking through all the detritus of the fire, measuring where it burned hottest, where it skipped over, where it validated other thinned acres accomplished by home owners with agency help. Once the survivor euphoria wears off there will no doubt be lambasting from thinning deniers—"let nature take its course”—or the village crank whose private lands across the river burned. Compared with what happened a year ago not so far away, I say, let’s rejoice and give everyone a pat on the back before we descend into dissecting what happened and why.
"We dodged a (small “d” this time) bullet this time but it could just as easily been us, on the west side of the Sangre de Cristos instead of the east side in Mora and Guadalupita and Rociada and Chacon. Our ranger district could have lit a prescribed burn that got away in the very forest restoration project I’ve been working on for three years. Someone could have let a campfire get out of hand up in Las Trampas or Santa Barbara Canyon. Someone else could have thrown a cigarette out the window onto dry roadside grass.”
On Friday, September 8, 2023 it was us, although everyone was saying we again “dodged a bullet” because our houses didn’t burn, just the surrounding forest. In an ironic twist of fate someone set ablaze the large thinning project above El Valle on the ridge that separates us from Las Trampas. The slash piles were still on the ground. After the smoke cleared and I could see the thinned acres up on the ridge it looked like it had snowed: the piles were white ash. The next day, when the rains came, the piles were black.
It was a crazy three days. First, the fire erupted midday on Friday with huge billows of black smoke scaring the shit out of everyone. I was in Taos when my neighbor Marty called telling me El Valle was on fire. She was on her way home from Española. Whoever got there first would get Paco, my dog. Forty-five minutes later, in Peñasco, the state cops at the road block told me no one was allowed on SH 76, the highway you have to travel to access the forest road into El Valle. I yelled and argued that I had to get my dog. I called 911: “Obey the cops.”
Along with other locked out El Valle neighbors, also using Sugar Nymphs Wi-Fi, we were constantly on our phones, talking to other neighbors, finding out who was in and who was out, telling our families that El Valle was burning, and fielding calls from other friends offering houses and help. I slept at the Sugar Nymphs house where Kai offered me some pot to try to sleep (no Xanax in my purse, my only possession). Instead of sleep I hallucinated for two hours on only two tokes. Marijuana has never been my drug of choice.
Early Saturday morning I got two texts: “We got into El Valle.” I threw on my clothes, left a note for Kai and Ki, and raced home. No one was manning the Road Closed signs. The helicopters and slurry planes were in full force: hundreds of water drops over burning trees with slurry laid across wide swaths of smoke. Those of us who made it back in packed up all the stuff we weren’t able to pack on Friday and waited to see if they (the county sheriff or state police) were going to try to throw us out. Once again they closed the El Valle Road but they didn't make us leave.
It’s now a week later. The crews are still here, remediating the bulldozer lines that had to be laid at each end of the village, chipping all the trees they cut to create the fuel breaks, fixing fences, once more passing through the burned acres, just in case. We finally got our mail, a week after the road closure sign went up; we have to have a talk with the mailman, who unlike the UPS and Express drivers who barreled through, obeyed the admonition. I’m walking through all the detritus of the fire, measuring where it burned hottest, where it skipped over, where it validated other thinned acres accomplished by home owners with agency help. Once the survivor euphoria wears off there will no doubt be lambasting from thinning deniers—"let nature take its course”—or the village crank whose private lands across the river burned. Compared with what happened a year ago not so far away, I say, let’s rejoice and give everyone a pat on the back before we descend into dissecting what happened and why.
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