Developers and Designers

When Santa Fe homeboy Tom Ford decided to build a monster house on top of a hill in Santa Fe, a hill that had already caused a ruckus between the city and the previous owners when they tried to build a different monster house, the powers that be rolled over and died. I guess Tom’s rationale, that he had to have a house big enough for his whole family to stay over, pulled at the heartstrings of the city councilors. They asked him to nip and tuck a little, here and there, which he graciously did, being the consummate designer that he is.

Tom Ford is the embodiment of two of the world’s worst professions: developers and fashion designers. Technically, he’s not a developer, he only hires them. His wealth underwrites their mad desires to build 15,000 square-foot what—mansions? manors? monstrosities? —you can’t really call them houses, that are the repositories of conspicuous consumption, from their Jacuzzis and indoor swimming pools to their stainless steel refrigerators and Wolf stoves. The ones who build mansions for clients like Tom Ford probably think they’re creating works of art. The ones who buy up vacant land and then subdivide it into gated communities so they can build many mansions at one time probably think they’re the engines that drive the economic machine. The Santa Fe city fathers (city fathers everywhere, actually) certainly think they are. The bottom line is always that without the construction industry the economy of the city will crash: not only will the workers be laid off, but all the lumber stores, the paint stores, the hardware stores, the glass stores, the plumbing supply stores, the electrical supply stores, the fixture stores, the appliance stores, ad nauseam, will go bankrupt. It’s as if nobody else already lives in the city and hires workers to restore, upgrade, and add onto houses already here and buys all the necessary stuff to do so at the lumber store, the paint store, hardware store, etc. There is no understanding that there is a difference between economic development and economic growth, that development means continued urban sprawl and expanded markets that eventually degrade the quality of city life. Managed growth is finding ways to enhance the opportunities for workers who want to increase their skill levels or find new jobs that contribute to the well-being of the communities. Sustainability is finding ways to create neighborhoods that allow people to work and shop near home and be less reliant on their cars, roads, and strip malls.

But who cares about all that? Certainly not Tom Ford. He only lives here part of the year anyway, and other than attending a city council meeting to defend his property wouldn’t be caught dead at a community meeting to discuss why the State Engineer’s Office is allowing the county to transfer almost 2,000 acre feet of water rights from Taos County to underwrite develop in the Pojoaque Valley (but that’s another story, saved for later). He’s too busy designing the clothes for all the other Santa Fe second home owners who only fly in to attend the opera or chamber music series and then jet back to their penthouses (those monstrosities actually have a designated name) on Fifth Avenue. Have you ever watched a New York or Paris fashion show on TV and seen what these guys like Tom Ford think women should wear? It’s enough to make you anorexic from throwing up. Not only would the majority of women in this country not be caught dead in these get-ups, I can’t imagine where the Fifth Avenue matrons actually wear this stuff. Actually, they don’t even wear it to the Santa Fe Opera, where the favorite mode of attire is tight-fitting jeans and sequined tank tops. Do they wear it to the grocery store to buy foi gras? Do they wear it to their toddlers’ $60,000 a year pre-schools when they go to pick them up (or do only chauffeurs do that?) Do they wear it to cocktail parties where they talk about bond trading and learning Spanish so they can communicate with their Salvadoran maid? I guess they must wear it to MOMA for openings. After all, it’s art too, que no? Jackson Pollack must be rolling over in his grave.

Solution: Turn Tom Ford’s business into a co-op, where the people who want to wear his clothes have to work in his sweatshops making them.

Los Alamos National Laboratory

Every time our (former) illustrious senator Pete Domenici is quoted in the newspaper or appears on TV I am reminded of his legacy: Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), where the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were developed and which today continues to poison our land, water, bodies and minds. Everyone knows this, including Domenici, but believes that our economy is so entrenched in LANL that any cutbacks or movement away from arms production would result in statewide economic collapse. (He finally decided not to run for re-election in 2008 because of a brain disease.)

What they fail to acknowledge, however, is that our economy is already collapsed for everyone except the few hundred LANL scientists who live on “the hill” and get paid big bucks to pollute our lives and endanger the world. The rest of New Mexico – particularly northern New Mexico – continues to garner all kinds of claim to fame: highest teen age pregnancy rates; highest per capita heroin overdoses; highest per capita alcohol related deaths; highest poverty rates; worst paid teachers; etc., etc. An announcement by the Lab, after it renewed its management contract with the University of California and Bechtel, is illustrative of the disparity it helps engender. Of the new 20 division managers named under a new administrator, not one has a Spanish surname. The Hispano people of northern New Mexico, who are the majority population, are LANL lackeys: they are the technicians, if they’re lucky, and the grunt workers, if they’re not. Two of my neighbors in the tiny village of El Valle get up every morning at five o’clock to drive the hour and a half to the lab where they are outside maintenance workers, freezing their butts off in the winter and sweating in the overgrown forests they thin all summer.

The rest of us live with the consequences. What those consequences are became abundantly clear during the Cerro Grande fire in 2000. What started as a forest fire in the neighboring Bandelier National Monument (actually a prescribed burn that got out of control), the fire ignited the tinder dry, overgrown ponderosa pine forests that surround the town of Los Alamos, home to the Lab. The Los Alamos site, formally Hispano land grant settlements and Native American hunting grounds on the Pajarito Plateau in the Jemez Mountains, was requisitioned by the federal government during World War II to develop the bomb in relative obscurity. During the cold war, the town of Los Alamos grew up to support the burgeoning bomb machine that ultimately became Los Alamos National Laboratory. Hastily constructed barracks provided instant housing for the scientists and their support crew (although most of the workers continue to live in the valleys surrounding the Lab in their traditional communities). Over the years, more suburban style housing became available, but was primarily frame and flimsy. When the Cerro Grande fire roared through town, it destroyed over 400 of these houses and apartments and then began burning lab facilities, storage pits, and contaminated canyons. Directly downwind, in El Valle and neighboring villages, the sky darkened and irradiated ash fell on our houses and fields. Those who could afford to leave fled: Mark took our son to Colorado to stay at my sister’s while I remained at home to take care of the animals, closing myself into the house as much as possible. Communities like Chimayo suffered under a constant cloud of smoke and many folks had to leave for weeks in order to breathe.

While the Cerro Grande fire brought the dangers of the lab literally into our homes and yards, we’ve all known for years that the Department of Energy has never enforced adequate protections. Radioactive waste has been dumped into canyons, contaminating groundwater and vegetation. Open incinerators have sent radioactivity into the air for us to breathe. For the past several years the Lab has been constantly in the news, as workers have been accused of security lapses, secret files have disappeared, funds have been misappropriated, worker morale has sunk to a new low, and the disparity of pay has been exposed. To address all these concerns, the Department of Energy renewed the lab’s management contract with the University of California, in partnership with the private weapons manufacturer Bechtel to make sure that these problems will continue to be swept under the carpet with corporate efficiency. Under this management, the Lab has been given the go ahead to start producing plutonium triggers (although it remains to be seen how many will be built) for nuclear bombs, work formerly done at Rocky Flats in Colorado, which was shut down and declared a Superfund site because of the contamination this work produced.

I often think that all of us who are activists involved in the many struggles we deal with in New Mexico—poverty, immigrant rights, resource protection, land grants, acequia advocacy—should probably all refocus our energies to shut-down the Lab. It is our most fundamental problem and the source of worldwide grief and suffering. It is an abomination.

Solution: Prohibit any weapons research and development and dedicate the Lab to environmental remediation and alternative energy development.

About This Blog

It was November 17, 2005 and I sat watching the news about the debate in the U.S. Congress over torture in a state of shock. I always knew the American government trained others to torture at the School of the Americas, and that the CIA had secret prisons all over the world. I knew, as Naomi Klein says in her book, The Shock Doctrine, “Just as ecologists define ecosystems by the presence of certain ‘indicator species’ of plants and birds, torture is an indicator species of a regime that is engaged in a deeply anti-democratic project, even if that regime happens to have come to power through elections.” But the fact that there was a public discussion on national network news about whether the CIA should be exempt from the Geneva Convention rules of prohibition was more than I could process.

After I cried awhile, I went over to lower the curtains and discovered, on our tomato plant sunning in the south window, a perfect tomato: round, bright red, barely soft to the touch, the repository of everything we deem beautiful and “good” in our universe. The dialectic of this tomato’s relationship to torture expresses the dilemma of our daily lives. How does one live in the world we have created that embodies water boarding and the wonder and potential of a perfect tomato?

Suddenly, at 55, I found myself unable to navigate this terrain. While I am, by nature (the nature/nurture argument will be explored in due time), endowed with a personality that has kept me relatively calm and grounded over the course of my life—a life, like that of anyone else, filled with doses of success, disappointment, struggle, and happiness—I have previously suffered depression. In my early-twenties, after dropping out of college and moving to a funky airstream trailer in the South Valley of Albuquerque, New Mexico, I was ready to admit defeat and buy a ticket to oblivion. I gained weight, I drank too much beer and tequila, and I brought home strangers from Okies, Albuquerque’s hippie/student bar, to try to assuage my loneliness. I wasn’t on the course I’d set for myself as a believer in achievement, both personal and political, and therefore I, and the sixties revolution of consciousness, had no future.

Over the course of the next 30 years I of course learned that there is no penultimate achievement where we do or we don’t arrive, personally or politically. But there are incremental steps, measured within the circumscribed time and place we find ourselves that provide enough reward and compensation to help define a life worth living. Personally, I built an entire house from scratch and made another livable. I bore two children who gave me enormous pleasure and a modicum of pain. I sustained a relationship with a life partner for 30 years, also with enormous pleasure and, I have to admit, more than a modicum of pain. Politically, I have been as true as I know how to be in disengaging from consumer culture and engaging in community efforts to smash the power elite. We knew the elite were vulnerable when the Cuban revolutionaries threw out Batista and embarked on a journey that revealed its own fits and starts, successes and failures.

But now, try as I might to not measure, I continually lose ground and I lose faith. The enormity of what is wrong in the world becomes the enormity of my daily life. Because I’m a writer, I find myself making copious lists of everything that has brought me to this impasse, with the idea of dissecting it, revealing it, indicting it, for some undefined audience that might actually listen and ultimately be moved by me. What that possibly can do to help me lift the daily burden is beside the point. Like the thousands of bloggers who have found voice on the Internet, I need the process of venting and the real or imaginary solidarity it elicits.

The list (begun in 2005 and continuing today) is in no particular order other than the assault of a particular day. It is sometimes local in specificity but always global in application. It comes via all my senses: my eyes that read it on the computer screen or see it on TV; my ears that hear it on the radio and in many conversations I have with friends and acquaintances; and my gut, where everything gets churned up and viscerally spit out. It is all within the framework that Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, sees as “the process of never-ending accumulation of power necessary for the protection of never-ending accumulation of capital.” I started this list before I read J. M. Coetzee’s book, Diary of a Bad Year, but when I saw the explanation he gives for writing his great complaint, I knew I had mine: “An opportunity to grumble in public, an opportunity to take magic revenge on the world for declining to conform to my fantasies: how could I refuse?”

My younger son told me no one would read this book (or whatever it is), with its list of depressing evils, unless I offer some sort of solution (he calls me a hopeless communist). Of course, there is no fundamental solution other than smashing the system – and by system I mean the economic, political, and cultural one that denies our humanity – but I have added as a last sentence to some of the blogs, something that might be done to perhaps move us along towards that goal. The rest of them just have to remain as is.