By Larry Calloway

Rio Arriba County Courthouse (oil by Paul Folwell)

The night before I drove down to Santa Fe to take a reporter’s job a Boulder political science professor gave me some farewell advice that foreshadowed everything. “Remember,” she said. “You are going to a conquered land. And you are the invader.” Liberals. Hah!

Nine months later as I sat with bound wrists in the back seat of a hijacked Rio Arriba County sheriff’s GTO with a pistol at my head and a driver in a military beret with an M-1 carbine on his lap pointing to a handcuffed sheriff’s deputy I thought, not so funny. (more…)

The only color photo of the first nuclear explosion (c) Jack Aeby

Asked for his first thought when the Trinity bomb went off, J. Robert Oppenheimer said, “I am become death, the shatterer of worlds,” words from the Bhagavad-Gita, which he studied in Sanskrit. He was a strange physicist, mixing science and sacred text. “Trinity” itself, was his allusion to a Christian poem by John Donne.

The Bhagavad-Gita is a justification of war and warriors that also speaks of “wondrous forms not seen before,” and “the light of a thousand suns” and “time grown old, creating world destruction.” (more…)

Gov. Bill Richardson’s fluent switching to Spanish from time to time in his first

Albert Beveridge

legislative address was an artful reminder to the English-only dummies: New Mexico is a state full of second languages, always will be, and always has been, although not always so proudly.
The former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations did not need to wait for translation of his linguistic departures from the text. Each time, the applause or laughter was immediate on the part of the crowd in the House chamber — well, half the crowd. Forty percent of the Legislature is Hispanic, as is the new governor, the new chief justice, the attorney general, secretary of state, treasurer and auditor. No governor in modern times — not even Toney Anaya or Jerry Apodaca — was able to switch smoothly to Spanish. (more…)

Stephen Watts Kearny

It was Indian Market Sunday in Santa Fe. One of the sisters — Stephanie or Susanna, I don’t remember who — carried a bottle of champagne in a brown bag. They were slim and poised in their bright summer dresses. We met at the Albuquerque Journal building, where I had my office, and walked four blocks to the plaza. The streets were full of money and Native American art. At the plaza they were going to meet another sister, Adelia, and her two children. They hated to cause a scene, but this thing was a long time coming. It was August 18, 1996. One hundred fifty years ago to the day their great-great grandfather, Gen. Stephen Watts Kearny, led his Army of the West into the Santa Fe plaza and declared New Mexico a possession of the United States. (more…)