The Kingdom And The Powah
When I first heard Billy Graham, on the radio, I felt related. He spoke like my father’s family from the mountains north of Asheville, NC. He would say heah for here. and continya for continue. I never saw him in person, but his full voice and clear phrasing rode the radio waves to my room. […]
The Nature of Pantheism
The neo-cons in the George W. Bush administration never documented what they owed to Leo Strauss. All I recall is that they claimed to have been students of philosophy under the brilliant refugee from Nazi Germany. By mere association with these U.S. politicians he has been “accused,” according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, of […]
The Way To Heaven
WOOD-FIRED open-air cremation is the way to go in Crestone, Colorado. I distinctly remember four of these lawful funerals held in a circular sanctuary on a hill on the sandy side of the San Luis Valley, below the highest of the Sangre de Cristo mountains. It always begins in the stillness before dawn. Two of […]
Spreading The Word
THE MILLENNIUM began at midnight in Australia with a blazing word on the Sydney harbor bridge: “Eternity” in a flowing script called copperplate. What was it supposed to mean? By then Aussies — but few of the global TV watchers — knew the story behind it. There was a writer — Arthur Stace […]
His Holiness In The Villa Of Holy Faith
In the golf comedy “Caddyshack” Bill Murray, playing the blundering groundskeeper, brags: “I caddied for the Dalai Lama.” Doug Preston, a Santa Fe writer, can say, “I rode a ski lift with the Dalai Lama.” But it’s no laff line. It’s true. His reminiscence in Slate releases a flood of links on Google if you […]
Recognizing The Gentleman From America
I RECALL Professor Charles Nilon, teaching a class in modern novels at Boulder, identified Ernest Hemingway as “an American gentleman.” The memory surfaced as I watched the first episode of the Ken Burns documentary on PBS. Like a British noble, Hemingway toured the colonies, hunted trophy animals, behaved well in military combat, was a sportsman […]
How To Tell A Fake Human
“Klara And The Sun” by Kazuo Ishiguro is a tale told by a robot living — if that is the right word — in an AI-governed dystopia where automatons imitate humans and ambitious parents submit their children to “genetic editing” for success in the vicious meritocracy. She (Klara) is an “AF” (artificial friend) bought like […]
Getting Jabbed In The County Seat
THE VACCINES are federal but the vaccinations are local. I was wondering how the two levels of government were meshing as I began to roll across the San Luis Valley to the community center in Saguache to get the first of my covid jabs, as the Brits call them. (We call them shots, but that […]
Excoriation Nation
Myra Ellen Jenkins would be happy she is not alive now. There is such a thing as living too long. I wrote in the 1980’s about her involvement as New Mexico state historian in the first controversy over the historic obelisk in the center of the Santa Fe Plaza. It was all about a word. […]
A Thick Description Of A Deep Time
A UNM UNDERGRADUATE named Federico Antonio Reade called me in Santa Fe in the fall of 1980 asking to record my recollections of the Rio Arriba County Court House Raid — a northern New Mexico rebellion that already was fading beneath a wash of scholarly interpretation. I had been the only journalist (and the only […]