Where the Red State Grows

CARLSBAD, NM, Nov. 12, 2016—Yesterday we stopped in at the Walmart in Roswell to pick up some flowers to put on Dad's grave. For a town with a military school and the former home of an Air Force base, the lack of flowers at the local Superstore on Veteran's Day was astounding. The best we could come up with was an autumnal-colored arrangement, which, as it turned out, ended up being the perfect complement to my father's headstone.

"Oh, those are pretty!" the cashier exclaimed.

"Thanks. I'm putting them on my father's grave."

The cashier winced and completed the transaction in silence; nothing puts a damper on a conversation like death, which I always find somewhat curious. Despite the numerous proclamations that America is a "Christian Nation"—and believers love to announce that Jesus suffered and died for our sins so we won't have to—the idea of dying, and then waking up and walking hand in hand with your departed loved ones along the golden streets that crisscross the Kingdom of Heaven, bathed in the pure light of unconditional love, without pain, suffering, or sorrow, is somehow terrifying to the vast majority of Americans. I don't get it. But I digress.

A Land of Secrets

A new idiom: As incongruous as Roswell Thai food.

The customer ahead of us had been a large-bellied man from Texas who filled out his dungarees and plus-sized, button-down, casual-Friday work shirt with style and perfection. His belly extended beyond the brim of his well-worn 10-gallon hat, and was stuffed with that marvelous kind of hard fat that doesn't sag or bulge unevenly. His midriff was a taut waxing gibbous moon of Lone-Star-State masculinity, and his demeanor was as sharp as the impeccably pressed creases on his Wranglers. He was purchasing a 12 pack of some type of cheap light beer packaged in a pale-blue pyramid that matched his shirt.

Once the cashier announced the total, the man peeled 10 crisp 100-dollar bills out of his fancy billfold and told the woman behind the register to place the remainder of the balance on a Walmart gift card. The man slipped the card into his breast pocket and scooped up the 12 pack. As he sauntered toward the exit, he puffed out his ruddy cheeks and softly whistled a strange, baleful melody that somehow mysteriously drowned out the Country Hip Hop that had been playing over the store's PA system. The haunting melody continued to drift through my skull even as the man crossed the parking lot and climbed up into the cab of a monstrous white pickup truck.

Later, in our own truck, Caroline and I wondered who the gift card was intended for? The man's wife? A mistress? A son or daughter at the Military Institute? The landscape down here in Southeastern New Mexico is wide open, but people do seem to have their share of secrets.

One of the nice ones we discovered was a nondescript little restaurant called Taste of Thai, located off the main drag. The walls were adorned with images of the Buddha and Congressman Steve Pearce, the irony of which made me laugh out loud. But the serious hostess wasn't laughing when she seated us, nor did she laugh when I exclaimed that my pineapple curry entree ranked up as among the best Thai food I had ever eaten. She didn't even crack a smile at the extra-generous tip we gave her. The seriousness of Roswell's service sector was alarming, which is perhaps why John Denver and his family fled the community a long time ago. Nevertheless, the community continues to thrive, thanks in part to a rumored crash of a flying saucer 69 years ago. We didn't stop at the UFO Museum on Main Street in our haste to reach my father's grave before sunset, but we did mark it on our To-Do list for another time.

Feeding the Beast

Americans work round the clock to feed The Beast

After placing the flowers on my father's grave, we steered our truck due west, out through the endless scrub toward the deepening orange glow on the horizon. We anticipated a good showing of stars and a pitch-black night sky out here in the middle of nowhere, but as the horizon dimmed we realized we were horribly mistaken. A thousand points of bright unnatural light sprung up in all directions across the desert—the telltale signs of industrial operations designed to squeeze every mole of petrochemical from New Mexico's Oil Patch.

The roads were pitted and wavy from the pressure of hundreds of thousands of heavy trucks. As we made our way into Carlsbad, a continuing promenade of tankers made their way toward locations to deposit their loads or headed back out into the oilfields to collect new ones. Along certain stretches of road, the air was saturated with so much methane that our eyes burned. It was here we realized that America has built an economy with an appetite for energy so voracious that we literally work 'round the clock in unsustainable futility to feed the beast. Shaken by what we were seeing, we muttered empty promises to ride the bus or our bikes more often once we got back home.

A plate of Mi Casita.

When we finally arrived at our hotel, Jonathan the night clerk recommended a locally owned restaurant a short drive away. Here in meat country, we figured a Mexican restaurant would be about the only place where we could find a vegetarian meal, and Mi Casita did not disappoint. Even though we showed up 15 minutes before closing, the waitress told us we were welcome to stay. The delicious red chile was worth writing about, while the "green" sauce was more of a yellowish gravy reminiscent of college-cafeteria days, though tasty nonetheless. Our amiable waitress's forearms were covered with tattoos, so I figured the large tip we gave her would help fund another one. In fact, we enjoyed our meal and hospitality so much that we tipped the entire kitchen staff as well—which will probably be a boon to Carlsbad's local tattoo artist.

Diamonds are a girl's best friend?

After a good night's sleep back at the hotel, we hoped to linger a little over a cup of coffee before heading out, but the dying cockroach on the floor of our hotel room spooked Caroline to the point that we packed up and left. As we checked out, I couldn't help but notice the matching constellations of five purple-brown dots on each of the hotel clerk's arms—inglorious fingerprints from a severe manhandling. She noticed me eyeing the marks and dismissed me without making further eye contact. Later, on our way to breakfast we saw a banner outside of a jewelry store that had been running a special: Buy a diamond for her and get a hunting rifle for yourself. Bling-bling! Bang-bang! I reckoned that down in these parts, nothing soothes a black eye or a split lip faster than a half-carat apology, and nothing stokes the need for a new hunting rifle more than a disobedient wife. But again, I digress.

People in southeastern New Mexico didn't seem to be mourning the election of Donald Trump like many of my friends were up north. Part of the reason we had fled our home during this weekend was to escape the hysteria and mourning that was manifesting itself in the wake of the Trump victory. Later in the day, outside of Loving, we saw a sign proclaiming that "Hillary will Never Be Our President!" These people made good on their word by voting two-to-one or more in favor of her opponent.

If the Democrats are looking for case studies describing who those mysterious rural Americans were who came out in favor of of Donald Trump, they need only visit the folks in Chaves, Eddy, or Lea county. If they want to understand why these people voted as they did, they need only talk to the plain-clothed Oil Baron who invests in WalMart gift cards to ensure his own domestic tranquility, or the tattooed waitress who benefits from the Trickle-Down economies of the oil-and-gas-, potash-mining-, and defense (Waste Isolation Pilot Plant) industries. Despite the cockroaches that occasionally upend themselves on the hotel carpet, most of the folks down here are proud, honest, hardworking people—not the "Basket of Deplorables" characterized by the HRC campaign—who are clinging to an idea that America can be great once again. And given the choice between whistling that haunting old melody or walking those golden boulevards alongside The Son of Man, can anyone really blame them?

See you on down the road.

A nod to the Greatest Generation

LOS ALAMOS, NM, Nov. 11, 2016—Three days after America made the fateful decision to elect "billionaire" celebrity Donald Trump as its 45th President, we hit the road in an attempt to locate something honest in the midst of the farce that had swept over our nation. Just eight short years after President Barrack Obama had promised "Hope" and "Change," which he then duly delivered in the form of a vast transfer of federal wealth to billionaires and bankers at the expense of working-class Americans, Donald Trump pursed his lips and squinted his beady eyes into the Television cameras and promised to make America great once again. The people bought it hook, line, and sinker, even as the Clinton crowd insisted that the abhorrent yellow-haired Reality-TV star stood no real chance of being elected.

Now, in the aftermath, watery eyed Clinton supporters staggered despondently to and fro—shell-shocked, blind, and numb from the crushing concussion of unexpected defeat—as Trump allies gloated with smug satisfaction over the Electorate's unambiguous confirmation that America as we know it had not changed and offered no hope to the majority of its citizens. Abject despair juxtaposed against a chorus of demonic glee had transformed social media, the airwaves, and the streets of some of our nation's largest cities into a disorienting noisy Hell of sensory overload. It was definitely time to unplug and escape, and the crumbling back roads of Southern New Mexico seemed an appropriate place of refuge. The buzz of our tires on long straight stretches of asphalt was enough to temporarily drown out the irreconcilable din of the raging Right and Left, and within hours of our departure we felt ourselves shaking off some of the horror of the 2016 Election.

In the Good Old Days before Cell Phones

Thank you for being part of The Greatest Generation, Dad.

In an era of endless instantaneous complaining, we sometimes forget that not long ago Americans made great sacrifices on behalf of their nation. This generation of people, dubbed by one prominent former Newsman and historian as "The Greatest Generation," looked outside of themselves toward the possibility of a Greater Good. These people built modern infrastructure, and made discoveries that would lead to the Space Age, plastics, high-speed computers, modern warfare, and the cell phone. Some became rich in the process. Others helped defend America and the rest of the world from tyranny and fascism on the battlefields of Europe, Africa, and Asia.

My father was one of the latter. He marched through Europe, killing Nazis and liberating Jews from the death camps that had been erected by their captors. He told me once that he had slowly slid a bayonet into the eye of an arrogant Nazi SS officer who would not provide answers to questions after being captured. He told me other stories about combat that made that episode seem tame by comparison. Clearly his experiences in World War II had left deep scars upon his psyche, but he didn't wear those scars on his sleeve and he preferred not to talk about the war. I was able to coax stories out of him only once. He told me his tales on two conditions: That I sit and listen to them until he was finished telling them; and that I never again ask him about the war afterward. A long, difficult day ensued, but in the end I felt I had a much greater understanding of my father, and certainly I had a lot more respect for him. 

Upon his return to the United States after the war, he took up a fight against ignorance, serving as a science teacher for junior high school students. He never asked for credit for serving his nation, and none was ever given to him. He died poor but happy just four days after his 79th birthday. His largely anonymous passing occurred in a nondescript rural community that had been carved into the unforgiving hardscrabble landscape of southeastern New Mexico. Few were present for his burial; no one referred to him as a hero. Though my father was not a gentle or necessarily refined person, he deplored racism and injustice. The war had shown him the price of those things firsthand. He revered self-reliance, ingenuity, and ethics. The war had shown him—more than any scripture or sermon—that Evil did exist; the fair-haired, well-heeled SS officers he encountered confirmed that the Devil is not always ugly. He hated bullies and he loved the truth, even if the unvarnished recitation of it caused discomfort to those who would try to twist it to their own advantage.

Inconvenient Truth

I had not visited my father's grave since he was buried 13 years ago. As I knelt before his headstone on this Veteran's Day, I realized that I had never thanked him for his national service and for the role he had played in helping me become an honorable, successful member of American society. I was surprised by the flood of tears that these thoughts unleashed in me, and I was slightly embarrassed to find myself as a grown man weeping before my father's ghost in a deserted cemetery in Lovington, NM. For here I was, standing in front of a legend who spent the tail end of his teenage years and the beginning of his adulthood slogging through blood and guts among strangers in a foreign land. Unlike members of today's generation, my father had been awarded no "Safe Space" to spare him from the daily "Trigger Events" he witnessed on the battlefield; he voiced no disappointment or resentment that his rations did not include a gluten-free option; he harbored no grudge that the vast majority of his dead comrades did not receive a "participation medal" for their sacrifice; and the gender or sexual preferences of his Brothers-in-Arms were much less a topic of conversation than the trueness of their aim or their ability to field strip and clean a malfunctioning rifle while being fired upon by the enemy.

Unlike my father, I am fat and soft and have had the luxury of living a life in which I've never had to go off to battle to fight for our current Way of Life. My father had wanted it that way. He told me during that very long day of unpleasant storytelling that he had fought with the hope that I or my own children would never have to do what he did. The idea of a nation being led by a Trump or a Clinton is far less important than the idea of having a nation worth fighting for in the first place. While many rage on Social Media or in the streets between mealtimes protesting that their particular brand did or did not win the popular vote on November 8, 2016, corporate fascists continue to invade every corner of our Democracy, ensuring that the wishes of the tiniest minority of the Wealthiest Americans trumps the Will of the People. As my father taught me long ago, Evil really does exist, and I guess if he were still alive today, he'd be telling me that the guy with the yellow hair or the woman with the pantsuit are not the ones we should be fighting against.

Thank you for your service, Dad.