By Paul Krza
This year, spring arrived in Socorro at almost exactly the same time as snowflakes blew in from the north, mixing with blossoms tossed from apricot and plum trees. Strange, but true.
Not many hours later, political weather shifted and something else strange happened -- Congress actually passed healthcare reform!
That’s the way it is, I guess. What you see is not always what you get. Welcome, to our Twilight-Zone world, as Rod Serling said, “a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind ... a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas.”
I’ve noticed numerous examples of this wackiness, both political and otherwise, which I’ve tucked into my mind shadows or stuffed into files. With apologies to Mr. Ripley, here’s my list of what you can believe -- or not.
• I’ll start out with something really outrageous (or maybe not) that I found in the Albuquerque Journal obits, where you learn all sorts of things about New Mexico. The person who died was a former Sandia Labs engineer, where he worked on a small-scale nuke reactor.
But more bizarre was his earlier research, according to the obit, “on how high to drop fake palm trees outfitted with listening devices ... used during the Viet nam War ... along the Ho Chi Minh trail so that we could hear what the North Vietnamese were saying.”
Googling this yielded nothing, but then again, it was probably really secret stuff.
Perhaps this was the forerunner of disguised cell towers.
• But if you think that’s outrageous and weird, how about this:
Back in the day, the guys (and they virtually were all males) who put vinyl on turntables were called “disc jockeys” who chattered about the music. Nobody cared about their political opinions. Both Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh are former disc jockeys, but for some strange reason some people nowadays actually take seriously what they have to say.
• More weird stuff, this time on the road. Just off I-25 in Albuquerque, past the Big I, the new Carpenters Training Center is going up, made, appropriately, of wood. No, wait! The main features are ... lots of concrete, and glass!
• Speaking of wood, and trees, well, where there’s smoke, there’s fire. In what could be a Ripley’s entry from New Mexico, you may have noticed that the timber management officer for the New Mexico Forestry Office is Nick Smokovich of Socorro. His boss is Butch Blazer, Forestry director.
• OK, let’s get back to politics, with a quiz: What government-funded program attempts to extend its services to everyone, doesn’t make a profit and has an alleged goal of making life better for all involved? That’s easy, the tea-bag right would say -- it’s that communistic, big-brother healthcare reform pushed by Obama.
Wrong. I’m talking about the Socorro Electric Cooperative, our friendly local electric provider that uses federal money, is owned by locals (some call that “socialism”) and goes out of its way to connect everybody. In the January issue of Enchantment, the co-op paper, we learned that “building 90 miles of line to electrify government buildings, a few stock wells and a ranch owned by a Texas family might not make sense to some folks, but that’s the typical role of electric cooperatives.” The Texan, by the way, is a Houston lawyer with a ranch at Beaverhead in Catron County.
A great idea, this rural electrification, proposed and enacted by ... President Franklin Roosevelt, part of the New Deal, then and now reviled by some (see tea bag, above) as a socialist plot. Likewise, extending healthcare to all humans across the country has to be as important as an electric pole in every backyard, don’t you think?
• Speaking of Catron, I noticed two candidates in the Reserve election actually campaigned on bringing “grants” to the town. Nothing wrong with that, except something was missing -- where those grants came from. In Catron County, “federal” is never used when money arrives, only mysteriously-sourced “grants.”
• Back again, to healthcare reform. Rush, Glenn and the boys in the Republican club tried to derail it, but failed. Who won it? A woman: Nancy Pelosi, reviled by the teabag/GOP fringe as an evil character. Turns out she’s a hard-charging, hard-working savvy legislator, described accurately as a “strong speaker.” Once upon a time, it wasn’t strange to give high marks to government folks who got things done.
Oh -- as for our cool weather, consider the “Arctic Oscillation,” which Earthweek Diary in the Journal notes occurred in December and was a “rare disruption of Northern Hemisphere circulation ... (that) dislodged almost all of the frigid air around the Arctic, sending it thousands of miles to the south.”
This, of course, made it difficult to brew tea, thus leading to healthcare reform. Really.
Paul Krza lives in Socorro where he is a writer. He’s never been on the government payroll except when the Army paid him for two years.
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