It was a notably halcyon summer in England in 1939. The weather was perfect, the tea hour agreeable, the bubbling hum of life intact as it always had been.
The denizens of Great Britain knew that Hitler, buoyant with success, was threatening war, but many took the calm of that summer as a reprieve from a future intrusion. Maybe it was not going to be so bad after all…
Fascist Germany was making plans.
That summer was 84 years ago, but it’s hard to avoid the similarities. We have a tender few months before an election that could empower a new kind of American fascism. MAGA could be a supercharged ruling minority, holding the White House and with likely victory in Congress. Popular vote be damned – they would exercise total control of all branches of federal government.
Trump has told us what he and his enablers would do. This time, it might be prudent to take his word more seriously than usual. Thanks to the worst Supreme Court since Roger Taney, he will finally have the power to enforce his lies. He’s feeling very emboldened these days.
The heart of fascist control is to suppress, to suffocate, to homogenize. Variations to the new norm, cultural resistance, the very life-force of non-conforming individuals can be identified, and the consequences meted out for all to see.
Nothing less is on the table. We cannot afford to suspend a looming reality. We cannot allow the elders to dither away until judgment day.
We cannot have a tea break.
This issue holds a set of portraits of people in New Mexico who represent a pastiche of color and variation, who are original and who are as different from each other as they are integral to our shared community.
What they all have in common is their commitment to successfully managing the change of our age.
Maggie Toulouse Oliver spends her days making sure the guiding principles of democracy are observed; that every vote is counted, recorded, and reported accurately. Her job has made her a target of incredible lies. What will happen if the liars seize control of the process?
Ray Sandoval took a cherished Santa Fe tradition, Zozobra, and changed it forever, earning the ire of many of his neighbors. A decade later, his success has demonstrated how to get things done in a city often resistant to change, even when it’s for the better.
A father and daughter team with high-octane guts and unflappable determination run an women’s reproductive clinic on the edge of New Mexico, a mile away from the Texas border. You love them for that – yet would they be permitted to go their own way in a Trump administration?
Lynn Atkison and Anne Lamott have been friends for a half-century – Lynn as a beloved teacher and Santa Fe Magazine editor, and Annie as a best-selling author who has never been shy about expressing her views. A future administration unshackled from the Constitution could handle critics like these by weaponizing the legal system to deter their non-compliant opinions.
The actor Zahn McClarnon is a seminal player in the expanding world of film and television by and about Native America – do we think that such stories will have the support they need to flourish in Trump’s America?
Santa Fe is a city separate from the mainstream, a place that that feels far away from the hyper-American sameness of Washington, New York, Dallas or Palm Beach. We have managed to keep our otherness – our uniqueness, our history, our diversity, our people, our home – mostly protected. We have worked hard to prevent unwelcome encroachments upon what is ours.
When Falstaff says we have heard the chimes at midnight, he was speaking of a reckoning; where the beauty, the camaraderie, the humor, the vitality, the glorious excess of his world was threatened by a whispering intimation that an ending was near to all that.
We must understand that the chimes are ringing.
They must not toll for us.
—OWEN LIPSTEIN
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Photo Tony Floyd
