Two Americas: Madrid and Santa Fe

God bless ordinary America

If you drive the long way from Albuquerque to Santa Fe along highway 14 you go through the old coal-mining town of Mádrid (accent on the first syllable).

Of course, back in the day coal was an environmental godsend, because it stopped the environmental disaster of cutting of firewood from the mountains east of Santa Fe that had just about raped those sacred lands.

But now Madrid is a ghost town, featuring the Mineshaft tavern, a reefer store, some failing gift stores and an old steam locomotive from the A.T. & S.F. Railroad. It is, you may say, hanging on by its fingernails.

But up at Santa Fe! OMG, the place where elite class liberals go to visit and retire! And the whole town is built in the fake adobe Santa Fe style that was invented by an architect in about 1920. You see, New Mexico created an adobe-style pavilion for San Diego’s Panama-California Exposition in 1915 and the pavilion was such a hit that the powers-that-be decided that there was money in them thar hills and built a museum and a hotel in a fake adobe style. Now everyone who is anyone in Santa Fe has the fake adobe-style walls surrounding their WEF-level estate.

The city is buried in high-end jewelry and craft stores that appeal to liberal women of a certain status, and then there are a bunch of woke museums up the hill at Museum Hill. We went to the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, and let me tell you, those artsy American Indians celebrated in the museum all know how to speak and/or write woke museum-speak. I wonder why if they are all really as indigenous and innocent and live out in pueblos along the Rio Grande as we’ve heard tell. The museum is all full of breathless Heritage and Culture and Matriarchs and Ancestors. Ancestors? I thought all known ancestors of European-Americans were racist-sexist-homophobe patriarchs. But I guess the American Indians are different: they had Matriarchs. There was some wall text headed “Resistance.” I don’t know what it said, because I have a rule that I never read museum wall text. I just hope the Resistance was approved by the FBI, because I would hate to see anyone that isn’t a known armed insurrectionist sucked into the maw of “Our Democracy.”

Anyway for a spot of relief we went to dinner out on highway 84 about ten miles out of Santa Fe and were surrounded by ordinary Americans that were clearly up to no good. One old geezer actually complimented me on my jacket — as one geezer to another.