The Mesa Paper

The Holiday Season has begun! I wish all The Mesa Paper readers a terrific season. It’s often the time we focus on family, indoor activities, cooking smells, cool mornings, bright days, early dusks, and fiery sunsets. There are other reasons for optimism this year. The height of the pandemic seems behind us, although caution remains […]

Many writers have repurposed T.S. Elliot’s phrase, “April is the cruelest month.” I won’t be the last when I say American election months are the cruelest season. In deep-blue California, the airwaves have been still relatively wavey except for the nonstop shady opposition to Prop 29. In competitive states and districts, though, the waves can […]

With instant communication and 24-hour news cycles, everything can appear important from media sources. It is – after all – the business of media to promote the news as important. Reporting can slide into expert opinion and speculation where the definitions of “news” and even “truth” seem under constant revision. None of us truly knows […]

Texas is already messed up enough on its own, thank you very much. Hardly a month goes by that we don’t read another story of the Texas mess. It would be a laughingstock among states, but these are not laughing matters. One of their two republican senators rebounded from trump’s 2016 presidential campaign lies about […]

Six Degrees of Separation originated in a 1929 Hungarian short story according to Wikipedia. In almost a century, it has been incorporated into films, games, other literature, music, television, formal mathematics, and psychology. The concept suggests each person is no more than six connections removed from another, if that chain of connections can be determined. […]

Hashtag ABG. Anything But Guns. That is the repuglican perspective on the epidemic gun violence continuing to sweep the nation. They blame anything. They offer to investigate anything. They throw money at anything. But they do not address guns as the proximate cause of the deaths and injuries in mass killings. In Uvalde TX, there […]

Last month originalist Supreme Court Justice Alito wrote (in a draft decision for a presumed Court majority overruling the 49-year-old Roe v. Wade decision), “The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision, including the one on which the defenders of Roe and Casey now chiefly […]

America has a long history of nonintervention in Eurocentric wars. We are fortunate that bilateral oceans buffer us from immediate threats of conventional warfare. That oceanic moat is less protective in a 21st century airborne or missile attack, but may offer some early warning and comfort. In the early 20th century, isolationist America watched the […]

Readers understand it can be difficult to write about current events when they change quickly. This month’s topic is particularly fast-moving. The words you read today were written two weeks ago. A decade ago, the Republican nominee for president, Mitt Romney, uttered what was at the time considered a gaffe. In a reflection of his […]

Some of the most progressive Democrats have buyer’s remorse, being not entirely happy with their election choice. Even strong Democrats seem happier to have trump OUT of office than to have Biden IN office. We were spoiled by expectations of “Obama, The Sequel.” That man is a great orator and a forceful extemporaneous speaker. He […]