The Desert is an Ocean

Essay

Keeler, California, is a town of six residents, two of whom are brothers

‘A car lay on its back outside, tires upward like the arms and legs of a helpless baby or a flipped-over armadillo’

Crazy Jay is a sweetheart, but don’t let him lock you up in that jail

It was a cold day, but heat never really leaves the desert. The sun is always there to lick you, to make you sweat. Even in the desert night you feel it, the urge to sweat. The brothers were beet-red and angry. “I liked it because it was quiet down here,” one brother told me. “I’ll tell you something, though. The arsenic will eat your silverware, turns metal into white dust.” The windchimes were screaming. The second brother turned to the first, away from me, and added, “Tell that girl she’s got a Borg implant.” The ride home I felt feverish, worried I’d swallowed remnants of arsenic while sipping from their coffee cans. A part of me worried that there really was an implant in my head — that the second brother was some kind of a desert oracle. That he had seen a falsity, a deficiency in me. That it took living in the middle of nowhere and drinking arsenic to see the inside of a city slicker’s skull. I learned later he was referencing Star Trek. Keeler, California, is a mile-long town …

Jeremiad

Election Fraud is as American as Apple Pie

Ballot-stuffing, other forms of cheating, lying, and chicanery, are all part of the traditions of our grand old democracy

Elections are games with rules, and rules are made to be broken

Anyone who tells you otherwise is full of it, or a Russian agent

By Michael Lind

“Down in Starr County, we throw out every third Republican vote.” The time was the 1970s, and the speaker was a slight acquaintance of my father who at the time was an assistant attorney general assigned to the state highway department. The visitor to our house in Austin laughed as he recounted how the all-Democratic vote-counters in Starr County would pass around ballots: “This one looks illegible to me. What do you think?” Texans had long known that Starr County and other South Texas counties along the Rio Grande border between the US and Mexico were notorious for their electoral corruption. Since the early twentieth century, these Hispanic-majority counties had been run by Democratic bosses, both Anglos and elite Hispanics. While black Texans were prevented from voting under Jim Crow, Mexican-Americans in some counties both served in office and voted. But of fear or gratitude to the ruling local families they often did as they were told by the bosses. For their part, the South …

The Desert is an Ocean

Critic's Corner

Election Fraud is as American as Apple Pie