I apologize to my reader( s ) for disappearing without a trace into the desert last week.    

Heading west from Durango on US Highway 160,  one soon comes upon the name of the great Moctezuma, imprisoned by the Spanish and later stoned to death by his own people, now memorialized in the names of motels and car washes in the very same town named for his nemesis, Cortez.  Poor Moctezuma, his courtiers murdered and his spies' (according to Cortés) hands cut off, his ghost is left to choose mostly between cheesy commercial references (as above) and being the invisible cause of cases of diarrhea among foreign travelers to Mexico.  I remember learning about the Spanish and their cutting-off-hands thing during the 500-year anniversary of Columbus' visit to this continent.  Would have loved to have seen the "Hands-Free Motel" while I was driving through.

But the cool discovery comes at Teec Nos Pos, just past the Four Corners monument in the Navajo Nation.  Still on US 160, you come upon Red Mesa High, student population mostly (high 90%s) Indian, you read on the marquee that they self refer as the "Redskins."  It seems that a lot of the regressive stupidity that was the first wave of political correctness has passed in this country.  We see magazine ads, from Indian interests, titled "Think Indian," and it is still OK to refer to black people as black people.  I always disliked "African-American" for its clunkiness and length, not even getting started on accuracy, precision, or installation of stiffness and fear issues.  In Canada we teased each other for our backgrounds, biological and otherwise, indicating to me a great leap forward (over certain evolutionary drives) in our comfort level with ourselves and each other.  I shake my head every time I hear an educated person use an appearance-based, hyphenated appellation for a person.  The relatively underprivileged Indians out roasting their red skins in the Arizona desert are way ahead of you.

Lenny Bruce destroyed PC decades before it got started.  Ask his good friend, the black dude Dick Gregory.  But we still had to go through it, didn't we?  Now we are torturing ourselves over health care.  Early blogs today are predicting (declaring) the demise of the public option. We all know, intellectually, that it is the thing that must be addressed, but we have to go through the motions of bowing to one of the dysfunctional parts of capitalism for how many more years?  Just enough of us have insurance to keep us from fighting for those who don't, right?  So we stand there and actually call this a debate when on one side we have liars, plain and simple, some informed but most just fearful bullies (no need to elaborate), and on the other fearful apologists (those who have a decent health care deal already) and a whole lot of the just fearful (we must compromise with the bullies and the selfish).  Not many advocates.  There are real differences between those who do and don't want health care for all, just like there are real differences between races, but we will not get to talk about them in this country. Let's just keep shoveling on the PC.

Uncivilized and terrified citizens of the United States, you cannot go to the doctor unless you have money.