mobilize the National Guard to jail the electors, appoint new ones, and declare himself the winner. He can vegetate, demented, in the White House and rule through surrogates for another decade. If he dies they can mummify his body and use AI to make him look and sound fine. This outrageous violation of the Constitution the Court is sworn to uphold should be denounced severely by Republican leaders everywhere and even by patriotic Democrats. Don’t they know that no man is above the law? Will someone please stop this from happening?

Fortunately, New Mexico is relatively immune to the scourge of national politics. This is due to our natural orneriness, which goes back to the Clovis, Chaco, Navajo, Pueblo, Mogollon, and other cultures that fought each other for access to water and land just as the Greeks and Romans did in ancient times. Orneriness also emerged from fights between Apaches and Comanches against Spanish speaking colonists and Pueblos, and later, (for a very brief moment) between some Pueblos, Apaches and Spanish speaking colonists against the United States Army when General Stephen Kearny and the gringos arrived to offer New Mexicans the blessings of democracy. Ask Taos Pueblo about this. Our American beginning was different from that of the American patriots when they fought against the Brits. We didn’t throw the king’s men back across the Atlantic border; in our case, our Eastern border crossed over us. And it strengthened our resolve—anglo, hispanic, native; scoundrels, all of us—to be ourselves and not an imitation of Washington. This orneriness took many centuries to marinate into the red and green flavors of today, and it is like no other.

New Mexico has always been the state different. Our quarrels have given us world class creativity in art, cultural, and politics. We still quarrel with each other incessantly. Each of our cultures tolerates too much corruption. We drink too much. But we still look each other in the eye, making judgments about the content of the character of the person before us. In the end everyone gets (or steals) a piece of the pie and we go back to quarreling. Let’s keep it that way. Si se puede.

(EDITOR’S NOTE: Jose Z. Garcia taught politics at New Mexico State University for more than three decades and served as Secretary of the New Mexico Higher Education Department for four years.)