Let Them Eat Sopapillas

Monarchy lives. King George and his consort, Queen Laura, breezed into Albuquerque on Thursday afternoon for private meetings with potentates and banquets with Lords, all courtesy of U.S. taxpayers. Remember the pre-monarchy days when Presidents traveled the country speaking to ordinary citizens? Seems as old-fashioned as a now, doesn't it?

I don't know what went down on the top three floors of the Marriott Hotel, where the King's massive entourage hung out that afternoon, but the Royal Couple held court at in the North Valley Thursday evening. At the Royal Table were majestic members of New Mexico's Congressional delegation and Knights from the local high-tech and military-industrial complex. I imagine a fair amount of groveling was required. I'm sure everyone felt compelled to keep laughing along with all of Emperor George's jokes about oil addiction and Katrina relief. Potentates can be such cut ups.

When the topic of rag-tag serfs came up, several regal syncophants were heard to proclaim "let them eat cake." This being New Mexico, however, the other Royal Dinner Party guests drowned them out with a loud "let them eat sopapillas." King George reportedly chugged down some cheese enchiladas with red chile and pined for the margaritas and brews all around him. A dry drunk can get very thirsty in the high desert.

Friday morning the blocks-long parade of limousines, cop cars, 72 (count 'em) police on motorcycles, Secret Service men and Fatherland Security operatives headed over to the Intel chip plant near Rio Rancho. Blindly passing the protest signs (see below), the Royal Cavalcade proceeded to a private rendezvous with a couple of obligatory "youth" reps, princely bigwigs from Intel, Counts and Countesses from state and local government, and Dukes from Lockheed Martin, Sandia Labs and Los Alamos Labs -- many of them knee-deep in the big nuke muddy. A couple hundred hand-picked Courtiers provided the applause on cue. Afterwards, the exit road was cleared of at least one dangerous lawbreaker who dared to step off the curb before the Bush processession had even left the building. (More on that in a later post.)

(Intel protest photo courtesy of Tom Soloman)

The "discussion" was about making Americans more "competitive" with engineers and scientists in China and India, who earn perhaps a tenth of what similar professionals earn here. Solution? A proposal to hire more math and science teachers. Not a bad program as proposed by Senators Domenici and Bingaman, even if it looks like Bush intends to fund only about half of it and omit the part about science scholarships. Even worse, just the other day he had to cut student loans and funding for the National Academy of Science. Our own St. Pete had to admit that Bush was constrained by what he called budgeteers in funding the science and math intiative. Other "constraining factors" might include 1-2 billion dollars going to the Iraq occupation each week, the huge deficits caused by generous tax cuts for the rich and the fact that we owe China billions of dollars thanks to "free trade."

No word on any addition of art, history, music, language or gym teachers. We like our graduates single-minded, uncritical in their thinking, out of shape, blind to history, speaking only English and culturally ignorant. Monarchies are like that. God save the queens. Especially the Republican queens.