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Now it can be told: we spent a very interesting few days in Santa Fe, NM, where the endangered liberal roams free and an entire economy appears to be based on... well, I'll expound on Santa Fe, travel, Los Alamos, the plight of the Native American Tourist Attraction, Albuquerque, birthdays, and so much more your head will explode.

Until then, click here (Windows Media Player or compatible player required) to see what some of Santa Fe's July 4 fireworks looked like.

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The route to Santa Fe is simple to remember- you get on I-25 northbound from Albuquerque, pass about a dozen Indian casinos, and then exit reality. Santa Fe is about an hour north of ABQ and about a light year away from the way the rest of the country lives. It's a relatively small area, actually- the "downtown" is roughly about a mile and a half wide and long, and you can easily walk from one end to the other. While you're walking, you'll notice a few things:

a) Every car seems to sport the same sticker, white lettering on green: "No War." The sticker appears on BMWs and beaters, VW buses and pickups. In a country where the majority of people at some point supported the war, nobody- I mean, nobody- did in Santa Fe. I threatened to wipe the "No" off the cars; Fran just laughed. If I'd had the time, I'd have stopped someone and asked if "No War" meant war's always bad, and in that case was fighting World War II a good thing? I suspected they'd have insisted that Roosevelt should have tried to just sit down and negotiate with Hitler.

b) There was not one local black person in the city. None. Nobody walking around, nobody working at the hotel or restaurant, nobody on the road or at the supermarket. There were a couple of tourist families, but not a single local. In a city that prides itself on its liberal, tolerant attitude, that seemed odd. I wondered why it had worked out that way, and whether anyone else around there noticed it. But then I noticed something else.

c) Lots of Hispanic residents, but few in the downtown district. They were all hidden away from the tourists, except at festive tourist Mexican restaurants. I was confused about this until I found where they were, mostly south of, say, Cordova, in comfortably bland apartment and townhouse complexes, in the aisles at Smith's and Lowe's, waiting patiently on line at the Bank of America, their kids happily chatting on cell phones waiting for the fireworks at Santa Fe High School, living normal everyday American lives in a world within a long walk of downtown but on a separate planet.

d) The city appears to have no ecomony beyond the tourism industry, and the downtown area, despite being home to the State Capitol and Federal Building, is geared 100% to tourists. The stores sell the kind of chotchkes tourists want, or artwork too expensive for most of the locals. The restaurants seemed filled with people from California and Oregon and Colorado and everywhere but New Mexico. I wondered what would happen in a year when the weather was bad and tourists stayed away.

e) The men all looked exactly like David Clennon. (This guy.) Graying hair, neatly trimmed, too long in the back, beard or goatee, gaunt, wearing a t-shirt and sandals, toting a latte, a croissant, and a copy of Utne Reader to a table at Downtown Subscription. I don't know the significance of this, other than to note that David Clennon is one of Hollywood's most liberal of liberals, and the David Clennon lookalike I saw today at Costco was loudly proclaiming his pleasure to snag a copy of Hillary Clinton's book there. For what it's worth.

So you might presume I didn't like Santa Fe, a weirdly segregated, touristy liberal enclave with perpetually extreme weather. You'd presume wrong. Actually, I loved the place- the natural beauty of desert and mountains, the artists on Canyon Road proudly displaying their work, the ultra-friendliness of everyone we met (this appears to be a New Mexican trait, present in Albuquerque and Los Alamos and Rio Rancho and wherever else we went), the unique and weird history (the Santa Fe Trail, the frankly commercial remaking of the city into a pseudo-historical location in the early 1900s, the bizarre and fascinating story of Los Alamos). Sitting in the Santa Fe Baking Co. having breakfast with the locals on a lazy Saturday morning, or sitting in the high school football stadium laughing with the kids as the band forgot the words to "Brown-Eyed Girl" and the tent above their heads threatened to blow off in the wind, or watching the bored local kids do the hip-hop walk and hang out in the Plaza with nothing to do on a Saturday night, I understood the appeal of Santa Fe. It's relaxed, it's liberal, it's tolerant, it's a throwback. It's 1969. 1969 may have been turbulent and war-torn, but the version in most people's heads is... is... is what Santa Fe is today.

We can't wait to go back. Not to 1969, to Santa Fe. Same thing, only, er, different. I can't explain it any more clearly. Just go, but a word of advice: when they tell you the food is spicy, it's an understatement. Beware the green chile.

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I want a column in the New York Times. I want it right smack in the middle of page one, above the fold.

I want a TV show, too. On CBS. NBC, Fox, ABC, and the WB, too. (Not UPN.) I want it at 8 pm (7 Central), a full hour, just me and my opinions.

I want all of it. And I should be able to get it. After all, according to the Senate Commerce Committee, I'm entitled to it.

Oh, yes, I am. Did you watch the hearing on Tuesday morning? I did, every minute of it, and what I learned from their grilling of Cumulus' Lew Dickey is that the Dixie Chicks have a right to have their songs played on any radio station, and that radio licensees have no right to make programming decisions on a companywide basis. I was unaware of this exception to the First Amendment. I was also unaware that you don't just have a right to speak, you have an absolute right to be heard. So I want my prime-time network TV show. I want my column in every paper. They have no right to say no. I demand to be heard!

Of course, this won't happen. But that's what Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-Uranus) and Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Hell) think should be the case, at least for leftist country singers with maybe three or four brain cells still functioning. They were appalled that stations chose to stop playing the Dixie Chicks after Natalie Maines shot off her mouth in London. Boxer, making a bid for the title of Worst. Senator. Ever., wagged her finger and compared Dickey to the Nazis and Communists, which made me wonder whether she'd have been as appalled had Dickey made a corporate decision to ban the music of a real Nazi or Klansman. ("Sorry, Mr. Dickey, but you'll just have to add Skrewdriver to your playlists.")

But what it all comes down to is my rights. The Senators all said the Net isn't a factor, and here I am, not a factor, so I want my prime time exposure, my front page column, my constitutional God-given federal right to be heard. If "Landslide" gets that, so should I.

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Los Alamos couldn't happen today. Los Alamos, in case your history class skipped from D-Day to the Cold War, was where the Manhattan Project built the Bomb. It was a massive undertaking. It was also completely secret. It's fascinating, actually- the government went to what was a ranch for boys in the mountains northwest of Santa Fe, a mostly undeveloped area without adequate roads or infrastructure or anything, built a small city, sent 6,000 people to work there, developed the bomb... all of this without a word in the press.

Think about that for a minute. You can look at the front page of the Santa Fe New Mexican on the day after the Enola Gay dropped Hell on Hiroshima and you'll see that the existence of a city of 6,000 people an hour away from Santa Fe had been a total secret until that day, when President Truman announced that we'd fried part of Japan and, oh, yeah, we did it in Los Alamos, which we didn't tell you about until now. Surprise!

But this couldn't happen now. Think about it- is there any possible way to keep a secret anymore? Pick the most desolate area of the Lower 48, like, say, the desert or somewhere in the northern Rockies or wherever. Build a city there. Truck and train caravans bringing thousands of people, endless supplies. ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, MSNBC, CNN, AP, every paper in the country, Drudge... hell, Entertainment Tonight would be sniffing around in case Ben and J-Lo might be among the population there. The government is hard-pressed to get away with anything on that scale. Too much media attention.

This, I think, is a good thing. Someone needs to keep the government honest and in check, and that job tends to fall to the news media (a problem on other levels, but nothing's perfect). But had this been the case in 1943, there might not have been a Manhattan Project, might not have been a bomb. Hiroshima spared, Nagasaki too. The war could have dragged on while the warring factions of the Japanese government fought over whether to surrender. More lives could have been lost. And God forbid if someone else- the Russians, the Chinese- developed the bomb first.

I think a lot about happenstance and the randomness of life. For example, I'm here, in a bizarre way, because most of my maternal family was murdered by the Nazis- had there been no Hitler and no war and no Holocaust, my mother would never have been hidden and would never have been sent to New Jersey to her previously-escaped aunt and uncle's custody, would never have been at that mixer where she met my father, would never have had me. Same for Los Alamos- if today's media saturation existed in 1943, there's no way it would have been able to fly under the radar. No Los Alamos, no bomb, no end to the war, no way to know what might have happened, good or bad. But it was 1943, and it played out the way the history books now say it did.

I guess the point of all this is that there are whole eras of history that happened by accident of timing. Life, in a lot of ways, is an accident. That;s the kind of revelation you usually get when you're stoned and gazing at the dirt under your toenail. I assure you that I'm not stoned. If you find yourself up that way, stop by the Bradbury Museum and see if you don't walk out feeling that way.

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I try not to allow myself the luxury of feeling bitter. It's counterproductive, it'll eat you alive from the inside, and... it's human, so it's hard not to slip.

I noted this week that another person who once did me wrong got a plum new job. It's another chapter for "When Good Things Happen to Bad People," and I've been subject to several case studies in my career. When the item about the person getting the job came across my desk, I had that momentary lapse, that cursing of the heavens, that "there is no God" feeling. I have to remind myself that it's no big deal, that it has no impact on my life anymore, that I've done very well since then, that it's no reflection on me.

But maybe it is. Maybe I went about my life and career in radio the wrong way. After all, I went with honesty, fairness, having the decency and guts to do everything in front of people rather than behind their backs. And I ended up a writer. They lied, stabbed me and others in the back, cheat on everybody and everything, drip with insincerity, and they're all in very lucrative jobs in the business, pocketing big cash and reveling in the perks. My way got me the job-a-year cycle. Their way got them bags of money. Guess I blew it.

Except for this: I don't want to be them. I don't want to live that life, play the oily salesman or the ambitious Sammy Glick. I look at these people and I know I couldn't be like that. And I wouldn't trade places with them for anything. They probably have more money coming in than I do, but I do OK. I also don't cheat on my wife, undermine others to get ahead, or work constantly in fear that someone else will surpass me.

So the item came across, and I felt that anger and stress welling up. Then I remembered that with my way, I can live with myself, sleep at night, look at myself in the mirror. And, ultimately, it doesn't really matter what kind of job those people have, what kind of car they drive, what label is on the inside of their suit jacket. I like what I have just fine. They can keep what they have. I don't want it.

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