By Arthur Alpert

The Albuquerque Journal may be authoritarian, but at least it’s not totalitarian – not one thing, not perfectly honed to its partisan ends.

That’s most apparent in Joline Gutierrez Krueger’s UpFront columns, like the narrative atop the front page Monday, Feb. 22. Under the headline, “It’s Too Late for Teen but Not for Others”, Gutierrez Krueger again explored a family’s tough emotional and concrete reality.

How does she do it? Get so close to people, I mean, and empathize, without getting lost. Sympathize, without losing distance. Describe real life, not abstractions.

And why does the Journal abide her brave, compassionate portraits of troubled (or unlucky) individuals and families? Well, they’re not political, not explicitly. And the Journal’s war against most of us doesn’t preclude sympathy for the downtrodden.Journal management indulges charity, in fact, as much as it hates justice.

I read Gutierrez Krueger as a foreign correspondent wiring dispatches from exotic climes. Warm dispatches, usually, to a mostly cold daily. Painted in crimsons, blacks and purples that contrast sharply with the paper’s palette of blacks, grays and whites – like Nantucket in winter.

Good for the Journal for tolerating an alien (the outer space kind) to its culture.