The Return Of Pat Nixon

"The years creep by, Lorena
the snow is on the grass again..."
- Henry de Lafayette Webster

By DUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ
The Paz Files

AUSTIN, Texas - Lately, America's First Ladies have had something to say. From Nancy Reagan to Hillary Clinton to Michelle Obama. The frumpy ones, like Laura Bush, kept their distance from the press, but they had their moments.

It's been decades since Patricia Nixon led her husband, Richard, on that fateful perp walk from the White House to a Marine helicopter on the day he left office in disgrace. Pat Nixon, went the line in the nation's capital, was very much like the boxer Leon Spinks - on familiar terms with the weird.

The weird was her husband, as we all came to find out after the mess he created in authorizing that infamous break-in of the Democratic Party's headquarters, a criminal act that became known as Watergate, that being the name of the building that housed the Demos. Pat Nixon had nothing to do with it, of course. She was the last of the Doormat Wives to occupy the presidential bedroom in the people's house.

We thought of Pat Nixon when we first saw the photograph atop this story showing bombastic Rick Perry doing the Republican macarena with his wife, Anita, at his side. Anita Perry is not used to being seen with her husband. He generally travels in the company of handsome men.

Perhaps it's the anachronistic hairstyle or the ranch look on her face. Pat Nixon perfected the homely look, and although Anita Perry is lightyears more attractive than Richard Nixon's main squeeze, well, maybe it's that gray shawl that takes one back to those dark days of the mid-1970s, when Nixon lied and lied and lied, but then went on national TV to say he was not a crook. Photos taken of Nixon's wife back then told the story of great humiliation. One day she was First Lady and the next she was First Lady to depart in disgrace.

In Austin, Anita Perry does not walk ahead of great public notice. She is rarely seen, in fact. But now her crazy husband has summoned her to places like New Hampshire and Iowa and South Carolina, where Anita Perry often flashes that faraway look, as if to say, "WTF am I doing in this B movie?"

It'll be interesting to see how her West Texas personality changes once the Republican strategists walk her to some high-end fashion boutique for expensive clothes that will plunge her into the 1990s, which, as you all recall, is what they did with the Wasilla Hillbilly, one Sarah Palin in the party's doomed 2008 election.

Anita Perry is a Texas gal, however.

She may just assume the position of looking indifferent as all Hell. She certainly has not said or done anything to make herself stand out so far. I know, I know. Most Republican wives are subservient to their men.

But Pat Nixon did one thing we found refreshing in that party's women. On the night before leaving the White House, her husband called his valet, Manolo Sanchez, asking for a bottle of whiskey and stayed up most of the night, a long, drawn-out affair that had him walking the halls and stopping to mumble slurred bullshit to the hanging portraits of this country's founding fathers, people such as Thomas Jefferson and George Washington.

Nixon drank himself to sleep.

Pat Nixon had gone to bed much earlier, perhaps fully knowing her days as political captive were over and Tricky Dick could go ahead and drink himself silly. She didn't broadcast it and she did not write it in some tell-all memoir, but Pat Nixon, in her own way, told her crooked husband the jig was up way before he passed on Bourbon in favor of the whiskey.

It won't be long before Anita Perry does the same to Rick...

- 30 -

Beatdown In Beaten Town...

"Cameron County Justice of the Peace Precinct 5, Place 1 Sallie Gonzalez has received the T.A. Vines award as an exemplary member of the Texas Justices of the Peace and Constables Association..." - Reporter Allen Essex, July 11, 2011, Brownsville Herald

By DUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ
The Paz Files

HARLINGEN, Texas - It doesn't take much to get a dose of bad press in this town. The mayor knows the drill, as do other city elected officials. You take a step this way and those people over there will stone you. You take it that way and those on the other side will rain a mountain of rocks on your head. It's Harlingen, Land that Time and Modern Advances Forgot.

The press here is nothing if not a gang of hungry flyweights out for a few laughs.

Now comes one Jerry Deal, editor of the sort of respected Blog - MyLeader News.com - to lash a local justice of the peace in no uncertain terms, to beat his feet on her head out of some misguided sense of community reporting. Sallie Gonzalez is the judge's name and that's her in the photo atop this story.

This is what Deal wrote about her today: "One thing that has really pissed off many is you seeking a 30 percent pay raise ($12,000), at a time the county has a serious money budget shortfall, plus this area has an unemployment rate of 12 percent and they and many others are feeling the impact of a poor economy. I must admit, you have real intestinal fortitude to take your case for a pay raise to a grievance committee under those circumstances."

That came well within the body of his story, but what made it even more bizarre was the fact that Deal, a former editor of the local Valley Morning Star, did not assign either an "opinion" or "editorial" tag to his beatdown. To say that he is merciless in asking Gonzalez to resign is being, well, somewhat kind. She wants a 30 percent raise, according to the breathless Deal, and he says like Hell she'll get it. Hey, he wants her gone, and he wants her to declare retirement plans, as in no bid for re-election, as in right now, sweetheart.

It is an absurd post by Deal, who we know knows better.

Ms. Gonzalez is an "elected" official. Voters will decide her fate. Deal seems bent on calling for her ouster without noting anything the judge may be doing, or have done, right. He fails to tell the rest of the story, which waters down his position and allows fair-minded readers to believe he is simply venting for venting's sake. Make your case in a straight-up "news" story, not a bodyblock below the knees. If the lady has done something terribly wrong, prove it. WTF.

So she has asked for a raise? Deal cavalierly assumes she will get it. We give elected officials credit for a bit more brains than he apparently gives them. She will appear before the county and state her case for the request. Cover it there, Jerry? We'll see. He knows the path to the ballpark, but when's the last time he attended a county commissioner's meeting? We'd bet it's been decades, if ever.

But to simply come out smoking with cliches and innuendo, and saying readers tell him this & that is not enough. Not for a true Journalist. We do not know this lady, but wonder what she would say in her defense. Deal did not call her, did not interview her and does not know what she would say to account for her pay hike request. That would help readers make their own decision on whether she's due the raise or is being silly. Deal blew it off.

Another of his complaints is that she fails to make herself available to local law enforcement on those occasions when her call is needed in a death case, that dramatic pronouncement at the scene. Again, that is for review by those who elect her and those who pay her. Deal includes nothing other than a cursory, hearsay comment from unnamed police officers. Bad Jerry.

Deal's blog is about the best little Harlingen has to offer. Much more is expected of him than of the others, even of the under-achieving Valley Morning Star. So, when he goes off on this sort of shallow reporting, well, the bar goes down even lower in town.

To be fair, it just may be that Judge Gonzalez is a tough, no-nonsense judge who treats anyone appearing before her like animals. That may be, but Jerry Deal brings no proof, other than anecdotal mentions that don't quite stand up to the tenets of fair & objective Journalism.

His fight with Sallie Gonzalez is further watered-down by his inability, or unwillingness, to apply the same reporting toughness on the Rio Grande Valley WhiteWings baseball team, the one that has yet to say whether it has settled its delinquent utility account with the City of Harlingen. Even a cub reporter would have written the Hell out of that story by now.

Not Jerry Deal.

He's going after a woman who wants a $12,000 annual pay raise, not the team that reportedly owed the city - what? - $40,000 for availing electricity needed for sloppy, semi-pro baseball. Groan and double groan...

- 30 -

Last Call For Women...

"The day Dolores Del Ruby arrived at the Rubber Rose, a snake crawled across the dusty road that led to the ranch, carrying a card under its forked tongue. The card was the Queen of Spades..." - Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get The Blues

By DUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ
The Paz Files

BROWNSVILLE, Texas - When the book of border love is finally written, it'll include a long chapter about doormats, not the ones sold in local department stores, but the ones kept at home, in the bedroom and in the kitchen. It'll be a doozy, replete with tales of men who chained their women, who snuffed-out their lives, who used and discarded them like worthless taco wrappers. This familial tale is not one often told in Brownsville, yet this town could claim the crown as setting for the worst of wanton female abuse.

The other day, it was the portly mayor dressing down the three women who serve alongside him on the city commission, swatting down questioning that came from the usually-forward Commissioner Melissa Zamora. The mayor went code, completing his stompdown by way of a clearly Macho question of his own: "Any more questions, girls?"

We're guessing here, but Ms. Zamora likely is the youngest of the three women on the commission. And, at - what? - 34 or 35, she is no spring chicken, not springy enough anyway to still be addressed as "girl," a lookdown term used by men when seeking to put themselves above on the gender ladder.

So, we ask: What is it about women of the Rio Grande Valley? Why do they take so much crap from their men? Why is it women always fronting the pages of the local newspapers in stories that tell of beatings, whippings, bitch-slapping, knifing and, in some cases, murder? What's that all about? Why would Valley men abuse women as if kicking a mangy dog that's ambled into the backyard, as if smacking down a fly swooping in for the Guacamole, as if shooting at a burglar trying like Hell to steal the family Buick?

It is an amazing cultural stain.

The questions posed here are not new. College professors at the local schools write alarming papers about it. Reporters occasionally rip the scab off the mess, as they did in the story to do with the killing of Rio Hondo schoolteacher Sonia Perez. The press has done its job, forever reporting on spousal abuse that comes straight off police reports. Woman battering is the sport of the Valley. Forget football or pitiful minor league baseball. A daily score on female whippings ought to be published in the front pages of every newspaper in the region. A blog should be created to monitor and record every single instance involving a man taking hand to a defenseless woman.

No one dealt these women a bad card.

No one singled them out for verbal and physical abuse.

No one said they alone should bear the brunt of their mate's bad finances, spurned adultery romance, a lost business opportunity, defeat at the polls, refusal to work or pay child support, etc., etc. These women have been so devalued that to try and gauge their current position in civilization is to try and see the farthest star in the universe. It's enough to say that their lot is not a pleasant one, rivaling that lived in the poorest of ejidos in neighboring Mexico.

And still they try. Still they go for romance. Still they fall for the fairy tale. Still they stay with a losing hand for the sake of the kids. Still they rise in the morning to go to work. Still they smile when they should cry. Still they willingly turn out the lights in the bedroom and do their sexual duty...

- 30 -

The Geek From Browntown

"He is not my mayor. My mayor could never be Captain Kangaroo..." - A Brownsville Resident

By DUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ
The Paz Files

BROWNSVILLE, Texas - They say that if he hadn't gone into law and made his millions, Tony Martinez likely would now be a snot-nosed waterboy for some semi-pro football team over in McAllen some 60 miles west of this throwdown town.

But he did go to law school and he did make his money, so that's why Martinez is now mayor here - the latest former street Vato to rise from a hardscrabble beginning to rule the local political roost. And it is now apparent that Martinez, a short and stocky man with a penchant for blinking when in lengthy discourse, will not be the politician to turn things around for the city's oft-whipped residents whose sole remaining dream is to one day see a non-Macho take the reins at City Hall. Tony, Tony has let them down.

The grade at mid-semester is not good.

Well, there's this, as reported in town by excitable blogger Bobby Wightman-Cervantes, a disbarred lawyer who has made a reputation for outing the outs of those who like to out others. Earlier this week, Wightman-Cervantes dressed-down the local justice system for being easy on another blogger. That one would be Juan Montoya, a one-time journalist who openly puts himself out for hire, offering his advocacy journalism for a fee. Wightman-Cervantes wonders why Montoya remains free after a few DWIs and after being trageted for non-payment of child support sought by the mother of his three kids.

But that's a story for another day.

Suffice it to say that Mssr. Wightman-Cervantes, on his blog http://www.brownsvillevoice.blogspot.com/, is angry at the mayor, a man who replaced former Mayor Pat Ahumada in the last election. If the blogger's assessment is correct, the new mayor is an uncouth cad, a novice at both politics and class. By looking at Mayor Martinez (that's him in the photo atop this story), you'd think: Here's an educated guy, a politician who knows its the Year 2011, a man among men, a mayor who knows the gender score.

But, he doesn't.

To back up: Last July 19th, during a rather wishy-washy meeting of the Brownsville City Commission, Commissioner Melissa Zamora was doing her duty by asking questions of a lifer city bureaucrat (Larry Brown) to do with the municipal airport. According to blogger Wightman-Cervantes, the mayor took umbrage and sent the discussion down the toilet.

Wrote the blogger: "Tony, being the consummate dick he is, decided to insult Commissioner Zamora by asking her 'any more questions, girls?' "

It remains as the blackest of stains in the history of this city's governance, a phrase Mayor Martinez is said to have stolen from Neanderthal literature written on the walls of newly-discovered caves in some remote part of the world. As could be expected in a bordertown owned part & parcel by the me-first Macho culture, neither Ms. Zamora, nor two other female city commissioners attending the meeting quarreled with the dim-witted mayor. The offending phrase merely hung in the air, there for all to inhale deeply and all to damn in silence.

"Any more questions, girls?"

The Geek had not stammered. The Geek had not blurted it out and then fallen back in his own disgrace. The Geek had not coughed and then blurted-out an apology. The Geek had merely nodded and gone on with his evening, leaving his female colleagues feeling like worthless sacks of beans and those in attendance thinking, what's with this boring pendejo?

Witnesses said the only person in the commission's chambers to laugh at the mayor's classless remark was the city's animal-control officer...

- 30 -

The Creep From Wyoming...

"By incest, murder, suicide
Survives the sacred purple bird
Himself his father, son and bride
And his own word..." - Howard Nemerov, The Phoenix

By DUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ
The Paz Files

AUSTIN, Texas - Dastardly Dick "The Creep" Cheney is back and talking tough again. His memoir hits the bookstores in a few days and he's spilling the beans on everyone who served around him during the horrible George W. Bush presidency.

In his new book, and as he has been doing since leaving the vice-presidency in shambles, Cheney beats up on General Colin Powell, the then-Secretary of State who was dispatched by Bush to go lie in front of the United Nations ahead of Bush's wild and costly invasion of Iraq. And he dumps on Bush advisor Condoleeza Rice, who later replaced Powell at State, calling her a ditzy and wishy-washy bureaucrat who fought him early-on and then came crying to tell him he had been right all along. About young Bush, Cheney says he twice offered letters of resignation when Cheney's role in the war brought public relations problems for Bush.

Cheney was the rat who pushed for use of the ridiculous claim that Iraqi strongman Saddam Husseim had weapons of mass destruction as a reason for the misguided attack. His book is titled "In My Time," but it could also be titled "In My Grass-Whorled Brain."

So far, those who have received advanced copies say the book is a laughable congratulatory goodbye to himself. They add that Cheney comes across as the brains in the Bush White House, and that it was Cheney who pulled Bush's strings all along, going so far as to say that he was in charge of the country during the Sept. 11, 2001 attack on New York, because, he notes, Bush was flying around the country on Air Force One fearing the next terrorist attack would come on him.

Cheney also lashes Donald "Duck" Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense under Bush, for being a wuss unwilling to go hardline against critics of the invasion. Rumsfeld has issued no comment, and Condoleeza Rice is expected to tell her side of the dealings with Bush and Cheney in a memoir still in the writing stages. Bush has largely ignored Cheney, but those who know him say he is not happy with Cheney's constant attacks on the truth and on current President Barack Obama, a Democrat.

The artful draft dodger (Cheney got 5 student deferments during the Vietnam War) has been quiet of late, but this book will again prove an embarrassment for all Republicans, who would rather forget the lousy Bush years. Cheney, however, seems bent on leaving a legacy not exactly loyal to the truth. His time has come and gone and today's crazed Republican Party does not interest him, or so it would appear.

It would be so much better if Cheney somehow found himself in Europe with his former boss and Rumsfeld.

All three Republican standard-bearers are considered war criminals by the international community and would be subject to immediate arrest...

- 30 -

Mr. Hernandez, The Doctor Will See You Now...

"These aren't bright people. But they are cunning. And they are greedy. And they are insatiable. If theirs was a sexual disorder, a doctor would surely diagnose them as nymphomaniacs. They simply can't get enough..." - Dr. G.F. McHale-Scully

By DUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ
The Paz Files

BROWNSVILLE, Texas - Our friend, Dr. G.F. McHale-Scully, is whipping on some local citizens once again, and the sight of grown men and women moaning and groaning is not pretty. This round, it is the Hernandez Family taking a beating, the patriarch Ernie being the main target of an onslaught that has to rank right up there with the best offered by Genghis Kahn and Muhammad Ali during their prime.

It's easy to find fat, juicy targets in this falling bown, where the physically-eccentric somehow find a place on the governing bodies. Hernandez and his daughter, Erin, will never be on the cover of People magazine (that's them in the photo atop this story). Daughter Erin is labeled the "Hyena" by McHale-Scully in his blog, http://www.browntownnews.com/ with so much relish that the always-sensitive hot dog business in Brownsville has filed a complaint at the police department. Nothing spices up this town of some 140,000 lost souls like a public whipping in writing that comes with enough adjectives to fuel a Gay parade.

Cameron County Commissioner Ernie Hernandez has been around. He's been a city commissioner and candidate for this and that, and his reputation in town is that of a manipulator who manipulates money into his pocket. At face value, that isn't such a bad thing, except that Hernandez has done it while serving in some sort of public capacity; that is, being paid for being a public servant. His ilk lives in similarly strange bodies elsewhere in the Rio Grande Valley, a land where a fat stomach will never cost you a job. You eat a plate of 12 tacos and you're county judge material, goes the line in the streets. A tire-sized bowl of menudo? You're ready for Congress.

Lately, ruthless McHale-Scully is taking full liberty in his lashings of the Hernandez family.

And it's not the first time, nor will it be the last. If nothing else, McHale-Scully is skilled in going the 15-round route while hooking non-stop to the body and jabbing just enough to the head to land headaches on his punching bags. Ernie Hernandez will take it like a Brownsville man, without reply and without retort. He has no weapons against the biting barbs being launched his way, and, really, not even a bottle of tequila would assuage his disgust. Whipped, he will be. Until the cows come home, or until the Titanic is raised to the surface.

Browntown News, begun as a respectable blogroll spotlighting decaying Brownsville and its well-hidden attractions, has taken a turn for something or another. It reads like a newspaper on crack, its writer hellbent on not only afflicting, but on total destruction.

"If Hernandez went into the ring with McHale, he'd meet a rain of leather unlike any ever seen on the goddamned planet," said a former editor for The Brownsville Herald familiar with both men. "McHale will pummel him to a bloody pulp, but Ernie's wife will likely throw the corner stool at him. That couple is as closeasthis..."

And so it goes in a town known as the state's only community-sized barn...

- 30 -

The Schoolteacher Murder...

"It was the one time God decided to take a day off..." - Resident of Rio Hondo

By DUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ
The Paz Files

RIO HONDO, Texas - Earlier that day, schoolteacher Sonia Perez had checked her cellphone messages and seen one she had not liked: I know what you're up to, and I'm pissed. It had come in Spanish, from her husband, a jealous man who'd fathered her two daughters, but always suspected there had been another man in her life.

Sonia Perez shook her head, as she always did when she read his nonsense. Things had gotten worse at home and she now feared for her life. The man she'd married told everyone he worked for God as a pastor at an area Pentacostal church, but she knew another side of him. There had been those times when he'd raised his hand to hit her, once punching her on the shoulder so hard that the pain lingered for two weeks. Still, she was holding hard to her marriage, staying with her wedding vows and not at all interested in breaking them by running away, or by filing for divorce. She had made that vow in church. God had heard her speak the hallowed words of marriage: "...in sickness and in health...for richer or for poorer." Sonia Perez had it rough for several long weeks that felt like years. She had grown used to deep sighs, to crying to herself, to wondering when he would become the man she had loved for many years. Everything said leave, but she would stick it out.

One cool night earlier this year, investigators found her body slumped inside her vehicle. Two gunshot wounds told part of the story, one to the head and the other to the side of her body. Sonia Perez was dead, murdered on a lonely Cameron County road. It was shortly after 10:30 p.m. when a noisy ambulance raced to the scene. A routine request by the officers at the scene had scrambled the two paramedics that made the unneeded trip. It was clear she had died soon after being shot, still strapped to her seat, her purse within reach in the passenger seat to the right. No discernible look of distress could be found on her face. She looked as if she had slumped-over from being drunk or had been cold-cocked from behind. If death has a look of clear fright, Sonia Perez did not show it.

The popular third grade teacher at tiny Rio Hondo Intermediate School in this dusty town known for nothing, really, was gone. It would be later in the day that some of her students and fellow teachers would get the word from the news media. The death was quickly labeled a homicide and the word went out that police and sheriff's deputies were on the hunt for the killer. Early-on, no one suspected her husband, the seemingly proper pastor, was involved. That would change in the days after the murder.

In his office, Cameron County Sheriff Omar Lucio wrestled with the case. He hated unsolved crimes and this one had few clues and the markings of a random killing. He told the press there were no suspects at the end of the first day. Lucio, an elderly man with decades of law enforcement experience, took the case home, walking into his home and heading for the booze cabinet. There, he reached for a bottle of bourbon and poured himself a glass. The alcohol went down like a raging fire, he would later say, like something that would nag him until the case was solved. No weapons or even shell casings had been found at the scene. The sheriff finished off three more drinks and then called his lead investigator to tell him he was on the case immediately. In his rare dream, Lucio that night saw images of a priest chasing the teacher in a small sedan for miles and then forcing her to stop. When he walked up to the driver-side window, he saw the young teacher smiling at the priest and asking if everything was alright in a calm, friendly voice.

Then, Lucio was jolted by the sound of a high-calibre pistol going off on the teacher's face, her skull exploding as if a small watermelon dropped from a tall building. Lucio lifted his head in total fear. He rose and left the bedroom and went for another drink, taking it to an easy chair in his home's living room, where he sat in his pajamas for almost two hours, working mental angles he thought would bring the teacher's killer out of the dark.

There was nothing to check-out. No marital problems had surfaced and the family finances seemed okay, well, as okay as could be expected for a poor Mexican-America family doing its best to raise two young, precocious girls. Lucio fell asleep in the comfortable leather chair he'd loved from the day his wife had brought it home from the furniture store. The alcohol had helped roust his brain in thinking in a manner that criminals think. This one would be solved, he promised himself. In the shower a bit later, he turned on the cold water and stood under the faucet spray for long minutes, wanting his bones to cry out for warmer water. A cold shower, he knew, did something for the brain. You don't go around shooting and killing teachers in my goddamned county, he'd wanted to tell the press.

To be cont'd...

- 30 -

[Editor's Note: We offer this as a re-creation of a murder that caught the attention and interest of many residents of the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas. It is a false memoir, the essence of the story being true, but many of the details coming from what we call literary license. The Paz Files will tell one story of this teacher's death in installments...]

La Zona Final...

"The crew took a vote, and she lost, so we traded her for two cases of beer to the first boat we ran into, about a hundred miles north of South Padre Island. It was a gang of shrimpers from Galveston. They were headed back to port... that was four years ago, and the girl is still in a state mental hospital somewhere in West Texas..." - Boat captain from Port Isabel

By DUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ
The Paz Files

BROWNSVILLE, Texas - It doesn't take a week here before any visitor gets the idea that he can write a world-beater corrido to just about anything, from tales of failed romances, to thrills from a bloody shootout, to the soulful lament about a plate of bad beans at a hole-in-the-hole eatery.

Music, and we mean local music, feeds the ragged soul. That's the line in the streets and in the bars and in the motels and in the schools. This town loves a bad story.

Lately, the tune has been taken hostage by a strolling guitar player by the name of Juan Bob, an 80-year-old unemployed mechanic who loves Johnny Cash songs and does his best to ruin them with his 3-string guitar, a piece of crap someone threw at him back when he would sell the local newspaper outside City Hall. That was earlier this year, at about the time the Packers were winning the Super Bowl. Juan Bob, who looks strikingly like what the Olympic skiier Spider Sabich would look like at 82, takes tips for his performances.

One humid night last week found him strumming Patsy Clines' "I Go To Pieces" as a string of wandering locals moved past him along a cracked downtown sidewalk. He would stand tall, guitar held close to his upper chest like John Lennon liked to hold it back in the 60s, when The Beateles were fab, and plunk away, his songs always off-key and his guitar sounding like a moaning prostitute unable to find the lost chord. But he stayed with it, even as women urged him on and men told him to go kill himself.

Juan Bob is as Brownsville as anything could ever be, and he's tasted good and evil ranging from booze to local women who took him down and then forgot about him. They say he has 10 or 12 kids in town, none of them who even acknowledge his DNA. Another woman, who does his laundry and will fix a sack of flour tortilla tacos for his evening on the job, calls him The Last Picasso, a local treasure the town ignores with extreme prejudice.

We watched him put on his act under a full moon the other day. Juan Bob played all requests, including pretty sad versions of Proud Mary and Penny Lane.

But that's this bordertown, forever striving, and forever wanting to belong.

If there was an ounce of Bob Dylan in Juan Bob, well, we never saw it. He was playing an Elvis song when we drifted away, and the small group of night owls moving past him were likely thinking of all-night sex and not his music.

Music gets little attention here. It is low on the list of needs, far below tamales and condoms, although it is used to gauge membership in some sort of bizarre civilization where a few boos heard on the streets are also considered attention.

Juan Bob, beaten mercilessly by the people of his own town, threw his battered guitar across his back and walked off looking like a wasted boxer who'd somehow believed being back in the ring was as good as it had been in the old days. The booing followed him all the way home...

- 30 -

The Losers' Club...

"If any would not work, neither should he eat..." - Thessalonians, III, 10

By DUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ
The Paz Files

McALLEN, Texas - These are the toughest of times for anyone looking for work, especially here, where the unemployed like to hang out in the billiard halls, bars and streetcorners, waiting for rain, for anything that's free.

Welcome to Hard Times.

According to those who keep track of such things, this city and its neighbor to the north, Edinburg, rank 4th in the Top 10 list of American city's where the unemployed have little or no shot at finding a job, decent or otherwise, largely because of a lack of transportation. The data is striking, not because McAllen has never had its share of do-nothings and deadbeats, but because it claims to be the most progressive community in the Rio Grande Valley. Among the telling measuring sticks:

* Public transportation coverage: 63.5 percent (13th lowest) - this means that most of the city cannot be accessed without a personal vehicle. For them, it's thumbing a ride or bothering a neighbor for a needed lift.

* Zero-vehicle households: 8.0 percent - this means that many people do not own vehicles, of any kind.

* Zero-vehicle households with low-income: 67 percent - this means that two-thirds of its poor people do not own a vehicle, an astonishing amount.

In town, there are those who like to think that all is cool and moving forward, but the McAllen metropolitan area is extremely poor. According to the influential Brookings Institution, the city has the lowest median household income in the country - $34,984. This makes the area's low rate of job access a troubling part of the problem. Getting to jobs in the surrounding smaller towns, like Mission and Pharr, San Juan, Alamo is bad, although ridership for McAllen's public bus system is at all time highs, according to The McAllen Monitor. Those buses, however, move only along the busiest streets and not into and out of the poor sections of town.

And no one disputes the fact that all of America's towns are struggling, some hurting more than others. Jobs are scarce and many, many Americans have simply given up the hunt. At last check, the nation had an estimated 18 million unemployed Americans.

Here, up and down the Rio Grande Valley, it is a daily battle for most residents who rise to make the give-it-a-shot effort, but are then swatted down like flies by employers who take job applications and then tell prospective employees to sit by the phone and wait for the call. It rarely comes.

In a land known for the ol' hurry-up-and-wait because tomorrow's a better day, Valley residents usually tend to quit the job hunt and instead make for the unemployment office, where they will sit alongside hundreds of others in the same boat, ready and willing to fill out paperwork that will get them a government check. The frustration appears to have them in mental rags, brains beaten down to the point that clear-thinking is impossible. Nothing is worse, they say boldly, then waking up to another day of hitting the bricks in search of a job that's not there.

Feeling like a loser comes too-easily, but there it is.

Dressed-up McAllen endures. Edinburg is faring worse, but, there, the drag-faced unemployed find shelter from criticism that they simply do not want to work by fading into the city's graying, aging architecture...

- 30 -

[Editor's Note: The number 1 American city listed in this survey was the Palm Bay/Melbourne region of Florida...)

The Proud Highway...

"I was dreaming I was on the Sullivan Show..." - Freddy Fender

By DUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ
The Paz Files

HARLINGEN, Texas - It is said in whispered chats during morning coffee in the Mexican restaurants that Mayor Chris Boswell hasn't been the same since Othal Brand died over in McAllen to the west. Who knows about that, but Boswell isn't seen in public very often.

Brand served McAllen as landlord, dictator and mayor for several decades and had a reputation as being the sort of public servant who kept the Mexican-Americans in stir. Once, it is said with glee in the living rooms of whitefolk who still remember, he chased down a motorist on N. 10th Street and berated the Hispanic man for long minutes before asking him for his citizen papers. Brand died last year, ending an epoch known as the Last Waltz For White Mayors.

Boswell is pretty much alone in the ethnicity roll of Rio Garnde Valley mayors. Cortez now rules McAllen and Martinez holds court in Brownsville, with a legion of lesser Mexican-American notables in the small towns in between. The reconquista, as it is known in local Hispanic driveways, came a few years back, even as Brand aged and eventually died. Gone was the Gringo Patron culture, is what locals now say without hiding. A hulk of a man, Brand never did coddle the Mexican community he served. In fact, he openly ignored it.

So, what's this about?

Progress in the Valley, or, really, the lack of it.

Because as Hispanics have risen to the point of leading the many communities that dot the RGV from Rio Grande City to Brownsville, well, the expected progress has hardly unfolded in a way that some would say the Hispanics are making their own mark. They're not.

They have arrived and taken the keys to City Hall, yes. But instead of leading they have largely become maintainers, house sitters and do-nothings. Richard Cortez has tried like crazy to make McAllen his town, but that Brand brand remains as vivid in the minds of residents as those life-sized Superman cardboard cut-outs Brand used when he last ran for the mayorship in an effort to go back to the past. McAllen voters told him to go to Hell, but that's what a revolution is - tough lingo; no bullshit at rough bars.

Poor Harlingen, located in the center hump of the star-crossed Valley, is the laggard in the Big 3, McAllen and Brownsville being the other two of the valley largest cities. Harlingen is today's Tombstone, Kansas, a town quickly gathering dust and, more and more, being seen by its neighbors as that ugly gray hair in the aging armpit. Indeed, it is said that bad luck moves up and down its streets like melting jell-o, like butter gone rancid, like long-spoiled beer.

Is it Boswell's fault? No.

The Hispanic community in town holds the majority and, as such, should have long-ago taken the reins of the city's government. Not that they haven't had their chances. There was mayor Connie de la Garza (a dude) and there was a mayor named Rodriguez and so forth, but you'd need an industrial-sized shovel to find any lasting contribution from those now-forgotten gents. Ah, opportunity. It comes and it goes. You'd think one freakin' Hispanic would rise above the salsa and chips circuit and burst forth with something commemorating the Hispanic culture.

Build a statue to the Hispanic immigrant.

Honor some brown-skinned public servant in the same way that McAllen people have honored Othal Brand, remembering him when times are bad as if to let others know that the status quo ain't getting it done.

It's time.

There surely is one Hispanic male or female public servant who has done something to merit such homage. One?

Not even one?...

- 30 -

The Fast-Food Diaries...

By DUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ
The Paz Files

HARLINGEN, Texas - They say it with great verve, as if no one could ever dispute its veracity. There are, goes the line, 10 rubes for every smart person in this town. Being easily swayed is the burden residents carry as if a 5-ton anvil around their necks. Rarely, and perhaps with only Babylon as the exception, has a town walked the edges of the cliff.

Now comes the latest blowback.

Yesterday was a good day for local business. The director of the city's Economic Development Corporation stood up and announced the arrival of a fast-food joint as if announcing the dawning of a brave new world. Panda Express, the poor man said breathlessly, is coming to Harlingen. Put down that plate of tacos, boys; it's Chinese grub from here till Christmas.

Panda Express is a business run out of a little hellhole in California known as Rosemead. It is a town known for nothing. But the company owns more than 1,300 eateries across the land, offering a cheap version of Americanized Chinese food. It is "gourmet" only if you have no damned idea what gourmet is. Throw that word out in Paris or New York, but not here, not here where the struggle to find the word "paradise" in the dictionary is one of those never-did-get-there things, like Russians dreaming of landing on the moon and Mexico resolving its bloody and shameful drug war.

Panda Express has bought a building here, and the plan is to offer this town of some 70,000 culinary eclectic folks something else to munch on for $5.99, like greasy orange chicken or somesuch supposed mandarin dish.

It is, to be truthful, in the same league as Long John Silver's and Wendy's and Jack-In-The-Box, food to fill, but never for the discerning palate. That's a fact, Jack. And we don't mean Jackie Chan.

Here's this from a lawsuit filed in California against Panda Express.

"For months [the manager] treated me like a worthless employee," Aremy Lomely, a former Panda Express employee, told the Oakland Tribune. "I felt so ashamed when the Asian workers watched me obediently run from the bathroom to the tables to the counters, cleaning when they did not have to."

As reported by the Associated Press, the young lady "is part of a federal court filing against a San Jose Panda Express restaurant that allegedly forced Latino employees to clean toilets and perform other menial tasks while Asian employees of equal ranking stood by and watched. According to the suit, the manager of the restaurant also punished Latino employees more often and more harshly, frequently cutting Latino employee hours and awarding them to Asian employees instead. The allegations occurred from 2008 to 2009, and the restaurant has since hired new management."

What Panda Express is accused of doing is violating the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which outlaws discrimination based on ethnicity.

The suit was announced by the U.S. Equal Employment Commission on Wednesday. It seeks monetary damages for the affected employees and will force the company to enact strict anti-discrimination training.

As happens with these lawsuits, a Panda Express spokesman said the company will not discuss pending litigation.

For Harlingen, it is something to wonder about. Abuse of local employees may not sit well with the large Hispanic population and a few select city leaders. Will Harlingen monitor Panda Express and its personnel practices, or will it go down the same path it's sought in its questionable dealings with the Rio Grande Valley WhiteWings semi-pro baseball team?

It's not a reach to say that local Hispanics will not take any crap from out-of-town Chinese-Americans. In fact, we believe Panda Express woud be wise to keep its abusive supervisors closer to the West Coast...

- 30 -

Three Up & Three Down...

"I am not sure why we keep picking on the Harlingen Stadium. Could it be better, sure. If the team wants a better stadium, shouldn’t they build it?" - Bill DeBrooke

By DUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ
The Paz Files

HARLINGEN, Texas - They play a mean brand of insignificant sandlot ball here. Hustle moves around the bases and player perspiration flows as if dripping down dog-tired farmworkers' bodies. Managers scream for victory. Fans sit up and rub the lump in their throats. The local team is fighting for first place in the Southern Division of the obscure North American Baseball League, battling a squad of sun-baked cowboys from San Angelo in West Texas for the top spot. It is pro baseball, but only because the players, mostly rejects from the major leagues and former college players unable to give up the dream, get paid a lowly wage.

By name they go as the Rio Grande Valley WhiteWings, but they could be the Harrison Ave. Hellfighters or the Ed Carey Drive Dummies or the Seventh Street Killers. The baseball they play is barely better than high school ball, below even A ball, the lowest in the established minor leagues recognized as incubator for Big League baseball's future. Still, the WhiteWings continue to take the field in a city-owned ballpark carrying the city's name - Harlingen Field.

That is important to the team, because without the field, they'd be playing either at the high school or in some pasture outside of town. They should thank their lucky stars that Harlingen avails the facility and even extends a generous contract for utility services, rolling costs the city has apparently had to lump in the past. No one talks about a certain delinquent debt the WhiteWings owe the City of Harlingen to do with the provision of electricity at the field. It is, some say, being paid on the installment plan and may have at one point reached the $40,000 level.

Now come rumblings that perhaps a new stadium is in order.

Like Hell!

Residents of this struggling, oft-whipped Rio Grande Valley community have so many other needs that it would take a fleet of dump trucks to transport their dreams from the neighborhoods to City Hall. A new stadium for a baseball team owned by some guy in Dallas? Obscenity!

Poor Harlingen is still awaiting payback from a huge investment in the drawing of a Bass Pro Shops to the city limits that may or may not pan out. Building a new stadium so that a team of mediocre players can lay claim to something good is bad politics and worse economics. Yeah, let the team build it with its own cash!

Harlingen Mayor Chris Boswell and his secluded city commissioners should go on record as saying such a proposal rivals that idea of a few years back by some other out-of-town dreamer to build the biggest topless bar over by Los Fresnos, the one that was going to employ more than 5,000 women of all ethnicities and include a runway for small airplanes. Pipedream!

The WhiteWings would be wise to thank Harlingen residents by opening the gates to the ballpark and playing the last week of the season without charging admission. Free hot dogs, free beer, that sort of thankee. Have the players wash and wax fans' cars in the parking lot. Have the team owner appear at a City Commission meeting to personally thank the local taxpayers. He's the owner, and owners, as we all know, are in it not for the love of the game, but for the money.

New ballpark?

Only a town full of suckers would go for that deal...

- 30 -

Quiz Day At The Ranch...

By DUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ
The Paz Files

AUSTIN, Texas - From time to time, perhaps to gauge the intelligence of our readers, we like to float a little test to do with the country's issues-of-the-day. We don't expect anyone to ace it, but there have been times when some brain has popped-in to score the maximum. Here, then, is this week's brain exercise.

1.) The name of Mexico's president is:

a. Felipe Alou
b. Juan Cortinas
c. Felipe Calderon
d. Moises Alou

2.) Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's religion is:

a. Catholic
b. Rastafarian
c. Mormon
d. Protestant

3.) Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann's sister is:

a. Missing in Aruba
b. Gay
c. Married to Pat Buchanan
d. In a foreign prison

4.) London is presently battling:

a. A Beatles reunion
b. Riots
c. Release of a Keith Richards album
d. A bad teeth epidemic

5.) The editor of this web site hates:

a. Minor league baseball
b. Tacos
c. Sex
d. Golf

6.) Which of the following is a falling town:

a. Carmel, California
b. Brownsville, Texas
c. Aspen, Colorado
d. Park City, Utah

7.) How long does it take Earth to circle the sun?

a. One day
b. 365 days/366 during a Leap Year
c. It'll never make it all the way around
d. 10 years

8.) Who is buried in Grant's Tomb?

a. The Unknown Soldier
b. Lou Grant
c. U.S. Grant
d. No one. It's a sham.

9.) Wh0 sang Midnight At The Oasis?

a. B.W. Stevenson
b. Maria Shriver
c. Maria Muldaur
d. Petula Clark

10.) Mark Sanford, the married ex-Governor of South Carolina, had a torrid sexual affair with:

a. Laura Bush
b. Kay Bailey Hutchinson
c. An Argentine bombshell
d. Elizabeth Dole


As always, 7 correct answers gets you a passing score. Good luck, kiddoes! (Update 5:10 p.m., Editor's Note: The answers are in bold/italics.)

- 30 -

Dawn Of The Fish Head...

By DUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ
The Paz Files

AUSTIN, Texas - Rick Perry's talking tough in Iowa. On a campaign stump through the Hawkeye State, Perry has taken hard to the lingo of the Lone Star State, saying he'd get "ugly" with those steering the struggling federal treasury. It's vintage Perry, a woeful college student who has forgotten his lumbering past and now believes he is presidential timber.

"We need a president who loves America," he told a mob of sympathetic Republicans yesterday. "I'm running for president because I love America."

The 61-year-old Perry tends to forget things, like that it wasn't but a few months back that he proposed seceding from the same America he now so dearly loves. This kind of Hypocrites have no problem lying. Ask Dick "The Creep" Cheney. Ask Donald "Duck" Rumsfeld.

What self-serving politician won't throw out that "Love America" line? All of them will do in a jiffy. But we cannot allow Perry to forget his past. It's too fucked-up to leave behind, Ricky.

Lately, Perry's been crowing long and loud about his role in what he labels a rosy Texas economy that really isn't. He claims to have created jobs. Ha ha ha. Here's what smarter Texas Congressman Lloyd Doggett says about that: "Twenty-five states have lower unemployment than Texas does today. We're tied with Mississippi for more minimum-wage jobs than anywhere in the United States."

And Perry ignores the huge billion-dollar budget deficit rosy Texas has on its hands, a deficit that has cut programs aiding the elderly and schoolchildren. Wasn't he the Republican who wanted to mandate vaccinations against the human papillomavirus, a cause of cervical cancer, for Texas schoolgirls just because one of his biggest financial backers had some connection to the drug's manufacturer? Ah, yes.

What is emerging quickly is that Perry is a liar.

He cannot be trusted, and that's the cancer in his campaign. You cement the diagnosis when you know that a die-hard Republican prankster like Karl Rove has not said one word in support of Perry. Nothing.

We're pulling for Michele Bachman to send this poser packing back to Texas. We do that because we know flighty Bachmann is going nowhere, either. Those two diminish the essence of anyone running for president. Rick Perry likely can't even understand the dynamic of a national contest. His grades in school were not good enough to brand him a visionary or an analyst.

It says here that his claim to accomplishing anything in Texas is suspect, and for good reason.

The State Fish Head is loose in the Midwest. That's all this silly presidential campaign is about, nothing more...

- 30 -

A Bum Took My Place...

By DUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ
The Paz Files

AUSTIN, Texas - The first frame of the Republican Party's Election 2010 photo album has been shot and pasted on the page. It's a doozy in full color, but it's just the first of many. There will be a mountain of others coming during the next year. Michele Bachmann is hot right now, having bought & won the Iowa Straw Poll this last weekend. And, by looking at this seemingly ever-victorious photography, you'd think the GOP likely believes it has a chance against sitting President Barack Obama.

Not these rubes.

Republicans again are like blackbirds in this movie, flying from this powerline to the next one, wooing voters right and far right. There'll be grand ascendings and high hopes before the fall for Bachmann and her party opponents, one Mitt Romney and one Rick Perry and one Ron Paul. Those are the three legitimate contenders for the party nomination, which is still long, long political months ahead. Anything can happen from here on out. Early betting has Romney ahead of the rabid pack, with Perry snapping at his heels and the joke Bachmann somehow still believing she has a shot at the White House. As Adam told Lilith in the Garden of Eden before Eve's arrival on the scene, "It ain't gonna happen, Baby."

Photographs tend to gain interest and then they tend to be discarded in favor of new ones. That photo atop this story is yours truly during one of my recent sojourns to New York. It seemed fitting. I was in a New York groove back then. But memory of the trip faded and the new image is of me moving across Rural Texas in search of the perfect country & western taco joint. Life is funny that way. You come and you go. So don't worry about America and the threats that are all of these hollow Republicans. They'll go the way of the hula hoop and Bugler and Western Auto and The Animals. Adios, boys and girls.

That celebratory music coming from Rick Perry's camp is nothing but crack-fed noise. His minions and backers fully believe he, too, has a chance at posturing up against Obama. That, I know, would be both enlightening and hilarious. Perry versus Obama is Jerry Quarry versus Muhammad Ali: no contest. Stop the bleeding and then stop the fight. Perry, the Texas governor and graduate of Texas A&M, majored in Animal Science, but got a D in Feeds & Feedings (stuff you feed farm animals, and how you do it). He managed a C in U.S. History and a D in a course listed as Meats, one of his Animal Science classes.

According to his widely-published college transcript, Perry left A&M with only 2 A's (Improv. of Learning and Military Science), 20 B's, 27 C's, nine D's and an F in Organic Chemistry. His final Grade Point Average barely met graduation requirements.

This is the same Perry who will take on Harvard-educated President Obama?

In his brief tussle with Ali, boxer Jerry Quarry looked pathetic after the first three punches, his face and head heading for the canvas soon after that. The same fate awaits Mssr. Perry, a man who told voters when he ran for re-election in 2010 that he had no interest in higher office and that he would serve out his term. He lied. He won't. While campaigning during the next year-and-a-half, Texas Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst will take the reins of the cash-strapped, runaway chuckwagon known as the Lone Star State. Perry'll be Sarah Palining, preening as if some real idea-man, as if some late-arriving savior, as if some sentient nouveau cheerleader. The title of president on him would be so diminished as to be made irrelvant by this man. He is no George W. Bush, and that spells danger.

Yes, sir, photographs are both funny and telling.

The nattily-attired Perry's early campaign photos have him looking like some rodeo cowboy who was plucked from the smelly bunkhouse for some promotional shot needed ahead of the annual rural pig fair. He's dressed, but looks like he really has no idea where he's going. That's about all any half-intelligent wit can take out of his cornpone smiling and his ill-at-ease posturing.

I wasn't feeling all that cool when my photograph was taken outside that bar in New York. I'd been walking all damned day and my feet were tired. But you'd never get that from the photo...

- 30 -

The Gizzard Of Darkness..

By DUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ
The Paz Files

AUSTIN, Texas - Forget for a moment the fact that Rick Perry doesn't even have his own state in his pocket. Forget the fact that his claim to having forged a great economy in Texas is a mirage. And forget the fact that all those Bush Republicans hate him, and will not be endorsing him. Forget those negatives Perry has on his ledger.

The biggest problem for Republican voters considering Perry for the party's 2012 presidential nomination will be his stance - or lack of - on immigration. The 61-year-old Perry has largely damned Washington, D.C. on the issue, but done nothing about it in his own state, a neighbor of Mexico along the nation's southern boundary.

Perry is declaring his candidacy for president in South Carolina, some 1,000 miles from Texas, where his gloss is shiny and his background not exactly known. It will be, sooner than he thinks. Perry may be the next darling of the rudderless GOP, but he's yet to face the national cameras and the national press. The boy simply has too many negatives.

At last check, there were 1.6 million undocumented immigrants in the Lone Star State, up from 1.4 million in 2010. Rick Perry may wish to leave that issue in his backpocket, but state economists who partially back his claim to a booming economy are noting that those immigrants he rails against at every Tea Party opportunity have contributed to that success, adding as much as $17.7 billion a year to the state gross product and enjoying such benefits as in-state tuition at public universities.

"Gov. Perry is very eager to appear tough on illegal immigration, but upon closer inspection he's part of the problem," William Gheen, who runs the North Carolina-based political action committee Americans for Legal Immigration, told he Associated Press.

The group, added Gheen, plans to spread the word to conservative groups. What the Far Right does with Perry's record is anybody's guess. It may just be that the lack of viable candidates forces the GOP into selecting a candidate somewhat sympathetic to the immigrant life. Perry is on record as saying Texas would not pass a law such as the one Arizona went after last year, one that would have directly targeted undocumented immigrants. And his dealings with Hispanic law enforcement and politicians along the Mexican border in South Texas carry all the marks of a social Democrat, which Perry was until Bush lieutenant Karl Rove persuaded him to switch parties and join the Republican fold.

Oddly, Rove led outgoing U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson's campaign against Perry in 2010, a harsh battle that further frayed Perry's connections to that wing of the party. Former President George W. Bush backed Hutchinson and is said to be cold to the idea of endorsing Perry. How that plays out in the coming months will likely define Perry's longshot bid. He does not poll well against Democratic President Barack Obama and is currently second to former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in the party contest.

Still, Perry has been lucky all throughout his political career, taking a lowly 2.1 grade point average out of college and moving into the governor's mansion. His rise is not unlike that of another college under-achiever: Sarah Palin, who enrolled in five colleges before ascending to the governorship of Alaska, where she promptly resigned after helping U.S. Senator John McCain lose the 2008 election to Obama.

Perry may surprise, but don't bet on it.

It's hard to picture him staying up with the president in a national debate on the pressing issues of the economy (he worked up to a D in that class at Texas A&M), or on issues to do with the Middle East, or on illegal immigration.

He absolutely has no experience in any of that...

- 30 -

It Was You, Michele...

By DUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ
The Paz Files

AUSTIN, Texas - It took more than 200 years, but the question finally went out last night in Iowa: If elected president, will you be submissive to your husband? Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachman, a Republican in the mold of the annoying Ma Barker, first flinched, then frowned, then fell back on her Mommy mode. She said she and her husband, Marcus, get along most of the time and that they are Godly people.

Well, there you go, went the collective sigh from millions of Americans watching last night's inaugural 2012 GOP presidential debate broadcast exclusively by pro-Republican network FOX. Bachmann stood her female ground, there looking shorter than the male candidates around her, but stuck in the middle like some sexual sandwich. America still doesn't trust a woman for the highest office in the land. Husbands are the problem, as is that monthly thing, as is the potential for mood swings, as is the possibility of an affair with some crazed Russian.

That one we leave to pop-psychologists who will surely write a few dozen books about the conundrum. From what we saw on TV, the debate surprised only in the way FOX questioners framed their unusually rough questions. They asked cypher Newt Gingrich about his $1 million revolving account with pricy jeweler Tiffany & Company. The Newtster replied, but only to say he was tired of "gotcha questions." Gingrich, a former Speaker of the House during the brighter Clinton era, is such a longshot that Las Vegas bookies have stopped taking bets on his candidacy.

The other no-account who may have seen his dream go up in smoke is former Pennsylvania U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum, who spent the evening whining about not being asked questions. He was positioned on the far left of the candidate panel, which perhaps was telling. Santorum lost big, as did Black Georgia businessman Herman Cain, whose appearance at the debate allowed the Republicans to say it is an inclusive party. Cain is this year's Alan Keyes, a glib African-American trying like Hell to belong to the country club set that will soon turn on him. Say goodbye, Herman.

It is still hard to see any of the GOP's aspiring candidates as being presidential. Mitt Romney, the frontrunner and former governor of Massachusetts, was booed and heckled earlier in the day at a state fair gathering in which he was jumped viciously by an elderly lady who wanted him to go on record defending Medicare and Medicaid. Trying mightily, the old lady forced him into stuttering of the sort that tells listeners this guy is just a goddamned loser. Later, in the debate, Romney shined about as much as a sodium lamp in Jack The Ripper's foggy London.

Tim Pawlenty, a dead-ringer for Lee Harvey Oswald and a former Minnesota governor, took his best shots at fellow Minnesotan Bachmann, labeling her a leader of failed causes. He drew a laugh when he noted that Bachmann was listing a legislative bill to do with energy-conserving light bulbs as one of her three main accomplishments. Bachmann, perhaps drawing on her household needs & wants, could only stare at him as if Pawlenty just didn't get the thing women have for light in the home.

To be sure, Bachmann simply does not deserve to be in the presidential race. Pawlenty and her critics are right: She has done little and knows next to nothing.

Sparking the event, however, was Texas Congressman Ron Paul. He took his belt and lashed the U.S. for its meddling in the Middle East, especially as it relates to Iran. It isn't the first time the flinty Paul has gone after Uncle Sam's wicked geo-politics. On the Fox Network, his words seemed seditious; anywhere else, they would have been applauded for being, well, real. It's too bad Ron Paul is so old. He brought back the 1950s in one reference to how the U.S. postured the late Shah of Iran as some goofy American puppet, a calculated planting Paul says eventually led to the anti-American bullshit we now get from Tehran.

As theatre, the debate was one of those Off-Broadway shows you get in New York for $8, amateurish casts talking loudly, but nonethless coming from the dreamer ranks...

- 30 -

The Last Taxi To Lockhart...

By DUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ
The Paz Files

LOCKHART, Texas - We'd been asking around about neat, tasty Tex-Mex joints to be found in rural Texas, and someone we trusted had told us about Mr. Taco over on busy Colorado Road in this Caldwell County town of some 11,000 country-looking denizens.

And there it was in its proud, but faded brown paint across the street from a business calling itself Kowboy Chiropractic. You get used to such ways of language in the outs of the Lone Star State., but that's a story for another day. Suffice it to say that Mr. Taco proved disappointing. It's an okay place for mediocre Mexican food, although, at $4.99, the plate of beef enchiladas wasn't all that bad.

Mr. Taco is saddled with the same thing that afflicts Tex-Mex joints that have been around for a few years; its waitresses are either aging, flawed beauties or young girls in need of a quick diet. The jelly roll is not on the menu, but you can see it on the employees. Not that the clientele we found was anything to call Hollywood about, either. Rural Texas, bless its heart, has the monopoly on fat Rednecks and Hispanic families with way too many brats in tow. Both were present when we bopped in for lunch on Thursday.

The jewel of the day, however, was a subsequent stop at Lilly's Bar a bit closer to downtown. There, it was the place's weathered, but still shiny linoleum floor and extra-high ceiling that welcomed us in from the blistering heat outside. Nothing like a cold drink in the middle of a day rivaling Hell.

Lilly Corpus Serna is the owner. She's been there 28 years and looks it.

But the lady is a charmer, as are the stories of the more than 100 elephant figurines she has on shelves behind the lengthy bar. Lilly'll talk your ears off if you ask about her menagerie. There's one someone brought back from Iraq and gave to her. Another is a miniature elephant some long-gone artist dropped off as his way of saying thanks for the many years of being served the national drink of Texas - beer.

As can be expected of bars, a litany of signs adorn the walls. No shirts, no shirt, no service, reads one, bras and panties are optional. Paintings of action-filled western scenes and proper Spanish women in full-dress hang up near the top of the wall fronting the bar. A dusty jukebox holding the music of George Strait and Little Joe Y la Familia stands at the ready.

You can walk in and think you've ambled into 1962 all over again. Most everthing is faded in the bar, including a pair of well-used pool tables at the rear of the place. They make hamburgers here, and they are supposed to be something else. Who knows; we'd eaten at Mr. Taco.

Drives off the beaten interstate always yield something new & different.

Lockhart is somewhat known for its BBQ eateries and to a lesser extent for its high school football team, the Lockhart Lions. Not much stands out, unless you count a fair number of aging, abandoned buildings in streets flanking the majestic, but gaudy county courthouse on all directions. Maybe there's a reason why these towns reach a pinnacle and then hang on to later die gracefully.

We have a long history of seeing these little towns rot and dwindle into communities of less than 10,000 residents. And you could say there's still a charm about them, but, the more you look, the more you see of what used to be...

- 30 -

Crank Time In McAllen...

"Before this is over, the City of Palms will know agonies far worse than simple gout, or leech fever, or even the heartbreak of psoriasis..." - A Party Animal

By DUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ
The Paz Files

McALLEN, Texas - The Mexican kid fell to the dance floor like a sack of beans, heavy and with an uneven thud, his torso slamming horribly ahead of his head. Then, seconds later, he was dead, a victim of the local nightlife on a local street that is fast becoming as notorious as was Nixon Way in Saigon back in the 1960s. The thing is they want to party here, and that's bringing the late-night fun and the midnight frolic. But it's also bringing an end to some young lives.

A party boy by the name of Alberto Rosales died in the wee hours of last Saturday.

It wasn't long before superstitious moms blamed it on the devil. The lifeless Rosales was sprawled on the floor of Le Rouge Club, gone from the planet from a spot on the dance floor at 109 S. 17th St. No one is sure what exactly offed this guy. Cops aren't talking and club owners would never talk. It's bad for business. What was said in guarded whispers was that some sort of disturbance involving Rosales had led to someone pushing him ahead of his fateful fall. City Police Chief Victor Rodriguez was holed-up in his office, perhaps unwilling to take on the power of the burgeoning entertainment district's burly bar owners. Boozing is part of the pursuit of happiness in this border city of some 120,000 residents. Now, there are those who say hard drugs have invaded the drinking scene, marching the local young straight to Hell.

McAllen's plans for this six-block stretch of bars and nightclubs seemed noble a few years back, when greedy businessmen began buying old flower shops and cafes and finance companies and barber shops that lined the street. It was to be the centerpiece of progress, the cherry on the partytime parfait. Booze would be trucked in and, yeah, young people would pay the $12 for a cocktail just to be seen. It is the very insecurity among the people of the Rio Grande Valley that allows for the creation of such killing zones. These kids are nobodies and they want to make it somewhere - even along old 17th Street, once the favored byway of the city's poor Mexican community loathed by the city's Anglos.

This Rosales kid may be only the beginning. Those who know say drugs walk the street in the pockets of weekend party animals, girls included. It is not a drag for the middle-aged or the elderly. They boo you loudly if you're over 30 all the way from Business 83 on the northern end of the street all the way to Houston to the south, over by what used to be little Roosevelt Elementary School. Get your $30 steak at El Patio and go on home, old timer, goes the line.

Booze has flowed like a runaway river now for almost two years. Complaints centering on loud music by residents living along neighboring streets have been entertained and ignored at City Hall. Sales tax receipts still look like winning Lotto tickets to the cash-starved mayor and his city commissioners. One death isn't enough to shut the keg down. Just play something by Santana and get that body off the freakin' floor.

"The city has nothing to lose," said one critic. "It has hired the daughter of the Devil, himself, to bring the action and it will dance. This is just the beginning of a long, cruel nightmare that even the church will have trouble explaining."

The majority are fed up with this orgy of dumbness and debauchery. It is one thing to allow the entry of drug money from neighboring Mexico to help the city's economy, but it is another when the Mexican clientele starts thinking it owns the joint.

"McAllen went after this Entertainment District for the people from Mexico," said a well-connected resident. "It went all out to approve every bar that came looking for an alcohol permit. What McAllen has on its hands now is what Reynosa across the river had before the drug war, its own Zumbido."

The words crash on the hot asphalt of the noisy, crowded street on this Saturday night. McAllen as a Zumbido may be harsh, but no one quarrels with the jagged landscape. It would take a dozen cameras positioned just right to capture this scene: Rosales falling in killer slow-motion, glazed eyes to the disco-balled ceiling, his last gasp for air coming about a foot off the floor, his back slamming onto the floor, his stunned soul rising and then hurrying to come up with an explanation for St. Peter...

- 30 -

Last Dance In Dumb Town...

By DUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ
The Paz Files

BROWNSVILLE, Texas - Some obscure punk band from Mexico waltzed into town the other day, bringing noise no one here needed. "It's a stab at life," said an outbound bus driver at the downtown station. "It can't be tortillas and beans everyday, man. You gotta dance sometime."

It isn't, of course.

Brownsville rocks to its own vicious sounds, dancing to a combination of midnight sexual yelpings and morning screams at the inattentive Gods. Here, going to jail for drinking while driving is a badge of sorts. Even the politicians know that walk, one covered nicely by the tired newspaper and blared the Hell out of proportion by the sensationalist blogs. Not drinking is the oddity, although you can find some of those residents if you go and get a bit nitpicky, something never recommended when you're down & out along the harsh Mexican border.

I popped into a downtown cafe and moseyed over to a corner table near a dusty jukebox that played an old, old song by Jose Alfred Jimenez, Mexico's Neil Diamond, that reminded me of a woman from my days in El Paso. That one had given her all, but sometimes even that is not enough. I sat back heavy and then dropped my copy of The Brownsville Herald on the table while a soft-necked waitress ambled over. I knew what I wanted.

"Tacos with egg and bacon," I said, holding up two fingers. "Plus a whole avocado sliced neatly and flanked by pico de gallo. Bring me that and get yourself a nice tip, doll."

She wrote it down on a palm-sized pad and pivoted a well-hipped retreat chased by some mumbling that sounded as if she was not a happy camper at work. If you ever get tired of people being nice to you, come to Brownsville. They wear bitching proudly here, better than they do in Beirut or Bogota. Arrive with a northern attitude and see the avalanche of cursing fall on you in Spanish. It's that kind of a movie, one with a sick plot, horrible actors and an ending that never comes.

Last Dance In Dumb Town, starring a cavalcade of do-nothings and mumblers solely interested in getting credit and getting paid. Don't ask for the best tacos; they serve what they want and that's that. There is no prime rib in town, not even a good T-bone. Those are trucked over to McAllen some 60 miles to the west, where chef's know the drill and waitresses know the score. Here, a Jack-In-the-Box taco will do when the wallet is thin. Here, the mayor will spring for a round of booze if the votes are in. Here, women pine for rough, full-depth sex, but get shorted most of the time. Dancing, then, is the outlet for those ragged bedroom emotions.

I see my breakfast being walked toward me.

"Here," the waitress says in the manner of a junior high dropout.

"Thank you, sweetheart," I say, nonetheless.

"Will there be anything else?" That subservient, yet annoying tone.

"Red Sox or Yankees," I throw back. "The pennant, I mean."

"Rangers," she tells me, smiling like a real worthwhile bordello slut. "World Series champs this year. Bank it, dude."

I smile and she smiles and then three fat cops sucking menudo at a nearby table lift their pig heads to smile before the entire cafe crowd bursts out in laughter not heard around here since blogger Jerry McHale was writing high school sports for the local daily.

There's nothing worth a damn in the newspaper and I tell myself these poor buggers need some sort of brain rubdown, and they need it soon. Much has passed this town by, and now, under a new mayor who is more at ease with a croissant than a taco-de-trompo, much more threatens to zip by as if to punish the most whipped town in America. It rained here the other day and the church said it was God crying.

The two tacos went down nicely and I got up to leave just as a song by Phil Collins burst out of the old jukebox and what followed was the needle scratching the Hell out of the record. Figures, I told myself, wanting, but not wanting to make a scene.

You walk carefully in this town.

Every sidewalk is an eggshell...

- 30 -

Down To The Sunless Sea...

"We want females, as a rule. If it's male, we just castrate it and sell it for steak in Chicago..." - Colorado beef rancher

By DUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ
The Paz Files

HARLINGEN, Texas - The cab driver we drew here wasn't mincing words. He railed on in Spanish, but his take on things went to the heart of the problem. "Politics will whip you," he said again as he reached for my bag and walked it to the sidewalk. "Sooner or later, smalltown politics will expose you for what you are: a do'er or a bullshitter."

Cabbies know the score. You can take an educated pundit published in newspapers and flush him down the toilet. Those guys know too much. Cabbies know just enough.

We were asking about City Commissioner Kori Marra, specifically about what's become of her during these past few months. We've been gone a bit and the local press, well, the local press leaves much to be desired, and you really can't go by the blogs on this woman - they love her enough to give her a pass on everything, or they hate her so much that the criticism becomes stupid. But she's still around, is what the jelly-bellied cabbie said in the end.

Marra, one of those hard-boiled daughters of West Texas who can party and wonder at the same time, is scheduled for some sort of hearing later this year to do with an accusation that she violated ethics reportedly important to elected officials. She's tanned, rested and ready, as they once said about Nixon.

Republican Jew-hater Nixon was a crook. No one disputes that anymore. Ms. Marra's troubles with the legal system pale in comparison to Tricky Dicky, a man not above asking his generals why so few Jew-surnamed soldiers were being killed in Vietnam. You can't go easy on Nixon. He ruined too many political careers and still stands as the only president ever forced to resign the office, leaving it in shambles to the point that his successor Gerald Ford quickly had the toilet seats changed in the White House.

Ms. Marra's baggage is much less. She has wisely taken the low road since those charges were filed back before Blogger Jerry Deal left the news arena for a crazed flirtation with pitiful local minor league baseball. Deal has left the story alone, as is his wont with the distasteful. Others in the city's media have flitted off to other stories, leaving the commissioner to plot her fight against the ethics charges in complete silence.

The city has moved-on, pondering the rise of gasoline at the pump, the long, hot summer, the cruel Gulf of Mexico weather, the sudden interest in Italian food. For the press, Marra has been absent of late. For her, the press has been absent forever. It's the best trade-off, she is said to have told someone who asked for anonymity. Reprisals are big here. There was that punk drug-pusher who was offed at an obscure apartment complex not that long ago. You take your life into your own hands by criticizing anything or anybody. Life in vicious Harlingen is defined not by progress, but by revenge. Vindictive is the favored word of the local elite.

So, what's Ms. Marra to do now?

Rumors circle her constituent district's streets as if songs from jilted women: she's not running again. She's moving to San Angelo. She's out getting another drink. She's not there.

Smalltown politics goes to the jugular. Marra is a single woman. She does her job as a real estate pro and then she finds things to do, like ride the winds to South Padre Island some 20 miles east of here for that killer tan. Women can take that political responsibility and shelf the sonofabitch; men cannot stop from plotting their next self-serving move. It's a gender thing. A male facing ethics charges of the sort Marra is facing would not only go drinking, but he'd take his secretary with him and then tell the guys about it. Women in the Rio Grande Valley don't get that pass. They will be whipped, says the Bible of the Border.

Of course, she should seek re-election. Women are the answer for this under-achieving, taco-eating, whiskey-swilling neck of the woods. Women should be out rioting against the Macho system in place, the one that can't seem to bicycle out of the crippling mud.

What the Hell, huh?

As our cabbie put it when we asked about her future in politics, "No one's carried her to the guillotine, so..."

- 30 -