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..."

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