Look At Him Now...

By DUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ
The Paz Files

NEAR BASTROP, Texas - The cops were stopping everybody, forcing motorists on Ranch Road 21 and State Highway 71, both usually passive thoroughfares into town, to turn around or into rural farm-to-market roads headed this and that way. The smell of something burning hung heavy in the air as Rick Perry flew into Bastrop to deliver his message of hope and help. Fires roared across the range here again Monday, driving residents away in droves, rusting horse trailers in tow.

Perry, the absent governor of late, had jetted back to Austin from a political party gathering in South Carolina to check on things he is responsible for, like the safety of the state's citizens. He will be in California on Wednesday night, tackling his Republican opponents for the party's 2012 presidential nomination. The questions there will come from moderators for the sponsoring television network, NBC.

Here in the picturesque geography of Central Texas, where windmills and faded-red barns still dot the landscape, the only question was: When will the firefighters whip the fires?

Perry managed a stop at the local convention center, where he fielded a few questions from the press about what the State of Texas was doing to avoid a larger disaster.

Almost too-quickly, as if to assuage scared locals, Perry said he'd already sent a letter to the federal government seeking a declaration of emergency that would bring federal resources to aid the firefight. For one shining moment, it was that other side of Republican Perry, the one that acknowledges belonging to the union and not the one who would like to secede from it.

Perry looked sort of agonized in forming the words before saying them for story-hungry reporters who full-well know his history of not knowing where he resides. For true Americans, it was that needed Perry comedown, the one most segregationist politicians get sooner or later.

He'll debate on Wednesday. He'll take on Bachmann and Romney and the others, but perhaps he will admit that, when the going gets weird, he goes to Washington, D.C. for help only the federal government can avail him.

An estimated 25,000 acres had been torched and some 476 homes laid low. That was something to behold, even from the highway. But seeing Rick Perry looking like a rube set-straight was priceless...

- 30 -

Meet The Fockers...

"Someone's got it in for me, they're planting stories in the press.." - Bob Dylan

By DUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ
The Paz Files

BROWNSVILLE, Texas - Junior Bonner called from his mobile home in Rio Hondo and warned me about writing this story. "Feelings wear on the top layer of skin down here," he said between swallows of beer that came from a can of Pearl. "But you go right ahead and stroke the hornet's nest. We sure ain't got much to do these days aside from reading the free blogs. Just spell my name right."

I listened and nodded to myself, or rather to the second-story motel window that allows me a view of serious-looking turkey vultures moving over toward Harlingen. A drink of something vicious and this idea will seem better: Rating the area's bloggers and their offerings. We have read most of them during the past few weeks and found that these three are doing the Lord's work on the matter of news & information. If your blog is not on this short list, well, your blog is not passing muster. And, of course, we know that most Rio Grande Valley blogs fall into two main categories: the under-achievers and the amateurish. We also did not review blogs doing nothing but providing copy & paste secretarial crap. Posting press releases also eliminated some from serious consideration.

And so, here they are, in order of their finish:

Number 1: http://www.browntownnews.com/

This blog is an offshot of what used to be Brownsville Literary Review and, before that, El Rocinante. It is a leap in quality from its beginnings, although it still, on occasion, swings below the belt. Still, readers get quality info, if a bit askew at times. Editor Jerry McHale, a notorious newspaper man in his younger days, is a blogger who can write. That may sound profound, but writing is not a talent to be easily found south of San Antonio. Adultery is, as is drinking alcohol and selling tacos or drugs. Downtown Browntown manages to serve snippets of the entire Falstaffian lifestyle that is lived and re-lived in Brownsville, Texas. The border town is known for hallucinated dramas, for unsolved killings of assistant district attorneys, for corrupt local politics, for education histrionics and for treating stray dogs and cats better than homeless wanderers. McHale, a devoted reader of the Gideon Bible found in most cheap motel rooms, chases his main dishes with just enough sides to make a visit to his site a unique experience. Where once he traded in profanity and pornography on El Rocinante, he now sits in the backseat of his mind, catching up on powerful tales he used to ignore in the same way he ignored women with horrible overbites. Mssr. McHale is a singular talent, a blogger often described as a cross between Hunter S. Thompson and Hugh Hefner, with a bit of Roberto Clemente in stories to do with the city's large Hispanic population. Downtown Browntown is new on the scene, but McHale isn't interested in joining the blogging boys on some shared journey. According to a note on his blog, he has entered his "classical" period and, as such, he is finding local streets he never knew existed and local people he never thought were worth a damn, i.e. the ones he once openly labeled lazy buggers. Downtown Browntown is the one RGV blog that forever makes us laugh, and that's saying something.

Number 2: http://www.rrunrrun.blogspot.com/

You read editor Juan Montoya's blog and you immediately sense that this guy is one of those tireless reporters who will get his jollies no matter what. The peripatetic Montoya, too, is a former newspaperman. What readers get on his blog is a boatload of inside baseball to do with the local colleges, the schoolboard, the district attorney's office and an overdose of anything that qualifies as hoary ghosts from that handy shelf of Hispanic border lore - like the escapades of Border Bandit Juan N. Cortina and largely-ignored Hispanic settlers he says made Brownsville what it is today. Those who like his blog tell him his stuff is A-1 in comments submitted after stories are posted. Those who despise him, including other Brownsville bloggers, point to his DWI arrests, alleged non-payment of child support for his three children and a penchant for using bigger, more-high-fallutin' words than he needs to in his reports. The grammar here is at times suspect, but the body of the stories hang nicely. Montoya has a good ear for stories, but at times is said to sell his journalism services in exchange for paid advertising on his website. Still, it's in the low-flying RGV and that helps his case. Montoya would be on the outs elsewhere, like in the Big City, for example, where readers quickly discern conflicts to do with ethics and transparency. Readers are nonetheless rewarded with a steady stream of stories about the city's well-known and well-connected. His ceaseless assault on the UT-Brownsville school president was a key to a local drive to separate her and her UT branch from the town's junior college. In some local circles that was the equal of the downing of the Berlin Wall. His blog is a distant second, but it is second on our list.

Number 3: http://www.myleadernews.com/

Blogger Jerry Deal barely makes this list. That has much to do with a lack of competition and his occasional shirking of objective journalism duties. The 78-year-old Deal is a former editor of the Valley Morning Star in Harlingen with a few Big City newspaper credits, but his standing drops to this level because of two things: He grants the local Rio Grande Valley WhiteWings semi-pro baseball team a free pass on off-the-field issues that include reporting (or, better yet, not reporting) on the team's contract with the city. Deal also will use his blog to, at times, assail people, even while holding hard to his desired reputation as a fair & balanced newsman. In the past, he has been accused of submitting his own comments under fake names and lying about visiting other websites. Still, he operates in the news vacuum that is Harlingen, Texas. In Brownsville, Deal would not compete; in Harlingen he is Top Dog, solely because of the lackluster competition. Also hurting his reputation is a bizarre and childish desire for reader comments. Deal is not above ending his stories with silly sentences such as this one: "Let's get some comments on this issue." That devalues his site and threatens to throw it into the blogging back row, there with Island Footprints and Winter Texan Blues. So, we list him as Number 3, but the distance between Deal's blog and Montoya's is far greater than the distance between Montoya's and McHale's. Maybe next year, Jerry.

Honorable Mention: http://www.brownsvillevoice.blogspot.com/

If you seek legal explanations to serpentine stories moving across Brownsville, this is your blog. It is operated by Bobby Wightman-Cervantes, a disbarred lawyer who stays abreast of things at City Hall and other local governmental agencies. His strength is not in writing as much as it is his knowledge of the law. Wightman-Cervantes can track down - and post - legal filings like Willie Mays tracked-down warning track flyballs for the San Francisco Giants. It was Wightman-Cervantes who first published the story of blogger Juan Montoya's jailing last fall on reckless driving and DWI charges. Indeed, he also posted a photo of a haggard Montoya in the orange garb issued to inmates at booking. It stands as the rare story involving a jailed RGV blogger. Wightman-Cervantes would likely place a bit higher and no doubt challenge for Number 3 if only he could write sentences using proper grammar. A veteran of the U.S. military, he also can be counted-on to deliver news and info related to the plight of the Valley vet, an issue of apparent great import to him. A little less emotion in his stories would also help, as would a change in an approach that often has him telling readers he has more info on his stories, but is forever not ready to reveal it. It water-downs his effort and makes him look like a rank amateur. Still, he is in the mix.

There are some dozen blogs in the Rio Grande Valley, but no other made the cut here...

- 30 -

The Real Squeal...

"Paz-Martinez, why are you defending this bureacrat? She has brought this upon herself, and, as a voter of her precinct, I will hold her accountable, PERIOD. This is not a public lynching. I am offended with your comments and demand an apology!" - Nora Lee Garcia

By DUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ
The Paz Files

HARLINGEN, Texas - It was the deranged chicken fight of the week, women assailing another woman. Wild stuff, skirts aflutter. Politics sprinkled with a bit of hot salsa. Culture battling itself. Broad-on-broad. Mano-a-mano. Hair-pulling by way of bad grammar. Sweethearts thinking the absurd. Internet bullies run amok.

In a few harsh sentences, that was how Jerry Deal's blog - MyLeaderNews.com - ended the week in this falling town of some 70,000 fun-starved denizens. It wasn't party, but, then, whippings rarely are pretty, and even when they have a shot at being something special, well, here, the grass-whorled local brain just isn't up to the task.

The rock-throwers were essentially four ditzy female bloggers who arrived to post damning comments against local Justice of the Peace Sallie Gonzalez, a public servant who (Great Scott!)dared to ask for a raise in a regional environment that says $10 is way too much to pay for a blouse or a meal. This is not a happy town. This is a town ready to explode.

Brenda G, Darla, Daisy and Nora Lee Garcia are the names these roused bloggers offered when posting on Deal's rapidly-swooning blog. Their assessments of Ms. Gonzalez's on-the-job performance and her salary increase request - a lousy $12,000 - likely will next be heard on the Jerry Springer Show. Anyone need a sassy maid? Call Nora Lee Garcia, whoever she is.

A fair few of Deal's bloggers - commenters - have taken to the gutter in presenting thoughts on issues related to Harlingen or the Rio Grande Valley. Usually, they make some sense. And it had been the practice of Deal, a former Journalist, to somewhat monitor the submitted comments for the ridiculous, the inane and the unfair. He is no longer so concerned.

This much is true: The woman animated starts to shake. Her words crack as they ride the aging canyons of a weary brain. Those fingers used to performing nifty deeds like preparing dinner or holding the house cat betray her when the ire rises above the normal range. It is not that these women do not have a gift for speaking or writing coherent thoughts; it's just that Nora and Daisy and Brenda and Darla perhaps get off on dispensing crap via the Internet. How else do you explain their awkward, but insistent headfirst dive into the community cesspool?

Why else would these women dump on another woman with such vigor, as if caught in a trap, a vicious cycle of comic one-upsmanship, all of them victims of their own preposterous stupidity. This, boys and girls, is what defines the hysteric, and this is why I have placed these women at the center of this editorial. Oh, if only we had photos of this fearsome foursome? If only they existed? For sure, no woman of the Rio Grande Valley acts in this brainless manner, as if just home from the psycho ward, as if an emotional mess soon to require a series of colon washes. In the parlance of sports, they have taken the field of bullshitting and they have damned the band. Halftime will be Daisy and Brenda and Darla and Nora Lee piling on Sallie Gonzalez, the referee, one Jerry Deal, oblivious to the fouls, in his own way sanctioning the dirty play.

JP Gonzalez may be the "witch" these bloggers say she is. And she may not deserve a raise, a request she apparently has withdrawn. She may not be their kind of politician. She may not wear the same style of clothing or have her hair done in the finer salons. Fair enough.

But to merely condemn for condemnation's sake is wrong.

Campaign against Ms. Gonzalez. Unfurl her errors and foibles. Tell it all. Document and prove. Then, and only then, can you swoop-in as if on roadkill. This sort of foolish blogging helps no one and nothing. Intelligent discourse is not that difficult to attain. You merely sit at your computer keyboard and tell yourself the Inner Moron in you will not come out today. To date, from what I have seen, these four women - and there are some cowardly men on Deal's website, all arriving with single names or invented monikers, to, obviously, distinguish themselves from the high school and college graduates. If only! - have contributed piles to the city's sewer system, but precious little to the whys and why nots related to Ms. Gonzalez's service. Wanna vent? Scream into your toilet, but don't bring that crap into the public light.

There is so much information missing in this sad affair that to blame it all on these four misguided lasses would also be unfair. Jerry Deal bears a good amount of the blame. He is the reporter who came forth with a story so shallow that it had to yield the sort of bullshit he now sees on his once-respected blog. Such is the fate of blogs whose primary intent is to draw reader comments.

As for Daisy and Darla and Brenda and Nora Lee Garcia, well, given that what I have put forward here is directed largely to you, just know that it is because I wish to make you ashamed, not too much, but just enough...

- 30 -

The Boy Who Loved Esther

By DUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ
The Paz Files

McALLEN, Texas - How do we remember our youth? Is it through old friends? Do we swim across our road-weary brains and beach onto those moments that, well, have remained unforgettable even as a multitude of others fill the larger gaps? Do certain towns, certain songs,certain years, fuel that desire to recall years when we were young, young being 10 or 11 or 12?

I love to go back to my younger days here, in the City of Palms. High school is largely a blur, but every now and then something comes full-clear, like that time I was busted for skipping classes and taking a bus to Mexico with two other friends. You could do it back then. Or that time we got into it with some clowns from Edinburg High (there was only one back then) at a rock club called The Green Flame over by the airport. Pushing and shovings led to a semi-brawl of sorts, with all of us bolting for the door and diving head-first into a dark-black Chevrolet Biscayne from the mid-1960s owned by the father of one of the guys in our gang, gang here meaning just four high school kids wishing to be hip.

Laughs always came easily back then. Being 15 seemed a good age to be stupid, to try and be tough, to act like Mr. Big Stuff on campus.

But a few years before that, I had fallen for a healthy 13-year-old named Esther Escamilla. I'd met her at an outdoor dance party held in a friend's backyard. His mother had placed a record player on a chair and his father had strung some lights across the grassy dance floor. It was free and it was what now would be called good, clean partying. No booze, no drugs, no bad language. I remember Esther in her pleated skirt and sandals, a white blouse, and a full head of hair that made her look like a lioness. I danced with her alot, Twist songs by Chubby Checker and Joey Dee and Dee Dee Sharp. I can still see her.

Who knows what became of Esther? One day she was not around, and when I asked my best friend about her he said he thought her family had moved. She'd known where I lived, but, no, I never found a note in our mailbox. Nothing. She was gone and I never saw her again. For sure, she married and had six or seven kids. She moved like someone who would become a good mother, her dancing choreographed as if by the Virgin Mary, no slouching down to my knees, no pouty mouth, no major red lipstick. I see her and I see a little girl wearing her innocence nicely. Those kids she had likely became police officers, schoolteachers, nurses. That's what I'd say now, although perhaps the Leave It To Beaver aspect of those days have something to do with that. I can't even bring up images of what it might have looked like to make love to Esther Escamilla. She might have made me very happy. She may have been the one Valley girl who would have kept me, would have forced me to stay home.

But everyone has his or her own memories of a first girlfriend or boyfriend. Few of us dwell on it, or have so much free time that we can push our brain to bring back the excitable scenes from high school, from teen parties, from those magical years that are the 16s, 17s and 18s.

Much came afterward for me, and of course I left my hometown after high school to enlist in the U.S. Navy. That was followed by college and my long pursuit of the best jobs in Journalism. I married the mother of my two daughters during my last semester in college. We divorced five years ago. We remain friends, I think.

Somedays, when people in the Rio Grande Valley who know me and know of my travels and my criticism of life along the Mexican border use that against me, I go back in time and take my brain to the noisy halls of McHi, where friends would skylark like crazy between classes, when walking into class after the bell was a badge, when saying horseplay in the Boy's Room or hanging around the soda machine outside the cafeteria had created the tardiness, when coughing in class was not about not being able to breathe, but because it was a way to message friends seated in another row, when saying "Black Power!" loudly as class ended seemed cool, that stuff. I don't know that I'd like to go back to my teen-age years.

Too much angst there.

Too many unknowns.

But I would like to go back to those nights when Esther Escamilla and I danced to Chris Montez's "Let's Dance," and when we would hold hands in guarded fashion, and when I would feel a certain sadness when her mother would show up and drive her home.

I recall my walk home was the height of loneliness...

- 30 -

World Series Of Darkness

"This may be the generation that faces Armageddon..." - Ronald Reagan

By DUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ
The Paz Files

AUSTIN, Texas - Sometime in the next nine days, Americans will pop a few horrible images onto their brains, brightened images of the attack on New York City, the Pentagon and on the nation's capital. Sept. 11th, 2001 is about to go front-center in the national psyche.

It was the day no one expected, the attack everyone said was impossible. But it happened, accounting for more than 3,000 deaths and a quartet of wild airplane rides for passengers of hijacked jetliners used in the assault. Blame quickly went to 19 members of the Al-Qaeda outlaw fraternity, terrorists in the pages of our newspapers.

A huge ceremony is scheduled for Ground Zero in Gotham City, geography where the Twin Towers stood before the attack and where they fell less than two hours after being hit. President Barack Obama will be there, as will other politicians and pseudo-celebrities.

What will you be doing on that Sunday morning?

Will you be hoping that it is the last such foreign attack on American soil, or will you be cringing when the television networks replay the country's most-awful video, shots of the iconic towers being hit by the jetliners, entire floors going up in smoke, people jumping to their deaths, the towers collapsing in what has to be the most dramatic news video of the 70 years? I say 70 years, because that's how long ago another national tragedy hit the U.S. - that one a Japanese sneak attack on our U.S. Navy base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii.

Much has happened in the span of those seven decades, good things and bad. Military conflicts in Korea and Vietnam kept the nation at odds within its own diverse community. That should not be forgotten. But it happens. Americans likely remember more about Woodstock than they do about the Navy ships that sank that morning in Pearl Harbor. Quick quiz: was it the USS Arizona or the USS Indianapolis? If you don't know, well...

Life is funny that way. America lives in a hurry-up society that doesn't exactly treasure its history. Not too long ago, I asked a waitress at a Chili's in Austin who was buried in Grant's Tomb and she said, smiling, she had no idea. One more: What country were most of these Sept. 11th terrorists from? If you said Saudi Arabia, head for the fridge and get yourself a beer on me.

So, what about our 10th Anniversary of the day America came under attack?

What about that date should we remember?

What exactly did we lose that day?

Who can frame a neat paragraph to put it all in context?

You should be able to do that with ease, is what I say. Every American should. Attacks on our homeland have been so rare that any citizen worth his weight in U.S. History knowledge should be able to list them. If you can't, then all Sept. 11th will ever be to you is just another day of great TV video. We live in a video world, I know. If something is not on video, well, it can't be true. Conspiracy theories about Sept. 11th abound. We're also a society with too much free time on its hands. Most of us would rather hear about the Britney Spears of the world, the Lady Gagas, the Kim Kardashians, the Derek Jeters, the Peyton Mannings.

No one but architects can give you the height of the downed Twin Towers.

Few of your friends and neighbors and co-workers can tell you it was the USS Arizona that sank at Pearl Harbor, and that the USS Indianapolis was sunk by a Japanese submarine farther west in the Pacific, and that many of the men who survived to jump overboard were eaten by sharks.

September 11th ought to be about feeding your need to know things you should know about your country and not simply a day to lower your head and dream-up a prayer for those who died that fateful day in the Big Apple...

- 30 -

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...

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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.)

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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...

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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...

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