Save Jerry McHale: The Paz Files

The Paz Files
http://thepazfiles.blogspot.com/

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In Nasty Brownsville, A Cubist Blogger Paints A Ghastly Canvas...
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgwtBWDD_xywtFzAhQObDTsKBNCjwZ0ufCAmVZ4RGORoFbb297nI9GpLKcL83kGpgObQXUxbmrdb6K78HpZpTybR8TVaJoNKsHSyUVaZZ5LcL-UjEWeC3dpTxGud1YwCaPf_pAA0VvFbB4/s1600/browtowner.jpg"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 300px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 199px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5686519206444201106" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgwtBWDD_xywtFzAhQObDTsKBNCjwZ0ufCAmVZ4RGORoFbb297nI9GpLKcL83kGpgObQXUxbmrdb6K78HpZpTybR8TVaJoNKsHSyUVaZZ5LcL-UjEWeC3dpTxGud1YwCaPf_pAA0VvFbB4/s320/browtowner.jpg" /></a>"The more things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is..." - George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman By DUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ The Paz Files BROWNSVILLE, Texas - The story of Jerry McHale is the story of the laughing snake. He is this town's Big-Time political operative, a man who's crafted his own savage journey across a piece of harsh geography so tough that many men simply give up and go on the government dole. McHale, editor of a string of biting blogs that have both entertained and damned this community, has asked for little in return, oblivious to the pain he has caused, pushed onward by the realization that, like Neil Armstrong, he's had to account for a largely-criminal world not his own. In our search of the one person who stood out or made a difference in The Year 2011, we pondered the work of such notable achievers as Manny Gomez, head coach of the wildly-successful Harlingen High School football Cardinals who made it to the quarterfinals of this past season's state playoffs. And there was Cameron County Judge Carlos Cascos, the rare Hispanic Republican, who fended-off attempts by the opposition to steal his election and then proceeded to do nothing out of ordinary, other than keeping things calm, allowing the press to look elsewhere for cheap scandals. In the judge's insular world, the villain became Roger Ortiz, the county elections administrator who played the partisan pinata for several days before rendering the verdict Cascos wanted. Outside his home, Ortiz lives in infamy. So it is McHale who takes the honor: Person-Of-The-Year. We have often both praised and criticized him. A California transplant who arrived in town some 40 years ago, the ingenious McHale has become the incontrovertible face of Brownsville. In fact and myth, he is both weathervane and weather stripping. In columns on his whip-like blog (<a href="http://www.browntownnews.com/">http://www.browntownnews.com/</a>), the largely-uneducated citizenry gets the good, the bad, the ugly and the ugliest. Whether it is a write-up about the college president he despises more than any of a hundred local women who over the years declined his sexual advances, McHale also generously brought fame to humble shopkeepers, street vagabonds, lissome waitresses, barbacks, gadflies, fuck-ups and a host of other Brownsville characters who were handed their 15 minutes of fame free-of-charge on a blog many call "the town's paddle." In the negative column of his ledger came horrible reports so unfair that even he had to laugh while typing them. When his best friend and fellow blogger Juan Montoya was jailed for driving recklessly and driving while intoxicated, McHale wrote about Juan out on some lonesome prairie, unable to maintain his own blog. When Montoya was again jailed this year, McHale wrote Juan was off to Cuba for something or another. It's a human failing, but one forever forgiven in this vulgar bordertown home to some 160,000 legal and illegal residents. McHale's attacks have spanned all that is life in town - from politics to the courts. He's been sued, he's been threatened and he's been derided by almost all of the locals he has upbraided. He's written in favor of the Gay lifestyle except for that lived by another local blogger, Bobby Wightman-Cervantes. And he has tirelessly and ridiculously pushed Brownsville as some nightclub paradise, a sort of Mecca without the prize, a honeymoon without the wife. But he's drawn support even for that joke, the populace here possessing what pop-sociologists call the "Goddamned Particle," that ability to blow-off falsehoods in the name of the oppressed collective. A barhopper from way back, McHale has been everything from Disco Freak, to Urban Cowboy, to Panama beach boy to wannabe boxer, his lone battle in the ring ending in a quick, one-punch knockout at the hands of a heavyset teenager from Mercedes. But that was yesterday. Today, he is the recipient of our Person-Of-The-Year. In our learned estimation, McHale exhibits the quintessential personality of anyone calling themselves a resident of the star-crossed Rio Grande Valley, a person able to look at the face of poverty and laugh, able to see wrong being done and still call for another beer, able to ignore a friend's failings and still throw dirt on another in the same boat, able to be completely at ease with Texas-Mexico border life as partly truth and partly fiction... <div align="center">- 30 -</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8418586410607151775-8118302490064581552?l=thepazfiles.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>
LINK: http://thepazfiles.blogspot.com/2011/12/our-person-of-year.html

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Friday, December 16, 2011

The Paz Files

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