She Came In Through The Kitchen Window...

"Yeah, I could eat a horse..." - Rey Guevara, at the Mexico City earthquake, 1985

By Patrick Alcatraz

Editor

McALLEN, Texas - So, I'm having a bummer of a humpday when things turn gorgeously interesting: city police find a body in a shallow ravine a block from where I sleep, which excites me. And then my friend Carrie calls out of the real blue to say, yes, she'll take me out to lunch. The body can go to Hell (cops say it was a young, tattooed dude the killers merely dumped), but, if you know me (me being single and picky), you know of my titanic battles with deciding on what to eat and on where to go get it.

So, thanks to my fawning God for throwing the interesting murder story at my feet...and for making Dear Carrie grab her cellular telephone so that she could call me. What would I do without local crime and local friends?

[She's on her way. I'll finish this later today...]

- 30 -

Something ends, so that Something New Begins...

One of those days...

- 30 -

The Comatose Newspaper...

"Oh, sweet morning. Is your head not right? Did you hear my warning? This is the time of times..." - Badly Drawn Boy, The Time of Times

By Patrick Alcatraz

Editor

McALLEN, Texas - It's no big mystery: they call it shrinking the product while growing the bottom line. Fast food businesses know the concept well. That is why the patty in a Whataburger is not what it was 10-15 years ago. So, when you reach for the daily newspaper in any of your local racks, what you are getting is a thinner version of the same product you got for a quarter not that long ago. The McAllen Monitor is going through a weird time, lashings seemingly brought on by a slumping economy and the widespread belief that, well, American newspapers are dying. Is The Monitor dying? Only its owners in Southern California know enough to be able to say with some credibility. Rumors and scuttlebutt abound that Freedom Communications, owner of The Monitor, the Valley Morning Star in downrange Harlingen, and The Herald in poverty stricken Brownsville, is said to be in deep debt. Some clues have surfaced about where the company is headed and what that means to its many individual properties.

The Monitor is so skimpy on Mondays it carries no Editorials/Opinion Page. Today, it ironically featured a lengthy column written by its managing editor, my friend Henry Miller, recounting his battle against the annoying bulge. Miller writes he once weighed more than 300 pounds. The irony is that there was a time when The Monitor also weighed-in with more pages and, yeah, more news. Its recent losses have mirrored Miller's weight loss, so much so that many in town believe the newspaper not known for anything in particular will soon go tabloid and become a three-days-a-week newspaper - as did its sister paper in Mesa, Arizona earlier this year. It's all about cutting costs, or one would think. The Monitor, serving a local population of more than 100,000 humans, can't seem to get past reporting on meetings, chasing handy crime reports, and offering an occasional feature story that actually interests its fading readership. Nobody I know knows exactly where The Monitor is in its deathbed, or in its fight to survive.

Among the things I notice about it is its writing staff, not exactly a group of interesting people. Reporter Jeremy Roebuck seems to have a handle on what makes for a well-written, meaningful tale. But there is little after Roebuck. I suspect he feels like major leaguer Albert Pujols would feel if he played for the lowly Edinburg Roadrunners. That Sports Page is woeful. It begins with the sports editor and the sportswriters. The Monitor's sports-types just don't cut it. It is pedestrian reporting at its worst. There is something weird about publishing game coverage of UT-PA sports written by a UT-PA employee (Hell-o, Jim McKone Days), or with having employees of the area semi-pro teams write game reports. That is the mark of a smalltown newspaper, better suited for the hellholes of far West Texas.

Today, The Monitor published a story about small businesses and how they are battling the sluggish economy. Yes, that is a timely story. It is the story of all of us, absolutely.

But what about a story on what's going on at The Monitor? This newspaper works its revenue quota and then transfers large amounts of money to its corporate offices in Irvine, California. It has been doing that forever. Perhaps it's time for The Monitor to level with its readers. Will it? Not likely.

Newspapers have a long, long history of slapping readers with bad news related to their operation on the morning they are ready to do it, and not before. But something's up with The Monitor and the other Freedom dailies in the Rio Grande Valley. The three individuals shown above, Publisher M. Olaf Frandsen (in dark suit), mustachioed Editor Steve Fagan, and Managing Editor Henry Miller (goatee), have the info.

Just don't expect them to share it with you anytime soon...

- 30 -

SUNDAY EDITORIAL: Soundtracks...

"Patrick, do you like to dance? could you twirl me around the dancefloor and keep me in that state of balance with chaos? i'm not always good at following, but that's often when i have the most fun. i'm distracted all morning now. lazy. thinking of sex when there are THINGS TO BE DONE. is this the spell that can cloud reality. the sun is bright and the air crisp and cool. a morning for robe and slippers. if we were to be together i would definitely want to please you." - Dallas, 2008

THE SONG:

If you could see me now

The one who said that he’d rather roam
The one who said he’d rather be alone
If you could only see me now.

If I could hold you now
Just for a moment if I could make you mine
Just for a while turn back the hands of time
If I could only hold you now.

I’ve been too long in the wind
Too long in the rain
Taking any comfort that I can
Looking back and longing for the freedom of my chains
Lying in your loving arms again.

If you could hear me now,
Singing somewhere through the lonely night,
Dreaming of the arms that held me tight
If you could only hear me now...

- Loving Arms, Kris Kristofferson & Rita Coolidge

THERE...

By Ron Mexico
Contributor

RIO GRANDE CITY, Texas – Shorn of all recent memory and the desire to go look for it, Patrick parked his pickup outside a bar on the western fringes of this falling border town and walked in wanting – needing – a taste of the hard life. Things with Rachel had warped-off, and again he thought a dive into the unknown would be one answer. She was gone; the old bar by the side of the road waved him in. You could fall for the feelings men hate and go rot in some corner, or you could push it away, push it so hard that the imagery of loss would melt into the rising afternoon scorch. Patrick pushed his pickup’s door shut roughly, the bang of rusting metal coming together serving as metaphor for the fast-flashing finale that had been the end of his brief romance with Rachel. He thought he’d heard from one of her friends that she'd flown to Florida, to forget him under a cascading waterfall of booze to be found in nightclubs along the ritzy beachfront hotels, there with the wily Cubans. Patrick stepped into the bar.

He wanted to merely amble over to a table by the back wall, over alongside the dusty jukebox. What was it about the two-three days after a break-up, is what occupied his grass-whorled brain. He’d been running that question across his mind on the highway and still had no answer when he asked the arriving waitress for a bottle of any Mexican beer. First, he’d thrown an old Beatles CD into his truck’s dash player and raised the volume to the clouds. Then, he’d pushed the off button and sailed for miles watching images that really weren’t moving across his vehicle’s windshield: Rachel splayed all over his living room couch, him seated on an easy chair across from the ancient, wicker coffee table between them, Rachel smiling and then saying she would not cheat on her husband again, him throwing his legs and boots atop the coffee table and leaning back as far as he could go on the chair, Rachel rolling around before finding her seated posture, him asking the whys and what nows, Rachel declaring some freedom from lies and betrayals, him wondering if she’d be up for one last ride, Rachel saying she had to go, him nodding forlornly, Rachel popping up to her feet to blow him a kiss, him saying, well, it was a chapter, Rachel shaking her short skirt into place and then skipping toward the house’s front door, him holding his place on the chair, Rachel saying she was sorry, him saying, sure, that’s an ending.

“Glass?” the waitress was asking as she set the bottle down on his table.

“Nope,” Patrick said in reply.

“Snack? We have chips and salsa…burritos...queso dip...”

“No, but thanks.”

He watched her turn and retreat to the bar, where a lanky, high-throated dude sat on a barstool smoking a cigarette and bullshitting with a portly, mustachioed bartender who looked like a cross between a hog and a walrus. Rachel had to be drinking, too. The winds blowing in from the east carried a certain feeling. Patrick could think that she was drinking with him, only 1,000 miles apart. His idea of the perfect love affair always began with a long kiss, moved to the gorgeous warmth of evening loving, and forever ended with the bindings of ragged feelings that required a quick escape.

The waitress stared at him from the far end of the bar. She was not a pretty woman, more utilitarian than anything else, someone’s idea of a quick porking and, sweetheart, it’s off to the card game, that kind. Patrick usually took a week between women. He rose and turned a bit to front the battered jukebox. Then he scanned the song selections, settling on one after a minute or so. “Fuckin’ Phil Collins,” he said to no one in a soft voice, announcing his choice.

Love has no memory, he told himself. Not real love.

It flirts with the joy and the pain, the stretchings and the tugs, the ins and the outs, the mixture of arrival and departure, like a birth. Real love couldn’t stay. Like even the neatest song or the loveliest movie, it had its end.

Real love, he'd heard somewhere, forces you to be as a page that aches for a word which speaks on a theme that is timeless. Patrick knew that song like a sonofabitch, its lyrics played well with his rolling philosophy – the one that said all he could know was his own time…

- 30 -

NO HONOR HERE...

"I have climbed highest mountains. I have run through the fields, only to be with you, only to be with you. I have run, I have crawled, I have scaled these city walls, these city walls, only to be with you. But I still haven't found what I'm looking for...But I still haven't found what I'm looking for..." - U2, I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For

By Patrick Alcatraz

Editor

McALLEN, Texas - Gone for much too long, I returned to the Rio Grande Valley last winter with a great hunger for recapturing my youth, days in high school when everything seemed possible and everything seemed here. But what is here today? It's hard to connect it with my past. I see trouble. I see danger. I see unrest, and I see something foreign. The Rio Grande Valley, land of my ancestors, has segued into something Middle Eastern. A wall is going up where I used to go hunting for snakes, there just this side of a river that always welcomed my dives and leaps off that rope we set up off a tree at a state park west of Mission. What hath Valley Man wrought? This Border Wall, a fence to the distant federal government, has brought a scene out of some foreboding Kafka novel - a story of rape and pillage and plunder. How the local populace has allowed this to happen is the so-called $64,000 question.

Last night, I accepted a friend's invitation to go see The Wall, a documentary film quickly gaining support as a major work of journalism. The project of California director Ricardo A. Martinez, it is a moment-in-time put to film. It is at once informative and tragic. I am somewhat familiar with the wall, although having lived afar, it never really entered my questioning conscience. Geography does that you. The film brings a mountain of information every citizen of the RGV needs to know about this pitiful undertaking, from the shenanigans of the Bush Administration to the fight the government found in many area citizens and elected officials. The tragedy lies in the fact that perhaps there should have been more opposition, as in serious vigorous in-the-streets dissent.

The wall is up in some places along the northern banks of the passive Rio Grande, there in all its ugliness and wonderment. It isn't needed, not there dividing two countries with a long, long history of mostly-positive relations. That it is policed by more than 30,000 U.S. Border Patrol agents is the other aggravation. This is made painfully clear in The Wall, which drew more than 200 people to Cine El Rey here on a hot and humid Friday night. It deftly noted that the government counts barely 5,000 such agents along the longer Canadian border to the north.

The film is a compilation of both interviews and informatrion offered via charts and video clippings showing federal officials, congress folk and bureaucrats, doing their damndest to explain something that should never have been considered or constructed. It featured property owners aghast at the idea that a 50-foot monstrosity was being considered for their backyards, and it featured a fight by Brownsville resident Bob Lucio, owner of a golf course the government wanted to dissect with its fence.

The culture fights in this country are a big part of our history. We tend to want to divide ourselves from time to time just to show we can do it. If it hasn't been the Irish, it's been the Italians or the Poles or the Asians. At present, America is wrestling with the Hispanic - the undocumented immigrant and the accomplished citizen. It is not without reason that some in this country have made a career of stomping on Hispanic immigrants (former Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo comes to mind here) and on the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor, a Puerto Rican by descent, to the U.S. Supreme Court. Fear rules some of these people. Fear of seeing their English language become a secondary language, and fear of seeing Blacks and Hispanics and Asians rise to positions of power in the government. The wall is nothing more than yet another rallying cry for these insecure Americans. It isn't Jesse Jackson posing the immigrant threat, nor is it former Hawaiian U.S. Senator Daniel Inouye. It is another American fronting this fight, the racist. Everybody knows it, because their fear is being worn on their ever-ragging faces. Commentaror Pat Buchanan, a Republican, is a perfect example of this American. You can't erect the wall fast enough for the Buchanans, and it has been Buchanan who has been vigorous in trying to discredit Sotomayor.

So, it is for that reason that films such as The Wall are needed. Everytime it plays here or elsewhere, the ful power of the truth is brought to bear. I am proud of director Martinez, a graduate of the New York University film school. He has delivered a timely blow to those who would merely push a horrible piece of Nazi-like work on a population that has done much for this great land and that deserves better. This was brought home to me in a scene where a Border Patrol agent fires a shot into the head of a would-be immigrant in a dusty road running alongside the fence somwhere west of here. The gasps that rose from the audience last night was haunting, as much as was the video of that North Vietnamese having his head blown off during the Vietnam War. There is something wrong and awful in that. It speaks of a barbaric act sanctioned by us, the so-called last, great freedom outpost on a God-abandoned planet.

There is no honor in the building of this wall.

How that cannot be evident to every American is beyond me.

I suspect that the fate of this wall is the same fate that is meeting a similar monstrosity built by the Israelis to separate themselves from the Palestinians they hate: The long-oppressed Palestinians have taken to blowing-up chunks of it into the harsh lands they live in, chunks of concrete flying off into the desert in clouds of dust that seem to carry the entire weight of what it means to be civilized. This wall along the Texas-Mexico border should be torn down and its scrap metal sent to the bottom of the deepest ocean.

Let me repeat: There is no honor here...

- 30 -

Pulp Mango....

"You are my sunshine, my only sunshine. You make me happy when skies are grey. You'll never know, dear, how much I love you. Please don't take my sunshine away..." - A Traditional Song

By Ron Mexico

Contributor

LA CHULA, Texas - "Had the love been real?" Rachel was asking as she fought back a king-sized desire to pull the trigger. It was almost dark and the silver-blue reflection of her pistol coming off the motel mirror threw a rather lovely light on Patrick's head. He wanted no part of dying, but now believed he'd likely go quickly, some brightened, blooming cloud of smoke being the last thing he'd ever see. Rachel pushed her arm forward and ran a hand through his tussled hair. It was an ending, Patrick was driven to say. This drew a snicker of sorts from Rachel, who then said, "I'm gonna hate not seeing that hair ever again." Her fingers worked his scalp and Patrick could only nod in agreement. It wasn't confirmation of her loss, no. He thought of the saddle he'd ordered for his horse, and how now who'd pick it up?

"Was it something I did?" he asked, moving his neck a bit to loosen the rope she'd tied around it and then to a chair where she had thrown their clothing. Naked and tied and having a gun to his head felt too-Cuban, he thought. But, then, Rachel had walked out of her jeans and panties and now sat at the end of the saggy motel bed wearing only a yellow halter top, her legs crossed but not so that he couldn't see her luxuriant patch of auburned pubic hair. She cleared her throat and he waited on her reply. Had anyone else been in the room and asked Patrick why he would ask such a thing, Patrick would have said, "I take it she's had me followed..."

"Nope," Rachel threw out.

"Then, what's this all about?"

"Just," she told him.

He wanted to ask, but he knew her well-enough to know that dancing around the Mulberry bush was Rachel's specialty, the one thing everyone in town would have said about her anyway. Instead of chasing a losing angle to a falling conversation, he chose to say: "Why don't you sing me a song?"

"You're naked!" she shot back, frowning.

There was little to make of that, and so he decided that perhaps silence would bring something telling, something he'd be able to assess and hash-out with her. Dying seemed a waste. Dying naked was crazy, not that he'd never thought of it, except that when he had it had been about perhaps dying while making hard love to some energetic young thing unable to satisfy herself before dawn.

"Do you love me, Patrick?" Rachel asked next.

He laughed softly and then said, "I love trick questions..."

Rachel cocked the gun and stared at him. Patrick smiled.

"No, don't smile," she growled. "Stop it! Frown! Stop smiling at me. It makes me want you..."

Patrick raised his head and back as high as they would go. Rachel stiffened her arm and kept the pistol inches from his head. Would she fire, he asked himself. There was little else to say here two hours into his capture. Patrick reached back far into the recesses of his brain for something from their past to maybe bring Rachel to her senses. She was a sucker for memories and, of course, he knew she could recall every little lovely thing he'd ever whispered in her ear.

"May I see your breasts?" he said and, at hearing that, Rachel lowered the gun...

- 30 -

When Love Walks In The Room...

"Across my dreams, with nets of wonder, I chased the bright, elusive butterfly of love..." - Bob Lind, Elusive Butterfly

By Patrick Alcatraz
Editor

McALLEN, Texas – There’s a certain road most guys look for when the warmth of unexpected romance begins to fill the air. It is a quiet, unpaved, brush-lined road of the sort favored by birds and snakes and scorpions and lizards – personalities of the animal kingdom who know their place in the star-crossed universe. A duck wouldn’t be there, nor would a dolphin or a chicken. Those need the human touch. Birds know altitude, a definite presence in every soaring love affair. Snakes, scorpions and lizards don’t need humanity. They are rough-edged and generally heartless and okay when alone. It is that long and winding curve, dusty and gravelly and desolate, that allows for thinking of feelings such as those delivered by arriving romance – the male & female kind, I mean.

By now, you likely know what this is about.

I’ve met a certain woman I seem to enjoy at every turn. It is a remarkable occurrence, because I wasn’t looking for it and, I suspect, neither was she. What to say and, more important, what to do? I know it happens, but my history is more the traditional flaming meteor across the sky, the one that burns out fast and forever. I generally meet someone and sort of know quickly whether my actions around her will segue into something else, something that will show her I am freakin’ interested. Usually, that is me acting the angel, saying silly things and chasing conversations of the sort that maintain a certain linear element, basically to let-on that there has to be more to it than smiling or being funny. I can be funny, although I eventually bore myself. What I focus on is being a “good date,” which to me means having a free-and-clear wonderful time, whether at the movies, dinner, the museum, or my place. Life is daily; love is, at the very least, three or four chapters in a book you can’t put down for the first 100 pages and then toss after 101. Love has a beginning, middle, and an end – even those that last 50 years. I seem to specialize in those that last, at best, a year. But it is a good year, full of everything, fast as a falling star, the spark in the universe that flashes and then burns out. In the end, I wheel-out my favorite coda: “I’m not that kind of angel…”

I have no idea where this one is going, or if it’ll go anywhere. I would like it to come with me around the moon, but I’m just half of the equation. Something tells me she wants to, but what man ever knows about anything to do with women? I know that if she reads this, and she comes here often, she’ll know it is her I’m talking about, me being silly with, throwing something out into the open that perhaps she’d rather keep private for the time being. She is the proverbial spark I haven’t seen in any other local woman. I get energy from her even when we text. She knows it if her sentient messages are any indication. They make me want to steal a horse and ride across the range toward her side of town, in the heaviest of rains, yeah. My desire to kiss her is strong. I’ve said that to her, even as I know that her home life wouldn’t stand for it, wouldn’t allow it. The universe is funny that way – it offers and it denies. Just how strong is love? I used to know, when I was in control.

Seeing her today and tonight and tomorrow and the next day and the one-two-three-four-five-six-seven-one hundred after that would be nice. A year would be better, five or ten or fifteen the Jubilee. I’ve always been inspired in my writing by the women around me and can say that a small group of them can find themselves in the pages of my first three books. Something tells me this one will inspire me to reach for higher ledges on the rocky literary mountain, perhaps even force me to reach the summit, from where I would proudly bellow a panther’s roar of the sort that would speak to great discovery: Love, love at last…

-30 -

News in the Time of Pain...

In a flashing neon sign of the times, last week Freedom Communications Inc. shut down its one-reporter Capitol bureau for its three South Texas newspapers, The Monitor (McAllen), the Valley Morning Star, and The Brownsville Herald. "It's a cost-cutting measure," said Olaf Frandsen, regional vice president for Freedom, reciting the mantra of modern newspaper executives. "We had to look for areas where we could cut costs without significantly damaging coverage." - Austin Chronicle, Nov. 16, 2007

By PATRICK ALCATRAZ

Editor

McALLEN, Texas – It’s just 50 cents locally, yet the price of the daily newspaper is not – and never has been – the best barometer for gauging its value to society. We live in a free country, and it is true: the press theoretically and romantically serves as guardian of those freedoms, by exposing government corruption, excesses and discrimination. It isn’t written in stone anywhere; it’s just part and parcel of what we like to call a free republic – a place where civil rights are to be respected. When they are not, it is then the duty of the press to bring such things to light. Yes, there are sports to write about. And there is the Lifestyle Page, and the Business Page. But it is a newspaper’s work in righting wrongs that stands as the reason it is called the Fourth Estate in our form of government – there weighed equally alongside the Executive Branch (president), the Legislative (Congress), and the Judicial (courts). Together, they are supposed to make this the greatest country in the history of the world.

Yet, the premise is flawed these days. Gone are enough daily newspapers to wonder about their future. Up have come the Internet news outlets – some worthy and many not. The Internet – through legitimate news outlets such as TheHuffingtonPost.com and through some totally unreliable websites such as the Drudge Report - is in its infancy, however. This website is an example of what is known as a Blog. I see them as being nothing more than personal vehicles for personal assessments and opinions regarding issues of the day. Blogs have fans and they have critics. There is value in both.

Still, it is the local daily newspaper that the citizenry looks to for helpful and meaningful timely information. Here, The McAllen Monitor does its best to serve as newspaper-of-record. It is not The New York Times, and it is not The Dallas Morning News. It is a small town newspaper with ever-limited resources and a reporting staff that, to be fair, is aggressive yet largely inexperienced. Those of us in the business know newspapers such as The McAllen Monitor as providers of those needed first two-three years of journalism experience for rookie reporters, many just out of college. Is it a bad newspaper? No. It could do more on certain issues, such as crime in nearby Mexico or perhaps report a bit deeper on local banking and health care, but it, I assume, recognizes its limitations. What readers of The Monitor get, then, is equivalent for the local citizenry as the campus newspaper is to students of McAllen High School. There are in Monitor Editor Steve Fagan’s outlook no pretensions. He does his best with what he has, is what I’d say.

Hang around any public place in town, such as a coffee shop or a small café or even a bar, and what you hear is serious criticism against The Monitor. It is not uncommon to hear local residents say something like, “I wish someone would start a second newspaper.” That would be something. My take on this also has come by way of chats with the local business and advertising community. To a one, they lament the rough economy environment playing from coast to coast and how that is affecting the Rio Grande Valley, but they side by the idea of seeing another daily walk into town. “Competition is what the Monitor needs,” said a good friend here who has long-wished for a competing publication.

There are a number of small weeklies and monthlies, such as RGVNation and a few magazines such as RGVMag and Social Life. The first two are meek attempts at news reporting if the story selection and writing are any indication. Social Life is a gushing of photos appealing to the vanity of McAllenites. So, no…there is no competition for The Monitor. Along with its sister newspapers in Harlingen and Brownsville downriver, they, well, have a monopoly on crippling mediocrity. What kills me is that all three of these dailies, owned by California-based Freedom Communications, are forever accused of siding by one segment of the area population, namely the Anglo community. And, about that, nowhere does it manifest itself clearer than when these newspapers publish stories about how certain illnesses, usually awful ones, afflict the Hispanic community more than other ethnics. The same road-tired angles to stories about welfare and housing woes are popular with these editors. Never have I seen a story in any of the three RGV newspapers that tells me, say, it is the Anglo community that suffers more than any other when it comes to Erectile Dysfunction, bad debt, or the receipt of welfare benefits. When The Monitor publishes a story about welfare, as it did this week, it is a handful of Hispanics interviewed at the local welfare office. Yes, the majority of residents here are Hispanics, but a little extra legwork, seemingly never a strength of Monitor reporters, might have yielded the name of an Anglo getting needed government aid. I say that is a disservice, and I continue to contend that the people of McAllen deserve better, more honest journalism.

The thing is that many staffers of its Editorial Department, including reclusive Publisher M. Olaf Frandsen, hail from elsewhere. Their outlook and allegiance is to a white-bread culture that does not take into account the unique culture of the Texas-Mexico border. It is for that reason, I believe, that many, many people here tolerate the newspaper, yet they would jump aboard another newspaper if they only had the choice.

Times are tough for everybody these days. The community needs an active newspaper out gathering serious, accurate information. The Old Way of holding fort in McAllen should have died with the end of former hard-edged Mayor Othal Brand, a man who many here say treated Hispanics with all the propriety of a coonhound. But The Monitor did not do that. Instead, the newspaper has turned its back on stories that either are published by other news outlets (The New Yorker on local health) or are simply ignored, like the lingering troubles at the McAllen Independent School District. Only the administration of The Monitor knows it, but many here believe it does not shake the health industry or school district tree because it garners a tremendous amount of advertising revenue from both. A Sunday edition of the newspaper is one gauge: invariably, that particular issue is fat with medical and school district advertisements. Lost, then, is the public’s ability to know what exactly is going on in town. Who knows? Maybe Editor Fagan thinks his young reporting staff is not up to tackling serious issues, or maybe Fagan would like to tell me that the order for "hands-off" comes from above.

In the end, what readers get is really nothing more than a daily exercise in “putting out” a newspaper. Most days, it is thinasthis, especially the Monday edition, which, if the newspaper would be honest, ought to go for a nickel. For me, The Monitor’s indifferent attitude to the goings-on in nearby Mexico is mysterious. These are fantastic stories, fraught with crime, corruption and blood – staples of most daily newspapers. The professional sentiment goes: if you get any of that, you go after it doggedly. The public deserves to know much more about the criminal activity on the southern side of the Rio Grande. Why? Well, because it is serious stuff when a country dispatches its army to man its border against its own misguided citizens – citizens even The Monitor knows are thugs and murderers. Yeah, maybe The Monitor thinks it’s too dangerous to send its reporters across the bridge to report on the disarray in neighboring Reynosa, a town that has a long, long history too close to this side of the river to be simply ignored. Still, one look at any of a dozen newspapers and news magazines published in Reynosa would show The Monitor that things have deteriorated beyond belief. For a newspaper that covets journalism prizes perhaps more than credibility, The McAllen Monitor would do well to improve its lot in town by bringing the stories home, as they teach in journalism school.

Perhaps there is still time…

- 30 -

Secrets on the Telephone...

By Patrick Alcatraz
Editor

EDINBURG, Texas – Every now and then I amble into the 107 Café here for my breakfast, most-always a plate of warmish Huevos a la Mejicana chased with hot, black coffee and the morning newspaper. The small eatery, like many in this sleepy, backward town, the county seat, is usually full of law enforcement types - city cops and deputies and, at times, a covey of uniformed state troopers and agents of the U.S. Border Patrol. I like to think they like the food in these places, although I always wonder how their schedules, presumably watching over the bad guys, allows them to sit for long hours while nursing a cup of coffee. You see them at area Starbucks, as well. I know it’s long hours, because that’s how long I hang around.

Fighting criminals is a full-time job. And, yes, I grant them a shot at a pot of coffee if that helps get some miscreant or wife-beater off the streets or off the backs of local defenseless women. Law enforcement has a place in this country’s hurry-up culture. If an idiot hits a laundromat, well, I want that fuck-up arrested at the most a block away. When I see a cop writing a ticket off to the side of the road, I tell myself he’s doing his job, although, yeah, I say it quicker if it’s a White person in the detained vehicle. Damn me for that, but know that I wrote about open racism against Blacks and Hispanics in the South for The Boston Globe. Those horrific images are seared in my usually happy brain. Also know that I have good friends who are of the Anglo-Sax persuasion, including one whose new friendship I already treasure. But they know me, and they know that I am opinionated, yet fair. It is a balance; that’s how I look at it.

So this morning, when I was watching network television, I caught-up with the mess that is our Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Really, the story on MSNBC – never on right-wing extremist Fox News – told about how the agency had been lying to Congress since 2001. You remember who our president was back then, don’t you. If you don’t, well, I’m not going to tell you. I do suggest that you take your ignorance to your local newspaper, where it will be duly matched. How novel! An intelligence agency lying to the people it theoretically answers to, in peace and during war. Pathetic and criminal is what it is, absolutely. The day is coming, I pray, when these outlaws in charge of the country’s agencies face the music while doing the perp walk. Bastards!

George W. Bush, the former president, should be arrested and prosecuted for crimes against humanity, for plunging the country into an unjust war, with marching young soldiers to their death in the hot, sandy geography of a country that did not attack us. His vice-president, the suck-ass Dick Cheney, should also be jailed. Vincent Bugliosi, a former district attorney in Los Angeles and the man who sent mass killer Charles Manson to prison for life and beyond, has written a book demanding a trial for Bush and Cheney. I agree. Until we resolve that mess, we can rightly be lumped in with rogue countries that do rogue things, like the Russians or the North Koreans or the Israelis or, lately, Mexico.

The CIA lives a secretive existence. A bit of darkened life is expected within its functions, but it must be truthful before Congress. That is the proverbial checks & balance we reportedly live under. I say reportedly because Bush turned it into some domestic spy agency that just doesn’t fit the idea of freedom to speak on your cell phone without the conversation going into some data bank recording inside the CIA’s building in Langley, or believing that you’re making hard love without some infra-red scope looking into your bouncing bed. It happens. And if you think it doesn’t, well, keep reading your hometown newspaper.

The crazy part of the CIA story for me is that it was current Secretary of Defense Robert Gates who headed the agency during the soiled George W. Bush administration. Current CIA Chief Leon Panetta says the agency started lying one year after Bush took office and after the Sept. 11, 2001 attack on New York City. Well, what does Gates say now?

One more thing: didn’t former Secretary of State Colin Powell mention the CIA as a source of the so-called Weapons-of-mass-destruction lies disseminated to the United Nations Security Council ahead of the American invasion of Iraq? Powell has paid the price. Bush hasn’t. Cheney hasn’t. And the height-challenged Robert Gates is still serving the country.

These are the people who tell you they protect you and your family and your peace-of-mind. Cops – local, state, national - are funny. Their business is apart from society out of necessity. Bob Dylan had it right, however, when he sang: “…the cops, they don’t need you…and, man, they expect the same.”

Obese, donut-scarfing cops aside, it is time to clean up this beaten country. What we have is shameful and, worse than that, it gets in the way when we want to tell other countries how civilized nations behave…

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[Editor’s Note: Patrick Alcatraz holds humanity to a higher standard…]

He Had This Grand Vision...

"Never been lonely. Never been lied to. Never had to scuffle in fear. Nothing denied to. Born at the instant the church bells chime, and the whole world whispering: Born at the right time..." - Paul Simon, Born at the Right Time

By Patrick Alcatraz
Editor

New York, N.Y. - Drained by this city's untiring energy and carrying the sweet memory of spending good time with my daughter, Gabrielle, I packed my duffle bag and rolled to LaGuardia Airport, bound for home and a print publication project I've nurtured a bit and now find comfortably on my lap. I have agreed to edit a weekly newspaper in McAllen, Texas.

Hell-o, great stories!

As I've said to many people and friends over the years, the Texas-Mexico border nearest the Gulf of Mexico is a veritable gold mine of gorgeous, meaningful news copy. Why the local dailies never made a national name for themselves writing-up a part of the country others elsewhere know little about is the mystery for me. There are stories all over the place, is my feeling. And we shall work them in the coming weeks, enough of them anyway to bring a new and novel noise to the Rio Grande Valley - a land that has for too long deserved better journalism.

We shall not pick sides, and we shall not serve as a voice for any one segment of the population. We shall strive to be loyal to the truth and the story, not to personalities, ethnic groups, or any advertiser. My approach is this: cover the news fairly and without prejudice, at all times ignoring no one. Our reputation will be earned, not demanded. It will be made from hard, investigative journalism offered with the authority of serious reporting.

I've been around the newspapering block, as it is said, cutting my teeth early-on in my career at The Brownsville Herald and then setting sail a journalism career that took me to the newsrooms of The Boston Globe, New York Post and The Associated Press in Denver. Somewhere in there I wrote a bunch of magazine stories and have to date written three novels. My letters to friends are never less than five pages, forever painted by about-to-be-jailed adventures, the color and stripe of new friends, the meeting of a new this-one-is-it female, the observations of my latest surroundings. This weekly newspaper will be "written," as we opt for magazine-style writing while saying adios to the so-called "inverted triangle" writing style favored by most daily newspapers. Our photography will shine in the same manner that Andy Warhol's Art brightened that world a few years back. But what our readers will quickly and readily see is a product that will write to their intellect, at times provoking a deeper thought to life in the RGV, and to the issues facing the region - troubled Mexico included.

So, keep reading this economic Blog for additional details. I am, as yet, not ready to divulge the name of the publication. Much work has been done, but much more remains between now and early August, when we expect to launch (get an invite to the pre-launch party!). It should be a new wind blowing across the harsh borderlands, winds fronting and trailing this journalism revolution from the outs of Rio Grande City to the sands of South Padre Island. McAllen and the rest of the RGV never have seen a publication like the one I envision. Buckle up, is what I'd suggest. Our stories will have depth and our opinion columns will be biting, yet insightful. Above all, this publication will be well-written. About that, you can be sure. I plan to read it myself.

Yeah, I can't wait....

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Interview...

"He said he was just going out to meet some dame, and, you know, that's the last we saw of him...Crazy as it may sound, now or ever, maybe he finally fell in love, in love..." - The Reluctant Eyewitness

Of Havana and France...

By Patrick Alcatraz
Editor

New York, N.Y. - It's only a few blocks from the Havana NY restaurant on W. 38th Street to the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue, yet there is a neat disconnect between what you find inside both buildings. The eatery offered a hefty and thoroughly-enjoyable plate of Ropa Vieja (shredded beef, white rice, black beans), while the library threw a bad dish of Nazi whippings in World War II France. It was a day for stuffing the tummy and, then later, feeding the brain. I love Cuban food with my history lessons.

Ana was our waitress. She's a peppy 20-year-old transplant from Mexico City by way of Los Angeles. Her lively, raven eyes alone are worth flying here from Texas, yes. Petite is in when the day's activities include checking out anything French. Miguel, the bus boy from the Mexican state of Guerrero, chatted nicely about living and working in The Big Apple. Ana was up for flirting, but as it so happened, I was dining with my daughter, and she does not like to see her old man in the hunt for romance.

In any case, we had our usual lunch treat in what is becoming my latest Culinary Tour. Twenty-nine dollars and change for lunch. I paid, my daughter Gabrielle left the tip (her Old Man does not believe in tipping, forever noting that it lets restaurant owners off the pay scale hook). So, that done, we bid farewell to Ana and her lovely, lovely smile and walked back out to W. 38th before walking toward Fifth Ave.

The New York Public Library is many things to many patrons. It was hosting an exhibition of All-Gayness on the third floor. We hung around the first floor, where we popped-in to check out a spectacular display of French and German memorabilia being offered as "Between Collaboration and Resistance: French Literary Life Under Nazi Occupation."

Right up my alley, I know, I know.

And so we hung around for more than hour, looking at and reading the many elements of the free exhibit. There were great black and white photographs, sad, sad letters and a collection of notebook pages from manuscripts that later became great books - like "The Lover" by French writer Marguerite Duras, a favorite of mine. The book was made into a movie, and that one, too, is worth the time and money.

Yet, the collection sent a singular message: life for writers under Adolf Hitler was no looking out a window for inspiration. Many Frenchmen, including writers, fought with the resistance even after the Germs invaded and conquered France. There was the writing, but there also was courage from book printers and publishers who took to the underground to make sure France would not be seen by the world as merely cowering to the brutes from Berlin. A handful of diaries also are on exhibit, as are now-grainy films made during the Nazi invasion and the resulting occupation. In stirring accounts (translated on accompanying wall mountings), the French writers told of being forced to leave their creative comfort, easy travel, freedom to say or write anything. In a series of bombings and tank asaults, those freedoms vanished from one day to the next. The Winter of 1943-44 was especially rough, with food being rationed. Travel was reduced to forced travel: prisoners being led to concentration camps erected by the occupying Nazis. Censorship cropped-up, as did a paper shortage. France's writers could only inhale and hope for an invasion by the Allies. Many of them took up arms. The story of writer Robert Antelme, Duras's husband, is particularly wild. He survived, but only after being held prisoner. As love would have it, his wife later divorced him and took up with his film director friend. But, yeah, what else is new? Even in the worst of times, well, the heart must be fed. Marguerite Duras fought off loneliness in her own way - in the arms of her husband's friend.

Still, she wrote this to Antelme when she was told he had survived the camps: "You are alive! You are alive! I, too, am coming back from I know not where. How long have I remained in this Hell? ...Be prudent. No alcohol, not a drop. The weather's beautiful. It's peace. I think I would have died of your death."

Women are funny that way, eh?

The evening would fall fast, a cool breeze sailing in from the Atlantic. We were headed for The White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village at sundown. It's all I needed to know. I was sure of this: Something nagged me about whether I'd rather have gone back to the Cuban restaurant for another smile from Ana, the attractive waitress, or perhaps spent much more time reading about French writers living in fear of Hitler.

I fully enjoyed both - like some Guy at a bordello taking two sweethearts and then having to choose one or the other with the last of the cash...

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I Didn't See Her Today...

"You don't send me flowers anymore..." - Neil Diamond

By Patrick Alcatraz

Editor

New York, N.Y. - The City that Never sleeps, it is said, holds a jillion stories - some naked. It is electric, and it for sure throws nutty stuff at you that you just don't get anywhere else. Today, it was a lanky, small-tittied woman in a plastic, see-through outfit moving on 42nd Street toward Times Square. I looked, as did a few hundred others moving along the busy, crowded sidewalk in front of the NY Port Authority building. Craziness is not all that rare, however, although usually it's lousy comedians, loud vendors, or the whistling NYC cops acting stupid. This is Color TV out in your face. I love it, but there are times the annoying win the game. Today's lunch at a cozy Chinese joint was marred by a Black guy talking much too loud, this in a tiny eatery where the tables are thisclose. I did my best to hold my temper; my daughter chided me for continuing to think that I'm the "only guy on the planet."

Anyway, my 23-year-old kid and I have been together quite a bit after not seeing each other for almost a year and a half. Gabrielle, St. John's U. Class of 2008, is a fine, fine dinner conversationalist. She likes to remind me of things I'd rather forget. I take it like a Man, yeah. She laughs when I say I find some things stunning and absolutely not believable. I say, "wrong guy," and she laughs again. We keep eating and she stares at me like a cop when I lift my tea glass for a refill when I don't even know where the freakin' waiter is, or may be.

A bit more enjoyable are those moments when we talk about her Mom, my ex-wife Narda. She, too, lives here, and, well, sometimes she goes out for a drink. She's in Spain, finishing a two-summer Master's program in lovely Salamanca. So, sure, I keep looking for her. But she's not there.

The photo of yours truly atop this installment was taken outside one of my ex-wife's favorite watering holes - an old, musty bar on the Lower East Side somewhere. Yeah, I e-mailed it to her, hoping her face will drop to the floor and think, "WTF is he doing there!"

I love this juiced-up joint...

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