People Who Mattered In 2010: For Blogger Jerry McHale, It Was One More Year Of Whipping A Lousy Bordertown Into Shape...

By PATRICK ALCATRAZ
Editor-In-Chief

MATAMOROS, Mexico - Once, while walking home down one of this bordertown's worst streets in the dead of night, Jerry McHale came up on an old woman walking her menudo-fattened dog. Stumbling while out of his gourd and slurring like some American soldier back in Saigon for a little self-whipping, he neared the woman, and then said, "Nice pig you got there..."

"It's a dog, you drunken asshole!" the chubby woman said in reply.

McHale gulped a wad of Tequila-flavored saliva before firing back: "I was talking to the dog..."

Such is the legend of the heartless man who saw his year sink in a nano-second when his beloved blog - El Rocinante - was yanked off the Internet, ending a 30-year, generation-of-swine run that came with thousands of stories to do with cheap local politics and photography that could not be seen as anything other than brutal porno. But, like Richard M. Nixon, he came back with a new venture - The Brownsville Literary Review, a blog not unlike El Rocinante, only with an intellectual-sounding name. It's still the alley-walking El Rocinnate, in our opinion.

And although we'd not do things his way, McHale, shown at left in photo atop this story, serves a purpose in low-rent Brownsville. It appears he sees his job in the same manner that Stalin saw his needy, post-war Moscow: It absolutely needed a daily spanking. Local politicians and bureaucrats have come to expect seeing their names alongside vicious vocabulary and, at times, alongside a gaping Vagina or erect Cock. Brownsville, in McHale's world, is about wanton sex. Indeed, he likes to tell outsiders his hometown always smells like sperm, and that it remains a town where men are men and women are for men.

And so, because we believe Brownsville still needs a daily whipping, we add Mssr. McHale to our list of People Who Mattered in 2010.

Now, all bets will be off if we hear that he's been to the county jail for a visit with imprisoned blogger Juan Montoya. And it wouldn't be because we'd be against one loyal pal visiting another; it's just that a Jerry McHale exhibiting such acceptable human feelings, well, is not the Jerry McHale the falling town's known for all these years. Oh, yeah, and we still remember the night he tipped a lanky prostitute outside La Rata Muerta bar at the local Boy's Town.

If our memory serves us right, he handed her an ancient 5 peso bill and said, "You work on not falling off the bed while I'm inside you and there'll be more where that came from..."

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