BRAIN DRAIN: What The Jose Canseco Fawning Rendered...

By PATRICK ALCATRAZ
Editor of The Tribune

PORT ISABEL, Texas - The Valley Brain, as it is often called in New England medical journals, is a study in combative wonderment. It is said that most everybody who lives this far south along the scurrilous Mexican border wishes for one thing - a return to calmer, less-demanding times. That is why, say pop sociologists, things stagnate and why many overly-sensitive residents find it easier to lump on anyone noting the area's many, many failings.

The photo above was taken here sometime in the 1930s. That decade and the two that followed are generally regarded as years in which the local brain suffered greatly, to the point of not regaining its full senses until decades later. And still, however, one reels at how this wildly-dependent region plays the Game of Life. Bring any sort of federal government aid and the people will smile, laugh, frolic, do cartwheels. Tell them their welfare checks will be cut or late...and the world comes to an end.

Never in the history of Mankind has a region so handed itself to more-ambitious outsiders.

There is nothing being invented here. There is no great contribution to society to pluck out of at the very least several such advances. It is a land devoid of drive. It is a community flatbed rolling down dusty roads while carrying ragged couches and battered General Electric refrigerators from one side of the Rio Grande Valley of Texas to the other. There is no needed mass transportation, unless you count the numerous U.S. Border Patrol paddy wagons. There is nothing approximating controlled growth. It is all willy-nilly; you build this taqueria here and I'll build my taqueria across the street. Then we'll branch-out to the next town and keep going. My uncle will build one in Harlingen and my aunt will build one in Brownsville.

The next thing you know we're taco moguls.

That is simplistic, but that logic plays itself across the societal spectrum here. It could be tacos, or it could be fruit, or it could be a gangbusters window-tinting business at the fleamarket. The approach is always rudimentary, forever without novel thought or grand scheme.

It also is why you see ridiculous stabs at belonging, why a psychic (a psychic!) hangs a sign that will read: "We now have a Christal Ball." A Christal Ball!

A new study of the region's gains and losses likely would fill the latter category way before the "gains" column would see anything resembling a list. People are starving, not for food - cause, as we said, there's always a cheap taqueria within buckteeth distance. No, they're starving for higher ground, for anything bringing something new & different, for a chance at the extra-special.

And that, boys & girls, is why the Valley Brain falls for a national joke such as Jose Canseco. The disgraced former major league ballplayer drew thousands of fools to the ballpark in struggling Harlingen this week. Most of these fawning fans set aside his use of performance-enhancing drugs and ambled in to watch him play. Canseco could not draw ten people anywhere else in the country, anywhere where a standard exists and that standard says you don't fall for cheap thrills...

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