Politics & Catholics: Why Things Change, But Don't Change In Poor, Little Brownsville...Life As A Bad Sermon...Abre, Maria...

By EDUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ
Editor-In-Chief

BROWNSVILLE, Texas - It's almost May and another long round of elections looms for this haggard town on the banks of the Rio Grande. Hope springs eternal. This'll be the one to turn things around, goes the accordioned line in the bars. Say adios to poverty, to corruption, to politicians out only for themselves, to a horrible way of life.

It is the church's mantra - you suffer here, but you'll rejoice in Heaven.

Pay the collection man.

Some say you can tell a whole lot about a town by the candidates it postures for elected office. Faces, they say, faces tell it all. Are they honest faces, or can you see a selfish gleam in their eyes? Are they attractive people, or are they people with faces that seem to have been mauled grotesquely by way of bad forceps? Is the cheekbone high? Bad news. Is the face askew? Worse yet. Is the length of nose at odds with the angle of the chin? Forget it.

This year, collectively, candidates for the Brownsville City Commission offer some interesting faces. One would like to say that they are attractively Catholic, but, ah, no, they are not. These seem to be pretty run-of-the-mill faces, the sort you see almost everywhere, from the convenience store counter help, to the carwash attendant, to the grocery store bagging corps, to the perspiring yardmen. Is there not one soul in town with a proportionate face and head?

Doesn't look like it.

This election's crop looks as if it came out of some cancelled border bandido flick. It's not their fault, of course. Everybody is a victim of their parents, although some go a bit farther down the pier and say it's all about the partners their parents chose on that fateful coupling.

We do not wish to be pretentious or hold ourselves out to be better than anyone else; it's just that, well, some things are clear to a reporter, and a reporter has a hard time losing an angle to a story he knows is there. So indulge us with this one.

Can it be said that Brownsville, a blind-obedience Catholic town, suffers the pangs of all-out belief? The church goes about its business laying down the law: the congregation must acknowledge that it's okay to be poor, beaten, abused, harangued, whipped and everything else. You do the time on Earth and you'll be rewarded in God's Kingdom. Suffering includes suffering bad politics and bad politicians. Take a number, Maria. You, too, Juan. St. Peter will call it at the Pearly Gates upstairs. He'll know exactly where you came from and what you went through. The church also bleeds.

Nothing great will come out of next month's elections, this year or any year henceforth. It'll be business-as-usual here, with maybe a new face or two. There are no visionaries in this town; they all headed for the coast - the Father, Son and the Holy Ghost. Symbols persist, however. The Holy Grail here is a cold mug at a 14th Street cantina; the Ark of the Covenant a battered Buick struggling to make it to the gas station. It is true: residents here live by Ecclesiastes. They agree that if you're not written into the Book of Life, you shall be cast into the Lake of Fire.

A few will say they have their favorite verses in the Big Book, and yet there they are on Friday night, drinking their asses silly while in the warm company of the neighbor's wife.

The election will come and go, so we won't give the names of some of the candidates whose photos you see with this story. They are not handsome people, unless handsome is defined in local, low-rent terms. They may have big hearts, but the hands and faces betray them. They may have one good idea for governance between them, but it is buried beneath layers of crippling cultural dogma.

It's a town with a myriad of problems, the least of which is its reason for being. Brownsville is here and not going anywhere. It will play its games and the people of the little village will do their Life Impulse. There is general acceptance of that, even up and down the fanciest pews. And they will stand on Sunday mornings, think about what's up there while forgetting what's brought them here. It has been proven time and time again that, here, in this tropical suburb of Hell, the day of reckoning is up ahead for everyone, up ahead and all that can ever mean is that they must get what they can while traversing the harsh geography under their feet and moving toward a place where it may eventually all work out. God is a concept by which we measure our pain, absolutely.

The face of the coming elections are the faces of the betrayed citizens. They know each other well. They accept and they make their allowances. They rise to applaud, and they sit back to listen, to take it one more time. It is in between their ears that they hold the secrets of this small, dusty bordertown.

Life lived by the Book of Genitals...

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