GOODMAN BLOWS SMOKE UP JERRY'S KEISTER

By Juan Montoya
Well, we knew that Dr. G.F. McHale's new blog was going to celebrate Downtown Browntown. But what we didn't know was that he was going to be giving away fellatio to one of the least effective bureaucrats living off the public weal.
Brownsville has a wealth of history that is shunned away like so much zona roja waste water. It is practically staring you in the face. However, we have not seen fit to make it an industry like so many other municipalities and towns across the country have done.
Brownsville is the beginning of the Chisolm Trail. This is where Jesse Chisolm and his gun-toting cowboys came to harvest "unbranded" cattle that "belonged to no one."
It is also the city where Juan Cortina shot it out with a deputy sheriff and then later, when moved to a rage by the unfairness of the new Anglo lawyers, settlers and military, took over the town and held it for three days until emissaries from Matamoros talked him into lifting the occupation of the city.
It is also the city where Porfirio Diaz, the Mexican dictator for 30 years, established his headquarters to make revolution against Benito Juarez and then later Sebastian Lerdo de Tejada, his successor.
And what has Peter Goodman, the director of the Historic Downtown District done to justify his $71,636 salary? Aside from blowing up historic photos and plastering them around town, not much.
Compare little, insignificant Northfield, Minn.'s efforts with its claim to historic fame.
It happened on September 7, 1876 when the James and Jesse James and the Younger brothers attempted a raid on the First National Bank in the waning days of their criminal career after being chased away by lawmen from their southern haunts. They killed two men and made off with a fistful of dollars.
That’s it as far as Northfield history is concerned. Other than that, it suffered the same ignominy of drabness and Midwest boredom as do countless other small burgs up north.
Yet, for a weekend every summer, the town (and its economy) comes alive as tourists from throughout the Midwest and Canada make the trek to see the reenactment of the raid and its aftermath (two town residents were killed and two of the Younger brothers were hanged).
The hotels are filled. Mementos and books detailing the raid are sold like hot hot dogs on street corners, and kids get to dress up like cowboys and get scared when real life bank robbers accost them on the street. Townspeople dress up in the garb of those days and become actors in the reenactment. It’s great fun.
And visitors gladly plunk their greenbacks to see it.
Compare that scene to Brownsville.
The Brownsville Convention and Visitors Bureau claims that Brownsville has “A History as Big as Texas." What about the wealth of history available to us here to generate economic activity? Where is the reenactment of the occupation by Cortina? Where is the reenactment of Charlie Lindburgh and Amelia Earhart inaugurating air mail to Latin America at the city airport?
Where is the reenactment of the cattle drive? Where is the reenactment of the future dictator shaking down local ranchers and industrialists for money to fund his revolution?
Instead we have a commercial festival called Charro Days that has grown stale like 60-year-old bread where for a week each year kids get to wear fake mustaches and dress like peons and white people make believe they love Mexicans.
Jerry lauds Goodman for occupying an office at Market Square, probably on the very corner that Cortina shot it out with the deputy in defense of a drunk ranch hand.
His "eight-to-five job" and $71,636 places him only 10 workers down from the top paying city job held by that other luminary Charlie Cabler. About the only times Goodman shows any passion is when he berates little old ladies at city commission meetings because they can't dish out thousands of dollars to rehabilitate their crumbling old houses.
Then Jerry tells us that "he earns botana money as the Brownsville Border Film Commission Board President."
That "botana money" could probably feed a family of four in this low cost of living city, no?
And, really, who gives a rat's behind what opinion he holds of Mel Gibson?
No wonder he "emanates optimism...and predicts that bountiful days are coming."
Jerry also has Goodman asserting that "within the next few years Brownsville's will undergo a face lift of unprecedented proportions. He asserts that not even the natives will recognize downtown. The changes will be that dramatic."
I would bet good money that if Jerry went away to Modesto and returned 10 years from now he will encounter the same downtown that he is rediscovering in his lost summer. Since when has he become a cheerleader for a person who has accomplished little else than to gut the Capitol Theater and ignored the wealth of history staring him in the face?
Where is the rehabilitation of downtown? "Coming to a gutted out theater near you," Goodman would probably gush.
" We've been sowing the seeds for many years," Goodman tells our surprisingly gullible Jerry. "The time has come to reap the harvest."
He sure has, hasn't he?