WE NEVER KNEW RRUN-RRUN WAS "EASY," OR CHEEZMEH IMPARTIAL

"And we are sick and tired of hearing your song
Telling how you are gonna change right from wrong
'Cause if you really want to hear our views
"You haven't done nothing"!

From Stevie Wonder

By Juan Montoya

Every once in a while someone tells us that we have been the object of derision or scorn in some dark corner of cyberspace.

The fact that it was – once again – in a Cheezmeh posting on Facebook didn't surprise us much. We've grown weary of even clicking on to that page unless we want to know where we can find a stray dog, adopt a pussycat, avoid a police checkpoint or peek in on someone sniping at local people while munching on doughnuts perched on a Lazyboy chair in Austin.

That said, we – as have others active in cyberspace – have been witnessing the convoluted evolution of the Cheezmeh group since its inception as a so-called grassroots organization to its current state as a...well, it's hard to tell what. What may have started as a spanking new forum for new ideas in the city has now deteriorated into a sort of segunda of shopworn gimmicks ruled over by a doughnut-munching head mistress who won't stand any guff from underlings, or from her betters for that matter.

We speak of Erasmo Castro, of course.

Over time, that cuddly munchkin has evolved into a ruthless Gargantua devouring his enemies with missives sent out from his cave in Austin. When he does come down to review the troops, it's always a smaller cadre that he encounters. That's why when the group decided to do away with the thin veneer of political impartiality and begin to take sides in local political races, everyone knew it would be a matter of time before it would also fall victim to the rampant polarization of the area.

Then, when fortune smiled on them and they were at the right place at the right time when the community soundly rejected Charlie Atkinson's rerun for city commissioner and voted in Jessica Tetreau-Kalifa and then the voters chose newcomer John Villarreal over former city commissioner Tony Zavaleta, Cheezmeh felt its oats. Suddenly, a community-wide rejection of these candidates had been their doing, and only their own.

This grew to be a common trait of the group. When local blogger Bobby Wightman led the move to deny Fly Frontera – represented by his nemesis Carlos Quintanilla also from Dallas – incentives amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars, Cheezmeh was a latecomer to the issue, but made like it was leading the parade.

Predictably, when the city denied the airline subsidies, Cheezmeh leaped at the chance to assert itself as the paladin of Browntown. It's easy to claim credit when someone else does the work.

Well, this led to a falling out between Castro, former Cheezmeh adherents and Wightman. Those defections just kept on coming. The Bartons, the Groves, Helen Flores, the Brownsville Firemen Union, the Brownsville Unity Council, etc., all demurely separated themselves from the Head Cheez and his minions.

Then the heroes of the black-playera-clad group – Tetreau and Villarreal – proved by their actions to be less than ideal role models of civility.

Tetreau couldn't keep her domestic problems with her mate from ending in the city lockup or in the police and newspaper reports and Villarreal's rant at a public park over a voter abuse group left a bad taste in everyone's mouth.

Then Castro's spat with Zeke Silva over his support of Luis Saenz for Cameron County District Attorney ostensibly over the Head Cheez's claim to veto power over the Cheezmeh blog deteriorated to a point where the blog meisters pulled the plug blog on the blog saying it was constructed to be a community tool rather than a personal organ of power.

"I don't have to explain myself to anyone...I reserve the right to remove anything..." Castro asserts.

The support of the Cheezmeh cadre has been an incidental one to personal friendships with the likes of Elia Cornejo Lopez, Erin Hernandez Garcia, and Rebecca RuBane because Erin gave them free legal advice, and Elia and Rebecca were "friends."

"It was a given that we were going to ask our friends to support Erin," he says. "We had already declared we were not going to enter into the primaries, man."

Castro now counters in a recent posting that Silva forced Cheezmeh's hand in the DA's race and said: "We were thrown into that race by the stupid Saenz people, especially Zeke who is s piece of shit."

Regardless of what Castro says, it was obvious since before early voting that he mired the group deep in the political muck with the obvious candidates, most notably in the Masso and Hernandez races.

But alas, Erin did not fare very well in the Justice of the Peace race, and both she and Masso are in for tight runoff races.

In the DA's race, Masso's 8,072 votes were just 306 over Saenz's 7,766. However, included in that total are an astounding 192 mail-in votes for Masso. That may prove, as a local blogger states, "problematic."

In the JP 2-2 race, Yolanda Teran Begum's 2,960 votes beat Erin's 2,507. Not only must Erin make up the difference, she must also get at least one more vote to overcome Begum's lead.

The Cheezmeh association with a political pariahs like Ernie Hernandez and his family and with a candidate like Masso who has yet to fully answer for his role in the Port of Brownsville's $21 million Bridge to Nowhere fiasco will doubtless hasten the group's declining fortunes.

Castro, complaining to his adoring admirers in his remaining Facebook forum, sounded like a long-suffering and toiling mother who is working her fingers to the bone for ingr

ate children who simply don't understand the toils and travails of putting out snippets of wisdom on the Internet.

"I do my best in attending to individual needs and requests, but if you think that running a page as big as this one is as easy as running the Rrun-Rrun or any other blog, you are sorely mistaken...Peace."

Now, if Castro actually had to create posts instead of cutting and pasting from the Internet as he does, he might have a point. But he doesn't.

And we thought we had our work cut out for us actually writing original pieces. We're in the wrong business.