Back in Town, Catching my Breath

  A few of the Flamboyan trees around our little place.   While there were numerous of these varieties of the class of trees known as jacarandas in really full bloom throughout the region, ours had only begun to bloom in earnest about three days ago. 
     The name for this tree in the English is Royal Ponciana, and there is a smaller type with the name Texas Poniciana or Pride of Barbados.   At one time, long ago, we thought that this particular type of tree was found only in the tropical lowlands and wetter mountainous settings  of the Mexican north and east.  But,  in fact, it is found far and wide, in Brazil, throughout the Caribbean, and almost anywhere in Central America, and the northern, and lower elevations of northern South America.

     The "regular" jacarandas come out earlier in the year, usually with an effusion of blue or lavender  blossoms that can cover the entire tree.   In the west of Mexico, jacarandas can be found with white flowers.  All of them, the flamboyan included, are famous for having the long sword-like, seed-pod.



here at our gate, one
can note a "reluctant"
Flamboyan that has just
begun its bloom, while
the one across  the street
is well on the was to
full bloom

     To the left,  is just another nice example of the famous old standby, the bouganivilla, which has been well established at the Quinta, with seven different colours being present on our grounds.

    To-morrow we can talk a little more about things that are going on in Mexico, in Washington, D.C.  and elsewhere.   My reaction to most of what is going on moves my inclination ever closer to dedicating my efforts more towards the benevolent withdrawal of Texas from the American Union.

More Later.
El Gringo Viejo

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Heading South

   The hour cometh and now is, that El Gringo Viejo will be heading down to our little adobe hideaway.   It is a pleasant thing to have rain, and the folks who are our neighbours here in Texas, coming to tell me that their ranch near Cerralvo, Nuevo Leon...somewhat mid-way between McAllen and Monterrey, received over 7 inches of rain during the past few days.

     Cerralvo is a city that during the colonial period of Spain in the Americas, was a capital of an area including most if not all of what is the Republic of Texas.   It is in a spring-fed pocket of good soil, near mountains that were store houses of lead and silver, and blessed with good ranching land for cattle, sheep, and goats.  Our neighbour, however, also wanted to confess to me that he did not believe me when I told him that in a contest of violence, the one who is controlled and knows how to use his weapons will almost always win the encounter. 

     I told our neighbour that during dark moments in the early days of what would finally become a war that good would beat bad.   It was my certain belief that the conflict between, good and bad, some kind of law against no kind of law, and against the cancer of quick riches as opposed to the development of merited wealth, the Mexican military would win.

 

     He declared that it had been months since they had had to shudder when the swaggering trash would drive by their ranch in their stolen, late model vehicles...sometimes Escalades, Grand Cherokees, and other types of SUVs.   They had not had to walk past them in Cerralvo  when doing basic shopping for the rancho.   The cockroaches had all but taken over the little hotel on the main plaza....as sort of an office for a couple of months....leaving it all but a ruin when they finally took flight at hearing from their "falcons" that the Army was approaching in force to occupy the city.

     What broke the back of the cartel people was that the Army and Naval Infantry came and, in a strategic sense, stayed.  Always hunkered down here, and on patrol there, always collecting information, and always choosing the place for armed encounter.    But my neighbour made an unfortunate mistake, thanking me for giving him the optimism to stay the course.  The fact is, of course, that I should thank him...because it is this nature of person who makes the quality of the populace worth defending.

 

     He was also advised by El Gringo Viejo that the War is in no wise over.   It never will be, actually.   But the excesses, the wantonness  and depravity, the making of so much money that causes so much death and destruction....by people who will never live to see their grandchildren or perhaps even produce them.....has been reduced very, very markedly.   Like the fellow said, when asked by a Gringo, "How come Ciudad Juarez became so peaceful all of a sudden?"

     The Mexican fellow, who lived in Chihuahua and had to travel frequently to the border city of Juarez, thought for a moment, then answered," Well, Sen~or, eet ees thees way,  They jus' ran out of pipples to keel."  Sometimes the best answer is the simplest one.

 

In any regard, we are going down to relieve Alvaro and to do a bit of engineering an re-engineering of the gardens.   Plus we shall be having clients in....another sign of the improving times....and we understand that it has rained a little to quite a bit almost every day for the last week and a half.   Lots of Birds.

 

We shall return sometime before the end of the month, but only for a week or so.   We are taking a client down to Mexico City and this should be interesting...in that I haven't been there for a few years....on purpose...but it is wondrous place to visit for a few days.

 

More later, perhaps before we leave in the morning

El Gringo Viejo

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While We Are At It

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    Would it be at all possible, now that there seems to be a few cracks in the wall, to have the Border Patrol, or BFI, or somebody go and pick up Auntie Zietuni and Uncle Omar Onyango to be removed to the detention and await their deportation.....tomorrow?

 

    Their possessions should be removed because they have lived, supported to a level they could never have comprehended in their homeland, by invading the systems of public welfare and assistance that is provided to slugs, dregs, and bums who want somebody to buy their lottery tickets, food, medical,  shelter, electricity, and manicures and hair extenders for them.

 

     Auntie Zietuni and Uncle Omar are illegal aliens and orders of deportation have been issued twice for each of them.  Highly paid attorneys from powerful and well connected firms have managed to obtain delays and/or appeals....while these two....who are actually furious that welfare and other public support has been insufficient for their liking....continue to rack up payments that are well on their way to 2,000,000 USD since their combined arrival in this horrid country that does not give enough to the immigrants who are the onliest ones who make this country great. 

    Please do your own research on this.   Zietuni Obama and Omar Onyango Obama.  Google them up....it is much worse than your humble servant states it here.

 

Thanks for your time and attention.

El Gringo Viejo

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Sorry about the sudden changes!

    We ask your indulgence.   The OROG will of course have noticed that our format has taken on the appearance of  an early Soviet government publication.  This is because we were trying to make a couple of small adjustments, and learned fairly quickly that google systems that worked at one time, now do not function.  The service that makes homespun blogger site so easy to set up have made other changes that do not permit a person to return to from whence he has arrived.

 

    It is improbable that the repairs can be made before our departure to-morrow for our little mud hut on the side of the Sierra Madre Oriental.   We shall continue to work during the day on this, as time allows, but my technical ability is not such that I feel willing to open up the HTML code and perform surgery.   So this will probably take time....or we possibly will construct our own, made-from-scratch blog platform.

 

El Gringo Viejo 

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Drifting in the Land of Memory and Adventure

_____________________________________________

Suddenly....after dozing off, listening to the rain...finally....my favourite messenger can be heard.  His mount is striking hard ground still, in spite of the bit of rain. It has been almost four months since any significant water has been squeezed out of the skies.



    El Gringo Viejo bolts up and strides, fairly quickly for a geezer, to the gallery outside the front door. It is, to be sure, El Zorro but he is on a different mission....riding up briefly and reining Diablo to a tippy-toe stop.  He hands me his letter of commentary, declaring, "This is to set the record straighter!" He smiled, saluted, and whirled off, shouting, "....the tax people are shaking down the hacendados and even some of the vaqueros.   El Capitan says that they must pay another 25% because of the new medical coverage!  And he told everyone it would be cheaper in the long run.....!!  Wish me luck!!"

     In just a few seconds it was as always...as if he had just disappeared into the darkening dusk and the oak motts at the base of the hills. I unfolded the letter and saved the envelope back inside, turn up the lantern to fight the darkness a bit, and commenced to read.  It was an order of revision and extension of El Gringo Viejo's previous post concerning having been the lowest ranking  White House Staffer in history....lower than an intern.   But,  as usual, there are things said in this fleshing out of those days that should be said.

     It is well that two curmudgeons allow folks to know that each of us has seen it all...or almost all....and we have even made some of it happen to folks....and some folks made it  happened at us.   But, there is not a lot of fiction involved in these recountings, if any.

 

TO WIT:

 

                    

As to the first part, El Gringo Viejo is pseudo correct.

 

     As the lowest ranking White House Staffer, or technically shortly thereafter, he was assigned to the Office of Economic Opportunity’s (OEO) field office in Edinburg, Texas called the “Associated City County Economic Development Corporation (a non-profit)” of the Lower Rio Grande Valley (easier said the “ACCEDC”).  In the summer of 1971 El Zorro (pseudonym) was discharged from active duty and returned to civilian life to pursue his BA degree in the Government curriculum offered at Pan American University, now University of Texas at Pan American.

     While working at the community centre at PAU and as an intern working at the Hidalgo County Judge’s office to supplement the GI Bill for education he was approached by El Gringo regarding a not-so-minor position at the ACCEDC to participate in a “low cost housing project” study.  The actual purpose of the study was not to justify and deploy low cost housing for the below-the-poverty-line families but rather to justify massive funding.  Here is where El Gringo Viejo would arbitrarily be the second lowest ranking White House Staffer.  To be perfectly honest, El Zorro is not sure El Gringo was at that time still a White House Staffer, but he was the Republican plant at the ACCEDC with token credibility.  His position was third in command behind the Executive Director, Eliseo Sandoval and the Vice Executive Director, Luis Ramirez.

     So he did have considerable influence but, being inserted into the agency by a higher power against the will of the directors, he had to fight for every smidgeon of respectability.  That being said he made an mid-level position for a low-income housing-study technician.  The irony is that El Gringo and El Zorro very diligently prepared a study and justified actual low cost housing which, if implemented, would have actually been a worthwhile project that was affordable and practical.  The problem with the study is that it was too good and would not bring in the massive amount of federal funding that the agency had anticipated.  The Director and his sidekick thought that by hiring a "low level" employee with no background or expertise in the area of low cost housing they could just throw numbers on the wall with the uneducated and impertinent documentation and the money would come down.  Ultimately, at a final conference where El Gringo and El Zorro presented and argued for  the results of their study, El Zorro was interrupted by Luis Ramirez with, “Don’t you ever shut up?”.  With that El Zorro walked out of the conference room and the ACCEDC never to return.   El Gringo Viejo has much more insight into the workings and purposes of the OEO and the ACCEDC but this is an example of the attitudes and ideology of the elites.  They have all the money but dish out small amounts to the recipients.  When the projects fail the reasons given are “not enough funding” while the administrators still wear their sharkskin suits, Italian shoes, drive expensive luxury cars, live in the finest neighborhoods and look down their noses at the “proles”.

 

      El Zorro has been on the fringes of this inbred socialist system from the President’s staff on down to the lowest local level.  El Gringo Viejo and El Zorro (before they were El Gringo and El Zorro respectively) were conversationally acquainted to John Tower, Lloyd Bentsen,  locally in the Rio Grande Valley.   Later supporting George Bush the first, El Zorro offering insight to Marlin Fitzwater * (Vice-President George H. W. Bush's campaign in 1988) as El Gringo advised George H. W. Bush.  As El Zorro made a personal and professional change, El Gringo has kept his right index finger on the button and his right ear on the ground (having been slammed on the left side of his head with a water sprinkler by a low life… sorry for the divergence…) but he is and has been a great inspiration for me.  His journal is worth every word, whether you agree or not, you cannot refute the logic and truths.

 

Z

 

 

*minor addenda:
 

    El Zorro was an "on-call"  security-cleared "point-man" who could be used with confidence both as a partisan and as a secure contact in terms of moral, criminal, and psychological examinations to handle events such as a formal round of meetings, public and private, which in this event cited by El Zorro, included the Vice-President of the United States (soon to be President of same).   In truth, El Zorro's security clearance was higher than El Gringo Viejo's.

    My task was to make sure that the people to be closest both physically and in terms of socio-political situations...would be the most adept intellectually.  I had to turn in a list of names, and none could know the other, and I had to name the "lead-dog" of the group of names.   Modesty, perhaps keeps El Zorro from pointing out that in this particular case he was the chauffeur of Marlin Fitzwater, the Vice-President's press co-ordinator, spokesman, and closest advisor in those days.  He had the most "face time".

  During this particular episode El Zorro had to advise Marlin very closely, and very frankly, about the  stupid Elephant Cannibalism that the Hidalgo County and much of South Texas Republican Ranch was practicing.  El Gringo Viejo's problem was that he was a well-known rightwing crazy and El Zorro, although the same rightwinger, was/is more controlled and understated.    Far better he than I to orient Marlin, and to show him the various land mines to negotiate.  I had little or no contact with anyone except at the hotel....Mr. Fitzwater and the Vice-President were very complementary.   Fitzwater stayed up, we talked at the bar for a bit, both of us drinking tonic and lemon juice, and after 16 or 18 minutes we parted company.  That was the entirety of my time with the XO...and I had spent less time with the CO.   

    El Zorro did three calendar days of work...all of this stuff is unpaid, and worked magic without detracting from the Star.   In those moments, the governor of Texas was a Country Club Republican like GWH Bush, but had booked an event in a very large venue to purposefully interfere with the Vice-President's Campaign....and the VP (soon to be President) was a member of the same Texas  Country Club Republican faction!!!

     We had to really watch out because LLoyd Bentsen was from McAllen - Mission.  He was also fluent in Spanish and was a powerful, adored, and despised political personality throughout South Texas and the Houston Big Business arena. He had been put on the ballot by the Democrats as the Vice-Presidential nominee.  When all was said and done, Bush duplicated, almost, Reagan's 44% of the Latino vote...and much of that was due to holding the skilled, blue-collar, professionals,  and small business Latins in where they were supposed to be anyway.  Texas went heavily Republican   King George the First was actually unaware that we could do that well simply by being accessible.   El Zorro was a very successful cog in that wheel of success.   Among other successes.

 

     The matter of the housing thing was understated.   Luis Ramirez always felt threatened by anyone who was competent.   Neither he nor the Executive Director would have known what to do with our neighbours-building-neighbour's houses with a very simple construction format, relying on Master-level blue collar tradesmen and pre-prepared plans instead of contractors and architects.   Frightening...to jerks who want to "help the poor" by paying themselves tonnes of shekels while "helping the poor".  Later, the Executive Director Eliseo Sandoval, was convicted of fraud and misappropriation and made license plate for a couple of years.   He and another "Executive Director" of the County's employment training program (millions and millions flushed) set up a janitorial service for the night-cleaning of various public buildings, using totally subsidised "trainees" to keep their costs down.  El Gringo Viejo had people ask me to drop a dime on them, but someone else did it before I had chewed the cud on it.
 

A laugh...and a waste of part of my life for the Republican Party.  But it was all worth it!

El Gringo Viejo

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______________________________________________

The Lowest Ranking White House Staffer in 1970

    El Gringo Viejo was probably the holder of the honorific title of being the lowest ranking member of the "White House Staff" during Richard Nixon's first term.   The ridiculous agency known as the Office of Economic Opportunity ( OEO ) had been set up during Lyndon Baines Johnson's only elected term.  It was a payola, vote-buying scheme, primarily aimed at Democrat vote-buying schemes.  Emergency Food and Medical Services, the grandmother of the modern day Food Stamp program, and scores of other dysfunctional programs aimed at the chronically lethargic.

    The Nixon people were an eclectic group of Republican Conservative "progressives" and hard nosed conservatives who believed  that the poor only needed stronger bootstraps and less beer.   There were literally already several thousand incredibly ridiculous stories about mega-corruption, program abuse, programs that had practiced no...absolutely no...accounting procedures of any kind since the inception of their "community action" organisations.  Please believe...there were thousands of programming "defects' that Ripley's Believe It or Not would have had a hard time believing.

     El Gringo Viejo came in while returning from active duty in the Army in 1969.   He tried, frankly, to impulse a bit of favouritism through a brother who was Executive Director of the Texas Republican Party...and went through the debriefing and security analysis and other such research that is presently called "vetting" through the established Republican patronage apparatus.

     Oddly enough, when we were informed to report to a cross between an interview and a briefing, we received another call from another central government office...the Regional Office of Economic Opportunity - Executive Office of the President.  I had made that contact on my own....since I was a great social scientist with my Sociology BA, and all!!  Ah! the audacity of ignorance and conceit!!

        In those days, the Southwest Region's headquarters for the five State region was in Austin, Texas....kind of a holdover from the original glory days of the Johnson Administration.   It was in an old WPA building a couple of blocks from the huge, pink marble,  State Capitol building to the east.

     It was a strange place.  Between the going in and coming out that day, I was tested, assigned a GS - 7, management trainee, project analyst and evaluator title.   "When do I report?"   Emmanuel Lupo told me,"You already have.  See you to-morrow".   As an afterthought, he added, "You Republicans aren't going to like it here. No friends, all enemies, and we're watching everything you do and everything you say.   You will never be in the rest room alone."

     On Friday, the Regional Executive Director told me to be ready to fly to Washington D.C. for a 2 day meeting with a fellow named Donald Rumsfield.   He would give us our "trajectory" which would be essentially a privatisation of the anti-poverty programs.  The ultimate objective would be to close the OEO down before it became a program that provoked dependency.   There were 30 "recruits" drawn from all over the United States who would meet with the former United States Representative, now Director of the OEO - EOP, and the meeting would be at the OEOB (Old Excutive Office Building), on the left side of the White House, as the White House looks out on a street named Pennsylvania.

      The first days at the third floor of the building in Austin were, in fact, not pleasant.   A Mr.  Xxxxxxxx, a highly placed bureaucrat in the regional office's pecking order, in charge of "field operations", was more than a little pointed, when I edged into his office to introduce myself.
       "Mr. Haney, I am...." I began.

       "Shut to the **** up and get your *** out of my office, ****ing Scab," were the first and last words that he spoke to me.   He had the official pictures of Martin L. King, Bobby Kennedy, Teddy Kennedy, Cesar Chavez, Lyndon Johnson, Jake Pickle, Ralph Yarborough, and Lloyd Bentsen.....but no picture of Richard Milhouse Nixon.   One other odd picture was of him with Fidel Castro and some other Cuban Revolutionary notables in front of the United Nations building in New York City.

        I was later informed that he was also highly placed in the American Federal Government Employees Union.   He was miffed because I had elected to not join the union at the time of my employment.    Very few people in the Regional OEO offices would respond when I spoke with them. So the Republicans, about 9 persons, were essentially surrounded by 153 career leeches...who like almost all central government employees in those days and these, spent about one third of their time in union meetings and personnel disputes.  Now, there is additional time spent on lecturing people how bad they are for hating lesbian, Eskimo Moslem, fishingboat captains, who are left-handed, and who have learning disabilities, and ABdDooaEE.   

      The flight to Washington, D.C. was still a direct flight as a holdover from the LBJ presidency, and it landed...bouncingly....at Dulles, and I transferred via something called "Hotel Courtesy Van"....to a hotel at Lafayette Circle.   The next couple of days were essentially the opposite of the OEO office back in Texas.   Everyone was civilised, pleasant, and a lot more concerned about the poor folks that than the Democrat, leftist "poverty warriors".   We were told to try to insert ourselves into the local community action agencies, especially the largest ones, where there was a lot of money moving around.  "Take your training and your temporary appointments and go out into the belly of the beast and preach the wisdom of free enterprise".   That was our "subversive order".   We even had a three minute wave off from the President, where he said the famous line from Benjamin Franklin about the best way to make war on poverty is to make a man uncomfortable in his poverty.  Nixon even brought on board a famous old liberal warrior...into the White House inner sanctum....a fellow named Daniel Moynihan who was famous for having said that the Black population would benefit from a period of "benign neglect".  Moynihan thought that if they were "taken care of", they would eventually wind up being the same Ping-Pong balls that the Indians had become...toys for White liberal social science experiments, none of which would ever produce positive results.

     As an aside, upon departing the meeting, El Gringo Viejo (aged 22, then) noticed that his real, live official government travel voucher was not made out to anyone except the traveller.

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This is a picture of the last long distance, coach and Pullman Southern
Crescent train, edging into Birmingham, Alabama.  It had an excellent
diner, a saloon car, and an observatory.  Very nice ride.  Lost money
even when full, which was most of the time.  We rode it a few times in
the early 1970s, and it died in 1978, and its bones were eaten by AMTRAK.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  It was just a voucher with travel authority, dates, and the equivalent of coach fare on any airline or common passenger conveyance. After asking, I was informed that it was valid for a train if anyone had the time for such idiocy.  The day was done, it was Thursday...Friday was supposed to be a travel day, and then there was the weekend....so I chased over to the train station and enquired at the AMTRAK if there were a train that could make the trip to Austin or San Antonio.   Oddly, there was not an AMTRAK...but, there was the last long distance service being operated by a fully private carrier, the Southern Railway System, and they had their famous Southern Crescent that would come through later to-night from New York City, heading for New Orleans.  A cumbersome connection with the old Sunset Limited (previously of the Southern Pacific, but by then the AMTRAK) would leave and go through Houston and then to San Antonio arriving late  Saturday morning.   I called a buddy in Austin and asked if he could pick me up....and he said, "You won't believe this but I have to be somewhere on Saturday"..."Oh, Phooey!, Where do you have to be, anyway?"   and then he responded, "I have a meeting in some place called the Frost Bank, in downtown San Antonio."  hahahaa.

Very propitious.

     And that was the first of two different "rides"...all Pullman... that El Gringo Viejo took by rail on the taxpayers' dime.  One other time I went and came, round trip, on another mission of "great importance" involving something like an extension of fulfilling the orders that had been given during that two-day "mission orientation" by the Nixon Administration.

     All of this is preambulatory to the fact that, mixing with conversations with political people and government people, and social people....it was quickly surmised by even the most intellectually  limited that Nixon was in a mess shortly after the 1972 elections.  He had carried every State in the Union, except for Massachusetts.   George McGovern's collapse at the polls had been total.   But the rum0urs about something called "Water Gate" were already bubbling in the cauldron.

     The one thing that I remembered and shall remember until the hearse drives into the Shady Rest Memorial Gardens and Skating Rink....is the "old guys"  (those who were 35 to 60 years old) at the bar in Georgetown (name unremembered but they did have a very good, AAA minor league bluegrass group)...talking about how John Dean was the actual author of the famous "Nixon Enemy List" and that Chuck Colson had warned Nixon not to leave Dean out of line of sight....that he was "out to get people who had been "mean to him" and let Nixon take the blame.  Dean was known to have prepared a list of over 500 people who had offended him on his way up the ranks....some were just local people with small businesses who did not like self-consumed drips.   Colson said he knew because he worked with Dean on the list until he realised that Dean was tech'd and fixated with vengeance.

     It is worth noting these things because the charge stuck, although it was never actually made.  Nixon used the IRS to get at people on his "enemies list".....It was one of the three charges out of 20 that were finally approved by the House Judiciary Committee, but on the way to the floor, it was apparent that there was no substance to the charge and it had not been included in any drafting of the formal Impeachment charges.   But the press took care of that...just like they took care of Joe McCarthy....and Lincoln Freed the Slaves....and Social Security will take care of the geezers....and the income tax will never exceed 1% of anyone's income.

(El Gringo Viejo felt somewhat vindicated when FOX News reporter Al Rosen [White House and special assignments] declared that he needed to correct and clarify a point about associating Richard Nixon with having utilised the IRS as a political retribution weapon.  He essentially pointed out that he had been correctly informed, almost precisely, of what El Gringo Viejo included in the above passages, even naming John Dean (jerk), and Chuck Colson (actually a good guy) as having been the culprits, and that Colson had always said that Nixon never knew anything about it. John Dean also confessed that truth some years back, in public.)

That's all.   Just the facts, ma'am.  714

El Gringo Viejo