DR. G.F. MCHALE-SCULLY PERISHES

The great American poet and novelist Dr. G.F. McHale-Scully was killed Sunday afternoon when his flight from Matamoros to Mexico City crashed near San Miguel de Allende. All 87 passengers and seven crew members perished.

McHale-Scully won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2011. He joined the elite club comprised of Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O'Neill, Pearl Buck, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Saul Bellow, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Toni Morrison and Bob Dylan. He is survived by three sons and his fourth wife Winona Ryder.

"We have suffered a tremendous tragedy," said former President Barack Obama. "The flags at all federal buildings should hang at half mast for the next year. He captured the clash of political cultures plus gave new meaning to sex and its pervasive influence on every-day life. He told stories that the average American could comprehend the profundity on his singular insights.

"His poems were gripping narratives laced with a haunting irony. After you read him, you would look into the mirror and you couldn't recognize yourself he had so altered your consciousness.

"His crystalline prose and unadorned diction made him a favorite among university students. A longtime professor himself, he possessed a natural rapport with the younger generation," continued the former Chief Executive.

"Readers, nevertheless, in the latter stages of their lives, were mesmerized by him. He had a unique talent to create characters struggling to grasp the finality of death. He had a transcendent quality that related to all ages."

McHale-Scully admitted that he could not resist the brutality of truth, a fascination that cost him several marriages, estrangement from his children and fallouts with longtime friends and associates.

"I know there are individuals who won't believe me, but sometimes I don't have the balls to go for the coup de grace because I don't want to be the one who has to wipe the slate clean of the bloody mess," he noted during a Harvard speaking engagement.

To his credit, he was unsparing in the depiction of himself. He argued that the savagery he unleashed on himself gave him liberties to be equally merciless on others.

Often compared to Henry Miller and Charles Bukowski and their decadent genre, he differed from this pair in that the two authors sympathized with losers inhabiting the fringes of society. McHale-Scully's subjects were average citizens who lived double lives that intersected with the dregs of society when they weren't coaching little league or barbecuing at family gatherings.

"I have the ability to objectify myself and others," he told a Stanford audience. "I don't visualize them as themselves but as persons who have evolved, or devolved if you like, into fictional figures. This viewpoint goes back to my roots as a beginning journalist when as a reporter I would interview politicians and would instinctively reduce them to caricatures. I reached a point where I could no longer distinguish between reality and fiction."

McHale-Scully established his reputation as a poet with Punk Poetry and as a novelist with El Cabrón, both critical if not financial successes. Among his 23 books, the majority a combination of short stories and poems, they have been overshadowed by the three novels of his Tommy Tamaulipas Trilogy and other masterpieces including Trump the Terrible and The Coronavirus Chronicles.

McHale-Scully has had as much of a devastating impact locally on his beloved Brownsville as he has had nationally and internationally. Jim Barton, the publisher of The Brownsville Observer, baptized McHale-Scully as the blogfather as he inaugurated the blogosphere with his seminal El Rocinante. The bloggers have grown to such prestige and power that they have replaced The Brownsville Herald as the source of breaking news and searing commentary.

"He was a brilliant thinker whose intent was to entertain and inform," said noted journalist Robert Rivard. "He wasn't a flamboyant personality, but you were aware of his presence. He had a wry sense of humor that he would interject with impeccable timing. His writing reflected his All-American qualities in the tradition of Paul Neuman, Robert Redford and Brad Pitt."

There will be no services. He has donated his body to medical science. His corpse has caused a sensation at UNAM, Mexico's most famous university, where his body was immediately transferred.

"We have all these female students chattering about their sexual fantasies upon seeing his cadaver," said Virginia de la Verga, the medical school's director.

"We had to lock his body in a separate section. You can't take any chances with young ladies these days. Pobrecitas! They have only known Mexican men."