Independent opinion
Cult of personality

Why doesn’t anyone in the city listen to Tom Noe?

Is it because he is Gallup born and raised? Is it because he doesn’t charge for his advice? Is it because he is critical of the golf course’s current greens superintendent, Bob Weekes, whom he believes doesn’t know a lick about growing grass? Or is it just because he’s not one of the mayor’s cohorts, the gang on the city council and in city hall who spend all day serving him and saying he is the greatest while running Gallup into the ground.

Weekes, Mayor Harry Mendoza and City Manager Gerald Herrera have spent the last year raping this community, sucking out everything that is good and spewing forth one lie after another and, in the process, throwing away any chance to bring Fox Run up to a playable condition.

In the last couple of months, the Independent has been conducting a full-scale investigation into Mendoza’s early years, uncovering the fact that back in 1948, he was charged by the district attorney’s office with being involved with at least five other men in the brutal rape of a 16-year-old Native woman. Five of these men were sentenced to spend as much as 20 years in prison for their actions that night.

Mendoza, as an article in the Independent stated back in 1949, was not prosecuted because he had enlisted in the Army. To this day, he has failed to come up with a logical reason why he should not have been prosecuted.

This is an editorial about the golf course, but we bring this up because those men who savagely raped that young girl deserve no respect, no matter what kind of life they led afterwards. We can image that the girl pleaded and begged for those boys to stop raping her. She probably begged for her life and, if the six thugs had not been interrupted, it’s quite possible she would have died. She was also fortunate, if one can say anything that occurred during a vicious gang rape is fortunate, that she lost consciousness after she was raped several times and didn’t have to remember more of what happened that night.

What happened that night is that none of the men committing the rape listened to her. Today, we see this same attitude in Mendoza, Weekes and Herrera. Mendoza has spent a life of doing what he wanted, running over anyone who got in his way, and refusing to listen to anyone who disagreed with him. This is the same type of behavior we have seen throughout history. Adolf Hitler was the same way, deciding to reduce the overpopulation in German towns by killing off six million Jews. Other example include Bernie Madoff and his financial accounting, Jim Jones and his cult community and David Duke. Do you need more examples? Ted Bundy.

The one thing these men have in common with Mendoza is that they all refused to listen to people. They all thought their ends were justified by their means. Wrong is wrong, people.

Mendoza is the type of person who came into leadership knowing that as long as he could surround himself with weak, incompetent people who didn’t have the intelligence or the temperament to challenge his actions, would allow him to continue in his brutal way ... rape Gallup.

That’s the case with Weekes and Herrera, and unfortunately, it’s also the case with Jay Azua and Allen Landavazo on the city council. As long as Mendoza has puppets he can control, he can get his way and Gallup, be damned.

On the surface, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to people in Gallup as to why Mendoza, Herrera and Weekes at least don’t listen to Noe, who says that for a few hundred thousand dollars, the Gallup course can be a lot better.

That’s the amount that the city is subsidizing the golf course right now. Noe has better credentials than Weekes and he has proven, by the fact that there are dozens of golf courses around the world bringing delight to golfers, that he can do what he says he can do. Weekes, like Mendoza, is a failure.

All Weekes has proven he can do is suck up to Mendoza and Herrera. He’s really good at that, but ask the average golfer if that makes the golf course any more playable. No, they will respond.

But Noe has made a serious mistake. He has spoken the truth about Weekes, saying that the man who should be the one to fix the problems at the course is more interested in finding the money to fix the parking lot, buying superfluous equipment and putting in a security system to protect the practice green. His only purpose in life is to stay in his job until he retires. This is no reason to keep him. Fire him today.

The truth is something that is in short supply in City Hall, which is understandable since this town has a mayor who has been lying to us about his involvement in that 1948 rape for the past 61 years.

For the past two and a half years, Mendoza has delighted in telling the citizens of Gallup that the city can’t do this or that. It’s either that the city doesn’t have the money or that it violates the state’s anti-donation laws. Yet, he still believes that he can cram down our throats a $20 million indoor arena that no one but him wants. This is just another rape in the making.

We know now that there is nothing we can say, nothing Tom Noe can say, nothing the citizens of Gallup can say that will break through that wall Mendoza has set up between him and the people he was elected to serve. He plans to run the city the way he wants and, unless either Azua or Landavazo come to their senses and think first of this community instead of their loyalty to him, Mendoza will continue to rape and rape this community on a daily basis.