SATIRE: This is parody. Not a real news report.
HARLINGEN — A tense 3-3 deadlock at Monday’s City Commission meeting spared the Herb Kelleher mural at Lozano Plaza after Commissioner Michael Mezmar delivered an impassioned 14-minute warning that painting over the Southwest Airlines co-founder’s face could cause the entire S&P 500 company to lose visual contact with Harlingen and simply wander into McAllen by accident.
The vote, which would have replaced the 2020 mural with a collage featuring the city’s All-America City Award logo, was defeated after Mezmar argued that Kelleher’s painted gaze functions as a geographic landmark visible from 30,000 feet, guiding Southwest pilots to Valley International Airport the way a lighthouse guides ships.
“If we paint over Herb, what’s keeping Flight 1482 from landing at Miller International?” Mezmar said, clutching a laminated aerial photo of downtown. “A brown bag? A nice font? No. It’s Herb’s face. He’s our landing strip. He’s our control tower. He’s our whole brand. You slap an S&P 500 company across the face, you don’t get another one. Brownsville doesn’t have one. McAllen wishes they had one. We have one and he’s made of paint.”
Southwest Reportedly Unaware It Was Being Held Hostage
According to City Manager Gabriel Gonzalez, a lobbyist contacted Southwest Airlines about the mural situation and was told the company had “zero concerns” and found the entire panic “kind of funny,” confirming that at no point had a single Southwest executive based route-planning decisions on a wall in Lozano Plaza.
However, Mezmar dismissed the reassurance as “exactly what they’d say before they leave,” and produced a handwritten chart showing that the mural was painted in 2020, Southwest has not left Harlingen since 2020, and therefore correlation equals causation.
Commissioner Rene Perez, who voted to replace the mural, pointed out that Southwest has flown to Harlingen since 1975, decades before anyone painted anything downtown. Mezmar responded by holding up a printed copy of the airline’s stock price and whispering, “Do you want to be responsible for THIS?”
167 Survey Respondents Outvoted By Fear Of A Phone Call That Never Came
The mural replacement was recommended by Keep Harlingen Beautiful after a city survey collected input from 167 residents, all of whom were apparently unaware their opinions would be overruled by a commissioner’s vivid imagination of a corporate breakup text that does not exist.
“I just thought the All-America logo looked nice,” said one fictional resident who asked not to be named because they did not exist. “I didn’t know I was voting on whether Southwest remembers we have an airport.”
The mural will remain. Herb Kelleher will continue staring down at Lozano Plaza. And somewhere in Dallas, a Southwest spokesperson was still laughing.
