by Molly Ivins
Plus, plopped on top of all this, we have three huge cities, all among the ten largest in the country. Houston is Los Angeles with the climate of Calcutta, Dallas is Dutch (clean, orderly, and conformist), while San Antonio is Monterrey North. Many years ago I wrote of this state: “The reason the sky is bigger here is because there aren’t any trees. The reason folks here eat grits is because they ain’t got no taste. Cowboys mostly stink and it’s hot, oh God, is it hot. . . . Texas is a mosaic of cultures, which overlap in several parts of the state, with the darker layers on the bottom. The cultures are black, Chicano, Southern, freak, suburban, and shitkicker. (Shitkicker is dominant.) They are all rotten for women.” All that’s changed in thirty years is that suburban is now dominant, shitkicker isn’t so ugly as it once was, and the freaks are now Goths or something. So it could be argued we’re becoming more civilized.
In fact, it was always easy to argue that: Texas has symphony orchestras and great universities and perfect jewels of art museums (mostly in Fort Worth, of all places). It has lots of people who birdwatch, write Ph.D. theses on esoteric subjects, and speak French, for chrissake. But what still makes Texas Texas is that it’s ignorant, cantankerous, and ridiculously friendly. Texas is still resistant to Howard Johnsons, interstate highways, and some forms of phoniness. It is the place least likely to become a replica of everyplace else. It’s authentically awful, comic, and weirdly charming, all at the same time.
Culturally, Texans rather resemble both Alaskans (hunt, fish, hate government) and Australians (drink beer, hate snobs). The food is quite good—Mexican, barbecue, chili, shrimp, and chicken-fried steak, an acquired taste. The music is country, blues, folk mariachi, rockabilly, and everything else you can think of. Mexican music—norteño, ranchero—is poised to cross over, as black music did in the 1950s.
If you want to understand George W. Bush—unlike his daddy, an unfortunate example of a truly Texas-identified citizen—you have to stretch your imagination around a weird Texas amalgam: religion, anti-intellectualism, and machismo. All big, deep strains here, but still an odd combination. Then add that Bush is just another li’l upper-class white boy out trying to prove he’s tough.
The politics are probably the weirdest thing about Texas. The state has gone from one-party Democrat to one-party Republican in thirty years. Lyndon said when he signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964 that it would take two generations and cost the Democrats the South. Right on both counts. We like to think we’re “past race” in Texas, but of course East Texas remains an ugly, glaring exception. After James Byrd Jr. was dragged to death near Jasper, only one prominent white politician attended his funeral—U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison. Dubya, then governor, put the kibosh on the anti-hate crimes bill named in Byrd’s memory. (The deal-breaker for Bush was including gays and lesbians. At a meeting last year of the Texas Civil Liberties Union board, vicious hate crimes against gays in both Dallas and Houston were discussed. I asked the board member from Midland if they’d been having any trouble with gay-bashing out there. “Hell, honey,” she said, with that disastrous frankness one can grow so fond of, “there’s not a gay in Midland would come out of the closet for fear people would think they’re a Democrat.”)
Among the various strains of Texas right-wingism (it is factually incorrect to call it conservatism) is some leftover loony John Birchism, now morphed into militias; country-club economic conservatism, à la George Bush père; and the usual batty anti-government strain. Of course Texas grew on the tender mercies of the federal government—rural electrification, dams, generations of master pork-barrel politicians, and vast subsidies to the oil and gas industry. But that has never interfered with Texans’ touching but entirely erroneous belief that this is the Frontier, and that in the Old West every man pulled his own weight and depended on no one else. The myth of rugged individualism continues to afflict a generation raised entirely in suburbs with names like “Flowering Forest Hills of Lubbock.”
The Populist movement was born in the Texas Hill Country, as genuinely democratic an uprising as this country has ever known. It produced legendary politicians for generations, including Ralph Yarborough, Sam Rayburn, Lyndon, and even into the 1990s, with Agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower. I think it is not gone, but only sleeping.
Texans retain an exaggerated sense of state identification, routinely identifying themselves when abroad as Texans, rather than Americans or from the United States. That aggravated provincialism has three sources. First, the state is so big (though not so big as Alaska, as they are sure to remind us) that it can take a couple of days’ hard travel just to get out of it. Second, we reinforce the sense of difference by requiring kids to study Texas history, including roughly ten years as an independent country. In state colleges, the course in Texas government is mandatory. Third, even national advertising campaigns pitch brands with a Texas accent here and certain products, like the pickup truck, are almost invariably sold with a Texas pitch. (Makes sense: Texas leads the nation with more than four million registered pickups.)
The founding myth is the Alamo. I was raised on the Revised Standard Version, which holds that while it was stupid of Travis and the gang to be there at all (Sam Houston told them to get the hell out), it was still an amazing last stand. Stephen Harrigan in The Gates of the Alamo is closer to reality, but even he admits in the end there was something romantic and even noble about the episode, like having served in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War.
According to the demographers at Texas A&M (itself a source of much Texas lore), Texas will become “majority minority” in 2008. Unfortunately, we won’t see it in the voting patterns for at least a generation, and by then the Republicans will have the state so tied up by redistricting (recently the subject of a massive standoff, now over, in the Legislature), it’s unlikely to shift for another generation beyond that. The Christian right is heavily dominant in the Texas Republican Party. It was the genius of Karl Rove/George W. Bush to straddle the divide between the Christian right and the country club conservatives, which is actually a significant class split. The politics of resentment plays a large role in the Christian right: Fundamentalists are perfectly aware that they are held in contempt by “the intellectuals.” (William Brann of Waco once observed, “The trouble with our Texas Baptists is that we do not hold them under water long enough.” He was shot to death by an irate Baptist.) In Texas, “intellectual” is often used as a synonym for “snob.” George W. Bush perfectly exemplifies that attitude.
Here in the National Laboratory for Bad Government, we have an antiquated and regressive tax structure—high property, high sales, no income tax. We consistently rank near the bottom by every measure of social service, education, and quality of life (leading to one of our state mottoes, “Thank God for Mississippi”). Yet the state is incredibly rich in more than natural resources. The economy is now fully diversified, so plunges in the oil market can no longer throw the state into the bust cycle.
It is widely believed in Texas that the highest purpose of government is to create “a healthy bidness climate.” The Legislature is so dominated by special interests that the gallery where the lobbyists sit is called “the owners’ box.” The consequences of unregulated capitalism, of special interests being able to buy government through campaign contributions, are more evident here because Texas is “first and worst” in this area. That Enron was a Texas company is no accident: Texas was also ground zero in the savings and loan scandals, is continually the site of major rip-offs by the insurance industry, and has a rich history of gigantic chicanery going way back. Leland Beatty, an agricultural consultant, calls Enron “Billie Sol Estes Goes to College.” Economists call it “control fraud” when a corporation is rotten from the head down. I sometimes think Texas government is a case of control fraud too.
We are currently saddled with a right-wing ideologue sugar daddy, James Leininger out of San Antonio, who gives immense campaign contributions and wants school vouchers, abstinenc
e education, and the like in return. The result is a crew of breathtakingly right-wing legislators. This session, Representative Debbie Riddle of Houston said during a hearing, “Where did this idea come from that everybody deserves free education, free medical care, free whatever? It comes from Moscow, from Russia. It comes straight out of the pit of hell.”
Texans for Lawsuit Reform, aka the bidness lobby, is a major player and has effectively eviscerated the judiciary with a two-pronged attack. While round after round of “tort reform” was shoved through the Legislature, closing off access to the courts and protecting corporations from liability for their misdeeds, Karl Rove was busy electing all nine state supreme court justices. So even if you should somehow manage to get into court, you are faced with a bench noted for its canine fidelity to corporate special interests.
Here’s how we make progress in Texas. Two summers ago, Governor Goodhair Perry (the man has a head of hair every Texan can be proud of, regardless of party) appointed an Enron executive to the Public Utilities Commission. The next day, Governor Goodhair got a $25,000 check from Ken Lay. Some thought there might be a connection. The guv was forced to hold a press conference, at which he explained that the whole thing was “totally coincidental.” So that was a big relief.
We don’t have a sunshine law in Texas; it’s more like a partly cloudy law. But even here a major state appointee has to fill out a bunch of forms that are then public record. When the governor’s office put out the forms on the Enron guy, members of the press, that alert guardian watchdog of democracy, noticed that the question about any unfortunate involvement with law enforcement looked funny. The governor’s office had whited out the answers. A sophisticated cover-up. The alert guardian watchdogs were on the trail. We soon uncovered a couple of minor traffic violations and the following item: While out hunting a few years earlier, the Enron guy accidentally shot a whooping crane. As a result he had to pay a $15,000 fine under what is known in Texas as the In Danger Species Act. We print this. A state full of sympathetic hunters reacted with, “Hell, anybody could accidentally shoot a whooper.” But the press stayed on the story and was able to report that the guy shot the whooper while on a goose hunt. Now the whooper is a large bird—runs up to five feet tall. The goose—short. Now we have a state full of hunters saying, “Hell, if this boy is too dumb to tell a whooper from a goose, maybe he shouldn’t be regulatin’ public utilities.” He was forced to resign.
As Willie Nelson sings, if we couldn’t laugh, we would all go insane. This is our redeeming social value and perhaps our one gift to progressives outside our borders. We do laugh. We have no choice. We have to have fun while trying to stave off the forces of darkness because we hardly ever win, so it’s the only fun we get to have. We find beer and imagination helpful. The Billion Bubba March, the Spam-o-rama, the time we mooned the Klan, being embedded with the troops at the Holiday Inn in Ardmore, Oklahoma, singing “I’m Just an Asshole from El Paso” with Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys, and “Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother” with Ray Wylie Hubbard laughing at the loonies in the Lege—does it get better than this? The late Bill Kugle of Athens is buried in the Texas State Cemetery. On the front of his stone are listed his service in the marines in World War II, his years in the Legislature, other titles and honors. On the back of the stone is, “He never voted for a Republican and never had much to do with them either.”
We have lost some great freedom fighters in Texas during the past year. Billie Carr, the great Houston political organizer (you’d’ve loved her: She got invited to the White House during the middle of the Monica mess, sashayed through the receiving line, looked Bill Clinton in the eye and said, “You dumb son of a bitch”), always said she wanted her funeral to be like her whole life in politics: It should start half an hour late, she wanted a balanced delegation of pallbearers—one black, one brown, two women—and she wanted an open casket and a name tag stuck over her left tit that said, “Hi there! My name is Billie Carr.” We did it all for her.
At the funeral of Malcolm McGregor, the beloved legislator and bibliophile from El Paso, we heard “The Eyes of Texas” and the Aggie War Hymn played on the bagpipes. At the service for Maury Maverick Jr. of San Antonio, and at his request, J. Frank Dobie’s poem “The Mustangs” was read by the poet Naomi Shihab Nye. The last stanza is:
So sometimes yet, in the realities of silence and solitude,
For a few people unhampered a while by things,
The mustangs walk out with dawn, stand high, then
Sweep away, wild with sheer life, and free, free, free—Free
of all confines of time and flesh.
November 2003
Smart as a Shrub
GEORGE BUSH THE Younger (“Shrub” we call him) is running for governor of Texas and shapes up as a promising source of electoral entertainment. Shrub was recently in the Rio Grande Valley at a Republican function where two actual brown persons were in attendance. He headed toward them with his hand out, saying, “HitherehitherehowareyouI’mGeorgeBushgladtomeetyouhow’sitgoingthere.” Shrub is a fast talker.
He next inquired what these gentlemen did and one replied that he works for Mexican-American economic development.
“That’sgreatthat’sgreat,” said Shrub, and then leaned over to confess in greatest confidence, “If you’re for making the pie bigger—I’m for that. If you’re for making the pie smaller—I’m not for that.” And they say this boy is not ready to be governor.
Our public servants have been busy contributing to the general joy lately: Mayor Lee Cooke of Austin had this to say about why the city has been negotiating in secret for a new city manager: “I wanted to have all my ducks in a row so if we did get into a posture we could pretty much slam-dunk this thing and put it to bed.”
Dallas justice added yet more lustre to its national renown by attempting to hang on to Randall Dale Adams, an innocent man sentenced to death for a murder he didn’t commit, long after it was clear to all but the meanest intelligence there was no way he could even be tried again.
And the Legislature is almost too embarrassing to contemplate. Turns out the Parks and Wildlife Department has obligingly been stocking the Speaker’s ranch with deer, elk, bass, and turkey, for which he has not paid. When this was pointed out to him, the Speak promptly offered to round-up the beasties and send them back.
One solon has introduced a bill to lop off the fingers of repeat drug offenders, joint by joint and then digit by digit for each offense. Another senator wants to make it a felony for anyone knowingly to spread AIDS.
The Texas Lege has long had a tendency to notice grievous social problems and then pass laws against them. But the city of San Diego seems to have carried this trend to an apogee even the Texas Legislature hasn’t yet contemplated: In San Diego, they ticket the homeless just as if they were illegally parked cars. The practice raises questions, of course. If a homeless person won’t move along, can the cops put a boot on him? Can a homeless person say, “I’d rather not take the ticket here, just send it to me?”
Thank heavens we can turn to Washington for comic relief. Shrub’s daddy’s dog had puppies and that’s it for the good news: drugs, S&Ls, the environment, Third World debt—all of these get worse by the day while Bush the Elder continues to impress us with the news that he rises at seven and stays awake through cabinet meetings.
Newt Gingrich, now there’s a gladsome tiding. Great hair, no integrity. He’s the real Bob Forehead. The reason Republicans elected this repellent little demagogue to the whipship is that they thought it would annoy Democrats. That’s the Donald Segretti school of politics. With any luck, Robert K. Dornan of California will be next.
If the Republicans keep putting these right-wing fruitloops out front as spokesmen for their party, Democrats won’t have to do dog.
Meantime, I’m pushing a new right-wing Dallas billionaire. This specimen’s name is Harold Simmons, and he’s a corporate raider by trade. He supports conservative Republican senators because
“I feel I get more bang for my buck dealing with senators than I could anybody else. In the last five years I’ve headed up numerous fund-raising events here in Dallas for out-of-state Republican senatorial candidates. As a result, I can now call on a first-name basis about thirty Republican senators.”
Isn’t that nice? And to what ends does ol’ Harold put his influence?
“I will lobby for things I believe in, primarily to keep Government off our backs, to keep them from passing laws to stop hostile takeovers and junk bonds and things like that.”
I like the boy’s candor. I like the equation of “keeping the Government off our backs” (where is Harold on drug testing?) with the use of junk bonds for hostile take-overs.
There should be an ad campaign on television. Some announcer with a four-balls voice will say, “Freedom to use junk bonds—one of our fundamental constitutional rights.”