American Dreams in the Heartland: A Love Letter to Texas
I will explain Texas for you, the way any place should be explained-- by debunking the stereotypes you already have about it.
You know how it goes: yes, the Parisians are rude, but that's a general big-city vibe that you can't hold against all of the French, really. You're not wrong, but you're not entirely right, either. Most of the French are polite and hospitable, though still proud and a little chilly.
You have to hold stereotypes loosely. My family lived in the Netherlands in the Eighties, and the soapy drama Dallas was the closest notion most Europeans had of Texas. My parents had to reiterate that most of us did not, in fact, ride horses into town from our oil fields/ranches. No, we drove everywhere in our cars (and trucks and sport-utility vehicles), from our detached houses on quarter-acres of suburban bliss (with two-car garage and swimming pool) to the restaurant three miles away. This is totally different, we assured them. Somehow, they didn't believe us.
Texas still has frontier life, that's not gone. I knew a family living an hour north of town (if you get to Cut and Shoot, you're too far West; the Big Thicket National Preserve, too far East), whose neighbors refer to their locale as "the prairie". There is, no shit, a stable at the high school where the ranch families' younguns clop in after morning chores, to park their steed next to the training animals for the farming elective. Sometimes the cowboys roll in late; punishments do not follow. Delinquency on a workhorse means a cow got out and had to be rounded up from the back 40 acres and/or the highway. Unlike the coastal elites, casual horsemanship shows lifestyle, not money. Ostentatious wealth is instead displayed by provisioning the family princess with her very first diesel dualie on her 16th birthday, and that with gooseneck hitch if they're proper loaded. If you don't know what any of that is, bless your heart, and keep pretending burgers come from the grocery store.
The family's kids got bullied on the playground. Not because they weren't plenty country-- the paterfamilias made a thorough, public show of castrating some pigs when his daughter first brought boys over in middle school. No, my friends got called names in elementary school because the other kids overhead their parents saying nasty things about that new family worshiping idols-- praying to images of Mary instead of to necessarily image-less God. That's right, some White kids almost gave other White kids bloody noses by the swing set, because somebody's 'rents were drunkenly grousing about those eye-dol-uh-tors and Cath-uh-licks moving to town.
But I'm not from the Kuntry, I'm from the Metro.
The most dramatic friend in my nerd-group tried to make something of his Catholic confirmation, but this was in central Houston, not the Prairie. He posted something to the boards (this was the year two thousand, only the nerds were on the internet, and we used private message boards as God intended) about how he wouldn't tolerate any jokes about his religion. The most incisive element of our cadre, and the shyest human I've ever known, responded that our group had never made an issue of anybody's religion, even in jest, so the special pleading was rather uncalled for. I believe we had, at that point, a Catholic, a Greek Orthodox, a Methodist, a Baptist, a something-vaguely Protestant (but not Bible Church, thankfully), an open atheist, and a couple general Chinese traditionalists whose exact relationship to Buddhism, Taoism, and ancestor worship cannot, and should not, be ascertained. My mother would joke about us, "two pasty White guys, two Asians, a Greek, one Black kid walk in... to play video games." We were a walking, talking, un-self-conscious racist joke waiting to never happen. Two of us had Hispanic last names-- the identified-as-Black kid because half his (Baptist) family came from the Caribbean, the identified-as-Asian kid because his (Catholic) family was Filipino. No commentary on any of these subjects ensued. Our identity politics instead revolved strongly around Smash Brothers champion selection and Star-Trek-versus-Star-Wars fandom, these being further subjects not to be taken lightly.
Nobody moves to Houston's miserable swampland for the joy of it. You're there because it's a better life than wherever you came from. The thankfulness is pervasive, and the universal project of working to make your life better places us all in the same soggy, muggy, mosquito-plagued boat (in a tragically literal sense, when the place floods out every few years). You get good service dressed up or down, as long as you act human. There was this lesbian mayor, who was quite popular not for the homosexuality thing, but because she worked hard on getting the traffic lights fixed. She saw our struggle, and knew it was real. It was a noble effort, but the traffic is still hell. You can barely see from one end of Interstate 10 to the other, the damn thing has to be twenty lanes across now. You will not be hated in Houston for your ethnicity or sexual mores; you will be hated for not speeding enough in the left-hand lane of the superhighway on the way home from work.
I guess Dallas* and San Antonio exist. I've been there, so I can vouch for them. But they're hours away. From Houston, it takes as long to get to New York or Los Angeles (on a plane) as it does to reach Dallas (in a car). Humans do not exist in distance, they exist in time; every major Texas city exists in its own time zone. El Paso is effectively on another continent. San Antonio is also a migrant city, but being more of a northern outpost of Mexico (without the endemic drug warfare), it's not a microcosm of the world the way Houston is. Dallas-FortWorth-Plano-et-al is also a mega-city, but nobody really knows what pumps its heartbeat. Somebody tells me about banking and consulting and old cattle-driving wealth and maybe engineering? I don't know, it's not like they make all the gasoline in the port like Houston does. But we do not feud, we from the cities. Distance, Old-West libertarianism, and mutual Texan self-superiority binds us together more strongly than the usual, petty enmities of familiarity drive us apart.
* Dallas is a "metro-plex" that implies a greater area, thus the "Dallas-Fort-Worth" moniker. But why include Fort Worth but not other important moieties, such as Arlington? and Irving? and Garland? and Plano? and Mesquite? and Midlothian? and yadda yadda yadda it's madness, but concatenating all of them would be a mouthful.
Oh and there's military sprinkled all around, if you look for it, like in Killeen (you can't spell Killeen without 'kill', say the natives). Not the flashy, spendy, high-class military stuff, though-- that's all on the Big Coasts, or up in the Mountains. But Texas has land, and centrality, so it's got big bases and stuff. Not that you care about the desperate hoi-polloi who put on the uniform to escape lives worse than a barracks-billet as the lowest enlisted man in the barrel, posted to grunt-work combined-arms infantry/mechanized-cavalry units that rot in the armpit of Texas. You read essays with ten-cent words, so your opinions about the military don't include enlisted men. But they're there, they're another thread in the tapestry.
Texas is what the Mexicans call el Norte, but the Americans call the South. I've met Europeans who placed it, geographically, near Colorado, who are surprised to know it has a massive, hurricane-pounded coast. Texas has hippies who drive their Priuses to the rally against fuel oil; Texas has pro-life Christians who don't know that the Church, for a millennium, didn't count a fetus as having a soul until the second trimester (cf. Aristotle's views on quickening and the soul, if you're curious). Texas has both kinds of music -- Country and Western. (but, seriously, all kinds of Countries and Westerns-- I knew a guy who played his native Levantine Jewish Klezmer music, grinning while he announced it as "country music, just not from this country"; and the old, beer-and-cocaine soaked Tex-Mexicanos refer to the Blues as “country music”, because it’s what they heard their Black neighbors playing, way back when).
I asked the Queen of Qatar, when she came to my university campus, why they chose us. I was in the Student Senate (representing the engineering college), and Qatar had just negotiated ("bought") a branch engineering campus from Texas A&M. They sought out a bunch of big names, and landed them-- Education City, Qatar now boasts campuses from Cornell, Carnegie Mellon, Georgetown, City College London. With the whole of American schools, and the whole world to choose from, I asked why Qatar came to College Station, Texas. "Because A&M has the best programs in these subjects, and we are only interested in the best" or something like that. The astounding part was the lack of propaganda-- A&M really does have the world leading programs in petroleum and chemical engineering (subject matters of some import to despotic oil regimes).
Texas is a big place, which we Texas will ritually intone because we have (1) cultish brainwashing, and (2) vast hurricane coast and vast tornado prairie and vast empty desert and vast everything else we’ve got. We have our own damn power grid. Because Houston to El Paso is halfway to California, and a third of the continent's width. Because it's Mexico in its South, the Old West in its North, a godforsaken desert in its West, an immigrant’s paradise in its East, the Old South in the hinterland, and a G-8-worthy nation in its totality (Texas just edges out Russia in GDP). Because it has hidden gems that glimmer so brightly as to be irresistible to monarchical Emirati despots with vast stacks of cash, looking only for the best. Because we have anti-Catholic bigots in a state whose demographics are exploding with Hispanic Catholics who are themselves rarely afraid to utilize cultural, ethnic, and racial epithets. Because people from all over the world come to Texas with a hope to live a better life, and then do.
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