After all the Texas-bashing I've experienced on this site (check my number, I've been here a while), with most of it being in the last few weeks thanks to our idiotic Governor's bid for attention (election coming up, you know) by suggesting Texas could secede from the union, I felt the need to post a few words from Molly Ivins on the state of Texas.
I figured that would be more productive than yelling at all of you making sweeping generalizations about Texas. I could tell you that none of you know a whit about Texas. I could tell you that you're all acting like Freepers. I could tell you that Texas progressives work so very fucking hard and then we come here and get shit flung in our faces by the very people who should be helping us, or at the very least, giving us some good moral support. I could throw my hands up in the air in frustration and tell you to kiss my liberal Texan ass.
More after the jump.
Instead, I will ask you all to please... please... remember that all the BS over seceding has been started by a Republican Governor who will soon be facing a very tough opponent to keep his current seat. I'm sure I also need not remind you that Republicans everywhere... EVERYWHERE... are going just a little batshit crazy right now.
I will ask you to please understand that sensible Texans (and we are here... we are here) do not want to secede and lots of us even voted for President Obama.
I will ask you to remember that stereo-types and sweeping generalizions are tools of the ignorant, and thus should be left at places like Free Republic.
Not here, guys. Not here. Texas progressives need you. We need you with us, not saying things like "Good riddance, rednecks". We love our state, and for all its Republicans, it is still a place full of millions of good people... many of whom fight for the same causes you do. We are working hard and have accomplished so much. We will continute to work hard, but we need you.
Please don't continue insulting us and kicking us while we're down. We need you with us.
And with that, I leave you with a few choice quotes from an article by Molly Ivins (God I miss that woman) that was published in an October 2003 issue of The Nation.
Truth is, I've spent much of my life trying, unsuccessfully, to explode the myths about Texas. One attempts to explain--with all good will, historical evidence, nasty statistics and just a bow of recognition to our racism--that Texas is not The Alamo starring John Wayne. We're not Giant, we ain't a John Ford western. The first real Texan I ever saw on TV was King of the Hill's Boomhauer, the guy who's always drinking beer and you can't understand a word he says.
And on Texas diversity:
Here's the deal on Texas. It's big. So big there's about five distinct and different places here, separated from one another geologically, topographically, botanically, ethnically, culturally and climatically. Hence our boring habit of specifying East, West and South Texas, plus the Panhandle and the Hill Country. The majority of the state's blacks live in East Texas, making it more like the Old South than the Old South is anymore. West Texas is, more or less, like Giant, except, like every place else in the state, it has an incurable tendency toward the tacky and all the cowboys are brown. South Texas is 80 percent Hispanic and a weird amalgam of cultures. You get names now like Shannon Rodriguez, Hannah Gonzalez and Tiffany Ruiz. Even the Anglos speak English with a Spanish accent. The Panhandle, which sticks up to damn near Kansas, is High Plains, like one of those square states, Nebraska or the Dakotas, except more brown folks. The Hill Country, smack dab in the middle, resembles nothing else in the state.
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.
On Texas politics:
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--US 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.")
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.
On progress:
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.
On Texas progressives:
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.
So as you can see... some of it's good, some of it's bad. Like most states, I'd venture to guess. We just have a little more work to do here.
Texas progressives will not give up. Please do not give up on us.
UPDATE: Thanks everyone. I was pretty down after reading Ye Olde Kos earlier today but after a few commisserations, some old stories and chat about Molly, and some good talk about BBQ, steak and beer and I feel as if I am now properly prepared to exit work this Friday evening with the proper attitude towards my fellow Kossacks.
And for that, I thank you all. :-)
Now I gotta go get me some BBQ and beer. You guys are killing me with those pictures.