You may think I'm delusional with that statement. It is an answer, or explanation to bhlogger's diary Texans send millions to Democrats, and the statement's made about Texas bashing.
Poking fun at Texas and Texas bashing isn't new, it has a long history, even enshrined on our movies
From the 1969 movie True Grit
LeBoeuf (Glen Campbell): There's times I've drunk water from a muddy hoof print and been glad of it.
Cogburn (John Wayne): If I EVER meet one o' you texas YAY-HOOS that AINT drunk water from a hoof print, I'll...I'll shake his hand or buy him a Dan'l Webster see-gar.
-- moviequotes
I tried in my comments to bhlogger to explain why this is. I did so kind of coarsely and inelegantly, so I will try to correct that and expound upon it here.
It's true Texas has given us many wonderful people. Here are but a few:
Carol Burnett
Cyd Charisse
Walter Cronkite
Buddy Holly
Molly Ivins
Lyndon Baines Johnson
Janis Joplin
Scott Joplin
Ann Miller
Willie Nelson
Chester William Nimitz
Roy Orbison
Dan Rather
Ann Richards (who interestingly enough is not on thelist I am using)
Gene Roddenberry
Sissy Spacek
Roger Staubach
Tommy Tune
Babe Didrikson Zaharias
My ex-husband, also a Texan, observed (and I think he got it from a comedian's routine, but I don't remember who that may have been) that Texas is the ONLY state in the union where you could be born in Texas, spend no more than 1 minute there, immediately whisked away to another state grow up there and that not matter, you are a Texan for life.
One Texas woman who seems to be often ignored, but one of my personal heroes, is Edna Gladney.
Thanks to one tenacious woman, that all began to change. For 33 years Edna Gladney (photo at right) served as Superintendent of The Texas Children's Home and Aid Society. The tradition of reform and driving mission to serve the best interest of children continued in Edna Gladney as demonstrated in the way she championed breakthrough legislation, leading two fights for major change in adoption practices. First, in 1936 when, thanks to her efforts, a bill passed that made Texas the first state in the southwest to legally remove the stigma of illegitimacy from birth records. . .
-- Gladney Center for Adoption
This information was still on birth certificates in 1962 in Colorado when I was born. Though it was not checked in my case, I have never been told, exactly whether my parents were legally divorced from each other at the time of my conception. I do know that they remarried each other when they found out I was coming "just in case." (We celebrate the date and year of the original marriage.)
But my personal situation is not why she's my hero, it is for this statement:
There are no illegitimate children. There are only illegitimate parents!
Whether or not she actually made the statement, I cannot tell. It has also been attributed to Leon R. Yankwich. But in the 1941 movie "Blossoms in the Dust" about her life, she (played by Geer Garson) is standing in the Texas legislature arguing for the removal of the detrimental phrase that kept children of uncertain parentage from being adopted.
The statement itself changes hundreds of years of the idea that children should be punished for the sins of their parents. It makes them visible, it makes them persons.
For all the good Texas has done, and the great people Texas has given us, Texas has a big ego (deserved or undeserved). Because like, you know, "everything's big in Texas" (the punch line of a joke I often told as a child. The joke was told to me first by my cousins living in Kansas).
from Strange Maps
The states in Texas' immediate arc, well let's go two states out, get the immediate impact of that ego. Texans have pride, and they wear it, literally. Growing up in Denver I'd often see Texans with belt buckles in the shape of Texas as big as their stomachs. (Made me wonder how these guys could bend over and pick up something from the ground without impaling themselves.)
Texans like to let those in other states, especially in that two state wide arc, know just how fortunate they are that Texas is there. "Why, without Texas these other states would just shrivel up and disappear."
One day at a restaurant a Texans loudly told his friends sitting at the next table that without magnanimous generosity of Texans visiting our fair state, our economy would collapse. I turned to my dinner companions and invited him and all Texans to leave our state and prove it.
Then there was (and may still be) Texas Week on the Colorado Ski Slopes. It was/is a time when Texans invaded en masse the Colorado high country to partake of our excellent skiing. If you were a Colorado resident you had to be a pretty die hard skier to visit the slopes that week.
All the yee-hawing, screaming, and carrying on. You could tell who were the Colorado residents because they'd be the ones shaking their heads in disbelief and some times disgust. I swear if they could have mounted Long Horn Cattle horns onto their ski tips, they would have.
I thought that was only something cartoons did to denote Texans but some actually do have Long Horn horn hood ornaments!
You can buy one right now on ebay for $24.99
In that two state arc you heard, constantly how great Texas is. I won't even go into the little state to state rivalry between the football teams, or the fact that Texas stole our original basketball team and hockey team, or which was a better show, Dallas or Dynasty. The fact that Texas won many of those battles and were loud about not only their win, but our loss, didn't help matters much.
Oh and my Texan ex-husband like LeBoeuf in True Grit, also claimed to have drunk water from a muddy hoof print and was glad for it.
In Texas, the skier was bluer, the air cleaner, the bucking broncos meaner,the beef tasted better, the cities were more fantastical, the women were prettier, the children cuter and better behaved, the men more manly, taller, tougher and handsome, yada yada yada.
You get the picture.
Imagine then, if you will, that the rest of the world perceives the United States as I just described perceiving Texas. Because it does.
For all the good we do in the world, which they will acknowledge, sometimes grudgingly, we also have an ego a million miles wide. And with like that ego the target we have painted for ourselves to be made fun of and bashed is just as large.
I think it was comedian Lewis Black who noticed that in other countries we tell them how great we are, compared to them, constantly. Even though our standard of living in lower than other industrialized nations, we do not have universal health care, we are slow to acknowledge, if we do at all, the contributions other countries and people have made to our success.
a larger map can be found here
We even steal TV shows from the BBC. While that may not be news now with The Office and Big Brother, many of us didn't know that Three's Company was from Britain originally, or that the 2000 movie Taffic was originally a 1989 British miniseries called "Traffik" about Heroin trade in the UK.
It's not that they mind, it's just that they'd like the credit of the original thought, idea, invention, contribution. Our drumbeat of "American Exceptionalism" even keeps our children from accepting excellence in other countries that we were not part of.
Sometimes their complaints about us are justified. Pakistanis have a justified complaint that we have not held up our end on trade agreements. But we kinda have not been listening, too loud is the chant "we're the greatest, we're the greatest."
Lynne Cheney made have made one of the most honest, illuminating statements in her life when on The Daily Show she voiced what Europe has long known, that they are our pawns and considered just another part of our fortification. It's okay if they deal with terrorist bombings just as long as we don't. They are still "them," not "us," alliances be damned. (That clip of The Daily Show is also one of the hardest to find, thank gawd for Crooks and Liars.)
Just like we poke fun of Texas and bash Texas, the USA and it's citizens are made fun of and bashed internationally.
In the 1973 movie Live and Let Die" (James Bond - Sheriff J.W Pepper
http://www.youtube.com/...
He reappeared in the 1974 James Bond movie, "The Man with the Golden Gun" this time in Asia full of "Ugly Americanism."
More recently the 2006 film A Good Year with Russel Crowe.
I liked the movie that was generally panned. Here a reviewer who did not like the movie said this:
As such, there is a single moment I considered mildly entertaining, which was the expulsion of the Americans from the restaurant after they verbally defiled the menu... yes, Americans are slobs without any appreciation for the sublime... that's been established. But this film is far from sublime, so there is no room for critique.
The "Ugly American" character is in many movies of international appeal.
Ugly American is an epithet used to refer to perceptions of loud, arrogant, demeaning, thoughtless and ethnocentric behavior of American citizens mainly abroad, but also at home. Although the term is usually associated with or applied to travellers and tourists, it also applies to US corporate businesses in the international arena.
- wikipedia
It's not just a plot device, or just/only/maybe/not a cheap attempt to get laughs from an international audience. These American tourists overseas do exist, my father on trips to Europe has given a few a dressing down.
We even take our lumps on the most popular car tv series in the world, BBC's Top Gear.
Even when they're filming here! (Supposedly, as their story line went, our government is so anal it said that the last time they were here they violated their passports, because they claimed to be filming a documentary and not an entertainment show. Our government found their show entertaining. So, supposedly, to come back here, they had to promise no entertainment.)
We are to the rest of the world what Texas is to the rest of the USA.
If you want to understand why America is the punch line for so many jokes in Europe and around the world all you need do is look at the fun we poke and bashing we do to Texas. Understand that dynamic, and you'll unlock one of the doors to understanding international relations.