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Sharp
Whether you agree or disagree with her
clearly stated politics, it’s hard not to admire the quality of Molly Ivins’ writing. The latest collection of her columns, Who Let the Dogs In? will
bring cheer to liberals, raise the blood pressure of her targets and their
admirers, and bring the occasional chuckle to all readers. Her sharp
intelligence combined with the skill of finding the perfect phrase and
fitting it all into the discipline of placement in periodicals separates Ivins’ writing from most of her peers.
Here’s
an excerpt, from the section, “Texas
Animals,” all of the essay titled, “Is Texas America?,” pp. 143-149:
Well,
sheesh, I don’t know whether to warn you that
because George Dubya Bush is president the whole
damn country is about to be turned into Texas (a singularly horrible fate: as
the country song has it: “Lubbock on Everythang”)
or if I should try to stand up for us and convince the rest of the country
we’re not all that insane.
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.
So,
how come trying to explode myths about Texas
always winds up reinforcing them? After all these years, I do not think it
is my fault. The fact is, it’s a damned peculiar
place. Given all the horseshit, there’s bound to be a pony in here somewhere.
Just by trying to be honest about it, one accidentally underlines its sheer
strangeness.
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.
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, a la George
Bush père; and the usual batty anti-govermnent 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, abstinence 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 guy 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 lit
that said, “Hi there! My name is Billie Can.” 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
The columns in Who Let
the Dogs In span twenty years, and reveal the consistency of Ivins’ point of view, and the sharpness of her wit. Take this book one or two columns at a time, allow her messages
to upset, please, or humor you, and wait a day or so to pick up a few more.
Steve Hopkins,
December 20, 2004
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