You know what I mean. This is offered in the spirit of the country we share being a place you can travel for most of your life and not see it all. That raises the question is it worth seeing? I think so.
One housekeeping matter before I get on a roll. I am going to use the word “Yankee” as we tend to use it down here. It’s good-natured ribbing now, probably less so right after the War of Northern Aggression, and we are aware that it really refers to a subset of folks from the far Northeast.
Non-Texans think those of us who live here have some kind of psychological kink about the size of the place. Maybe so, but all it is not phallocentric folklore. It’s rather stuff that gets put on us by others.
You gotta start with the geographical fact that Texas is really not just one place. I prefer Central Texas and I understand why LBJ, who could live anywhere after being POTUS, came back to the Pedernales country, even if he never learned to say it right. I don’t know how he got the habit of saying Perd-NAL-ease. He used to be a country school teacher and he had to know better.
I was reading a report on the stock of an out of state company that was drilling in the Eagle Ford Shale, and it told me Giddings is in East Texas. The only way you could think that is if you drew a line on a map down the center of Texas. I’m pretty sure Giddings would fall on the east side of that line. On the ground where people live, that does not make Giddings East Texas.
East Texas is boggy creeks and piney woods. In American Indian terms, East Texas is Caddo country like West Texas is Comanche country and Central Texas is represented by the tiny tribes that eked out a living on the edge of the Great Plains, including the one that gave its name to a prominent city in the area, Waco.
I am reminded of when my late wife Donna was Executive Director of Common Cause of Texas. She was on the phone one day to her Yankee Board of Directors and they were ragging on her about money spent on phones and travel. To which she gave the classic response: “Do you understand that, when I am in El Paso, I am closer to Los Angeles than I am to Texarkana?”
She might have added that Texarkana is East Texas and El Paso is West Texas and literally in another time zone…and let’s not get started on cultural zone.
And that neither has a lot in common with Galveston in one direction or Wichita Falls in the other.
When I was teaching at Indiana University, another prof and I were scheduled to visit an Indiana prison on professional business. I picked her up that morning and she asked if I had Mapquested where we were going?
“No.”
“Then how do you know if we are heading out early enough?”
“It’s in Indiana. How far could it be?”
Living in Central Texas, I’m used to driving all day to get out of Texas, no matter which way I’m going: Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, or Mexico Mexico. It leads to a different way of looking at distance, such that driving from Austin to San Antonio, Dallas, or Houston is not that big a deal..where my Yankee friends would be crossing state lines and they don’t customarily drive such distances. On the other hand, I envy them the trains between Connecticut and New York City and between New York City and Washington, D.C.
I’m just saying that Texas is different and the ways it is different are many. It’s easy for that to morph into “better” even if we don’t start out intending that.
Note that it’s not all about size. With due respect to Alaska, they have greater distances but they have two cultures: the indigenous people and the settlers. There are only so many things you can do with ice.
Texas, on the other hand… East Texas was a plantation economy based on slavery. The Coastal areas were based on trade and fishing. The Rio Grande Valley and the Winter Garden are farming on a grand scale. The rest of South Texas and all of West Texas are the land of vaqueros AKA cowboys. And oil got discovered on top of all that.
It’s complicated. The size complicates the politics in that it takes big bucks to play in all the major media markets (how many media markets in Alaska?). To play statewide, you are better off if you can speak Spanish or have surrogates who do. Understanding this puts the rabbit Beto O’Rourke pulled out of his sombrero in some perspective. It didn’t hurt that he speaks Spanish better than an opponent named Cruz, but his primary method of campaigning was to leave the media markets alone and personally visit all 254 counties. Before he was done, he had actually raised enough money for a little advertising, and the GOP had to open national spigots to save Cruz.
Texas will be “represented” by crazy people for a good long time because they have drawn districts to protect themselves. Austin is the largest city in the country without a Congressman to call its own because districts are drawn to scatter the liberal vote. The influx of Yankees from places where Republicans are sane does not help. They vote as they’ve been accustomed to voting by party and it takes a while to sense the crazy.
We would not be such a political drag on the rest of the country if each area either by geography or by culture were a separate state. We apologize for causing the national delay, but when our demographic ship comes in here in Texas, we will be anchoring the other side because white male Ayn Randers are not using their time in the majority to learn how to play well with others.
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Previously Published on Medium
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