I already knew what general ideas I wanted to express about Texas, and I had gathered some lovely quotes by John Steinbeck which I will weave into this text, but I was lacking a way to rightfully begin the essay. Of all places, I found the right quote to begin when I was rereading Pride and Prejudice [1]. In the scene a minor character, Mary, is eager to get some attention so she takes to playing music for the party, leading to this description:
Mary had neither genius nor taste; and though vanity had given her application, it had given her likewise a pedantic air and conceited manner, which would have injured a higher degree of excellence than she had reached. (emphasis mine).There is more than one way to make yourself appear ridiculous. One is to be of a low quality. Another is to put on a brazen bluff that something of middling quality is the very best. This is my critique of white Texans, and their cult of Texas.
Before I get too far in this essay, I want to be clear that I am not trying to totally tear the state down. Texas is a great state. I think I could be happy living there, but only by doing the same things I have to do in Oklahoma -- surround myself with books, find whatever pockets of woodland are available, and spend the time I can with the weirdos who will have me. If I lived in one of the large metropolitan areas, I would dread driving there even more than I do here; on the other hand, I could enjoy some artistic and cultural opportunities. No one should feel ashamed of living in, or being from, Texas. After all, life is what you make it nearly anywhere in the first world. But still. I wish these people could tone it down a bit.
Steinbeck in his book Travels with Charley writes:
Writers facing the problem of Texas find themselves floundering in generalities, and I am no exception. Texas is a state of mind. Texas is an obsession. Above all, Texas is a nation in every sense of the word (165).This is far as I can tell a unified front that white Texans deliver to the rest of the world. And it is worth saying that this front is not without its admirers. I once saw an online thread where more than one person said how great it was -- inspiring, even -- to hear people so uniformly "positive" about their state, and how wonderful is it to hear such pride! These admirers are plebs -- plebs, I say! -- who have been ground down by a wider culture of endless advertising and vulgar self-promotion to the point that they come to expect it. If someone says they are "the best" enough, these people start to think there must be something to it. This is how you get a con man as President.
The Texas bluster doesn't work with the sophisticated, and so it didn't work on Steinbeck, who had the good fortune to marry a beautiful Texan, but the misfortune to watch a Texan (LBJ) ,who was the husband of one of his wife's most intimate friends, picked as vice president and thus witness Texans at their most empowered. Steinbeck again:
I've studied the Texas problem from many angles and for many years. And of course one my truths is inevitably canceled by another. Outside their state I think Texans are a little frightened and very tender in their feelings, and these qualities cause boasting, arrogance, and noisy complacency -- the outlets of shy children. At home Texans are none of these things. The ones I know are gracious, generous, and quiet (166).I have not had the pleasure of visiting any acquaintance of mine who is a Texan in their native land. Instead, I have only been a tourist of that great state. All I have ever received is the "boasting, arrogance, and noisy complacency" that was obvious to Steinbeck in the early 60s.
And all of that is even worse when you are an Oklahoman. For people not from this part of the world, there is an intense rivalry in the game of football between the University of Oklahoma and the University of Texas. And while since I've turned two both teams have won the same number of National Championships -- one a piece -- OU (as we call it, creating an acronym that reverses the letters in the name . . . for some reason) has had the upper hand in the games played. This is called the Red River Rivalry and is played every year in Dallas, Texas at the Texas State Fair. To fill out the local color of this bizarre ritual, there was a man from Oklahoma who went by the name E.Z. Million who repeatedly ran for political office on the one issue of trying to get the game returned to Norman every other year so that the tax revenue would not be lost to Texas. As far as I, or anyone I know of, can tell, none of the offices he ran for had the authority to say where the game would be held. However, his passion was evident, his core argument sound, and as he is no longer with us, I have no wish to speak ill of the dead. His obituary is an interesting read.
It's hard to know how much the football thing influences the experiences I've had, but an outside appraisal of the two states would lead you to see that a boasting Texan is just punching down. The population of Texas is around 29 million people, and its annual state product is around $1.9 trillion. Oklahoma has about 4 million people and state product of about $200 billion. For my part, I have no problem pointing these truths because I define my life to a greater extent by more granular groupings: my community, my neighborhood, my block, my social circle, the person I am trying to make friends with at the moment. It is the Texan who insists on grouping identity at the level of a landmass that takes hours to traverse even by car.
My main theory is that the losses in the king of college sports as well as perhaps bad experiences with belligerent Oklahoman leads Texans to think they are protecting themselves by going on the offensive against "my type" (sure would help if they investigated more deeply what my type was before launching a tirade). People from other states probably get a more charming, less insulting version of Texas pride. To again draw a parallel to Pride and Prejudice, at one point Elizabeth says of Mr. Darcy, who had mad an ass of himself on his first impression with her:
I could easily forgive his pride, if he had not mortified mine.But what is this Texas that it's boosters (and boasters) are promoting? (Really, I just want an excuse to share another Steinbeck quote I had copied. They are fantastic):
What I am trying to say is that there is no physical or geographical unity in Texas. Its unity lies in the mind, And this is not only in Texans. The word Texas becomes a symbol to everyone in the world. There's no question that this Texas-of-the-mind fable is often synthetic, sometimes untruthful, and frequently romantic, but that in no way diminishes its strength as a symbol (169).So how did this symbol come to be? In true essay fashion, as established above, I thought about this problem for a few days, and came up with my best attempt at an answer. I then sat on that thought for some time, and eventually (months later) came across a quote in a book that lends some credibility to my thinking.
To some extent Texans are correct in asserting that their pride comes from being "the Lone Star State," like a whole other country. Let's move past the thornier issues of the Texas Revolution having roots in too much illegal immigration from whites into what was at the time Mexican territory (irony!) and a desire to preserve the institution of slavery. The fact is that Texas fought and won a war of Independence. To some extent that makes it a different from the other states. But that didn't seem to be enough to explain the out-of-proportion intensity, which in no way resembles how the truly self-assured talk.
And then it came to me. Not too long after independence, Texas became one of the united states only to join a rebellion against the Union sixteen years later and be crushed along with the rest of the South in the Civil War. I think this more than anything explains the maniac behavior outsiders observe and the gullible admire.
As I said, I later on came across some history that somewhat supports this idea. In the book Look Away! William C. Davis shows how unenjoyable the end of the Civil War was for Texas:
As late as April 8, 1865, just hours before the final gasps of surrender commenced, Governor Pendleton Murrah in Texas still struggled to put clothes on his people's backs, but found not a single machine in his frontier counties. He had dreamed of making Texans self-sufficient, but instead now they were reduced to selling the few cattle that escaped the impressment officers, in order to buy fabric brought though the blockade, or misappropriated from the military and sold on the black market, and at grotesquely extortionate prices (286).Texas: born in insurrection, seasoned early by defeat and humiliation. That would absolutely make for an "us against the world" mentality.
As I draw near the end of this essay, I want to lean on Steinbeck's words one more time:
I have said that Texas is a state of mind, but I think it is more than that. It is a mystique closely approximating a religion. And this is true to the extent that people either passionately love Texas or passionately hate it and, as in other religions, few people dare to inspect it for fear of losing their bearings in mystery and paradox (166, emphasis mine).I think an essayist should be willing to tread where others dare not. I have explored some of the depths of the Texan psyche, or at least how the Texas diaspora takes to the road. I want to be clear that I neither hate nor love the Texas religion. I have no passionate feelings for the state whatsoever, and have not since I was in my early teens [2]. Instead, I just wanted to unravel the puzzle of what some otherwise decent individuals flip a switch and become so braggadocios, if not nasty, with so little cause (And I assure you, I never try to provoke the Texas response. . . well, in person). What makes someone lose all taste, proportionality, fair-play, and reason? I think it's an interesting case study in identity formation. It's also more enjoyable and safe to investigate because the stakes are low. Frankly, I find the absurdity of it all amusing.
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[1] I reread this greatest of all novels in English as part of a reading list I made in response the corona crisis. I thought at the time that were many books I wanted to read one more time if I was going to die. Apparently, since I have reread so few of them after making the list, it turns out there weren't as many as I thought, but Pride and Prejudice was one of them.
[2] There was a time I was really into the OU/Texas rivalry. Then I joined debate, and had tournaments most years on the date of the game. Later on, the knowledge that has come to light on the effects of repeated collisions on the brain has really soured my enjoyment of Concussion Ball. As I have moved outside of the ritual, as well as grown older, it also seems odd to me to emotionally live and die based on the decision-making skills of young men aged 18 to 23. When the crowd is booing, I just think to myself, "well, of course they did something stupid. What did you expect?"
