Sometimes I love Texas. We have some cool stuff. We have Six Flags Over Texas. We have Willie Nelson. We have good BBQ. We have ZZ Top. We have great skateboarding and great skateboarding history. No joke – when the skateparks died in the last 1970s, Texas was a massive part of keeping the dream alive. From Jeff Newton and Zorlac in Dallas to all those rad dirtbag rippers in Houston, Texas was super important.
However, we don’t always make the best collective decisions. Case-in-point, please refer to the kickass gun slinging, executin’, fetus-protecting career of one Rick Perry. For a state that supposedly has a “weak governor”, Perry has proven amazingly adept at using his position (and the Republican majority in our House and Senate) to bludgeon the state to his heart’s content, in particular women, the poor, and the sick.
But this article isn’t about trash-talking our kickass governor. What was I talking about…? Oh yeah, about the good and bad thing…
So yeah, rest of the country, cut us some slack. We gave you Willie Nelson. We gave you the Reverend Horton Heat. We gave you a state so big it takes a day to drive across it. We gave you Waco, Ranch Apocalypse, David Koresh and the Branch Davidians. We gave you the Grassy Knoll and the Texas Schoolbook Depository Building. We gave you the Big Boys. We gave you Tom Landry. We gave you King of the Hill. We gave you Bill Hicks.
Seriously, Bill Hicks alone should totally get us off the hook for our bad leadership decisions. Don’t make me mention Roy Orbison or Tommy Tune, because I will.
Maybe the outsized arse-holery (the cliché is that things are bigger in Texas, right?) somehow fertilizes some creative unconsciousness that ends up giving the world people like Townes Van Zandt, Willie Nelson and Molly Ivans, and more that I don’t know but should.
Taking a different tack I wonder if the mixed bag of people you point once was embodied in the stars of Texas. In particular I’m thinking of LBJ, man, he was one tall mess of contradictions. But now there seems to be a leaning toward people of pure evil (e.g. Rick Perry). ..OK, that may have been an overstatement, maybe,
Dude…I was with you until Tommy Tune. No doubt a supreme talent, but not one to be mentioned with ZZ Top, The Reverend, and the Big Boys.
To quote the mighty Hicks…”I’ve tossed entire civilizations into an inverted gym sock”