My sister got married and moved to Texas. Almost 40 years ago. Don’t ask why; it’s complicated. The family would occasionally haul down to Texas to visit.
I can’t honestly say I relished those trips. Yes, it was educational to visit Dealey Plaza, where John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Seeing how compact the layout is, you go from “How could Oswald hit him twice?” to “How could he miss?”
But Texas is so .... my sister lives outside Dallas, which is not a proper city, like Chicago. The skyline, with its neon trimmed buildings, seems an inflatable backdrop, something the Army Corps of Engineers would set up overnight to create the decoy of a city.
Though one early visit stands out. We rented a Lincoln Continental — when in Rome — which I dubbed “The Fat Man’s Car,” thinking of that TV detective Cannon. He drove a Lincoln.
Back then, in the mid-1980s, Texans could drink and drive — they had drive-through liquor stores. At one point, my brother and I slipped away, picked up a 6-pack of Lone Star beer and tooled around, enjoying the full Texas cultural experience.
Steering with one hand and nursing a beer with the other was perfectly legal. Why? Because freedom. They would be gosh-darned if they were going to let some gubment bureaucrat tell them how to live. They not only drank and drove but celebrated the practice.
“Texans love to drive and drink,” Jan Reid wrote in Texas Monthly in 1983. “I’ve done it many times ... gained new vigor for the upcoming stretch of road from the rousing feel of a cold one wedged between your thighs ... the freedom to imbibe behind the wheel represents a level of personal liberty that is denied residents of more thoroughly urbanized parts of the country. We tenaciously defend our right to drink and drive.”
Tenacity slips, and personal liberty is on hard times in Texas. Not because they passed an open container law in 1987 (for drivers; passengers could imbibe until 1993). Having seen the ravages of alcohol up close, I applaud common sense so clear it even sank into rock hard heads of Texans, eventually.
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As General Philip Henry Sheridan said— 'If I owned Texas and Hell, I would rent out Texas and live in Hell'
ReplyDeleteI support secession from the union, them or us, either way, but we keep the fresh water sources.
ReplyDeleteFrightening!
ReplyDeleteTwo old phrases from the 70s and 80s pop into my head when Texas is mentioned. One is the charming bumper sticker that Texans sported during the “energy crisis” of the 70s: “Let the Yankee bastards freeze in the dark.” This Yankee bastard has neither forgiven nor forgotten...even after fifty years. And if I hadn’t had a serious case of the Wheezies (Covid, the Plague, etc.) while those same Texas bastards were freezing in the dark in early ’21, I’d have laughed my ass off. Payback’s a bitch, y’all.
ReplyDeleteThe other slogan is the tourist one “Texas: It’s A Whole Other Country.” It certainly is, isn’t it? Especially these days. If they won’t secede on their own, how about a cowboy boot in the butt? Let’s just kick them out. Then we can invade and pacify and civilize them. Worked for Vietnam, right? What’s a few tens of thousands of dead Yankee boys if we can buy cheap running shoes from Texas, made in non-union sweatshops owned by New Englanders?
I have my own Texas stories, Mr. S. Being pulled over by Texas Rangers in the summer of ’68 for driving while long-haired, and having to bail out a fellow passenger who didn’t have his draft card. Getting robbed by bikers in Corpus Christi that same summer, and hitching back home to Chicago, with seven bucks in my shoe and the clothes on my back. Took three days, including twelve hours of standing in the Oklahoma rain. Oklahoma is Texas without the food and the music. Or abortion rights. I have a severe case of Oklahomaphobia.
Saw Dealey Plaza, up close and personal, while thumbing my way home. An accommodating trucker took me through it, on a Sunday morning in August. Compact is the word…or maybe just “teensy.” Like…well…like shooting fish in a barrel (sorry). My wife has been to The Sixth Floor Museum, and has stared out of The Window. She said the view below looked about the same size as our back yard.
I, too, have a sister, Mr. S. A kid sister, four years younger, who moved to Minnesota fifty years ago, when her future husband got a teaching job. I used to drive up to Minneapolis in my VW Bug, along the Great River Road (Dylan’s Hwy. 61) that parallels the Mississippi. Our mother moved up there from Florida in 2003, after our father died. She made it to 92, and spent her last decade in a Jewish senior high-rise complex, with a boyfriend who was born on Leap Year of 1912, two months before the Titanic sailed. She described it as being the college campus she never got to experience (there was a Depression on, doncha know). And she was the redheaded new girl in school…who won the heart of the star quarterback.
My sister grew more chilly and distant as the years passed, and our mother openly expressed the fear that her two children would become estranged after she was gone. In typical Jewish-mother fashion, she told me: “I’ll go to my grave dead (how else, Ma?). And you’ll become strangers to one another." I told her not to worry about it. That won’t happen, I assured her. But I knew better.
Our mother died in 2012. My sister and I occasionally have long phone chats, and we exchange e-mails. But we have not been face-to-face since the day of the funeral. It’s not complicated at all…it simply is what it is. She just doesn’t like her big brother.
Lovely story about your mother.
DeleteThanks muchly. People repeatedly told me my mother was a saint. Perhaps she was. Serene on the outside, steadfast within. She had to be. Grew up dirt-poor in Lawndale, living in the back of a candy store. Lost her father at fifteen, and endured emotional and psychological abuse from my old man for decades. The book would have had to be entitled: "Sixty Years of Servitude." But her last years, in Minnesota, were good ones.
DeleteEncouraging citizens to spy on and inform law enforcement is a tactic of the Gestapo, Stasi, KGB and various other tyrannical governments. Only the ignorant or the stupid don't see this as another move toward autocracy by the Right.
ReplyDeleteThere are no words to adequately say how painful this is to women and how awful this is for this country. I just got a really offensive post about Biden from the Nextdoor site which I have waited 8 years to answer. I probably will have my house firebombed. It won't be the first time my house has been vandalized because of an election sign. They apparently have free speech but I don't. My point is they are everywhere, and we had better be properly afraid of what they are doing to this country, both overtly and sneakily.
ReplyDelete"Score another victory for the zombie army of imaginary babies, which has been marching across the country on a moral crusade, forcing conservative Christian religious practices upon women."
ReplyDeleteI may have posted this here before, since it offers the soundest perspective about the responsibility for unwanted pregnancies that I've ever read.
It's quite evident that the major factor inspiring the anti-abortion crusade of the past 50 years is the attempt to blame women for having sex on their own terms, not the well-being of unborn babies. This is clear for several reasons, an obvious one being that Republican legislators have such little interest in caring for the welfare of actual, living people once they've been born.
This is a long essay, unfortunately studded with ads. (It was originally a Twitter thread, which I'd post instead, but Elon has long since decided that neither I, nor the majority of EGD readers who I assume are not on Twitter, can read it via his site anymore.) The punch line, to me is: "Women enjoying sex does not equal unwanted pregnancy and abortion. Men enjoying sex and having irresponsible ejaculations is what causes unwanted pregnancies and abortion."
But there's a lot more the author has to say (to the extent that she expanded the essay into a book.) I'll just note that she's fairly graphic in her commentary, so you're forewarned. But I think many of the folks who bother to read EGD comments would find it compelling. For whatever that's worth!
(Alas, I realize that this has nothing specifically to do with Texas, the primary focus of today's column.)
https://designmom.com/twitter-thread-abortion
As soon as I saw it was from a Mormon I remembered reading. I don't remember it being that graphic but I am going to reread it know. I didn't know she had turned it into a book.
DeleteMy, how insightful.
DeleteSo is the author saying that women do not enjoy sex, or that they are not smart enough to understand that pregnancy is a common outcome of it? She certainly thinks that women are nothing more than passive, insentient objects that function as props in a world in which anything that happens is simply the consequence of an action or decision made by a man.
Jeez, talk about denial of agency.
I'm only responsible for what I write, not for what you imagine I wrote. None of what you suggest is in the actual post. If you're trying to say that religious fanatics want to re-establish that sex is purely for procreation, then you've made your point. Though it isn't a secret.
DeleteNeil, it appears that Sue B. at 8:27 was replying to the link I posted yesterday, not to your column.
DeleteI'll just respectfully suggest that you seem to have missed the point of the woman's essay, Sue.
The answer to your questions is no. She's definitely not saying those things.
She's addressing the fact that the primary rationale motivating the anti-abortion folks is not concern for "babies", but simple slut-shaming when she says: "What this means is a women can be the sluttliest slut in the entire world who loves having orgasms all day long and all night long and she will never find herself with an unwanted pregnancy unless a man shows up and ejaculates irresponsibly."
"Women enjoying sex does not equal unwanted pregnancy and abortion. Men enjoying sex and having irresponsible ejaculations is what causes unwanted pregnancies and abortion."
She definitely does not think that "anything that happens is simply the consequence of an action or decision made by a man." What she's saying, quite clearly and in capital letters, is that "UNWANTED PREGNANCIES ARE CAUSED BY MEN," as she has carefully explained, and that people should therefore "STOP TRYING TO CONTROL WOMEN’S BODIES AND SEXUALITY" as a purported method for preventing or dealing with unwanted pregnancies.
I didn’t imagine anything you wrote. I was responding to the author of the essay/diatribe who Jakash quotes in his item. She’s not saying that sex is purely for procreation, she’s saying that it is purely for men’s recreation, and suggests that women get no fulfillment out of it at all, which is news to me.
DeleteEven as I was reading ‘Animal Farm’ and ‘1984’, as a teen, I was beginning to wonder why it was automatically assumed that Orwell was writing about ‘them dirty Commies’. Yes, ‘Animal Farm’ was an allegory for the Russian Revolution and the decade that followed, but we were already spying on our own citizens ala ‘1984’. And I’m not talking about gossip or that woman who lived on every block who spent her days peeking behind her curtains watching the ‘suspicious’ comings and goings of her neighbors. Especially the kids.:D
ReplyDeleteHow soon before we see infomercials featuring smiling folks in 10 gallon hats surrounded by bikini babes bragging that ‘I make $10,000 or more a week, and all with just a coupla phone calls. Wanna know my secret? Just call the Texas Attorney General’s office and he’ll put YOU on the righteous path, too! Girl down the street had a baby bump but no baby? Neighbor’s son got traces of mascara on his eyelashes? Lesbian NOW member’s odometer puts on thousands of miles a month drivin’ young women to a ‘Walmart’ in New Mexico? There’s big bounties bein’ paid, and folks goin’ to prison! You know what kind of folks we’re talkin’ ‘bout. Call now for more information! Then start makin’ them calls!’
In other news: The stories of Lyndon Johnson speeding down backroads of Texas over 100 miles an hour with a 6pack next to him on the front seat were legendary during his presidency. Some of the roads were on his own property, some not. The east coast media didn’t quite get it that that’s just how things were done in Texas. Lots of open space, open road, and 12 cylinder engines.