Don't Hate Us Because We're Texans

I'm sorry, but I just don't think I can take any more. First George W., now Rick Perry. George W. was bad enough with the damn boots and the hat and the aww-now-good-ol'-boys manner, but at least we were comforted by the fact that, really, he wasn't From Here. He wasn't born in Texas. He wasn't really raised in Texas. His people aren't from Texas.

But Perry? He's a thousand times worse, because he is, as Wikipedia points out, a fifth-generation Texan. Slap me, please. Now, I don't know about the rest of y'all and the states you call home, but here in Texas, being a 5th-generation child of the state is a big deal. People brag. I've heard them.

So let me be clear right up front: I wasn't born in Texas. Nope. I was born in Magnolia, Arkansas. But I could claim Texas if I wanted: both my parents were born in Texas. They were raised in Texas, met and married in Texas, and--12 years later--I was conceived in Texas. My mother spent her pregnancy in Texas and then, at the last minute, my father was transferred to Arkansas, where I was born. They brought me to Texas as soon as my mother was allowed to travel, when I was 6 weeks old. She joked that she wanted to make sure I grew up wearing shoes. I don't do genealogy, so I have no idea how far back my ancestors have been from Texas. Three of my four grandparents were. That's all I know. It could well go back much, much further.

My husband, on the other hand, has a younger brother who *does* do research, and The EGE and his brothers can trace it back five generations on their father's side and six on their mother's. The EGE was born and raised here and is much a Texan as anybody I know.

That's why when I read today's Midland Reporter Telegram and William Murchison's column titled "Perry upsets national media with Texas delivery," I started ranting. I pretty much haven't stopped since. In this column, Murchison (born in Corsicana, educated at the University of Texas and Stanford, former editor of the Dallas Morning News and nowhere, that I've ever seen, referred to as anything approaching liberal) seems to take the New York Times to task for the comments its readers posted on its website, comments about Perry that, he says, include:
"Texas yahoo"
"alpha male Texas quarterback style"
"more whackos [sic] from Texas" (That's my [sic], as Murchison is apparently OK with the spelling.)
"the Texas twang and the Texas swagger"
"tiresome and stupid in a big Texas way"

and, I'm sure, plenty more. I couldn't find them, although I did find an amusing column about him.  Now, this is supposed to make those of us who live in Texas and love the state fightin' mad. We're supposed to rise up en masse (although we probably wouldn't use that particular term) in a show of support for One Of Our Own, Our Proud Texas Son. I think we're supposed to scoff at anything the NYT has to say about Perry from here on out, as if it were responsible for its readers' comments.

Bunk. Here's the deal: Rick Perry, just because he was born here and has been governor here forEVER and talks and walks and, apparently, thinks the way the rest of the nation (and way, way too many Texans themselves) think a man from Texas should talk and walk and think, that doesn't mean a thing. Not a thing. Because if you want to pick someone and claim they're the quintessential Texas man, you'd be better off picking my husband, who, if he were picked up and plunked down in some tiny hamlet in Eastern Europe, and someone came up and asked him (via interpreter, we assume) where he was from, would not say, "The US" or "America," or "Earth," but would, instead, say without thinking, "Texas." I will argue that he represents the state as much as Rick Perry or Clayton Williams or any of the men (or women, although you don't hear much about those since Molly Ivins and Ann Richards left us) you hear about in the national forum.

No, I'm not going to argue that Texas doesn't have some serious problems. It always has. It was among the last states in the nation to get rid of its anti-miscegenation laws, and it did that only when forced to by the US Supreme Court as a result of Loving v. Virginia, on June 12th, 1967 (ten years and five days before The EGE and I got married. I don't know about y'all, but to me, that's a frighteningly short length of time). It's got lots and lots of pregnant unwed teenagers and an educational system unwilling to teach sex education. It has a textbook committee with religious ideas, ones they're more than willing to foist on the rest of the textbook-using national population, that could be called, at best, shockingly conservative. Some would say "whacko," but we'll take a pass. Lots of people without insurance. A lack of tolerance for diversity in all its forms. And, right now, a horrible, terrible, devastating drought.

But there's more to the state. Of course there is. You know no state is monolithic. So while Texas is plagued with a governor who swaggers and prays for rain and shoots coyotes on his morning jog, it also is home to kind, thoughtful, creative people who love the state because, long before it became what it is today, it was a state with its fair share of eccentrics and rebels, visionaries and thinkers. It's a big, big state, and it has been home to all kinds of people, many of them utterly fabulous.

So when Rick Perry does whatever he does, please don't look at him and see the rest of us.  Yes, he will have many supporters here, and you may begin to think that Texas is full of boastful swaggerers who don't believe in global warming or evolution and want to ban abortion and think, honestly, that all white men should carry sidearms. Don't buy into it. Realize that Texas is just like any other state, only bigger (unless you're Alaska); it has all kinds of people, and all kinds of people can trace their roots back even further than Perry can. He doesn't speak for us, and he doesn't represent our views of the world or the nation or the state. Or our views of life.

Many of us live here not because of the conservative, bible-thumping, right-wing tang in the air but in spite of it. We live here because we like to be able to drive past the edge of town and watch the sun sink below the horizon in a gorgeous, fiery blaze of orange and because we like to be able to see enough of that horizon to see the weather approaching long before it gets here. We like being warm and dry (although not, thank-you-very-much, quite *this* warm and dry), and what we really, really like--and sometimes feel is slipping away--is this: from the time I can remember, way back when we lived Elsewhere but came to Texas to visit my parents' families, almost all of whom still lived in the state, you knew you were in Texas by two things. One was the accent--and no matter where you were, when you heard someone with a Texas accent, you recognized them. When I was a kid growing up in the Rocky Mountains, there was nothing so thrilling as hearing that accent; to me, it was home, because it was how all my relatives sounded to me.

The other thing that told you you were in Texas was when you were driving along some little bitty two-lane highway. You had to keep your hands--at least one of them--at the 12 o'clock position on the steering wheel because whenever a car or truck would pass you going the opposite direction, you and the other driver would both raise your index finger in a little salute. It said, "I see you." When there were miles and miles between towns and not a lot of anything there, that was important, seeing and acknowledging each other. It still happens, although not as much, of course. People From Elsewhere don't do it, and lots of younger people, used to driving on the Interstates and not having much use for the little back highways, never learned the habit. But when you're feeling that something's been lost, that fools have led us astray and made the state the laughingstock of much of the rest of the nation and quite a bit of the civilized world, you can still go out and find some little road up around Tahoka or Lamesa and be reminded that there really is a reason we once had a reputation not as a joke, not as a state full of rich, flamboyant yahoos, not as a gaggle of right-wing nutbags, but as a wide-open state of really friendly people.

Well, except for the rednecks. But when I think of them, I rinse out my brain by thinking of my husband, the guy who can trace his ties to Texas back for more generations than Rick Perry.