God Save Texas: A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State

by Lawrence Wright

At Buc-ee’s, an aspiring Texan can get fully outfitted not only with the clothing but also with the cultural and philosophical stances that embody the Texas stereotypes—cowboy individualism, a kind of wary friendliness, superpatriotism combined with defiance of all government authority, a hair-trigger sense of grievance, nostalgia for an ersatz past that is largely an artifact of Hollywood—a lowbrow society, in other words, that finds its fullest expression in a truck stop on the interstate.

The only state with more residents is California, but the number of Texans is projected to double by 2050, to 54.4 million, almost as many people as California and New York combined.

Neither Steve nor I could have lasted in Texas if it were the same place we grew up in, but we’re so powerfully imprinted by the culture it’s impossible to shake it off. Still, both of us have considered leaving and often wondered why we stayed. Many times I’ve considered moving to New York, where most of my colleagues live, or Washington, which is Lotus Land for political journalists. I’ve never felt at home in either spot. Washington is a one-industry town, and although writers have influence, they are basically in the grandstands watching the action. New York intellectuals sometimes put me off, with their liberal certitudes, their ready judgment of anyone who differs with them. The city is a pulsing hive of righteous indignation. In any case, I think I’m too much of a rustic to survive there. Once, when I was walking up Sixth Avenue in Manhattan, I saw a nicely dressed older man standing in the street beside the curb. He was turning around in small, distracted circles. All my prejudices against the city came up: here was a man in need, but people were walking by, evidently uncaring. In Texas, we wouldn’t let a confused old man place himself in danger. I approached him as any gallant Texan would and said, “Sir, are you okay?” He looked at me in puzzlement. “I’m waiting for a cab,” he said.

I think Texas has nurtured an immature political culture that has done terrible damage to the state and to the nation. Because Texas is a part of almost everything in modern America—the South, the West, the Plains, Hispanic and immigrant communities, the border, the divide between the rural areas and the cities—what happens here tends to disproportionately affect the rest of the nation. Illinois and New Jersey may be more corrupt, Kansas and Louisiana more dysfunctional, but they don’t bear the responsibility of being the future.

I’ve seen the same thing happen to people who come from other societies with a strong cultural imprint; they reverse the image. But being the opposite of what you were is not the same as being somebody new. As soon as the doors to liberation opened, I fled. I wanted to be someplace open, tolerant, cosmopolitan, and beautiful. I thought I would never come back. I turned into that pitiable figure, a self-hating Texan.

Despite the chest-thumping Tea Party bluster about secession these days, Texas tossed away its independence when it appeared it would have to surrender on slavery.

In the late afternoon on October 3, 1930, a gurgling was heard; then, two nights later, oil flew into the air in a great and continuous ejaculation. People danced in the black rain; children painted their faces with it.

Texas is the only state to have its own electrical grid, which was created largely to avoid federal regulations. The state invested $7 billion in high-voltage transmission lines to carry wind power through the shrub-covered plains eastward toward the cities. Because of the intense energy needs of the oil and gas business involving oil refineries and petrochemical plants, Texas uses far more electricity than any other state—67 percent more than second-place California. And yet electricity in Texas is cheaper than the national average, in some places actually free at night. That’s because Texas gets about 17 percent of its electricity from wind power, and wind generally blows more at night, when demand is lower.

Texas in the wake of the boom was revealed to be a civilization built on greed and impermanence, a civilization that was here to take, not to give. It was odd, because Texans were always talking about how much they loved the state, but I wondered where was the evidence of that love.

There’s another story that Texans tell about the capture of Santa Anna, which has long been regarded as mere legend. Recent scholarship, however, makes it more likely that Houston’s victory at San Jacinto came about in part because of the sly distraction on the part of a serving girl, Emily Morgan. “Why, historians ask, did Santa Anna choose an untenable encampment on the plains of San Jacinto, with the Texan Army in front of him and a bayou prohibiting his retreat?” Steve once wrote in Texas Monthly. “Why, on the afternoon of April 21, when he knew that Houston’s forces were only half a mile away, was his army taking a siesta? The answer resounds through the ages: Santa Anna was in a hurry to get into the sack with Emily Morgan.”

Whether the legend is true or not—and even Steve has doubts—she is memorialized by the Emily Morgan Hotel, next to the Alamo.

HOUSTON IS the only major city in America without zoning laws. You can build pretty much anything you want anywhere you want, except in designated historical districts. You’ll see some odd sights, such as a two-story family home adjacent to a roller coaster, or an erotic nightclub next to a shopping gallery, or a house made of beer cans. Solo skyscrapers suddenly pop up in residential neighborhoods. The absence of zoning is an artifact of the anticommunist hysteria of the 1950s and 1960s, when zoning was viewed as a communist plot. But there was another group, of blacks and liberals, who saw an advantage in siding with the ultraright. “Zoning would have been used to keep people out,” Bill White, a former mayor, observed.

“Houston is now the single most ethnically diverse metro area in the country.” One out of four Houstonians is foreign born, and no single racial or ethnic group constitutes a majority. “We speak one hundred forty-two different languages,” Sylvester Turner, Houston’s second black mayor, told me. “We’re seeking to be even more inclusive.”

Texas is near the bottom on education spending and academic achievement. These failures will have national consequences, since one out of ten children in the United States is a Texan—more than seven million of them. One in four Texas children lives in poverty.

Harvey had become indolent; it just sat on top of Houston and the surrounding region, pouring more rain than any storm in U.S. history—measuring 51.88 inches at Cedar Bayou, just east of Houston, a record. An estimated 34 trillion gallons of rain fell on East Texas and western Louisiana.

When disaster strikes Texas, one of the most effective first responders is a local chain of grocery stores, H-E-B, which dispatches a convoy of fifteen vehicles, including mobile kitchens that can produce 2,500 meals an hour, fuel tankers, portable generators, and Disaster Relief Units that contain pharmacies, ATMs, and business services equipment. By the time Harvey made landfall in South Texas, the convoy was already on the way to Victoria and Rockport. Over the next several days, various units headed to Houston. On Thursday, August 31, the Beaumont emergency management coordinator called H-E-B to say that the city was marooned. There was no water pressure. No supplies were getting in. And the state wasn’t able to help in a timely fashion. The H-E-B convoy charged through. That’s my idea of enlightened Texas capitalism.

To understand the anxiety that floats beneath the boasts of Level Two, we have only to visit the vaulted sepulcher of the Dallas Museum of Art. Solemnly designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes, it opened in 1984, boasting “the finest collection of post-war American art” in the Southwest. It also laid claim to the country’s “finest collection of Japanese-influenced American silver,” “the largest display of Chinese export porcelain,” “the largest Robert Rauschenberg painting,” the “largest painting by Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo,” and finally, “the world’s largest indoor sculpture by Claes Oldenburg.” Only in Texas is Large Art an aesthetic category.

The best museums in Texas are in Fort Worth. The Kimbell, gracefully designed by Louis Kahn—his last and maybe finest work, using parallel concrete vaults that ingeniously reflect natural light—is one of the most acclaimed buildings of modern times. It set a standard for the future, which was matched by Tadao Ando’s exquisite Modern Art Museum. The Amon Carter Museum of American Art (designed by Philip Johnson) houses a distinguished collection of Western art. These buildings showcase the artistry of Level Two and its power to elevate a culture; and yet the walls are practically bare of any great Texas artists.

In 2011, Shepherd opened a restaurant in a former lesbian nightclub that he calls Underbelly. He subtitled it “The Story of Houston Food.” The menu changes every day, depending on what is available from the local farms, Vietnamese bakeries, the catch that day from the Gulf, and the whole animals that are brought to his in-house butchery. His wine list is annotated by the local rapper Bun B. He folds all of these influences into a cuisine that reflects the city that Houston is now. “I wanted to go from simple regional cooking to hyper-regional,” Shepherd told me.

Hollywood adored the Texas myth. On the silver screen, “Texas” was not a real place, it was a symbol for the unbridled West, a playground for the frontier legend, made over and over again in the epic westerns of John Ford, William Wyler, and Howard Hawks. “Texas” was an arena of the soul, where a man comes face-to-face with death and destiny. It occupies the same emotional territory as the wilderness of Judea, only without God. When we’re in “Texas,” the actual film may be shot in Monument Valley, Utah (Stagecoach, The Searchers), or in the rolling Canadian wheatfields (Days of Heaven). There’s a forgettable thriller called The Swarm, in which a train crosses a range of mountains to enter the coastal city of Houston. Even in The Alamo, the archetypal Texas movie, San Antonio is set on the banks of the Rio Grande, which in fact is two hundred miles south.

The LBJ Ranch is now a national park, and one early summer day as I was driving west I decided to stop in. The bluebonnets and Indian blankets along the roadsides had faded, replaced by purple thistles and Mexican hats. Lyndon Johnson used to race down these narrow roads in his Lincoln convertible, with a scotch and soda in hand, terrifying visiting heads of state as he careened into the curves. The Lincoln was equipped with a special lever-action horn that bellowed like a rutting bull in order to capture the attention of the heifers in the pasture. Johnson would be trailed by a station wagon full of Secret Service agents, and periodically he would slow down and rattle the ice in his styrofoam cup outside his window until an agent dashed over and refilled his drink.

Lyndon Johnson was Kennedy’s opposite in so many ways. Where Kennedy was polished, Johnson was vulgar—fantastically and unself-consciously so—picking his nose, scratching his ass, eating off other people’s plates. He once held a staff meeting in his bedroom while he was getting an enema. Kennedy went to Harvard, he had a Pulitzer Prize, and his friends were movie stars. Johnson went to a teachers college in San Marcos. Kennedy was beautiful and Johnson was ungainly, with immense features—his nose, his ears, and his cock, which he named Jumbo. Kennedy seemed to be a liberal because of his background and rhetoric, but in fact he was a business-oriented conservative and a Cold Warrior. He expanded defense spending by 20 percent.

Even if stricter gun laws in Texas were clearly shown to make us safer, Texas politicians are so enchanted by guns that there’s no chance of that happening. There’s a locker-room lust for weaponry that belies the noble-sounding proclamations about self-protection and Second Amendment rights.

When the students returned for the fall semester, a protest group called Cocks Not Glocks handed out more than 4,500 dildos. Some of them were huge and I think possibly lethal. There was a dildo-juggling contest and T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan Take It and Come.

In Texas, it sometimes seems that every living thing can bite or poke or sting or shoot you. You always have to be a little bit on guard.

John and Hawk stopped to eat at the J and P Bar & Grill in Comstock, near the Mexican border. “A couple of cowboys walked in,” John recalled. He stiffened a bit when he saw them. “I could feel the cultural distance immediately.” The cowboys still had their spurs on. Their hair was matted in the shape of their hats, and they had the vivid tan lines of men who live outdoors. They were drinking Coors Light and shooting pool, but they obviously took note of John and Hawk, two gray-haired men in garish Spandex outfits like aging Spider-Men. One of the cowboys finally demanded to know what they were up to. “We’re riding across Texas on our bikes,” John said. “Why the hell would you do that?” John explained that they were raising money to buy bicycles and books for schoolchildren in Kenya. The cowboys returned to the pool table, but as John and Hawk were leaving, one of them stuffed two $20 bills in John’s pocket. “Give this to them kids in Africa,” he said.

When our current governor, Greg Abbott, was the Texas attorney general, he described his job this way: “I go into the office in the morning, I sue Barack Obama, and then I go home.” As governor, under Trump, with even less to do, he advocates a constitutional convention to consider various amendments that would transfer power from the federal government to the states, which his predecessor Rick Perry once called the “lavatories of democracy.” A recent law would create the Texas Bullion Depository—“the first state-level facility of its kind in the nation,” Governor Abbott tweeted when he signed the bill, adding, “California may be the golden state, but Texans deserve to keep their gold in-state!”

Sanford Levinson, a distinguished law professor at UT, compares Texas to Scotland—another formerly independent nation that has never entirely accepted the loss of its independence. The difference is that Scotland actually can secede, if its voters choose to; for Texas, that battle has long since been lost. The only way Texit might work is through a constitutional amendment that would allow American voters to say: Just go.

There were protests against the killings all over the country, but Dallas was an inappropriate target for such a demonstration; in the last few years, under the leadership of its black police chief, David O. Brown, the murder rate was lower than it had been since 1930, and police shootings had dropped sharply, along with complaints about improper use of force. Although the police were undermanned and underpaid, the Dallas department had developed a national reputation for fair and nonviolent action. Indeed, during the march, some officers tweeted photographs of themselves standing with the marchers.

After seven years of near seclusion, George W. got a standing ovation in his adopted hometown when he approached the podium. He looked much older, his hairline receding, his face deeply lined. He still had that way of squinting when he makes a point. “At times, it seems like the forces pulling us apart are stronger than the forces binding us together,” he said. “Too often, we judge other groups by their worst examples, while judging ourselves by our best intentions.” As he spoke, I wished for the millionth time that he hadn’t invaded Iraq.

Fairly considered, the Texas legislature is more functional than the U.S. Congress, and more genteel than the House of Commons, but a recurrent crop of crackpots and ideologues has fed the state’s reputation for aggressive know-nothingism and proudly retrograde politics.

Of all the governors on the rotunda wall, Ann Richards, who served from 1991 to 1995, is the most memorable, at least in my lifetime. She was incredibly vivid, with that stark white hair swept and sprayed into a blinding pompadour—Molly Ivins called it “hard hair”—and a switchblade sense of humor that was honed on the primitive male chauvinism she had grown up with. She became a national figure when she gave the keynote address at the 1988 Democratic convention. “Poor George,” she said of the Republican nominee, George H. W. Bush, “he can’t help it. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth.” She wasn’t nice, but she had a wonderful smile and batted those icy blue eyes when she stuck the knife in.

Greg Abbott was a great track star in high school, having never lost a race, but in 1984 a tree fell on him while he was jogging through the wealthy enclave of Houston’s River Oaks, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down. He had just graduated from law school and had no health insurance. Fortunately, he won a $9 million judgment from the homeowner whose tree had fallen, and from the tree company that had inspected the tree and failed to recommend its removal. Later, as a member of the Texas Supreme Court, and then as attorney general, Abbott supported measures that capped pain-and-suffering damages in medical malpractice cases at $250,000.

When I tell people outside the state that I live in Texas, they often look at me uncomprehendingly. It’s like saying that you cheat on your taxes. But if I say I live in Austin, the nearly universal response is, “Oh, Austin is cool.” This from people who may have never even been here. For them, living in Austin is forgivable in a way that living in Texas is not.

Austin is a city of dogs and bars and food trucks, a pretty city with many quirky passions. At sunset, it is rimmed in refracted light, an atmospheric phenomenon known as the Belt of Venus. William Sydney Porter, a bank teller in Austin before he went to prison for embezzlement and adopted the pen name O. Henry, called Austin “the city of the violet crown.” The hills that serve as a backdrop to the town are covered with junipers that bloom in January, emitting great puffs of red pollen, the source of what is locally called cedar fever. Someone described the citizens of Austin as “valedictorians on antihistamines.”

Soon after Mechler’s resignation, Rob Morrow—the former Travis County GOP chairman, with the motley fool hat—announced his candidacy for the statewide position. His priorities had not changed since he was drummed out of the county office: “I like big titties. I am a proponent of boobyliciousness. In the past several years I have shared on social media the pics of over 500 extremely hot, busty women.” He concluded by saying, “I am for having bikini contests at the Alamo every 4th of July. Case closed.”

Mexico defines Texas in a way that no other state experiences with any other nation. We are like a couple still living next door to each other after a particularly bitter divorce.

Octavio Paz, the great Mexican poet, once cataloged the differences he observed between his country and mine. “The North Americans are credulous and we are believers; they love fairy tales and detective stories and we love myths and legends,” Paz writes. “They are optimists and we are nihilists—except that our nihilism is not intellectual but instinctive, and therefore irrefutable. We are suspicious and they are trusting. We are sorrowful and sarcastic and they are happy and full of jokes. North Americans want to understand and we want to contemplate. They are activists and we are quietists; we enjoy our wounds and they enjoy their inventions.”

The bus flew across the road and landed with such force that everyone over thirty broke their backs. My sisters and I were the youngest passengers, and although we were shaken, we were able to stand and walk. We were in the middle of the Chihuahuan Desert. There were maybe forty injured passengers. No cars on the road, no way to call an ambulance, nothing to do but wait for the next bus. The adults were splayed out on the floor or on their seats, groaning in pain. Daddy was stoic, but I could see he was suffering. My mother had also broken her breastbone and was gasping for breath. The driver was the most gravely injured. I later heard he went to prison. When the next scheduled bus finally came, about four hours later, we rode another hundred miles or so to Juárez, every bump in the road eliciting agonized choruses from the wounded passengers. It was sobering to hear the adults weeping. I didn’t speak Spanish at the time, and I didn’t understand why the police wouldn’t let us take our parents to the hospital in El Paso. It turned out that accidents are often treated as crimes in Mexico, and we were all being held as witnesses.

The cartel wars in Juárez made it the most dangerous city in the world between 2008 and 2012, even worse than Baghdad. More than 10,000 people were slain during that period.

I used to think Marfa was a kind of practical joke that West Texans were playing on cultural elites. It’s remote even for Texas. The nearest airports are in El Paso and Carlsbad, New Mexico, each two hundred miles away. The landscape is okay if you like scrubby hills and plains of yellow grass. And yet aesthetes come from all over, lured by the minimalist vibe the place embodies.