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

by Lawrence Wright

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.

After being voted out of office, Crockett advised his Tennessee constituents, “You may all go to hell and I will go to Texas”—an example followed by many since.

Money so easily acquired comes to seem well deserved, because those who have it must be either uniquely perspicacious or divinely favored.

I had hoped that my generation would be the last to deal with racial discrimination, but hatred is a potent addiction.

The last thing Lyndon liked to do at night was to stand on his porch, look at the stars, and pee.

But she was game and even bemused by her condition. “Just now, during cocktails in the music room, I was trying to carry on a conversation with this gentleman,” she told me. “He was so unresponsive, although I was being my most charming self. Finally, I realized I was speaking to a bust of Shakespeare.”

I said that I noticed a new bathroom in the Austin airport. The sign said, All Genders. Greg observed that would spell the end of urinals. We were all silent for a bit. That would be a loss. Steve later reported a sign on a restroom door at an Austin restaurant that said: WHATEVER JUST WASH YOUR HANDS

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.

The very places that made Austin so hip are being demolished to make room for the hotels and office spaces needed to accommodate the flood of tourists and newcomers who have come to enjoy what no longer exists. Forbes magazine just determined that Austin is the best place to live in America, which will only take it further from the manageable town it was to the megacity it is destined to become.

Despite the tumult and the expectations of a record turnout, only 42.62 percent of the registered voters actually went to the polls in Texas—again, one of the lowest in the nation. Young people, in the 18–24 range, vote at less than half the rate of those who are between 65 and 75. Only about 40 percent of those with a family income under $25,000 per year tend to vote, compared with about 75 percent of those whose income is above $75,000. Those with less than a high school education turn out to vote at a rate of 32 percent, a scale that rises to 82 percent for those with advanced degrees.

There are already nearly seven hundred miles of fence along the two-thousand-mile U.S.–Mexico border, as a result of the 2006 Secure Fence Act, passed during the George W. Bush administration.

There was a barrier then, of sorts—a cable running through upright railroad ties—but people just stepped over it. Folks on both sides thought of themselves as citizens of the border, as if it were a region, not a boundary. The border was what they had in common; it united them and made them distinct from their countrymen farther away.

The production manager called the band together and told them, “Floyd’s real name is Jim, and from now on, that’s what he wants you to call him. Ain’t that right, Floyd?”

I was holding Roberta’s hand when the doctor asked, “Larry, would you like to see Roberta’s liver?” I certainly would.

While I was there, a group of tourists came over to take a look, and one of them stuck a bottle of beer through the cage. The goat snatched it out of his hand and downed it in a single expert gulp. This happens dozens of times a day. Roberta refused to get out of the car.

There must be a corresponding loss of wonder without the stars to remind us where we stand in creation.