Another Southern Travelogue

 TexAss

The capitol of the new Confederacy, Texas, is a joke. Let me explain. It's not just the idiotically isolated Texas power grid, or the draconian anti-abortion laws, or the border police state, or their ethically crippled governor. It's in the water. It's on the roads. It's in the cars. It's in the money.

Katy 'freeway'

TexAss is full of huge, sprawling suburbs. The Dallas/Fort Worth metro area stretches for hundreds of square miles, as does the Houston metro area. There is no mass transit outside the city cores. You get an award if you see a bicyclist, a bus, a scooter or a train. Everything is by car. Which is no accident, as this is also the capitol of the U.S. petrostate. Nouveau-riche suburbs surround the cities, insulated by miles of road. The houses are packed with 2 story foyers, marble islands, huge TVs and excess size like some sad attempt to mimic “Cribs.” Massive 5, 6, 8, 12 lane suburban stroads criss-cross the prairie, lined with chain stores and embedded, walled housing developments branching off into cul-de-sacs. It is similar to older suburban areas like LA, but writ larger and built yesterday. Any remaining 'historic' city cores are tiny enclaves existing behind shabby one story stroad-scapes or shiny, environmentally-stupid skyscrapers.

Then there is the heat. My car's thermometer registered 112 degrees F in downtown Dallas, on a heat island of concrete, in a slow-moving traffic nightmare. In Fort Worth it was 114F in the world's worst-designed construction project.  It hit 103F while walking the streets of Austin looking for beer and music.  The temperature gets below 100, you think it's 'cooling off.' In the summer going outside is reserved for early mornings, late evenings or a cooling rain. Without air conditioning – and the electricity needed by AC – this place would be intolerable and wouldn't last a minute. (*According to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the amount of electricity consumed by air conditioners will triple by 2050, requiring new energy sources equivalent to the combined current electricity capacity of the United States, European Union, and Japan. - CP)

Most of TexAss is in a drought and heat advisory right now, especially in the west. So far, no rolling blackouts, as even the crypto currency bros have agreed to slow or halt their 'mining' for a time. (Of course the libertarian Crypto capitalists like TexAss.) But people – or simulacrums like Elon Musk – are still moving here. They are monuments to the inability to understand science. It's really all about the money. Those missing income taxes and dearth of public assets and benefits. The lack of laws, regulations, guidelines or much of anything. Those formerly cheap houses. That sweet, sweet, cheap labor.  That abused Latino labor.

Even ground water in the Texas 'hill country' is coming up short, as builders build and build, tripling the population.  

Back to those 'freeways' again. Evidently the freeway between Dallas and Houston, I-45, is a joke. I attest. I drove through 2 accidents, 1 car fire, weaving racing cars, lots of construction and 108F temperatures. I suspect the car fire was spontaneous combustion – or the lack of engine oil, adequate coolant, high speed, the 108F or someone dropped their burning drugs from the tinfoil. One accident was caused by a racer that had just passed me by. The traffic skirted the fool and moved on. The freeways are littered with shredded and peeled off tires, as the heat, shabby retreading firms and bad surfaces are doing their thing.  Since it is well known that I-45 or 'Woodlands' is a strip for accidents, why do they keep on happening? Well, it might have something to do with the drivers... this is TexAss after all. Slow learners evidently.  Quality has its tangible effects.  

Along I-45 on the road to the city of Houston is a massive alabaster statue of Sam Houston, the founder of TexAss as an independent slave state, so it figures. Mexico spoke Spanish and incidentally did not have legal slavery. One of the Houston suburbs here, Sugarland, is a former slave sugar plantation, then a prison and the biggest convict leasing center in TexAss in Jim Crow. They still think they remember the Alamo. No one remembers the Comanche.  That is the dying history.

States like TexAss give you the feeling that some kind of social endpoint has been reached, and we just don't know it. A whole society built on oil or the car is becoming a luxurious dinosaur. The sprawling middle-class, white collar suburbs are well-groomed with trees and lawns, while the poverty and dusty destitution of the inner city, Rio Grande valley, rural towns and west Texas is well known. The middle-class residents will hire tiny Mayan gardeners to do the physical work of mowing their post-stamp size lawns. Pray don't get your hands dirty.

I saw nothing of interest in the nature except a grove of old pines and oaks. Long time residents have told me that TexAss is 'ugly' for the most part, though there are parks like Gila Bend, Guadalupe Mountains and Padre Island that are not. What I have seen confirmed the former – shrubby trees, flatness and no water bodies. Not even much agriculture. I live in a city full of lakes, a famous creek and the mighty Mississippi. They have turned the rivers here into concrete canals, ditches or 'bayous' for the most part, like the L.A. 'river.' No river at all.

Could I even find NPR on my car radio in any of Texas so far? No, though finally it popped up around Dallas while leaving. Plenty of Jesus though. Bombastic male voices making Biblical points at the level of a 3^rd grader. Culturally, this place resides in the past – maybe the Reagan 1980s – 40 years ago. Even the 'lactation' experts in the hospitals first talk about baby formula to exhausted mothers, as do the pediatric nurses. Forget about breast milk.  While the ideas are archaic, the built environment is 'modern.'   It's a sort of parallel to the film “Dune” in its combination of a medieval social structure and high-tech space ships. It's the geography of libertarian end times.

In the Houston suburb I am in, Katy, the local Trumpers stormed the school board demanding 'critical race theory' books be removed from the library. One of these books was written by a middle-class 'black' kid growing up in a mostly 'white' neighborhood, but not really critical of much of anything. So its not just forbidding talk of real history - slavery, the Civil War's real cause, Jim Crow, institutional racism, the incarceration state or non-European American poverty - as the racist GOP understanding of “CRT” goes - it is anything, no matter how milquetoast, written by a dark skinned writer. To its credit, the majority of people in the suburb organized against these clowns, at least according to the local paper.

Will “Beto” or Biden save the day? No. In this political environment, the controlling Democrats still backed Henry Cuellar, an anti-abortion Texas 'centrist,' against a Sandernista in a recent primary. Biden was going to appoint an anti-abortion judge in Kentucky, in a deal with Mitch O'Connell until he ran into a storm of shit.  Their abhorrence of offending Joe Machin is indicative.  Democrats are ultimately collaborators with this neo-Confederacy in every sense of the word. I say ultimately because right now they differ as factions, especially over the value of bourgeois democracy ... which they themselves have let slip.  A good section of the Republican Party and maybe 10% of the capitalist class wants to junk it directly.

Money is the unifying factor from what I see. The many ethnicities that immigrated to Houston, a multi-national city – African, Latin American, Asian, Euro-American – are there for the 'opportunities.' After all, imperialism, war and climate change, in their authoritarian or democratic guises, are decimating parts of the world, pushing people every which way. But here in TexAss 'wealth' becomes a more obvious, piquant truth. Under the controlling gun rights, anti-abortion and Jesus blather – Guns, God and Babies – it is really about the Dough Ray Me. And to hell with society or the future.  

Live by the Car, Die by the Car, I say.

P.S. - Speaking of money, the Dallas Cowboys, America's Ersatz Team, hasn't won anything since 1995, yet they are valued at $7B, more than any other NFL franchise. This is TexAss.  As the Guardian put it, "all hat, no cattle." 

P.P.S. - in Oklahoma, while getting gas, the temperature reached 113 with a hefty wind, like someone holding a blowtorch a few feet from your whole body.  The worst outdoor heat I've experienced in my life, equivalent to a hot, dry sauna in a wind tunnel.

PPPS:  Even Texans are getting tired of TX DOT plans to pave the state... https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/apr/29/texas-highway-expansions-project-displacements-protests

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms: “Southern Cultural Nationalism,” “A Minnesota Yankee in King Trump's Court,” “The Neo-Confederate States,” “Why the South Lost the Civil War,” “Drivin' Dixie Down,” “Texas Fertilizer Plant,” “A Confederacy of Dunces,” "Empire of the Summer Moon" or the word “Confederacy.”

The Cranky Yankee / July 16, 2022