The myth of Texas is alive and unwell.
Honor the Texas Flag, I Pledge Allegiance to Thee.
My grandfather died when he was ready or maybe sometime after that. And before that he was born in New York City during the Great Depression and reared in Quebec where he skied to a four-room schoolhouse and worked as a fry cook at his family’s kosher resort. His French wasn’t good and it wasn’t good to be Jewish, but he did finish school and finish college and join the Army during World War II right as the United States was getting involved. Though he never killed a Nazi, he did serve as a Staff Sergeant in New Guinea and earn two bronze stars — all before he turned 30.
My grandfather never liked to talk about the war, but he was always happy to describe earning his doctorate and my grandmother’s love in Los Angeles as he and the nation sighed relief and celebrated winning the war. They were at a dinner party and, as the story goes, they recited the same line from the same poem at the same time across the table from one another. “She has a lovely face,” they said. “God in his mercy lend her grace.” And after those fateful words he took her on a date and they were married some time after that. That was in July of 1951. By August, they were driving across the county to the uncertain promise of a new life in a state still better known for barbeque and broncobusters than the university where they would spend all of their working years. Decades later, my grandmother, sitting on her blue leather couch at the corner of Pecos and Greenlee, would smile and say, “we had only planned to be in Texas for a year.” But a year turned into two and, somehow, two turned into sixty more.
My father was born and raised a Texan, so it must have felt natural for me to follow suit. We both grew up watching Texas football on Thanksgiving and wearing shorts on Christmas Eve. Our boyhood summers were spent working in our father’s backyards, sunbathing at the same neighborhood swimming pool and flipping canoes on Town Lake. We both wrote letters to astronauts in Houston and jumped off big rocks at Pace Bend. High school was more like Dazed and Confused than Friday Night Lights, even if by the time I arrived freshmen hadn’t been paddled since that famous moon tower was decommissioned my father’s senior year, four decades before.
I grew up, like many boys in Texas and other places too, concerned with the myth and magic of some distant past that I knew that I could never really know. The Texas of my imagination was like a scene from my great grandmother’s favorite novel, Lonesome Dove. Bandits in the hill country and blue pigs eating rattlesnakes under the front porch as a band of sleepy cowboys wake to the sound of a rifle cracking some twenty minutes’ ride away. Or maybe some version of a more contemporary past: not memories of childhood games like “cowboys and Injuns” so much as the scenes my father remembers watching in a crowded canvas tent on his scoutmaster’s black-and-white television that storyful summer of 1969.
“Houston, Tranquility Base here,” Neil Armstrong’s voice must have crackled in every child’s ear across the county. “The Eagle had landed.” Who could have imagined that? Some little city made rich by black gold was turned famous again in a typically Texas fashion. Everything is bigger in the Lone Star State, and so for children like me the bigger surprise was that Armstrong and Aldrin planted a flag with fifty small, white stars instead of a single big one.
I’ve pledged allegiance to all fifty-one stars ever since my teachers told me about the new rule sometime after the Twin Towers fell and before the Longhorns won their last national championship game. I couldn’t have been much past third grade when some kind-faced teacher in a pressed white shirt explained that unlike other schools in other places, our state flag was flown at the same height as the national one. And because we lived in such a special state, and more likely because someone’s grandfather’s grandfather died defending The Alamo, we had to hold up our hands on our hearts a little longer and say each morning, “Honor the Texas flag — I pledge allegiance to thee, Texas, one state under God, one and indivisible.”
This state — one and indivisible — takes pride in place as much as it does in the past. Every small town in Texas has good people, a grocery store, a gas station and a Dairy Queen. The best trucks and beer and brisket are always Texas-made. Even the shape of Texas is special. Where else in the country can you actually expect to order a state-shaped chicken-fried steak with cream gravy, mashed potatoes and a corn bread roll all without the waitress laughing you out of the black leather booth? There’s nowhere else in the world like Texas. Our state capitol is the tallest in the country, our highways are the fastest in the county and most Texan’s sense of pride is even larger than the kind I’m told plenty of other people from other places can also understand.
This is a state with big cities, ghost towns, wide-open spaces and afternoon thunderstorms that can turn even the hottest summer days cold. It’s a place with more red than blue, more oilrigs than wind turbines, and a history that, to borrow a line from Steinbeck, “is based on, but not limited to, the facts.” We’re a state that’s sued the federal government almost fifty times in the last eight years — and lost almost every time. We’re a people that distrust used car dealers, “the media” and any government that isn’t local, unless that local government tries to ban plastic bags or fracking. Our children read textbooks that deny the dark history of our peculiar past and grow up to a world where abortions are effectively illegal but concealed hand guns are permitted in college lecture halls. Honor the Texas flag, God bless this beautiful state. But must this godforsaken place govern itself like some jerkwater 19th century cow town?
Cowboys are a dying breed and even oil isn’t worth what it once was. My generation was supposed to grow up in a new millennium. Minorities are permitted to vote, even if the legislature made it unconstitionally impossible. Women can serve in state government, even if they’re not often elected. I am not supposed to have to argue with my white-neighbors to invite a black or Chicano friend over for dinner, like my grandfather did when he first moved to town. Yet, somehow, Sandra Bland and others like her were still allowed to die. Our agriculture commissioner called Hillary Clinton a “cunt” on Twitter last month. And Ken Paxton, the state’s attorney general, is headed to trial next spring for two counts of felony fraud.
Gun battles are no longer fought on the Capitol steps, but plenty about Texas hasn’t changed. We’re hard as ever on immigrants, the environment and a woman’s right to choose. We do not even pretend to adequately serve minority communities, or educate the disabled and the ever-growing working-poor.
Many Texans feel that their way of life is under siege. They worry that the home they have always known will, like all present places, evanesce into some kind of imaginary past. The myth and magic of my childhood is, in many ways, becoming a sort of parochial pride. And I don’t know what to do about it because I am proud that grandmother picked her own blackberries for cobbler on Sunday nights and my grandfather’s pickup didn’t have air conditioning.
I am not upset by or trying to upset tradition. I am, however, concerned when pride becomes parasitic on every person that couldn’t have found themselves fighting at The Alamo’s last stand. What happens when a place refuses to remember present populations as well as the past? Texas is more than the history and future of the mostly straight, white statesmen who pledge an oath to God to serve it. Maybe it should act accordingly. Times change, after all.
Bonnie Parker and Clyde Chestnut Barrow’s outlaw days have come and gone, and the rocket-riders of Space City are not even trying to fly to the moon anymore. My grandfather is now dead and buried alongside the state highway just outside of town. And just as I do not want to forget his and all those other stories now past, so too must we not forget that this place is big enough for a few more.
