George W. Bush Interview With Mark K. Updegrove (Audio) 
Them's Fightin' Words!
From East Coast eggheads to English snobs and French peaceniks, the whole world's against Texas. They blame us for the president. They call us gun-toting, abstinence-promoting, capital-punishing cowboys. They think we're a bunch of hicks.
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That kind of question usually prompts the good-offense-is-the-best-defense counterattack. In the old days Texans would bring up Neiman Marcus to justify our importance to the rest of the country. Today we try to boost our prestige by invoking the Nobel prize winners at Southwestern Medical School, high-tech billionaires like Michael Dell, stars like Beyoncé, or our skyscrapers designed by famous architects.
Or, we don't defend Texas at all. This ruse is conveniently free of hypocrisy and keeps Ivins on the best-seller list. I recently met a Texan who is a visiting law professor in Düsseldorf, Germany. He handles the backlash by making it immediately clear that he didn't support Bush and donated to his opponent. "Otherwise," he said, "it will be another boring conversation."
Finally, there are those who embrace Texas but disown the president. Houston gallery owner Hiram Butler took this approach when he attended his first meeting on a committee at his alma mater, Williams College, in Massachusetts. He was greeted with cowboy boots at his seat and one too many Bush jokes. "They looked at me as if I were somehow connected with those people. I said, 'They aren't from here. They were not born here. They are carpetbaggers of the worst ilk.'"
Anyone who's resorted to any of these tactics knows that they seldom, if ever, provide much relief. Whether you become an apologist, a booster, or a self-hating Texan, people keep making fun of us. Worse, they're right a lot of the time: We do execute the mentally retarded and the insane; we do spew filth into the urban air; we do deny health care to poor children and prefer tax cuts to improving public schools.
But criticism has a way of sticking to Texas in a way it doesn't to California, for example, which gave the world Charles Manson, Robert Kennedy's assassination, and the O. J. Simpson trial and is still known as a golden land. The obscene concentration of wealth in Manhattan has essentially turned that place into the world's largest walled community, but it's still the Big Apple, where dreams come true. Texas, with a less decorous history and mythology, has always played a different role in American life. "Texas is a mirror in which Americans see themselves reflected, not life-sized but, as in a distorting mirror, bigger than life," John Bainbridge wrote in The Super-Americans, the 1961 classic of Texas bashing. "They are not pleased by the image. Being unable to deny the likeness, they attempt to diminish it by making fun of it." We cultivated a unique identity, and we're still paying the price.
IN THE BEGINNING, few people knew who we were and those who did weren't so eager to nurture the relationship. The Scotch-Irish immigrants who took over the state with their soaring birthrates in the nineteenth century were best characterized by the French historian Amaury de Riencourt: "Strong, inhumanly self reliant . . . [t]hey shunned objective contemplation and were determined to throw their fanatical energy into the struggle against Nature . . . they fought their own selves with gloomy energy, repressing instincts and emotions . . . remorsely brushing aside all men who stood in their path." These men won independence from Mexico but lost the Civil War, suffered the humiliation of Reconstruction, and generally saw nothing mythic about their lot.
By the twenties, Texas was producing nearly 40 percent of the country's oil, bringing real riches to the state for the first time. But there was something unsavory about the instant wealth it created that led non-Texans to look down on the place. Then, too, Texas was still linked in the minds of outsiders to the backward, slaveholding, agrarian South, another reason its good fortune seemed undeserved. As the late historian Walter Prescott Webb once wrote, "We in Texas have become a sort of whipping boy for the other regions . . . Texans may have done things that foster this attitude of not too delicate criticism and invective. But there is no doubt that a good part of the hostility stems from the fact that Texas is booming." Texans began to wrestle with two contradictory notions. One was imposed from the outside: We were inferior because we were uneducated and chose to live in a place with an unbearable climate and a scrubby, hostile landscape. The other came from within: We were superior because we had triumphed over adversity and made ourselves rich. How could we make others see us as we saw ourselves?
The answer came from a New York ad man, who, speaking in Corsicana in 1923 to a regional meeting of the Advertising Clubs of America, exhorted Texans to start selling their "gloriously romantic history." Dallas took the message to heart, and the result was the Texas Centennial Exposition of 1936. The fair was promoted as a Western extravaganza. Chorus girls, dressed like cowgirls in chaps and ten-gallon hats, traveled the country to spread the word. So too did a Texas Ranger captain, packing two .45-caliber six-shooters as he galloped into hotel lobbies on his horse named Texas. With every public appearance, Texas's link to the Old South faded and its alliance with a new region, the wild, unfenced, oil-rich Southwest, grew. By the time the fair actually opened, Texas had something it had never had before: a mythology. Texas history became a great adventure featuring the cowboy as a hero. The cowboy was us: strong, self-sufficient, solitary, of few words and many good deeds.
The rest of the world, looking at our new wealth and power, didn't quite see it that way. Life magazine came to investigate in 1939 and saw the oilman as a rich country bumpkin who was prone to violence, bragging, and spending too much money in really dumb ways. Thirteen years passed between that story and the publication of Edna Ferber's Giant, but not much changed in the way others saw us. The Houston Post called the best-selling novel "surgically vicious on Texas"; it depicted us as free-spending, boorish, and bigoted—none of the things Americans, sanctified by victory in World War II, wanted to be. No one cared that Ferber said the book was a metaphor for America. The 1956 movie version of Giant, directed by George Stevens, became a film classic while it reinforced the clichés. Stevens softened Ferber's social criticism and created instead a morality tale about the battle between old-fashioned, honorable cattle ranchers and vulgar, trashy, insatiable oilmen. The cattleman, Rock Hudson, was supposed to be the good guy, but James Dean, playing wildcatter Jett Rink in cowboy hat and boots, merged the hired hand with the oilman and stole the movie. Rink was honorable, solitary, prone to use his fists, inarticulate about his many contradictory longings—not so different from his Scotch-Irish ancestors, except that he was very rich, which made him at once more appealing and more threatening, because he was answerable to no one.
And so we became not a metaphor for America but a caricature. "It is currently fashionable among the more advanced spirits in this country to look upon Texas with an air of amused condescension," asserted Bainbridge in the first sentence of The Super-Americans, five years later. Bainbridge proceeded to do just that for another four hundred pages or so, portraying Texans as a lively, rich tribe of Jett Rinks who lived, inexplicably, in a place that was "the least scenically rewarding state in the nation with the possible exception of North Dakota or Nebraska," with weather that was "changeable, disagreeable, and bizarre." The book was greeted with the usual howls of denial in Texas—We aren't really like that! reviewers around the state protested—while reinforcing the stereotype elsewhere.
Then President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas in 1963. Our violent nature was validated once more—"Deep in the Hate of Texas" was the way one out-of-state editorial framed the tragedy. That the successor to the sunny, handsome, Harvard-educated president—Now there was an American!—was a jug-eared rube from the same state where JFK had been killed didn't help. Lyndon Johnson had been a brilliant Senate leader before becoming vice president, but when he succeeded Kennedy, the rest of the country inevitably and unfavorably compared him and his wife, Lady Bird, with their glamorous, clannish predecessors. (During the race for the nomination in 1960, Jacqueline Kennedy had referred to her husband's then-competitor as Senator Cornpone and Lady Bird as Mrs. Porkchop.) President Johnson pushed for his Great Society, but he became ever more distracted by our failing effort in Vietnam. To his detractors, he was Jett Rink in the Oval Office, mumbling about "muh fella 'muricans," serving barbecue to foreign dignitaries, casually displaying the gall bladder scar transecting his bloated belly, and cruelly sending American sons to their death in a faraway land. Hatred of LBJ was so intense by 1966 that an underground drama written by a 26-year-old antiwar activist became a literary sensation, reviewed by noted critic Dwight Macdonald in The New York Review of Books as "the funniest, toughest minded, and most ingenious political satire" he'd read in years. MacBird was a parody of Macbeth that centered on the Kennedy-Johnson rivalry, with LBJ in the title role and Edward and Robert Kennedy as brothers Bobby and Ted Ken O'Dunc. In one scene, the MacBirds invite their enemies to a cookout at the royal ranch. The brothers land in a helicopter, and Bobby, standing in for Macduff, spies the oil well in the garden. Teddy points out "moo-moos on the lawn."
"I understand they roast the oxen whole," someone else chimes in.
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