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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Johnson left office in 1969, and Texas's reputation didn't recover until oil prices started climbing in the mid-seventies. Then, for what may have been the first time in history, we were indisputably the good guys. The rest of the country needed us to get the oil out of the ground and into their gas tanks. And so we became the superstate, as Newsweek claimed in a 1977 cover story: "After decades of insecure braggadocio, tall tales, and youthful excesses, that state of the Union and state of mind called Texas . . . has begun to outdistance and bedazzle former detractors," the story crowed. We were rich and sophisticated, admired for our Philip Johnson skyscrapers and our cutting-edge shopping malls. The northeast—Detroit, Cleveland, maybe even New York—was played out; the action in the U.S. was in the Sunbelt, and Houston was its capital. The only people carping were a few Texas intellectuals. Larry McMurtry, living in pre-Pulitzer exile in Washington, D.C., hated the soullessness of the oil boom and mourned the passing of the cowboy. An icon had devolved into John Travolta's urban nomad, riding a mechanical bull at Gilley's.
The apotheosis of Texas chic—as that brief happy period was known—came with the success of Dallas, which aired from 1978 to 1991, reaching more than 300 million people in ninety countries. Dallas was the top-rated show in the country for four years, thanks largely to Larry Hagman's J.R., the audacious, ruthless oilman Hagman modeled on a wildcatter from his hometown of Weatherford. (Hagman also used the resentment he harbored from receiving minimal syndication royalties from I Dream of Jeannie to give J.R. his edge.) J.R. was a villain, but in the greed-is-good eighties, he was also a hero. There was only one problem. Just as Dallas became popular, the J.R. archetype disappeared from Texas to reemerge on Wall Street. Manhattan oil traders were acting like Jett Rink, but real-life corporate gunslingers like T. Boone Pickens slipped from view. Oil prices had started to fall two years after J.R. was shot in the final episode of 1980. That show may have been the highest-rated television episode in history—eerie proof that, as far as the rest of the country was concerned, the JFK assassination was forgotten—but it also proved to be a harbinger for the end of the boom. We'd overbuilt and overspent and taunted the rest of America (remember the bumper sticker that suggested we let the East Coast "freeze in the dark"?). In other words, we behaved like . . . Texans. Then came the disastrous presidential campaign of 2000—a veritable anti-Texas jihad on the part of the Democrats, who criticized the state's environmental, health-care, and criminal-justice shortcomings—followed by the Enron collapse and the war in Iraq.
"You can make a pretty good case for never electing a president from Texas," a friend of mine formerly in state politics suggested to me, evoking the Johnson-Bush comparisons that are now part of a new two-rubes-don't-make-a-right strain of Texas bashing. Texans know, of course, that the two men come from very different places. LBJ grew up poor, in an isolated and backward place, and to his detriment never quite believed he was as smart as the Harvard types he inherited from JFK. Bush grew up surrounded by wealth, in a state that could compete in many ways with the East his family left behind. He went to Ivy League schools but came back home with his Texas-bred contempt for intellectuals.
Each man approached the world as a Texan, not as a hick or a cowboy—which neither was or is—but in their opposition to the world beyond our borders. One man fell prey to our fabled inferiority complex, the other to our legendary braggadocio.
THIS SPRING, THE PEOPLE of Great Britain were reintroduced to the people of Texas via a five-part documentary series produced by Channel 4, a competitor of the BBC. It was titled The Texas Season, and it was promoted in full-page newspaper ads featuring an overweight man in a string tie and cowboy boots. The ad presaged what was to come: a presentation of Texas as a land of freaks, one of whom had become president of the United States. The first hour-long installment was America's Fattest City, featuring whale-size Houstonians posing for boudoir photos in lace catsuits, competing in all-you-can-eat contests, and driving twenty feet to their mailboxes. The voice-over sounded like a Travel Channel documentary on Amazon primitives: "Many Texans take pride in their super size. They're famously competitive. They want to be the best, even in the area of wanton gluttony." This was followed by Texas Teenage Virgins, which focused on a group of irrepressibly horny Lubbock teens trying valiantly to adhere to Bush's faith-based abstinence program with help from a toothy local minister. As he put it: "I teach that sex in marriage is like fire in the fireplace" (that's "fahr in the fahrplace," of course). "It'll keep you warm and make you feel good. Sex outside marriage is like fire in the middle of the floor. It's gonna burn your house down and destroy your life—physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and financially." In Turning Muslim in Texas, a beefy good ol' boy searched anxiously for a place to pray during a high school football game. He found his spot, turned his gimme cap around, and kneeled in the direction of Mecca. Cut to his mom: "When he told us he was a Muslim, it was the most disheartening news we had ever received from our son," she confessed. "I've often wondered if I'd feel the same if he'd told me he was gay."
Having demonstrated that Texans were ugly, sexually repressed, and bigoted, all that remained for the producers was violent. The Texas Solution explored crime and punishment during Bush's gubernatorial years. State representative Suzanna Hupp grieved that she hadn't had her handgun in her purse the day her parents were murdered in the massacre at Luby's in Killeen, and a victims' support group forgave the killers of their loved ones—just before their executions. "In Texas," the narrator said, "forgiveness does not mean mercy." He explained that "Texans have a view of the world that is simple but powerful. There are good guys and bad guys, a view that George Bush clearly shares."
Even after nearly four hours of Texas bashing, I held out hope that the last episode, The State of Texas, would offer some new insight. It was narrated by Christopher Hitchens, a Brit who has been a regular commentator on the American political scene for The Nation, Vanity Fair, and other publications. His goal was "to make a film that says, 'Here are all the things you think about Texas and here's why they're not true.'" To find the stereotype-free answer, Hitchens, his blue eyes wide, the corners of his mouth just slightly derisive, headed straight for a Western-wear store in Fort Worth and bought himself some cowboy duds ("In Texas, it's better to be a drugstore cowboy than no cowboy at all"). He then interviewed a weepy Alamo docent, conversed with border guards as they hunted illegal aliens, engaged in target practice with a gun nut wearing an anti-U.N. T-shirt, reminisced with toothless, aged cattle ranchers, and gawked as T. Boone Pickens managed assets on his desktop computer. The witty disdain of Larry McMurtry and the dry humor of John Graves provided some relief. But Hitchens, like many before him, could not see beyond the myth.
Ultimately, he came to three conclusions. The first was familiar: that our "Republican state of massive power and wealth" harbored "a deep insecurity." The second was that cowboy culture—as he defined it—had nothing to offer the rest of the world. "The wilderness may have been suburbanized," he intoned, "but there is no conquering the wasteland within."
Hitchens's third discovery never made it on the air. Wrapping up the shoot, he confessed to his crew that he'd found Texas "much nicer and more enjoyable" than he'd imagined.
"Everyone said they'd been thinking the same thing," Hitchens told me. "There's something for your readers."
Maybe I'd expected too much of a foreigner, hoping it was possible, in 2004, to see Texas whole. It always seems to be the complexity of the state that surprises and finally defeats its visiting chroniclers: the extremes of poverty and wealth, the inescapable backwardness competing with the passion for innovation, the obvious bigotry competing with our exploding ethnicity (the international stew of southwest Houston escaped Hitchens's notice), our allegiance to the past and our deep desire to abandon it—in other words, Texas is the place that best tolerates the contradictory nature of America itself.
In that way, Texas, trying to forge something new, has outgrown Bush. As much as he can be a man of the West, he reverts under pressure to conventions of the old Eastern aristocracy, surrounding himself with loyal family retainers, believing he has no obligation to explain himself, certain that, because of his birthright, he knows best.
But these are complicated notions that don't serve any outsider's agenda. It's a lot easier to label us all cowboys and move on.
AT THE END OF MAY, I had coffee with Phillip Jones, the president and CEO of the Dallas Convention and Visitors Bureau. For the past six months, he has overseen the creation of a new ad campaign for the city. Jones is a tall, thin, approachable fellow with a shock of red hair who seems more Methodist minister than McKinney Avenue but who in fact is selling the latter. Jones was traveling the globe to promote a re-branded Dallas, another warrior in Texas's eternal battle for the hearts, minds, and dollars of our critics. To Jones, Dallas's image problem had less to do with Bush and more to do with its inability to shake the big-haired image of Dallas. "Dallas has fallen off the radar," Jones told me. He gave me his pitch, listing all the "hip and trendy" new restaurants and shopping venues, the $275 million performing arts center soon to be constructed, the new Nasher Sculpture Center, the cool people who either live in Dallas or once did (Mark Cuban, Norah Jones). "It's an opportunity to tell our story to a new generation of people who don't know who J. R. Ewing is," Jones explained. He, like Christopher Hitchens, was trying to transcend the stereotype.
Dallas's new story came out of some very intense brainstorming sessions between community leaders and the Richards Group, the advertising agency hired for the campaign. Pretty early in the game they abandoned the idea of using cowboys to sell Dallas; they wanted to get away from clichés.
Surveys revealed another similarity to Hitchens's experience: Visitors to Dallas always arrived with low expectations and left feeling pleased that the city offered so much more than they had imagined. Further investigation revealed that "more" meant "bigger." As John Beitter, the Richards Group's principal in charge of the project, explained, "not bigger in terms of the stereotype, but bigger in terms of thinking." Dallas could be sold as a place where the cowboy's traditional love of wide-open spaces lived on in Dallas's current passion for wide-open thinking. At this writing, the advertising executives were trying to choose between two mottos: "Dallas. Where Big Ideas Come From" or "Live Large. Think Big."
I was tempted to ask whether an advertising campaign based on bigness really represented an escape from the stereotype, but I stopped myself. We can't let it go. We're always trying to dismiss the past and move forward, but it still has a funny way of riding along beside us every time.
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