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

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With humor and the biting insight of a native, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Looming Tower explores the history, culture, and politics of Texas, while holding the stereotypes up for rigorous scrutiny.God Save Texas is a journey through the most controversial state in America. It is a red state in the heart of Trumpland that hasnt elected a Democrat to a statewide office in more than twenty years; but it is also a state in which minorities already form a majority (including the largest number of Muslims). The cities are blue and among the most diverse in the nation. Oil is still king but Texas now leads California in technology exports. The Texas economic model of low taxes and minimal regulation has produced extraordinary growth but also striking income disparities. Texas looks a lot like the America that Donald Trump wants to create. And Wrights profound portrait of the state not only reflects our country back as it is, but as it was and as it might be.

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ALSO BY LAWRENCE WRIGHT The Terror Years Thirteen Days in September Going - photo 1
ALSO BY LAWRENCE WRIGHT

The Terror Years

Thirteen Days in September

Going Clear

The Looming Tower

Gods Favorite

Twins

Remembering Satan

Saints and Sinners

In the New World

City Children, Country Summer

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A KNOPF Copyright 2018 by Lawrence - photo 2
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A KNOPF Copyright 2018 by Lawrence - photo 3

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A . KNOPF

Copyright 2018 by Lawrence Wright

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Hal Leonard LLC for permission to reprint an excerpt of Mammas Dont Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys, words and music by Ed Bruce and Patsy Bruce, copyright 1975 by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, copyright renewed. All rights administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC. International copyright secured. All rights reserved.

Portions of this work first appeared in The New Yorker as Americas Future Is Texas (July 10, 2017) and The Glut Economy (January 1, 2018); and in Texas Monthly as Remembrance of Things Primitive (February 1993).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Wright, Lawrence, [date] author.

Title: God save Texas : a journey into the soul of the Lone Star State / by Lawrence Wright.

Description: New York : Knopf, 2018.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017031324 (print) | LCCN 2017044473 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525520115 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525520108 (hardback)

Subjects: LCSH : Wright, Lawrence, [date] TravelTexas. | Harrigan, Stephen, [date] TravelTexas. | TexasDescription and travel. | TexasPolitics and government21st century. | TexasSocial conditions21st century. | TexasEconomic conditions21st century. | BISAC : HISTORY / United States / State & Local / Southwest ( AZ , NM , OK , TX ). | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Cultural Heritage. | POLITICAL SCIENCE / Government / State & Provincial.

Classification: LCC F 391.2 (ebook) | LCC F 391.2 . W 75 2018 (print) | DDC 917.6404dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017031324

Ebook ISBN9780525520115

Cover photograph Pecos Clouds, FM 1776 South of Coyanosa by Jeff Baker 2009

Cover design by Chip Kidd

Illustrations by David Danz

v5.2

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Contents

For Steve,

who was there at the beginning

and will be at journeys end

Were oilmen and philosophers

Astronauts and ranchers

Fishermen and roughnecks

And college professors.

Were carpenters and preachers

And artists and physicians

High-tech geeks

And redneck musicians.

Were Church of Christ and Baptist

(Evangelical and Southern).

Were straight and gay and what the hey

We come in every color.

Were Czech and Greek and Mexican,

Vietnamese and Cajun

We sprawl a quarter million miles

We have no common language.

God save Texas

From the well-intentioned masses!

God save Texas

From the posers and jackasses!

God save Texas

Hes the only one who can!

unpublished song by Marcia Ball and Lawrence Wright

ONE
The Charms, Such as They Are
Subtle was the word my friend Steve used as we drove through a spongy drizzle - photo 4

Subtle was the word my friend Steve used as we drove through a spongy drizzle from Austin to San Antonio on a mild February morning. He was referencing the quality of the pleasures one might experience from observing the Texas landscapesmall ones, requiring discernmentalthough the actual vista in front of us was an unending strip mall hugging a crowded interstate highway. Subtlety is a quality rarely invoked for anything to do with Texas, so I chewed on that notion for a bit.

There are some landscapes that are perfect for walking, disclosing themselves so intimately that one must dawdle to take them in; some that are best appreciated in an automobile at a reasonable rate of speed; and others that should be flown over as rapidly as possible. Much of Texas I place in this last category. Even Steve admits that Texas is where everything peters outthe South, the Great Plains, Mexico, the Mountain Westall dribbling to an anticlimactic end, stripped of whatever glory they manifest elsewhere. But in the heart of Texas there is another landscape that responds best to the cyclist, who lumbers along at roughly the rate of a cantering horse, past the wildflowers and mockingbird trills of the Hill Country. Our bikes were in the back of my truck. We were going to explore the five Spanish missions along the San Antonio River, which have recently been named a World Heritage Site.

Steve is Stephen Harrigan, my closest friend for many years, a distinguished novelist who is now writing a history of Texas. We stopped at a Buc-ees outside New Braunfels to pick up some Gatorade for the ride. It is the largest convenience store in the worlda category of achievement that only Texas would aspire to. It might very well be the largest gas station as well, with 120 fuel pumps, to complement the 83 toilets that on at least one occasion garnered the prize of Best Restroom in America. The billboards say The Top Two Reasons to Stop at Buc-ees: Number 1 and Number 2, and also Restrooms You Have to Pee to Believe.

But gas and urination are not the distinguishing attractions at Buc-ees. Texas isor at least the kind of material goods that reify Texas in the minds of much of the world: massive belt buckles, barbecue, country music, Kevlar snake boots, rope signs (a length of rope twisted into a worde.g., Howdyand pasted over a painting of a Texas flag), holsters (although no actual guns), T-shirts (Have a Willie Nice Day), bumper stickers (Dont Mess with Texas), anything shaped like the state, and books of the sort classified as Texana. There is usually a stack of Steves bestselling novel The Gates of the Alamo as well.

One image on the T-shirts and bumper stickers and whiskey jiggers has become especially popular lately: that of a black cannon over the legend Come and Take It. The taunt has a long history, going back to the Battle of Thermopylae, when Leonidas I, king of Sparta, responded to the demand of the Persian leader, Xerxes, that the Greeks lay down their arms. In Texas, the reference is to a battle in 1835, the opening skirmish of the Texas Revolution, when Mexican forces marched on the South Texas outpost of Gonzales to repossess a small bronze cannon that had been lent to the town for defense against Indians. The defiant citizens raised a crude flag, made from a wedding dress, that has now become an emblem of the gun rights movement. Ted Cruz wore a Come and Take It lapel pin on the floor of the U.S. Senate when he filibustered the health care bill in 2013.

At Buc-ees, an aspiring Texan can get fully outfitted not only with the clothing but also with the cultural and philosophical stances that embody the Texas stereotypescowboy individualism, a kind of wary friendliness, superpatriotism combined with defiance of all government authority, a hair-trigger sense of grievance, nostalgia for an ersatz past that is largely an artifact of Hollywooda lowbrow society, in other words, that finds its fullest expression in a truck stop on the interstate.

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