Harrigan Stephen - God save Texas: a journey into the future of America

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

Lawrence Wright

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GOD SAVE TEXAS

A Journey into the Future of America

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Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

First published in the United States of America by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC 2018

First published in Great Britain by Allen Lane 2018

Copyright Lawrence Wright, 2018

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).

Illustrations and endpapers by David Danz

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Cover design by Richard Green

ISBN: 978-0-241-32573-5

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unpublished song by Marcia Ball and Lawrence Wright

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.

Ive lived in Texas most of my life, and Ive come to appreciate what the state symbolizes, both to people who live here and to those who view it from afar. Texans see themselves as confident, hardworking, and neurosis-freea distillation of the best qualities of America. Outsiders view Texas as the national id, a place where rambunctious and disavowed impulses run wild. Texans, they believe, mindlessly celebrate individualism, and view government as a kind of kryptonite that saps the entrepreneurial muscles. Were reputed to be braggarts; careless with money and our personal lives; a little gullible but dangerous if crossed; insecure but obsessed with power and prestige. Indeed, its an irony that the figure who most embodies the values people associate with the state is a narcissistic Manhattan billionaire now sitting in the Oval Office.