{"id":1228413,"date":"2023-09-26T14:37:51","date_gmt":"2023-09-26T14:37:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dissidentvoice.org\/?p=144301"},"modified":"2023-09-26T14:37:51","modified_gmt":"2023-09-26T14:37:51","slug":"texas-for-breakfast","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2023\/09\/26\/texas-for-breakfast\/","title":{"rendered":"Texas for Breakfast"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I know it\u2019s hard to fathom, but there really was a time when \u201cDon\u2019t Mess with Texas\u201d actually meant something and not just in terms of litter.<\/p>\n

It forewarned the uninitiated of bona fide badasses, legendary contrarians, daring dreamers, and serious politicians who had no qualms about taking fatuous pretenders out behind the proverbial woodshed and beating the living or figurative shite out of them.<\/p>\n

Sam Houston once drubbed a U.S. congressman half to death with his cane in Washington, D.C., and practically walked away scot-free. (His lawyer was Francis Scott Key!) Then, three decades later, during his second stint as governor of Texas, he jeered the Texas secession convention, refusing to swear loyalty to the Confederacy. A century later, Denison native Dwight D. Eisenhower, who served as the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces during WWII and became a two-term U.S. president, would very bluntly throw staggering shade at the then-budding but insatiably greedy American Military Industrial Complex. JFK didn\u2019t heed Ike\u2019s remarks, and, though Lyndon Baines Johnson played along (to his discredit and, I think, regret), he also became the most progressive American president in history, enacting dozens of eye-popping rights, privileges, and freedoms that most Americans today take for granted. Then we traded longhorns for lambs, allowing our last real lion, Ann Richards (she had more brains and balls than Poppy or Sonny Boy Bush combined), to be ousted by Dubya\u2019s personal \u201cturd blossom,\u201d Karl Rove.<\/p>\n

Since this act of nasty debasement, a gaggle of Republican oaf-keepers have spent the last three decades reducing our great state to what we are now \u2014 an international laughingstock.<\/p>\n

Cattle manure. Openly deranged.<\/p>\n

Semiautomatic rifle-packing asshats.<\/p>\n

And this was well before the dog and Ken Paxton pony fiasco.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re no longer seen as a great state. We\u2019re viewed more like a Third-World banana republic (emphasis on \u201cbanana\u201d). Texas is now a joke, an adjectival term of derision, as in \u201cthose idiots went all Texas on us\u201d or \u201cthat stupidity is Texas-level, yo!\u201d<\/p>\n

For educated Americans and most of the rest of the world, Texans are synonymous with shameless cretins, imbeciles, morons, or losers. The slow, Republican-led domestic intellectual plummet and resulting international perception shift have reduced us to a superficial, xenophobic, conformist dystopia. Which sincerely sucks, because we used to be the exception, not fascist fools.<\/p>\n

Texas produced the first female sheriff, the first all-women state Supreme Court, the first woman on the U.S. Supreme Court (Sandra Day O\u2019Connor), the first Black woman in the U.S. House of Representatives (Barbara Jordan), and the first Chicano G.I. Joe (legendary Medal of Honor recipient Roy Benavidez). Texas was the home turf for the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the first Bilingual Education Act, Roe v. Wade<\/i>, and dozens of landmarks that define the Great Society. Texas was even the base of operations for Madalyn Murray O\u2019Hair and the American Atheists association and Mike Judge\u2019s Beavis and Butthead<\/i> and King of the Hill<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Texas produced Janis Joplin, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Beyonce, Selena, Freddy Fender, Katherine Anne Porter, Robert Rauschenberg, Erykah Badu, John Graves, Doug Sahm, the Butthole Surfers \u2026 hell, even Black Panther Bobby Seale is a native Texan!<\/p>\n

The Lone Star state also produced icons of the Third Estate, including Walter Cronkite, Molly Ivins, Dan Rather, and Jim Leher.<\/p>\n

Today, Texas politics has descended into an ignorant crescendo of conformist, party-line blowhards like Greg Abbott, John \u201cCornholio\u201d Cornyn, and Ted Cooz. And Texas\u2019 national contributions to cultural and intellectual development rise to little more than lukewarm, rustic slop jars like Chip and Joanna Gaines, Jenna Bush Hager, Kelly Clarkson, Pascal High School\u2019s own Sheridan Taylor Gibler, Jr. (also known as Taylor Sheridan), and clueless, third-rate sophists like Alex Jones and Joe Rogan.<\/p>\n

Lone Star icon Willie Nelson once said, \u201cI\u2019m from Texas, and one of the reasons I like Texas is because there\u2019s no one in control.\u201d And back when he said it, it was probably true. We used to be more open-minded. We were practical and believed in common sense. But Texas is no longer governed by pragmatism, assertive wit, or human decency. Texas has been reduced to a big, red, Republican Porta-Potty, where backwards wastrels launch excrement on the shithouse walls just to see what will stick under the graying, mustachioed upper lips of their, yes, deplorable constituencies and pass their hypocritical smell tests.<\/p>\n

In 2021, the Texas Lege made abortions illegal and sexual assault rewarding, because raped women were no longer permitted to abort their vicious fecundators\u2019 offspring. On Sep. 1, 2023, the Lege made it legal for God-bothering chaplains to serve as guidance counselors in public schools without certification or experience in classroom instruction \u2014 but, hey, they\u2019re at least qualified to explain to prepubescent female students how Mary was made preggers without her consent and how hallowed by thy shame<\/i> that turned out!<\/p>\n

And this immaculate transgression was followed by several other lapses into priggish asininity. The feckless Lege\u2019s new \u201cdeath star\u201d bill eliminates local civil ordinances around the state, including workplace protections and common-sense environmental regulations. Senate Bill 17 bans diversity and inclusion programs at public universities (because what\u2019s wrong with gubernatorial incumbents gathering boner mounts at places called \u201cNiggerhead Ranch\u201d?). Senate Bill 19 gives the checkless Lege the power to proclaim that only college instructors who obstruct diversity and inclusion can receive tenure. House Bill 900 gives the reckless Lege expanded parameters to ban books in Texas libraries\u2014except the Bible<\/i>, of course, the reading of which will soon be required by force and policed by the new armed hall monitors the Lege is encouraging to reduce the scourge of intellectual discourse.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t mess with Texas?<\/i><\/p>\n

Heck, it\u2019s getting so that any half-conscious dunderhead with a pulse can eat Texas for breakfast. We\u2019re mindless buffoons walking around with Texas Lege-ratified \u201cKick Me\u201d notes on our backs, wondering why everyone else is bent on making us butt-sore.<\/p>\n

At one time, Texas may have been Willie\u2019s sublime free-for-all. Now, it\u2019s clearly not. One party has been running the show for too long, and its leaders and their rabid base refuse to think constructively, thrive on cultural impracticalities and historic inanity, and seem bent on making sure any semblance of conscience or enlightenment is fenced in.<\/p>\n

Even some Texas Aggies are appalled.<\/p>\n

The slow, anti-intellectual deluge of Red State Kool-Aid has left Jim Bob Q. Public Yellowstoned<\/i> (thanks, Gibler) and the party behind everything we used to rue seems to revel in seeing the rights of anyone who isn\u2019t straight, white, and a man\u2019s man trod upon with impunity.<\/p>\n

So please mess with Texas, friends.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s get rid of the real trash.<\/p>\n

This post was originally published on Dissident Voice<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I know it\u2019s hard to fathom, but there really was a time when \u201cDon\u2019t Mess with Texas\u201d actually meant something and not just in terms of litter. It forewarned the uninitiated of bona fide badasses, legendary contrarians, daring dreamers, and serious politicians who had no qualms about taking fatuous pretenders out behind the proverbial woodshed [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5589,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[68868,442,414,784,876,36],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1228413"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5589"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1228413"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1228413\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1231082,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1228413\/revisions\/1231082"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1228413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1228413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1228413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}