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I just got back from a very quick 1-night trip to Dallas. I’d never been to Texas before. It was (only slightly unseasonably) warm and humid. All I can safely say about the trip is that it was for work. While I had very little time to explore, the nature of the trip did allow me to meet maybe a dozen natives and shoot the shit with them a little bit. Not bad for a 28-hour work trip. I’ve spent a week in some places and not spoken to that many people who really live there.

In a short span of time, my impression of Texas was reinforced in some ways and expanded in others. The landscape around Dallas is depressingly featureless and arid. Everywhere I looked, on the center dividers down streets, in the landscaping around my hotel and the highway, I saw dying grass. I’m talking lawn-grass, not the free, ankle-biting stuff of the open plains. The kind of thing that suburbanites have elevated to a 2-inch high art form, a dense carpet of uniformly hued verdance, crisp and well-trimmed and unbesmirched by corruption: bacterial blight, gopher holes, incursions of crab-grass. I’d never stopped to ponder how Chrsitian the quest for a perfect lawn is. But it’s a fine analogy. Not even an analogy, more like a connecting vein of cultural ore between the edict to tame nature, the imperial drive into the heart of Africa, and the eternal defense against our own relentless instincts: clear lawn, clear mind, clean soul, clean nation, clean world. Praise God.

I was particularly distressed by one retail establishment, name of “Outdoor Store” or something similar. A fan of the outdoors, I first thought “Oh cool, what a huge camping store,” when I saw it. As I got closer it got even huger, and before I’d even come close to the door I was walking between hunting duck-blinds and pre-fab houseboats all strategically placed willy-nilly in the gigantic parking lot. So this is “the outdoors” in Texas: riding a boat painted with what looks like military camoflage out on some pond and shooting ducks and geese (such as there are in Texas).

The all-important grass everywhere was pathetically parched and dying. The climate simply laughed at it. I like to talk to the land, no matter how buried it is underneath human settlement, and the scorching of the grass was like a joke: the land’s one true “fuck you” to everything that had been stacked up on it. It’s just too damn hot and dry in Texas to grow a golf-course-like greenbelt around every highway. Period. Still, they seem to try. And I imagine that, in the suburbs, the neighborly competition for the best lawn on the block probably drives some pretty impressive talent. High tech blooms everywhere in Texas, and one thing you can never say about the place is that it’s full of stupid people. Fuck no.

I actually really liked everyone I met there, from the young and saucy types to the old and crusty ones. The old and saucy ones were my absolute favorites. The speak-your-mind factor was much higher around the table there, from what I saw, than it is here in California. This is a stinging blow to me. I perceive CA as the maximally-accepting center of the tolerance universe, but the truth is that a lack of TRUE racial/class/misc. demographic integration has really hurt us here, and the illusion of tolerance that comes with being part of The Left seals our fate. The real estate landscape in CA is much like the geographical one: there are many different series of isolated peaks and wide open flat spaces in between. Ironically, the center of “left-ness” in CA is one of the most impenetrable housing markets in the world: San Francisco.

Now, the only public defender *and* staunch Democrat I’ve met in the past year was this weekend in Texas. Fucking awesome guy, and his wife, too. I felt closer to them, ideologically, than I had to anyone homeside in quite a while. It’s not easy being a Democrat in Texas, and to be one there requires great commitment. We have to remember that a lot of people in Texas are actually liberals. After all, I’m sure that in Texas you encounter a lot of shit that makes you want to be a liberal. Here in CA it’s like a default you get for free and take for granted.

Not only is Texas not 100% Republican, but CA is not 100% Green Party. I grew up in Contra Costa county, not exactly a stronghold of Naziism but definitely a clusterfuck of white/redneck bigotry. And look at who our Govern(at)or is. We must keep in mind that there’s diversity in every location and resist the stereotypes that the media, the parties themselves, and we, ourselves, would like to foist upon the picture to make it simpler: we are not all alike, not even all the people from one locale.

So what’s my point? I guess the main thing for me is that Texas proved to be a big place, a large state with multiple large cities and enough room for more than one point of view. It’s not a great place to be a Democrat. But it’s not exactly a homogenous one-horse town you can shurg off all that casually either. Texas is a big state with a rich internal political struggle. It was the Democratic state legislature in Texas that elevated “redistricting” into my consciousness as an issue to care about. Redistricting in a huge issue across the country and always will be, but it was the ballsy motherfuckers in the state legistature of Texas who actually absconded to a secret location and HID OUT from the motherfucking law for WEEKS to protest redistricting there.

It’s a shitty place to be a Democrat, but maybe that means that the Democrats who live there have to be pretty good ones. In fact, I think Texas has potential. I didn’t see much of it but I can hold out hope for any place with smart people who are able to make a decent living. It’s congenital poverty that corrupts.

So in the end I’m fucking thrilled to have gone to Texas. Even though I didn’t learn everything I would like to about it, I did get a slice of a different perspective on home.

And that’s why we travel, folks. Not to find the rest of the world, but to find ourselves.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 13th, 2005 at 8:21 pm and is filed under Cool Shit. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Edit this entry.