Dear Dan Patrick
He banned our book from the state history museum. Thanks are in order.
Welcome to The Experiment, where we guess if there’s no fighting in the war room, then the state history museum is no place to discuss state history. Welcome to all the new subscribers! Come in, come in, there’s plenty of room. Get your notes from Elie and Judy. They can catch you up.
This week we’re giving credit where credit is due and sending Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick a thank you note for canceling the virtual event for Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth hosted by the Bullock Texas State History Museum.
Why thank Patrick for censoring our book? The ham fisted repression drew national attention and launched Forget the Alamo from the 500s on Amazon’s rankings to as high as 17. All weekend long, our book has been outselling Bill Clinton and James Patterson, Matthew McConaughey, George Orwell, who probably never imagined a wannabe dictator like Patrick, and Stephen King, who most assuredly has. My Washington Post oped about getting canceled trended on Twitter. Penguin ordered a second printing, and then a third.
And then on Tuesday, we got the strangest news: Amazon was sold out of Forget the Alamo. Dan Patrick had turned our book into the new toilet paper. You can’t find it anywhere. We broke the internet. Thank goodness he didn’t allow Bryan and Chris to speak to 300 people on a Zoom call hosted by the state history museum.
As always, we offer recommendations on what to do (talk smack to a radio host who won’t read the book), read (Samantha Grasso’s smart take on how the Bullock cancellation fits into the national narrative), watch (Chris Tomlinson forgetting the Alamo on MSNBC), and listen to (Leon Bridges has new music out, y’all).
But first, why don’t we call Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick “Lieutenant Dan”?
July 7, 2021
The Honorable Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick
Texas Capitol
Austin, Texas
Dear Honorable Governor Patrick,
This is difficult for both of us, but writing letters when the Alamo is under attack, leaving aside questions of the wisdom or efficacy of its defense, is in the finest traditions of of the Lone Star State. Best practice, if you will, not to mention, gentlemanly conduct. Even if all that is on offer, as awkward as this is, a thank you note. I promise brevity, if not fulsome sincerity.
Pithy or death!! (Too soon?)
In any case, thank you. Is it OK if I call you Dan? Manners are important to me, and you are the lieutenant governor of the Great State of Texas. I find myself in the awkward—there’s that word again—position of having to thank you for banning our book from the state history museum insofar as that attack backfired like an invasion of Moscow. That always ends badly, except for their own insurrection in 1917, but what’s a little anti-government slap and tickle between superpowers, eh?
Perhaps it was your intention to launch our book up Amazon’s sales rankings. This, in our view, should not be prioritized over fixing the power grid, but still: thanks. It did not go unappreciated. Thousands more people will have read the book because you told the Bullock Texas State History Museum to give us the virtual bum’s rush than if you’d just ignored us for five more hours. I can say with great certainty how well ignoring me works. A lifetime of experience attests to the efficacy of same. And yet.
In ignoring the obvious and most effective course of action, you showed true leadership. The haste with which you leapt to our aid could not but stir the soul and move the heart of even your most determined detractors, of which I was one until your generous act bore home to me the shame and error of my ways. Again: thanks.
Surely you watched with pride the result of your leadership as we, stunned into abject adoration, regarded your sudden and quiet absence from the scene after that one tweet with quivering (yes, WE WERE A’QUIVER) passionate intensity. First you killed us, then you claimed us, and then you left us, but that troika of thrusting derring do remade us into a topic of national discussion. Less three book writers than passengers on your trireme, but if Ceasar were from Baltimore. It could also be a galley. I’m trying to be precise here.
We, rising and falling your tide—which, another has written, waits for no man—could but conclude that this was all your intent. We are all gentlemen, after all, and a gentleman could never have meant that tweet. “Fact-free” was your Balthasar, by which he made your noble intent of your scurrilous act known. A code, if you will. No gentleman of your obvious intelligence and discernment could possibly mean such codswallop.
Again: thanks.
Without you banning our book about Texas history from the Texas history museum, Forget the Alamo would just have been a book. Thanks to your deft maneuver, Forget the Alamo has become part of Alamo lore. You haven’t just increased our sales but lifted our book from the history section and entered it into history.
I have the honor to be your obedient servant,
J. Stanford
How I’m getting through this
Getting cancelled
Hiking the Nambe Lake Trail
Hiking White Sands National Park
Revising by changing my POV (h.t T.F.)
Looking forward to the paperback edition
And then talking some more about writing
Talking smack to a host who won’t read the book because words
What I’m reading
Samantha Grasso: “America Will Defend Its Myths to the Death Before Admitting the Truth” - This might be the smartest thing written about the Bullock Affair
These so-called Texas “culture” “warriors” of the GOP are either playing three-dimensional chess by getting a book event for Forget the Alamo canceled, or they’re the silliest pieces of shit to ever come into office who have no idea what they’ve just done. Before last week, I had no clue about this book, and I wonder if I would have found it as quickly after its publishing, or really, ever, at all, if it weren’t for Abbott and Patrick trying to cancel book events because they were afraid that people would believe these authors and forget the Alamo.
Maria Popova: “How Memory Makes Us and Breaks Truth: The Rashomon Effect and the Science of How Memories Form and Falter in the Brain” - h/t L.R.
…our memory only retains a fraction of what we have attended to in moments past. In the act of recollection, we take these fragments of fragments and try to reconstruct from them a totality of a remembered reality, playing out in the theater of the mind — a stage on which, as neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has observed in his landmark work on consciousness, we often “use our minds not to discover facts, but to hide them.”
Jason Stanford: “Texas Republicans rush to guard the Alamo from the facts” - Second byline in the Washington Post!
I’ll leave it to First Amendment scholars to say whether forbidding a state facility to host a conversation because of the contents of a book constitutes censorship. As a Texan, I’m just embarrassed to be governed by politicians who quaver at the prospect of a single uncomfortable conversation. If Texans were tough enough to fight at the Alamo, they should be tough enough to talk about why.
Sharyn Vane: “Don’t ‘Forget the Alamo’” - In which I point out a logical fallacy.
When the Bullock withdrew as host, the Writers’ League of Texas offered to continue with the event that night on a different platform, but deferred to the authors’ decision of how to proceed. The logistics of notifying all Bullock-registered attendees of a venue swap on short notice were untenable, Stanford said. “That’s like saying, ‘The restaurant’s closed, but you can still have dinner.’”
What we’re watching
Chris Tomlinson forgot the Alamo on Joy Reid’s show on Monday.
What I’m listening to
Leading of the additions to The Experiment’s Spotify playlist is Leon Bridges, who has a new album coming. “Why Don’t You Touch Me” is an early look at how he’s bringing his soul sound into a contemporary space.
The New Pornographers dropped off my radar a few years back. “High Ticket Attractions,” from 2017’s Whiteout Conditions, is good stuff.
Laura Mvula got so ‘80s with her latest r&b album that it should come with parachute pants. “Safe Passage” works for me, though.
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Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of the American Myth by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and myself is out from Penguin Random House.
Just trying to figure out how to entice Dan Patrick into reviewing my blog-published book. It has some of his favorite themes in it - historical entrenched racism in Texas and even, oh my, what to do with the Alamo. I'd understand completely if he panned it and wanted to warn all his followers not to access it....