How could anyone have possibly seen this coming from a mile away?
We're all worried about black swans, but the gray rhinos are stampeding right at us.
Woke up this morning to a strange email crediting me with influencing the Texas Republican Party platform. Apparently the delegates — amid their celebrations of Pride by kicking out the Log Cabin Republicans and calling for the end to “homosexual marriage” — took time to make various declarations about a historical site down in San Antonio.
Let me say first of all how much Bryan, Chris and I appreciate the Texas Republican Party’s dedication to promoting our book, Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. Hey, when an ex-public official started a blog focused on our book, we were at first taken aback. But by the time state legislators started denouncing our book and then state GOP chair Allen West commemorated Flag Day by calling us “nefarious cancel culture cretins,” we’d figured it out. The Texas GOP was not going to let our book fail.
Frankly, we were flattered, but it wasn’t enough. After three weeks, sales were flagging. Then Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick resorted to outright government censorship to lift our little book into the national spotlight, making it a best seller. Thanks to Patrick’s personal intervention into the market, for a hot second we were all anyone could talk about. We sold out Amazon — twice — and when the Christmas book-buying season came long, we sold out Book People. That’s all thanks to a hero named Dan Patrick. He was from the government, by god, and he was here to help. Thanks!
When the paperback edition came out earlier this month, though, Republican politicians — even the ones who keep running and losing over and over again — were silent. I felt like the coronavirus. In 2020 I was such a big deal, and now… nothing. I’m still here, but no one cares. Republicans were busy trying to make it illegal to be trans, or, I dunno, teach school or something.
I felt like the coronavirus. In 2020 I was such a big deal, and now…
I should have known better. Those Republicans weren’t going to forget our little paperback launch! They were just picking their moment. This weekend, a little more than 5,000 delegates (9,600 were eligible to come, and about that many usually do) gathered in convention center in Houston. Oh, what a time they had. They booed Senator John Cornyn for seeking middle ground on gun safety, spent more time thinking about gay people having sex than most gay people do, and physically confronted congressman Dan Crenshaw, who lost an eye in combat as a Navy SEAL, and calling him “eye-patch McCain” for criticizing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
I know, I know, I figured that was it, just a bunch of boomers swanning about in their best crazypants. With all this cuddling up to insurrections and dictators, they would never have time to remember the Alamo.
Folks, this is why I don’t gamble. I should have known better. Yesterday, they made the Alamo a whole plank in the platform. A whole plank! The Alamo should be “remembered and not ‘reimagined,’” run by Texans and not by the United Nations, and keep its ledgers public. They demanded that anyone running the Alamo had to “affirm and emphasize the intrinsic significance of the 1836 battle in telling the story” (in other words, screw you, conquistadors) and not move the Cenotaph.
“Visitors to the Alamo should conduct themselves with decorum and reverence inside the shrine…”
And because one plank wasn’t enough, they snuck a little love into the plank on “Heritage”: “Visitors to the Alamo should conduct themselves with decorum and reverence inside the shrine, out of respect for the sacrifice of the heroes who are honored there.” Come to think of it, at least has precedence in world-class historical sites. That’s also the rule in Lenin’s Tomb.
Guys! That’s so sweet. We really weren’t expecting this. Yes, you really did surprise us! Really. Never saw this coming.
As nice as it is to be remembered by thousands of people wearing sequined sweatshirts and “Let’s Go Brandon” ball caps, I will admit some misgivings. As nice as it is for them to point the spotlight, however briefly, on the Alamo, we’re keeping some strange company on stage. I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but have you seen this?
Forget, for a second, the Texas Republican Party’s fixation on the gays. The platform calls homosexuality “an abnormal lifestyle choice,” which tells me that that a lot of them have certainly tried it. C’mon guys, stick with it! It’ll start to feel normal after a while. Honestly, the Texas Republican Party platform is more focused on two dudes having sex than Call Me By Your Name was. This platform couldn’t be more fixated on gay sex if it had an ad for Astroglide.
It used to be the scariest part of the Texas Republican Party was when they would LARP Leviticus. And that’s here, of course. To wit: gays. But now there’s stuff in here about the 2020 election being invalid. They say states shouldn’t have to follow federal laws if they don’t want, a legal theory called Nullification that was in vogue in the South before the last Civil War. I wonder if they will rebrand it before the next one?
But when I saw the plank saying that Texas should have a statewide referendum to determine whether to remain in the Union, the scales fell from my eyes. Good one, guys! You got me, I’m not afraid to admit it. I mean, wanting ignore Washington… I kind of get it. But wanting to hold an election to secede? Texas Republicans might be crazy — as well as so fixated on dudes having sex that Billy Eichner would tell them to take it down a notch — but they’re not stupid, right?
That’s when my dumb brain did that thing it normally does: minimized the danger. I applied logic and reason to the Texas Republican Party platform and categorized the whole thing as beyond the last reaches of sanity. Clearly, at some point, reasonable people would stop this from happening.
I put this to my buddy Frank Spring over Father’s Day brunch because, at the moment, it was impossible to draw S in to the conversation. Having regaled Frank of the enumerated tomfoolery in the platform, I had neglected to notice that S had become a quivering caldron of rage. Apparently her brain works differently that mine in that when the most dedicated partisans in the party controlling our state say they want something done, S considers it a solid possibility that it might happen. Also, she had ingested more caffeine than normal. So it was either the tea or the foundation-cracking realization that things will keep getting worse until their is more violence. One of those two, probably.
I put it to Frank that surely Texas was just peacocking a bit and wouldn’t do what it once did before, namely secede. There have to be enough reasonable people out there to see how Texas splitting off would leave the state without a proper military and thus vulnerable to invasion from Mexico. Had they thought through the implications — notably the deleterious impact this would have on fantasy sports — then obviously they never would have put in writing that they want to commit a little sedition, and by that I specifically mean again.
“So you’re wondering if these Republicans will do what they say they are going to do and which they’ve done before?” asked Frank. To his credit, he did not lean over the table and flick my ear. Instead, he explained what his friend Michele Wucker wrote about the difference between black swans and gray rhinos.
“Nothing to do about that one, right? No one could have seen that coming.”
Basically, big things happen — 9/11, the housing bubble popping in 2009, Enron imploding, Pearl Harbor — and we all look up at the people we hired to protect us and say, “What the hell, guys?” To which they shrug and shout down at us, “Nothing to do about that one, right? No one could have seen that coming. ‘Twas a black swan that’s what it was.” And we all go, “Right, a black swan, right…” because believing that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t possibly have put Humpty Dumpty back together again is easier than questioning why they hell he was allowed to get up on that wall to begin with.
The truth is, the worst things happening to us have been coming from a long way away. They are what Wucker called gray rhinos, or “highly obvious but ignored threats.” Sure, you can be shocked that you’re getting a 100-year flood twice in three years, but have you really never heard of climate change?
Most things we think of as black swans were actually gray rhinos, coming at us in broad daylight. They knew we were vulnerable to a pandemic (and did nothing). George W. Bush got a presidential daily briefing titled “Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US,” and he played on his ranch. People were raising questions about the overheated housing market and speculative role of Wall Street in 2008 but were told to keep selling houses to anyone who could fog a mirror. Enron yelled at reporters who asked critical questions on earnings calls and bullied their way into what at the time was the biggest bankruptcy in American history. And someone sent a memo warning Washington that the Japanese were planning to attack Honolulu, but apparently it got lost in the paper shuffle.
These weren’t black swans, explained Frank, but what Wuker calls gray rhinos. A gray rhino is the thing charging straight at us that we try to explain away. Like, sure they tried to nullify the election results, but enough Republicans stood up to stop them. And, sure January 6 was awful, but the good guys won and now a bunch of those insurrectionists are going to jail, and besides, Joe Biden is president, right?
That gray rhino keeps charging right at us while we read a Time article about how two-thirds of Southern Republicans want to secede from the United States, again, and we laugh it away, because how unlikely is it that the thing that happened before could happen again? And now that they spent a whole weekend together to write down that, yes, they really do want to do this thing that they’ve done before, even now, my brain is telling me to discount the most literal interpretation of what they say they want to do.
Even so, plans for sedition aside, thanks for promoting our book that, come to think of it, focuses on the first time Texas seceded from a country, in this case Mexico. I hope I’ll be able to count on you for my next book, tentatively titled, It’s All Fun and Games Until the Shooting Starts. I’ve got a lot of material for the first part. I’m just not sure how this one will end.
Jason Stanford is the co-author of NYT-best selling Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. He works at the Austin Independent School District as Chief of Communications and Community Engagement, though he would want to point out that these are his personal opinions and his alone, but you already knew that. Follow him on Twitter @JasStanford.
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Buy the book Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick banned from the Bullock Texas History Museum: Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of the American Myth by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and myself is out from Penguin Random House. Out in paperback now!
Surely they secretly love you for giving them a target to stir up the right wingnut zealots. Hope you don't have to move due to the excessive "love" they send your way 🤣🤣🤣