Texasmorphia
Stultus est sicut stultus facit.
Welcome to The Experiment, where there’s a little too much “yee” and not nearly enough “haw” in Texas these days. This is Memorial Day weekend in Austin, which means the legislature is wrapping up its' biennial work. Bad things are afoot at the Circle K my friends, and if they have their way, the legislature might end up making it illegal to discuss Forget the Alamo in classrooms, which would be a shame.
Want the latest on Forget the Alamo? It’s a best seller on Amazon, and Publisher’s Weekly raved: “Enriched by its breezy tone and fair-minded approach, this is an essential look at the Alamo from the perspective of today’s racial reckoning.” Stops on the virtual book tour include stops at BookPeople on June 9 and Politics & Prose on June 14. A lot of you have asked about an audio version; if you have Audible, you can listen to it for free. Pre-order it here before June 8.
This week I’m summing up the nonsense that is the Texas legislature, and Jack Hughes is looking at a different sort of nonsense with a modest proposal for Queen Elizabeth.
As always, we offer recommendations on what to do (make this tahini-parmesan pasta salad), read (this essay on the bias of noise), watch (The Mitchells vs. The Machines was a crowd pleaser), and listen to (Margaret Cho on Good One).
But first, here’s a 1956 official Texas Highway Map. The way things are going, we might need it.
I would like to start with an apology. Last week I compared elected officials in the Republican Party to fellas who had so lost their way that they had taken up “humping orange traffic cones.” This is horribly unfair and frankly beneath you, dear reader. You deserve better. After what’s been going down in the legislature here in Austin, I am forced to admit that what I wrote unfairly besmirched traffic cones of any color and in fact pylons in general. That redirecting vehicles could be compared to the legislative process in Texas could have the unfortunate effect of giving traffic jams a bad name, and for that I apologize. I will henceforth strive for a more exacting mode of expression.
The Texas legislature is a day care for moral cowards, myopic careerists, and, it must be said, poo-poo faces.
The Texas legislature is passing so many bad ideas into law that you’d think they were selling dumb in bulk at Costco. After one mass shooting, the Governor got out of his “thoughts and prayers” ditch and proclaimed that “there are things that can be done. Everyone knows it.” So this year the legislature did what everyone knows shouldn’t be done and legalized carrying handguns pretty much anywhere without training, a license, or any particular reason. And because most Texas politicians are more afraid of getting challenged in a Republican primary than of a mass shooting, they also went ahead and limited legal abortion until after the woman knows she’s pregnant.
Texas is passing so many bad ideas into law that you’d think they were selling dumb in bulk at Costco.
We had record turnout in Texas. A lot of people mistakenly believe there was not a “blue wave” of Democratic votes in Texas even though more Texas voted for Joe Biden than voted for any Democrat in state history. The problem, at least for Democrats, was that there was that the blue wave crested early, freaking out a ton more Republicans, and that red wave wiped out the blue wave. Democrats, despite record turnout, did not pick up a single seat in the legislature, which leads to the obvious conclusion that Republicans can dominate high-turnout elections in Texas. So of course the legislature, to protect Republicans from voters who evidently pose little threat, passed voter suppression laws that will, inevitably, rile up Democrats to vote in the midterms.
Stultus est sicut stultus facit.
And because the ballots 2020 election in Texas were, by all expert accounts, counted fairly and accurately, resulting as I’ve said big Republican wins including Donald Trump’s biggest-single electoral vote haul, the Texas legislature refused to confirm the governor’s appointee for Secretary of State who had overseen the election. Her sin? She didn’t say the election—which, again, people, Republicans won in Texas—was rigged.
You might be wondering how the legislature is handling the twin crises of the pandemic and Winter Storm Uri, that week in February when it got really cold and suddenly Texas became a failed state. We here in Texas are wondering whether the legislature is handling these crises.
The same Texans who froze in the dark will bail out the power companies that didn’t invest in measures that would have kept the power and heat on.
It’s not that their priorities are not on display. Some electrical companies are facing financial ruin because our power grid is built to work when things are going well but not to prevent things from going badly. So the legislature is going to bail them out by allowing them to add a total of $2.5 billion in fees over the next decade onto electric bills. If this doesn’t make sense it’s probably because we’re talking about dollars, but yes, you understand this correctly: The same Texans who froze in the dark will bail out the power companies that didn’t invest in measures that would have kept the power and heat on.
As far as COVID-19 goes, it’s important to remember the role our lieutenant governor played in this pandemic in March 2020 when we went on Tucker Carlson’s show, that Algonquin Roundtable of Derp, to suggest that senior citizens should be willing to sacrifice their lives to preserve the economy. “Those of us who are 70 plus, we’ll take care of ourselves. But don’t sacrifice the country,” he said.
He took “tak[ing] care of ourselves” literally. The lieutenant governor presides over the Texas senate, of course, so when the legislature came into session the following January, he required every senator to get tested every day, required masks be worn in the senate chamber, and imposed social distancing and quarantining requirements on top of that. But if you think that he’d come to Jesus about doing onto others and whatnot, you’d be mistaken. To be fair, being mistaken is quite common when it comes to the Texas legislature.
The problem is that sometimes the governor, in his vacillations between cautiously placating his anti-mask rightwing and cautiously placating the scientists, medical community, and other sorts hoping to survive the plague, would occasionally and not unreasonably suggest that certain limitations on social movement could preserve lives. He once went so far as to suggest that his orders preventing local governments from imposing lockdowns were a riddle for them to solve and that he was not opposed to them finding the solution. (Honestly, I am more than a little embarrassed that I typed that sentence. It’s the kind of sentence that leaves one sticky, as if I do not come away cleanly after touching on a subject. Texas confers upon its observers a feeling of shame, as if averting one’s eyes would be the kinder option. Suffice it to say that this really happened, I wish it had not, and I’m sorry to be the one to remind you of it.)
The lieutenant governor was nonplussed with the governor’s perfect imitation of the chicken on the weather vane, and the legislature made a priority of giving themselves veto power over the governor’s emergency powers. A bill currently in conference committee would reserve to the legislature the power to “restrict or impair the operation or occupancy of businesses” during an emergency, prevents the governor from moving an election date during a public emergency, and forbids local governments from declaring their own emergencies, all of which is at least consistent in this way: Exactly none of this is how any of this is supposed to work.
Exactly none of this is how any of this is supposed to work.
In conclusion, because this has to end somewhere, is a civics bill that would make teaching current events impossible because it would require, “to the best of the teacher ’s ability, strive to explore the topic from diverse and contending perspectives without giving deference to any one perspective.” In other words, Texas law would require that teachers “both sides” George Floyd’s murder, the January 6 insurrection, and even whether or not Joe Biden really won the 2020 election. This is a state mandated Looking-Glass, but look on the bright side: Think of how much Texas schools will save on electricity with this much gaslighting!
I could go on, but I never meant to get this far. I honestly intended to touch on the civics bill as a launching point to tell you about a love story at the Alamo, but I’ll get to that next week. This week, as we take a day to remember those who died in war wearing our flag, I had to force myself to face what a lot of my friends have been fighting, overmatched and outgunned, to stop, which is methodical institutionalizing of legislative dysmorphia. I look at the Texas legislature and do not see Texas, only madness.
God bless Texas, and hurry.
By George
by Jack Hughes
At 95, Queen Elizabeth is a bit overdue for planning her successor. The next in line, Prince Charles, is old and unpopular, at least compared to the next in line, William, who is getting pummeled in a protracted PR war with his brother, Harry, who can do no wrong. What’s a Queen to do? Give the crown to her great-grandson? “I know what you’re thinking,” writes Jack Hughes. “Isn’t George VII just ‘VII’ years old? Well, first, he’s almost eight.”
Read it here.
How we’re getting through this
Cultivating enemies
Making Tahini-Parmesean Pasta Salad
Getting anywhere in 20 minutes or less
Shuddering at the carnage in journalism
Making Braised Chicken With Gochujang
What I’m reading
3 smart people: “Bias Is a Big Problem. But So Is ‘Noise.’” - Sent this to a ton of people at work.
No noise-reduction techniques will be deployed, however, if we do not first recognize the existence of noise. Noise is too often neglected. But it is a serious issue that results in frequent error and rampant injustice. Organizations and institutions, public and private, will make better decisions if they take noise seriously.
Natalie B. Compton: “30 observations from my first vaccinated flight” - I’m puzzled why fully vaccinated people are still afraid.
Why do I always buy a worse seat on a worse airline because it’s $50 cheaper, then spend that same amount on a terrible meal at an airport chain restaurant?
Nicholas Confessore: “Michael Lewis Chronicles the Story of Covid’s Cassandras”- This is depressing.
Not quickly enough. The aliens had landed. The virus was already among us. By the time it was politically convenient to act, the pandemic was already too late to stop.
Edward-Isaac Dovere: “The Inside Story of Joe Biden’s Most Fateful Decision” - I hate how reporters mistake what they observe for the inner workings of a campaign. He didn’t get the inside story, but he did get access.
She wanted to tell him, she needed to tell him, but she was shaking. He came in close. She said it again: Maybe losing his son, losing so much, was what had to happen to make him president right now, for this moment. “God,” she said, “has a strange sense of humor.”
Sally Quinn: “The End of D.C.’s Elite Social Scene” - More self-aware than I expected.
Ritual, in every society, plays an important and necessary role. These institutions will surely be replaced slowly with more meaningful and relevant ones. Watch what the Bidens do. They will point the way toward inspired new versions of old rituals.
What I’m watching
The Dry, a clever who-done-it starring Eric Bana, is worth your time.
But definitely make time for The Mitchells versus the Machines, which is visually inventive and thematically appropriate (and interesting) for the whole family. It’s on Netflix. Check it out.
What I’m listening to
There are so many things I wanted to take from Margaret Cho’s turn on Good One: A Podcast About Jokes, but I realized I’d just be writing about her ideas, not mine. Come for the parallels between the AIDS crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic; stay for the creative necessity to bombing on stage. Also, I don’t know that there’s a smarter interviewer who disappears into the wallpaper as much as Jessie David Fox, so much so that I had to look up his name even though I regularly listen to this podcast.
I don’t think I’ve ever understood that I’m a mammal quite as well as I do since I listened to this edition of the TED Talks Daily podcast hosted by our pal, Elise Hu.
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Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of the American Myth by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and myself comes out June 8 from Penguin Random House. There is no better way to support this book than to pre-order a copy. You’re going to love reading what really happened at the Alamo, why the heroic myth was created, and the real story behind the headlines about how we’re all still fighting about it today.
