Because Texas

“Now, in Russia, they got it mapped out so that everyone pulls for everyone else... that's the theory, anyway. But what I know about is Texas, an' down here....you're on your own.”

– Detective Loren Visser in the movie “Blood Simple.”

(This newsletter is the rebirth of a project I started in 2017. I was sending out dispatches from my website of the same name and getting good uptake. Feedback was terrific and several hundred subscribers signed up for the weekly report, and thousands were reading. But the standard required to make a small amount of revenue to cover time and expenses was daunting. And I was otherwise engaged with endeavors consuming an increasing amount of my time. I surrendered.

But along came Substack, which appears to be designed for what I was trying to achieve with my writing. My goal here is to offer information, insight, and maybe even entertainment. There will be personal experience in here since I provide a point of view. But my focus is on this confounding state, its myths and realities. I will write about travel, literature, history, movies, politics, and just life its ownself under the Lone Star.

It’s free to anyone who wants it, but those modest paid subscriptions, if you are inclined, can help fire the engines. Go ahead and be inclined. I’ll publish at least once a week, depending on interest, yours and mine. I will also post randomly with stories worth sharing and that are not part of the weekly newsletter).

House of the Rising Gun

The Texas legislature can be a rancid place where morality goes to putrefy in a stew of greed, ego, and even uncontrolled sexual impulse. I spent 22 years in the building as a reporter and heard stories of lobbyists, officeholders, bureaucrats, and even governors that I never wrote because they were too salacious for TV news, and impossible to corroborate.  

Nothing has changed.

I will not write too frequently about Texas lawmakers in this space; except when they make their usual trips out to the edge of the legal cracker and stare down into the abyss. Happens often enough. The latest story is not hard to believe. A lobbyist for one of the largest communications firms in Austin was reportedly being investigated by the state’s Department of Public Safety for allegedly slipping a date rape drug into a female capitol staffer’s cocktail. Everyone in the pink granite building is all atwitter trying to identify the victim and the perpetrator.

Maybe Tip O’Neill, the former U.S. House Speaker, meant to say, “All politics is sexual,” and not “local,” because this latest incident is only a change in form to historic behavior. I personally knew of four prominent male legislators in the Texas house who kept a chalkboard on the kitchen wall in a house they shared. They marked an X next to the names of interns they claimed to have slept with and turned the conquests into a game. And two legislative sessions previous to the current gathering, the Daily Beast reported on a state senator who invested his time in young women and not much in transformative lawmaking. He reportedly offered a young capitol staffer a roll of hundreds and asked if she wanted to “fuck tonight.”

Hell, the body of the Texas Senate includes a doctor, Charles Schwertner (R) of Georgetown, who was investigated by the University of Texas at Austin for sending unsolicited lewd and sexually explicit pictures (Did the senator text dick pics?) to a graduate student. Schwertner denied the allegations but did resign from his position as chairman of a health committee after claiming the photos were sent by a third party, though he never identified that person. (Was it SATAN??!!!)

Only took one session for redemption to be offered Schwertner in the eyes of the Texas GOP. Lt. Governor “Damn” Patrick has given him two leadership roles this year, including a Special Committee on Constitutional Issues.

Which might be the perfect place to send yet another gun bill.

And that’s exactly what happened. The Texas House had already passed a measure that was first labeled “permitless carry,” which means no training, background checks, or anything to get in the way of you carrying a gun. You got a gun? Take it wherever you want to go, unless specifically prohibited by a business. Permitless sounded scary and the law became Constitutional Carry, but it slowed down in the Texas senate until Schwertner introduced his own bill and sent it to the new committee he chairs, which was empaneled with permitless carry supporters, which Patrick and he selected.

A seventh-grade civics class could predict the fate of this new legislation, and Gov. Greg Abbott has said publicly he will sign it into law. The rest of the nation reels over mass shootings and is trying to come up with methodologies to improve gun safety and Texas is about to make guns as available as party favors and free drink coupons.

I do not believe it will be long before we are giving them to toddlers, tucking them in for night-night with baby’s first .45 caliber and whispering the dream to them of growing up and having their very own AR-15.

Not to worry, though. There is a good chance our concerns are being recognized by a potential dick-pic texting, good Christian conservative medical doctor.

Thanks, Senator Dick Pic!

Oh, and that investigation into the date rape “roofie” by the lobbyist and capitol staffer? It was dropped. Not enough evidence, the DPS said.

War of the Words

You might not get much policy from Texas U.S. Senators Ted Cruz (R – Cancun) and John Cornyn (Constantly Concerned), but you can rely on them for consistent humor. They never disappoint in that category. Neither of the two were bothered about a surge of people at the border until we got our new president. Cruz and Cornyn stayed away from La Frontera while Trump was in the White House and said nothing about children being plucked from the arms of their parents and kept in cages.

Suddenly, however, a group of 18 Republican senators felt a need to have some adventure. The polls are showing the GOP that the only vulnerability Joe Biden has appears to be on the matter of immigration and the rush to America from the south. I guess that’s why Cruz waited until midnight to go stand in the cane breaks along the Rio Grande near Mission and talk about the “cartel members and human traffickers” he could hear on the other side, swinging their flashlights and mocking the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol.

I am just confident as hell that smugglers of humans and narcotics want to attract attention to themselves during the dead of night to let American law enforcement know their locations. Cruz is a phony drama queen.

Four years ago, when masses of unaccompanied minors began showing up at the border in the Rio Grande Valley, I was called upon to come manage communications surrounding the issue for some business organizations and NGOs. Even the most dispassionate of observers had to have been moved by the frightened children, hungry, scared, a thousand miles from home and no parents.

My advice was to urge everyone to stop referring to the situation as an “immigration crisis” and start talking about it as an “humanitarian crisis.” This allowed journalists, churches, and social organizations to turn their focus toward helping children without fretting over the optics and politics. The nature of coverage of the story changed, and dramatically.

America continues to treat the symptoms and not search for a cure to the cause of what is happening at our border, and Washington consistently lacks any kind of understanding of the trans-national culture that exists between the U.S. and Mexico. While I am no expert, I lived on the border for many years, and have reported on its issues for decades, and have ridden bicycles, motorcycles, driven cars and trucks, hiked, rafted, and flown along probably every mile of the river course from El Paso to Boca Chica Beach near Brownsville, and I continue to use my spare time to return to the region because it is unique in the Americas.

What I know is that the people who live in that part of the world view the Rio Grande as connective tissue, not as a separating construct, and any policy that does not consider their interests will be a miserable failure. “The river,” they frequently say, “has never divided us.” The other thing they laugh about is the futility of constructing a wall. Building a 20-foot wall only prompts the purchase of a 21-foot ladder.

That’s why a wall remains a flat-assed stupid idea, and it’s not something you can improve with just linguistics. When GOP pollster Frank Luntz came up with his latest notion, more than a few people probably found it offensive. Luntz decided the solution was to simply re-brand the wall as a “barrier,” which would defuse resistance to the idea. His focus groups of voters indicated that might also open up a political pathway to citizenship for people brought to the U.S. as children. Conservatives, he has argued, will support the “Dreamers,” if they can have their barrier.

Why in the hell does there have to be such linkage? There doesn’t. And president Biden has just let it be known that he has cancelled all construction contracts for the wall. Unused funds will be returned to the U.S. military and used to mitigate environmental damage on the border. And now we are stuck with a monument to our ignorance? What’s next?

“Mr. Biden, tear down this wall!”

Current politics ought to prove to Mr. Luntz and Republicans that every issue is not just a marketing problem. A wall along our border with Mexico is a cultural, political, and environmental monstrosity, and no political compromise or language will make the concept acceptable. It also ignores the proximate causes of people leaving Mexico and the Northern Triangle countries of Central America, which include climate change hurricanes and no shortage of American imperialism.

What we really need is a “barrier” to ignorance.

Hemingway and Texas

Ken Burn’s six hours on PBS about Ernest Hemingway was, as is most of his work, masterful. But he failed to explore an interesting narrative thread that would have added even more intrigue to the glories and tragedies of the writer.

In the spring of 1934, a young man named Arnold Samuelson hitchhiked down from Minnesota to Key West with the goal of meeting and learning from Hemingway. Samuelson was burning with the desire to write and he thought his best chance was to learn from the acknowledged expert on story telling. Hemingway, gruff with intruders into his work rhythms, answered the door when Samuelson knocked, and, ultimately, gave him a job on his boat, the Pilar. His tasks were to keep the craft clean and write a daily ship’s log, which he did for a year. In the spaces between, he gleaned what he could about writing from Papa H.

Samuelson fretted greatly about writing and finances, a common emotion for every writer. Hemingway was impressed enough with the young man’s enthusiasm and determination to call him, “The coming American novelist” in one of his letters. Samuelson was certainly armed with experience; he had wandered the U.S. as a hitchhiker and had ridden the rails to take all kinds of jobs.

But Samuelson, who had published a few articles about Hemingway after he left the Keys, ended up in a kind of psychic stasis and never completed a novel. There is speculation he was unable to recover from his sister’s mutilation murder in Los Angeles. He scribbled notes and agonized and started and stopped projects and seemed irrevocably tethered to his year on the Pilar. No experience seemed to surpass the time spent with the celebrated author.

Eventually, Samuelson drifted down to Robert Lee, Texas, a town in Coke County that had been named after the Confederate Civil War general. Lee had served as a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army’s Second Cavalry for five years in Texas leading up to the War Between the States and had camped for a while on the Colorado River near the townsite that bears his name.

There wasn’t much for Arnold Samuelson to do in the empty reaches of West Texas. He became a local handyman, junkyard operator, and a clandestine curator of a manuscript about his time with Hemingway. His daughter discovered the stack of pages after his death and worked relentlessly to whip it into publishable shape. With Hemingway: A Year in Key West and Cuba is interesting because it shows the American icon’s life when he was at the peak of his powers, though there is little insightful from its author. Certain passages, however, reveal how Samuelson was influenced by the declarative style of his hero, and leaves the reader wondering what he might have written had he found his voice. Samuelson died of a heart attack on his property shortly after returning home from buying his first new motorcycle.

There is also a brilliant bit of writing about Arnold Samuelson’s tragic life in the book, Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost. Written by Paul Hendrickson, I consider it to be possibly the best biography of the author, and, yes, I’ve read them all. But please don’t mistake me as someone impressed by his hairy-chested, bullfight-loving, great white hunter bullshit. I do admire, however, anyone who lives out their dreams and experiences life at its fullest, and there is an easy argument to make that was his grandest accomplishment.

My view is that another writer from Northern Michigan became the author Hemingway envisioned for himself. Jim Harrison produced numerous novels, memoirs, non-fiction narratives, and poetry, and was a food critic for Esquire magazine. Harrison is best known for his novella, Legends of the Fall, but all his books ring like a bell, and a few might be suffused with immortality.

Dan Crenshaw’s Eyes

The Texas congressman continues to face the frightening possibility of blindness. Crenshaw lost an eye to an Improvised Explosive Device while serving as a Navy Seal in Afghanistan in 2012. But the explosion also damaged the remaining eye, caused a cataract and tissue damage, which is what led to his recent retina detachment. The “good eye” is not presently good.

Crenshaw’s politics aside, which I find utterly abhorrent, he does not deserve this potential disability. No one does. Retinal detachment surgery can be horrifying, and it’s expensive. If you don’t have health care or are burdened with a policy that has high deductibles, you could end up in a financial mess. Crenshaw, though, as a member of congress and a military vet, has full health care coverage. His fears are not financial, at least not now.

To say the retina is delicate is imprecise. The tissue that lines the back of the eye and captures light to send to the macula and optic nerve is only four microns thick. When it detaches, often spontaneously or through trauma, doctors use various techniques to reattach it to the scleral wall. Usually, this involves changing the shape and the pressures in the eye by using a scleral buckle, a silicon belt that is put around the eye. Laser is used to “tack” the retina back against the sclera, and either a gas bubble or silicone oil is injected into the eye to hold it in place while it heals and re-adheres to the back of the eye. Unlike gas, the oil has to later be removed. Crenshaw, like many detachment surgery patients, was given the gas therapy and had to stay face down so the gas would float against the back of the eye and hold the healing tissue in place.

The second-term congressman, who represents parts of West and North Houston, comes from one of the most Gerrymandered districts in Texas. His conservatism had him singing in harmony with the conspiracy theorists who claimed the presidential election was stolen from Trump and he supported the lawsuit by the indicted Texas attorney general that sought to have Biden ballots tossed out in states that he had won.

More relevant, though, is the fact that Crenshaw has voted against almost every measure that came before congress and was designed to expand public health care. His own bill, which claims to improve outcomes but is nonsensical, is a direct care policy that requires the patient to pay monthly fees to a doctor for visits. None of those payments would cover the kind of surgery Crenshaw just received in an attempt to save his vision. A comprehensive policy is needed, one with manageable deductibles and premiums, which is exactly what paid for his eye operations.

I know the fear Dan Crenshaw is experiencing. My right retina detached in 2011 and I underwent nine operations trying to save my vision. I also went on a quest to find the most capable surgeon in the world to operate on my eye, but I got to him too late. Although my vision could not be saved, I met one of the most interesting and accomplished people I had ever encountered in Dr. Steve Charles and I wrote a book about him and my experience.

I am completely blind, however, in my right eye, and wear a custom prosthesis over the atrophied globe. It is a hand-painted ceramic, which amounts to a giant contact lens, and is mostly indistinguishable from the healthy left eye.

I also lost money, and am still recovering, financially. I am self-employed and bought an affordable insurance with a high deductible, which also paid not much more than half of total costs after deductibles. The nine surgeries over three years were as painful emotionally and physically as they were financially.

Like everyone else in the country he has bravely served, though, I wish congressman Crenshaw only the best outcome. I hope his vision improves.

And his politics, too.  

Y’all Aboard?

Rail travel might get another chance at viability in the states with “Amtrak Joe” in the White House, and the first, true, high-speed project is close to being shovel-ready in Texas. Texas Central is working to build a bullet train in the state on dedicated tracks between Houston and Dallas. The train, which will use the latest in Japanese technology, will run at over 200 miles per hour, and is estimated to take about 15,000 vehicles off of I-45, one of the deadliest highways in America. The project has already passed the two largest federal government obstacles related to the environment and safety standards.

But money?

Dollars are always the issue on advanced rail projects in the U.S. In the rest of the civilized world, national governments invest in infrastructure like mass transit by rail. We don’t, very often, and certainly very little as a percentage compared to what gets spent on highway construction. The Texas Central train was initially estimated to cost around $10 billion but is now reportedly running at twice that amount. Although developers had hoped to begin work on the route in the first half of this year, there remain questions about funding.

A Republican Texas congressman, Kevin Brady, says plans for construction to start this year are not realistic, and simply won’t happen. He also said taxpayers will not be invested in the bullet train, which, if true, might be fatal to the vision.

Two previous attempts at high-speed projects in the U.S. were doomed by private funding mandates. The “Texas Triangle,” which was planned to connect the state’s four largest cities was a consortium of the French TGV technology, Bombardier of Canada, and a construction partnership. Unfortunately, the state legislature refused to provide a penny, and Herb Kelleher, who founded Southwest Airlines by flying to those cities, spent what amounts to a Saudi fortune on lobbyists to kill the project, which he did.

The outcome was similar for a Florida bullet train that was in planning stages around the turn of the century. The Florida Overland Express, branded as the FOX, was to run from Key Biscayne and Miami up the coast to the cape and then over to Orlando and Tampa. Kelleher, unfortunately, had only recently started flying into those communities, too, and didn’t want to lose passengers, which meant he went to Tallahassee and rolled out the big lobbyists.

I was involved in the public relations and political affairs of the FOX, and we managed to get all of the appropriate legislation approved with the exception of funding. In 2000 dollars, the 280-mph train was going to cost just over $6 billion, but the outgoing governor, Lawton Chiles, refused to sign the spending measure and leave it for his successor, who happened to be Jeb! Bush.

The politics of the situation were cruel and predictable. Kelleher, air transportation associations, highway builders, all leaned hard on Jeb! and gave him big dollars in his run for governor. These were the same interests that were dangling presidential campaign money in front of his brother, George W. of Texas. As one of his first public acts as governor of Florida, Jeb! vetoed funding for the FOX train, and later denigrated it as a “little choo choo,” and it became “The Train that Never Was,” even after voters mandated its construction with a referendum. Both of Jeb!’s terms seemed dedicated to stopping high-speed rail travel in his state, which he did, effectively, while also saving criticisms for the proposed funding President Obama was talking about for federal projects involving fast trains.

The Texas Central train’s fate is also fraught with political and financial peril. There is, however, a new president with an infrastructure bill that is likely be passed and will provide $80 billion dollars for railroads, including high-speed technology. Amtrak said it will add 30 new routes, if the bill is passed.

With apologies to Emily Dickinson, maybe the Texas bullet train “can stop and feed itself at tanks” of money from congress, “and then prodigious step.”

Terlingua Fe

You can no longer call it a ghost town. Terlingua, which was once the mining center of cinnabar, used to create mercury, began to disappear when demand declined. The old adobes started to crumble, and no one really noticed because the community had never acquired any kind of notoriety. There weren’t really any ghosts but not many people stayed, either. In the summer, Terlingua can feel like living at the center of the sun.

But it has long had a romantic ruggedness, up close to the western entrance of Big Bend National Park with a view of the Chisos Mountains and only a short walk to the Rio Grande. The town was revivified by a chili cookoff in 1967 when two journalists decided to have it out over whose pot was the tastiest. The event became legendary and grew annually. People came from all over the U.S. to participate as it opened up to the public and thousands competed over camp stoves in the high desert.

Whatever ghosts might have been in Terlingua can no longer afford a place to stay. The town at the lost edge of America and Texas is booming with pricey Airbnbs, restaurants, cocktail bars, and people who will help you have a desert “experience.” There are small adobes for rent that cost more than my first car for a few overnights, and shipping containers sitting up on a ridge line with bunks, sinks, toilets, wireless, and TV that are reportedly renting for $169 plus taxes.

The place is hard not to love, though, even with its neophyte profile. In the evenings, on the porch at the general store, there are still authentic people gathering to make music, dance, and drink as they watch the sun set the Chisos Mountains aglow in the east. But if you want to live there, some of real estate costs sound like Austin and Manhattan. This lovely little spot just down the hill from the general store can be yours for $2262.00 a square foot.

Can’t make me hate Terlingua, though. I still go there regularly, always will, and have been for too many years to recall, or change the habit. And I will always see it through the lens of Gary P. Nunn and Jerry Jeff Walker’s music……

The Campfire Has Gone Out

Those of us a certain age grew up on early black and white TV programs that informed our view of the world. TV westerns, which avoided the reality of how the West was actually settled, were still, usually, little morality plays. Three of the most popular were “Gunsmoke,” “The Rifleman,” and “The Lone Ranger.”

Chuck Connors, the star of “The Rifleman,” played a former Civil War soldier who lost his wife and settled in New Mexico with his son. In the show, Connor’s character, Lucas McCain and his son Mark, end up in situations that require ethics and marksmanship. Mark was played by Johnny Crawford, who was also one of the original Mouseketeers at Disneyland.

Whenever his dad would get injured or nicked by gunfire, Crawford’s character came running and wailing, “Paw! Paw!”

Crawford served two years in the U.S. Army in the late 60s and had a long and successful career as an actor in popular network television programs and as a musician with his own orchestra in California. He also was a lifelong member of the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association and the American Junior Rodeo Association. He had competed many times in calf roping, bronc riding, steer wrestling and bull riding.

Crawford’s remarkable life ended at age 75 on April 29, 2021 from Alzheimer’s, pneumonia, and Covid.

No one better to sing him out than Texas cowboy troubadour Don Edwards….

“Bid ‘em all adieu

We can hear the angels shout.

Oh, here they come to heaven,

The campfire has gone out.”