Texas is a Real Education

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I flew down to Texas last week to get out of my tiny bubble on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and see that this is a big country that includes people who don’t think as I do nor even wish to. And from Texas I took my family to California to be among people who think as I did when I was younger but with uninhibited extravagance. It was quite a trip.

On Election Day, I expected Wonder Woman to win who fights for justice, peace, and equality, and she did not. It goes against what Miss Mortenson taught us in tenth-grade civics class so I went to Texas to try to make sense of it. Miss Mortenson believed in newspapers that tell the truth, the American ideal of the intrepid reporter who can’t be bought, and when I landed in Houston, I saw we’d arrived in the land of Fox — it was on giant screens in airport waiting areas and cafés — the network that coagulated entertainment and news by telling its audience what they wanted to believe and thanks to the Australian Rupert Murdoch, 70% of Republicans believe the 2020 election was stolen and Biden was illegitimate, and there is the heart of the illness in this country, the willingness to believe what you know is not true in order to think more of yourself and less of other people.

Texas presents stylistic differences, for sure: no adult Minnesota male would walk down a concourse dressed in a cowboy outfit and no self-respecting waitress would addresses a stranger as Darling but here it comes with the job. You see people enjoying a whiskey highball with breakfast. There’s plenty of plastic surgery. One walks around averting one’s eyes. And I shrink at the sight of young women competing at cuteness, 18-year-olds working hard at being 11 or 12, squealing, yelping, yipping.

I got a car service at the airport and the driver filled me in a little. I asked her, “What would a Democrat need to do to win statewide in Texas?” She said, “Become a Republican.” I asked her if Democrats have any hope. She said, “We did until this year and now we’re just scared. Nobody likes Ted Cruz and still he got reelected. When Texas got hit by a winter storm and the power went out and Houston was in the 30s and Cruz flew to Cancún for a holiday, we were sure we could beat him, but no. When people vote for someone they despise, that’s serious.”

The pool at the hotel had a swim-up bar where you could order a grasshopper or a martini. Looking around I saw bulges on men’s hips where they seemed to be carrying hardware under their jackets, perhaps an electric drill or a hammer. And plastic is everywhere, plastic abounds. No recycling bins in sight.

After a few days we flew to California and a mountain resort that offers birdwatching and pottery-making, self-guided meditation, olive oil tastings, and a spa that offers a flower seed scrub and body polishes and an exfoliating experience with a traditional Chumash narrative. There are artists in residence. Chefs create dishes from local growers. There are “impactful group experiences.” At the restaurant, you can order vegan lasagna with roasted root vegetables or lavender lemonade. Lavender grows on the grounds and roses and many varieties of herbs. The resort has a policy of “wildlife acknowledgement,” meaning “do not approach and do not feed.” There is little plastic in evidence and recycling bins everywhere.

Clearly the country has chosen cowboys and highballs over meditation and the country is about to get an education. Thanks to the highly selective teaching of history, I grew up a patriotic optimist before the era of resentful billionaires. The Fords and the Rockefellers were grateful tycoons and endowed foundations to do good things unlike Elon Musk who paid a quarter-billion for the privilege of advising the incoming president. Back in the days of cursive writing and table manners, this was considered Conflict of Interest.

Some of my best friends are earnest progressive Democrats who are passionate about transgender rights and when I tell the joke about the transgender Christmas tree whose pronouns are tree/trim suddenly I become an enema. But I’m troubled to see corruption in broad daylight accepted as normal. We’ve arrived at an oligarchy more brutal than the one Thomas Keillor fled when he sailed from Yorkshire in colonial times. So onward we go. We are about to get the government that Texas voted for.

Garrison Keillor © 12.29.24