Texas: The "Show You" State

The You Tube video “Shopping in Texas” circulating among my email friends features a woman in a boutique trying to open a classic whiskey decanter. Finally, it opens with a loud pop which prompts the rest of the patrons to draw their pistols and hand-turret them around the room. The video keeps alive the stereotype of Texans as gun-slinging Second Amendment nut cases.
Rick Perry, the former cotton farmer and now right wing Obama bashing governor, joined his fellow tempestuous “tea party” goers in threatening to secede from the Union if the government doesn’t stop spending all of Texans’ hard-earned tax dollars on bailouts for corporations. He, of course, didn’t mention the long-term, on-going bailout of Texas cotton farmers who have received subsidies since at least the Eisenhower Administration. But let’s not muddy the waters. Let’s be clear by telling half-truths and ignoring inconvenient ones (Whoops! Wrong expression! Inconvenient truth belongs to that commie-liberal turn-coat southerner former VP Gore and his Global Warming nonsense.)
Most Texans don’t fit the stereotype. But the stereotype stays very much alive because of the few who do fit. And when the governor of Texas joins the few, he helps reinforce the stereotype with rebar. Nice going, Rick. You’ll show them.
The American political Right Wing is a bird with multiple right wings, and no left. Therefore, it doesn’t fly. It just flaps its wings and scurries around the barnyard in circles, much like a chicken with its head cut off. It has the wing against gay marriage; the wing against evolution; the wing against illegal immigration; the wing against corporate bailouts; the wing against current deficit spending but not against Bush league deficit spending; the wing against all deficit spending except right wing earmarks. The only difference between the Texas Right Wing and the American is that the Texas variety thinks it’s an eagle.
Imagine if Texas Republicans, for instance, actually wanted to get rid of illegal immigration. They don’t of course, except when they are wearing their Republican hats. The inconvenient truth is undocumented workers once provided cheap labor for contractors, agri-businesses, and factories. They helped smaller businesses that couldn’t afford to ship their manufacturing abroad to compete with those multi-national ones that do. They kept the cost of produce down in the supermarket and they prevented huge losses of crops because they were the most available, efficient, and cheap source of labor for domestic agriculture. Those same business owners and farmers will also holler about unions and the high price of documented labor. And yet, those same business owners will put on their Republican hats and shout about those undocumented Mexican migrants who break the law by crossing the border, and shoot themselves in their economic foot. They would prefer to turn the Texas border into one long Alamo and shoot the lawbreakers on principle, even if the vigilante principle contradicts the economic one. But they’ll show you!
Let’s call Rick Perry’s bluff. Let’s put Texas on sabbatical for one year without pay. Let’s show Texas what life would be like without federal support. Let them distract their Obama-targeting secret militias with full-time employment on the Mexican border instead of the Feds spending federal tax dollars on National Guard troops and Homeland Security to do the job. Let them put their money where their mouth is. We don’t need their oil (they have little left), nor do we need their cotton (we can get it cheaper elsewhere). Let the “Show You” state show us how great life will be without the rest of us. Lone Star, Lone Ranger, You’re on your own. My guess is undocumented Mexicans, most documented ones, and most Mexican-Americans born in Texas would move out or stay out of Texas…and so would three-fourths of the rest of the state. It would end illegal immigration into Texas because no Mexican in his right mind would want to live there.
That self-destructive contradiction reminds me of a movie Rick Perry should see: Sergio Arau's 2004 film "A Day without a Mexican." The message of the movie is that southern California’s entire economy would shut down without Mexicans. And maybe he ought to take another look at the movie The Alamo. As I recall, it doesn’t have a very happy ending for the Texans.