D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
June
2009
The Best Little Rebellion in Texas
Don't they know that "Texas" is just "taxes" spelled sideways?
With apologies to all our friends and neighbors in the great state of Texas, we must say, with all best wishes: Don't let the door hit you in the backside on your way out.
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By "out" we mean out of the United States of America, as Texas Gov. Rick Perry recently intimated — that's a nice way of saying "threatened" — during one of those anti-tax protest rallies. Flush with anti-Washington fervor, Perry told the crowd, "When we came into the union, in 1845, one of the issues was that we would be able to leave if we decided to do that."
(Technically, the governor was incorrect, but we're not ones to let a little historical inaccuracy keep the Lone Star State from saying, "See ya, pardner. It's been a great little 164 years, but we're packin' our 10-gallon hats and equally oversized egos and hittin' the trail, solo.")
The governor went on, in the sort of tone Texas lawmen have used in a thousand old Western movies to let the bad guys know they didn't cotton to black hats taking over the town or their gal, "My hope is that America, and Washington in particular, pays attention. We've got a great Union. There's absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, who knows what might come out of that."
Perry might well have added, "Heck, we've seceded before and we can do it again!" One of the great tragedies of history, in retrospect, was that Gen. Sherman's March to the Sea didn't find a way to detour through Dallas and wind up in Houston, so Texans might have come away from the Civil War with a sharper understanding of the consequences of wild talk. You don't hear folks in Georgia speak much about secession any more, even today.
But Perry's overheated rhetoric wasn't just a one-day wonder — the result, perhaps, of too many Lone Star beer and whiskey shots of pre-rally courage. Later, when a questioner asked the governor, "What do you think about the idea of secession or sovereignty for your state?," Perry replied, "Oh, I think there's a lot of different scenarios."
Lots of different scenarios? We're not naive enough to hope that one of those "scenarios" might involve the governor of Texas sitting down and reading the Constitution. As a commentary in The New Yorker recently put it, "Exiting the United States is not as simple as resigning from a restricted country club."
Nor do we dare hope that the president of the United States, having learned a lesson from his predecessor who was 16th in that office, might withdraw the rest of our troops from Iraq, send them to Austin, and give Gov. Perry what his fellow Texans might call "an ass-whoopin'."
Besides, the governor was only echoing the sentiments of, well, a shockingly high percentage of his fellow Texans. According to a follow-up poll, fully a third of all Texans and half of Texas Republicans are game to secede.
To which we say, "Shoot, let 'em!" Besides sparing the nation — what's left of it — the rantings of blowhard politicos like Gov. Perry and the overweening influence of Texas' antediluvian school boards on our textbooks, we'd enjoy a sweeping range of upsides.
Consider the world of sports. Football fans would no longer have to contend with the ambitions of the Dallas Cowboys (so long, "America's team"!) or their pugnacious owner and his deep pockets. Minus the Cowboys and the Houston Texans, the NFL (that's National Football League, so Texas would be included out) would be free to finally put a team in Los Angeles, the nation's second-biggest TV market. Hockey's Dallas Stars — stolen from Minnesota when we lived there, where they were the North Stars — would of course have to be repatriated as part of any secession deal.
Folks whose politics lean to the left could rejoice in the departure of Texas' 34 electoral votes and 32 mostly conservative congressional representatives. It would probably take no more than a generation of permanent minority status for the GOP in what's left of America to return to being the party that once embraced the likes of Nelson Rockefeller, William Scranton, Earl Warren and Margaret Chase Smith.
With Texas-based PC makers like Dell and Hewlett-Packard now facing stiff tariffs to get their goods into the USA, Apple Computer would thrive. The phrase "Abort, retry, fail?" would fade like a nightmare after awakening.
"Tex-Mex" food could return to being just "Mex."
The whole "Texas Hold-em" poker fad — well, let's just say they could keep it.
American Airlines — note the name — would have to relocate from its DFW headquarters. Albuquerque would be handy, wouldn't it?
In fact, New Mexico would especially benefit from jettisoning our oversized neighbor to the east — and not just because our Border Patrol funding would skyrocket. (Can't have them illegal Texans sneakin' into the USA, can we?) White Sands Missile Range and Holloman Air Force Base would suddenly assume even more crucial importance (ka-ching!) as the front line of our nation's defense against a rogue nation next door. All those troops from Fort Bliss — now abruptly on the wrong side of an international border — would have to go somewhere, too.
With the Johnson Space Center in Houston lost to us and gained by the new nation of Texas, New Mexico's Spaceport America might finally make sense and enjoy a role more important than rocketing the rich into almost-space. Indeed, Richard Branson could be encouraged to take his goony scheme to Texas, which seems to have an excess of people with too much money and too little sense.
Las Cruces in particular would benefit. As the first stop for refugees from Texas still loyal to the USA, it would boom. Ethnic neighborhoods — "Little Texas" — would pop up, where nostalgic expats would wallow in Lone Star suds and Willie Nelson tunes. Billions would flow into the city's ever-expanding array of banks from Texas oilmen unwilling to trust a fledgling nation led by the likes of President Rick Perry. (Think of Zurich after Germany went nuts in the Thirties.)
More important, Las Cruces would escape its currently onrushing fate as a "second city" to El Paso. Trust me, having once worked for the newspaper in St. Paul, Minn., being the smaller of "twin cities" is no fun. With El Paso as foreign a city as Juarez is now, Las Cruces could get its own commercial TV stations. Real airplanes flown by real airlines could land at "Las Cruces International Airport," and aviation folks would stop laughing at that name. The Sun-News could be printed locally again.
Even Silver City would benefit, as artists who chased the zeitgeist to trendy places like Marfa, Texas, unexpectedly found themselves in a second-tier foreign country. (At 24.6 million people, minus any "loyalists" who'd flee to the US, Texas would rank just above North Korea, Ghana and Yemen in population.) Such creative types might haul themselves and their galleries back to the US side of the border to escape obscurity, landing in places like Silver City.
Americans — real ones, not the temporary kind like in Texas — and Europeans in search of a "Wild West" experience might opt to skip Texas, its dodgy new currency and air of bellicosity. Instead of Fort Worth or San Antonio, tourists might prefer American locales like Silver City or Deming.
Besides, our area would enjoy a certain cachet from becoming the gateway to not one but two foreign countries. Silver City could replace its "Four Gentle Seasons" slogan with something tasteful like, "Close Enough to Texas But Not Close Enough to Smell the Cow Poop."
Re-routing I-10 to skirt Texas might be a hassle, it's true, but who in their right mind would want to make that long drive, anyway? Better just to catch one of the many flights out of the now-bustling Las Cruces airport. And, yes, Texas does still have some oil — maybe it'd join OPEC. But that'd just make the oil and gas still in the USA in places like New Mexico more important.
In any case, no hard feelings, y'all. We promise to come visit your newly re-minted nation as soon as the passport and visa requirements are worked out (and once we get all our shots, of course). Heck, the exotic allure of being a foreign country might make Texas more appealing — sort of like Canada with more cows and mosquitoes, without all that pesky cultural stuff.
We can hardly wait to revisit the Alamo, for one thing. It's been years since we last saw that crucial landmark of Texas' independence, and it will have new importance once Texas is independent again.
As we recall, though, the most striking thing about the Alamo is how small it is. Kind of like the new country called Texas — down there with Ghana, just behind Uzbekistan.