Texas: It’s bigger than France
By PAYAM SHARIFI
“Where are you from?”
We Americans are pathologically unable to give a simple answer to this question, going so far as to invent unseemly fractions more suited to a breakfast plate (i.e. “I am one seventeenth Danish”) than genealogy. After 20 odd years of struggling with this question myself and various attempts at something accurate yet edifying, I have decided that it is okay to rest on your laurels, and even better to be concise and controversial than wordy and weird.
“Texas,” I now respond with a restrained smile.
According to The Economist, the recent history of the United States can best be gleaned from the trajectories of certain “super” states and how their political and economical momentum has shaped the rest of the country. In the 1960–70s, New York and New Jersey led the way; in the 1980–90s, we had California’s economic miracle, a taste for leisurely excess, and Ronald Reagan.
Like it or not, we now live in the Texan era. With three presidents in a little more than four decades, Texas’ politico-economic formula has proved itself to be a winning one. Faced in any adolescent envy of my more sophisticated East and West coast relatives – twee Bostonians and glitzy Angelinos – I comforted with the thought that, at least, I knew my country. The Texas School Board requires that a full semester be dedicated to the history of the state. Forget France, Iran and Russia: “Remember the Alamo,” we were told by teachers with a Texas twang. For to understand Texas is to understand the aspirational model for a large part of the country – the state conveys a condensed, performance-enhanced image of America; it is no-bullshit, hard-working, rugged, fun, fundamentally unhealthy, and of course, swimming in oil, both literally and figuratively.
Like other petrol powerhouses, Texas is maximalist. Second in size (to Alaska) and population (to California) within the United States, if Texas were a country it would be 40th largest in the world. It has its own Paris, its own Moscow, and even its own Saudi Arabia. The flags of Spain, France, Mexico, and the Confederacy have all flown over this state. There’s no state income tax, and the public land belongs to the state itself, not to the federal government – a concession it demanded before joining the union. A brief stint at independence, between 1836 and 1846, cemented an independent streak that continues to flare up. While the state of the nation is decidedly gloomy, Texas has managed, in a disturbing affront to karma, to fare better than the rest of the country: relatively low unemployment and foreclosure rates, and drops in housing prices lower than the national average. Texas’ clear penchant for the over-sized and the grand (be it the size of soft drinks, homes, or gas tanks) is mitigated by a frontier mentality that frowns upon living beyond one’s means.
Oil has an uncanny ability to gloss over formal distinctions: for every robust rule, it offers an exception. For those of us still traumatized by the fourth-to-last letter of the English alphabet (W), there are three other Texan letters that may provide some historical respite: L, B, and J, for Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973), a throwback to a time when the Lone Star State produced Democrats.
On a recent visit to the capital, Austin, I stopped by the Lyndon B Johnson Presidential library, where the pluralism of a by gone era sparkles like so many jewels of a lost empire – where Johnson, master Texan legislator, once inherited a country traumatized by the assassination of JFK. The liberal eye of a very conservative storm, Austin is home to the behemoth University of Texas, where some 40,000 undergraduate students are enrolled, benefitting from one of the fattest endowments in the world – second only to Harvard’s – thanks in large part to the oil-slicked generosity of its alumni. With rolling hills, an indie film scene and a budding foodie culture, Austin is California plus affordable housing and microscopic taxes.
Yet if Austin is the exception, then it is Houston that leads the rule of Texas. Due in large part to two factors – oil and immigrants – Houston is the fourth most populous city in the US. In a little over 50 years, it has risen quietly from scratch, becoming the energy capital of the world with more than 5,000 energy-related firms calling the city their home and more Fortune 500 companies than anywhere in the country, save New York. Reading like a Who’s Who of natural resources, five of the six major energy companies run their operations from Houston: be it the US headquarters of BP and Royal Shell, the international headquarters of Conoco-Phillips, or the operational headquarters of ExxonMobil and Chevron.
Houston offers a very different alternative to the dramatic narrative of America’s successful urban experiments. Conveying a rather conservative, quiet type of confidence often overlooked today, Houston has been content to leave the spotlight to its more needy neighbors. Fuelled by the nearest thing to “old” money in Texas, Dallas gets the runway shows and the starchitecture: it recently added an opera house by Norman Foster and a theatre by Rem Koolhaas and Joshua Prince-Ramus. Best known for its complete lack of zoning regulations, Houston is a sprawling, flat city, built on a swamp, where residential and commercial real estate dance deliriously and imperceptibly across some 1,500 km2. With 100 per cent humidity and temperatures reaching 40º for four months a year, the city did not, perhaps could not exist, before the invention of modern air conditioning.
The same combination of oil and immigrants is responsible for the best private museum in the world being in Houston. Founded by Dominique de Menil, née Schlumberger, The Menil Museum is housed in a brilliantly lit building designed by Renzo Piano, and offers one of the best collections of Oceanic and Surrealist art in the world. The Menils escaped Vichy France and moved the headquarters of family-owned Schlumberger, at the time the world’s largest oil industry parts manufacturers, to Houston, singlehandedly putting the city on the cultural map of North America. Eventually the Menil Foundation acquired an entire neighborhood in central Houston where it boasts the Rothko Chapel, the Cy Twombly museum (also designed by Piano), as well as a site-specific Dan Flavin.
Texas’ population is 15% foreign-born. After a century and a half of Germans, Czechs and French, today it is largely Latino. Despite being socially conservative, Latinos vote overwhelmingly Democrat and it is to these individuals that the rest of us Texas escapees look to save the state from its reactionary excesses. One day, the petrol party will be over, and the rabid libertarianism that passes today as the Tea Party, needs us immigrants to keep them at bay. The history of America is one of immigrants and in this, crucially, Texas is not an exception, but the rule.
