As Texas Goes... Read Online Free PDF Page A

want to know whether you’re expressing your right to private property by dumping pesticides into the aquifer or killing off the last pair of blue-pelted ferrets on the planet. And there are actually quite a few things the empty-place residents expect to get from government as their rightful due. Finally, even though you’d never know it by looking at the composition of the US Senate, the number of people who are actually living in empty places is pretty small. They don’t call them empty for nothing.
    The current Tea Party strain in the Republican party is all about the empty-place ethos. And Texas is the natural leader, because it’s managed to hold tight to its historic alone-on-the-prairie worldview while growing by leaps and bounds.
    “Ask my students,” says Tom Dunlap, a professor at Texas A & M. “They all associate themselves with the country. They’re living a myth. They think of Texas as open wide—but 80 percent of the people in Texas live in one of the major metropolitan areas.”
    “People still think of this as the frontier,” says Martin Melosi, the director of the Institute of Public History at the University of Houston. “But it’s an urban state!”
    Describing their state, Texans don’t generally say “empty,” although there are exceptions. (Rick Perry, who grew up in the very small west Texas town of Paint Creek, said his dad called their neighborhood “ the big empty .”) It’s more likely you’ll hear them call their state “open”—whether they are liberals stressing multicultural hospitality or conservatives talking about the anti-union right-to-work laws. But however you slice it, Texas believes people deserve plenty of elbow room. Its politics has always been based on an empty-place ideology. And the more crowded it gets, the more intense the feeling becomes.
    “If you’ve got a car, you can carry a gun”
    Texas is so big that the entire population of the planet would fit in it if everybody in Texas lived as close together as New Yorkers. Which they don’t intend to do. But you get the idea—very large place. Texans seem to think very little of jumping in the car and driving 300 miles to see a football game, or taking a job four or five hours away with the understanding that they’ll commute back home for weekends. This tends to confirm the feeling of empty-placeness, even if the trip is between San Antonio and Fort Worth.
    No matter where they live, Texans believe they only need to get behind the wheel to leave civilization behind. “We just like to pour concrete and get in our pickup trucks and drive. That’s what we do,” laughed Lois Kolkhorst, a Republican state representative who successfully sponsored a law to raise the maximum speed limit to 85 mph.
    Nobody can tell me what to do in my own car. Empty-place politics does tend to lap over into motor vehicle laws. For instance, in 2011 Governor Perry vetoed a bill that would have outlawed texting while driving. The practice of sending text messages while theoretically steering a car was “ reckless and irresponsible ,” Perry said, but he was opposed to “a government effort to micromanage the behavior of adults.”
    Rather than wasting time discussing the possible feelings of non-texting drivers about this position, we will take this opportunity to mention that Perry once named his boots Freedom and Liberty .
    In the same spirit, the governor in 2007 signed a “traveling rule” making it clear that Texans have a right to carry concealed weapons in their cars whether they have a permit or not. It is also legal to carry a concealed weapon without a permit if you’re on the way to your car. The bottom line, a Dallas police officer told the Dallas Observer , is “ If you’ve got a car , you can carry a gun.”
    Guns laws are a close-to-perfect reflection of the empty-versus-crowded mind-set. If you’re on your own, you might feel more secure if you have a weapon to protect yourself against the bad guys.