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A Journal of Political Thought and Statesmanship

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A Journal of Political Thought and Statesmanship VOLUME XIX, NUMBER 1, WINTER 2018/19 A Journal of Political Thought and Statesmanship William Charles R. Voegeli: Kesler: Politics after e Road Trump to 2020 Michael Mark Barone: Bauerlein: Hubert Camille Humphrey Paglia David P. Charles Goldman: Hill: e State Pentateuch Secrets Richard Angelo M. Brookhiser: Codevilla: Benedict Yoram Arnold Hazony Kevin D. Michael Williamson: Anton: Don’t Mess Draining with Texas the Swamp A Publication of the Claremont Institute PRICE: $6.95 IN CANADA: $8.95 mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm Book Review by Kevin D. Williamson Austin City Limits God Save Texas: A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State, by Lawrence Wright. Alfred A. Knopf, 368 pages, $27.95 avid remnick, editor of the new thor, often by a junior editor) two or three They stop at Buc-ee’s, a Texas-based chain Yorker, asked staff writer Lawrence times until the recycled material smells fresh convenience store that sells fudge and ko- DWright to “explain Texas.” Why enough to put a cover and title on. Wright laches and kitsch along with the usual gas- would Wright choose to live there? “I hope has spent decades writing about the politics station fare, and which (accurately) adver- this book,” says Wright, “answers the ques- and personalities of Texas, and this book is tises the remarkable cleanliness of its bath- tion.” But the book—God Save Texas: A Jour- a kind of greatest-hits album underneath rooms in humorous billboards along the vast ney into the Soul of the Lone Star State—does a thin wash of the now-familiar indignant ghastly asphalt lengths of Eisenhower’s Folly. not explain Texas. It does not even explain moral hysteria induced in the NPR crowd by Buc-ee’s is not Lourdes; it is a place dedicated why Lawrence Wright of the New Yorker the Age of Trump. to urination and defecation and the acquisi- chooses to live in Texas, a question of limited tion of things that later will be urinated and interest. It is not, as it proposes to be, a medi- he book begins with wright and defecated, and to gasoline: go with the flow, tation on the culture and politics of Texas and his friend Stephen Harrigan, author of and flow with the go. It is bigger and stranger their influence on the wider American scene.T The Gates of the Alamo (2000), riding than, say, those excellent Autogrills strad- It is an overflowing slop-bucket of ignorance, their bicycles through one of the ugly stretches dling the Italian Autostrade serving strong laziness, and snobbery in the shape of a book. that sprawl between Texas cities, just as they espresso and salami sandwiches, and it is The structure of the work will be familiar sprawl between most American cities. Wright over-engineered compared to those stunted to those obliged to read books produced by is disappointed by the scenery. “The actual and hobbled little gas stations on Manhat- columnists and broadcast-media figures: a vista in front of us was an unending strip mall tan’s west side, but it is recognizably an ex- series of mostly disconnected essays and vi- hugging a crowded interstate highway,” he ample of the same genre: it’s a gas station. gnettes repackaged as a monograph, lightly writes—a sentence that could have been writ- Wright concludes from his visit that Texas stitched up with newly written connective ten about nearly identical scenes in almost any is “a lowbrow society…that finds its fullest material and punctuated every fourth page of these United States. This is somehow the expression in a truck stop on the interstate.” or so by something the author doesn’t realize fault of the oil business, which left Texas with The areas alongside intercity highways tend, is hilariously stupid or obviously wrong. As “cruddy strip shopping centers, garish beach for obvious reasons, to be home mostly to the with chainsaw sculpture, the process leaves communities, the ugly sprawl of car lots and unsentimental, un-quaint, unlovely, high- its mark on the product: columns and es- franchise chicken joints and prefab warehous- volume/low-margin businesses that serve says are arranged in a particular order and es that issued out of the heart of every city and people in transit through places that do not then written through (sometimes by the au- crawled along our highways like poison vines.” have much of a sense of community because Claremont Review of Books w Winter 2018/19 Page 19 mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm there aren’t any communities there. The in- that it in effect saved the city’s soul. A similar ors have been Republicans, and none served terstate isn’t where you’re going, it’s how you campaign of humiliation is what he seems to before the 1980s. Rick Perry first held office get where you’re going—a means rather than have in mind for Texas. as a Democrat (his CV does not emphasize an end. This is true in Texas, as it is true his energetic support for the presidential in Southern California, New Jersey, Maine, here is less thinking here than campaign of Al Gore) and Texas did not go Ohio, and any other blasted and blighted posturing. Channeling the same aw- all meshuga Republican until the 1990s. The slice of exurbia where three gas stations rub Tshucks cornpone offered up by other state didn’t have a Republican governor be- up against an Applebee’s and a Burger King. rich, liberal Texans such as Molly Ivins (the tween Reconstruction and the Reagan era. California-sourced daughter of a River Oaks If Wright didn’t know any Democrats, he ven as wright sneers at texas for millionaire who enjoyed taking her private- wasn’t looking very hard. the sin of having ugly commercial and school pals yachting before she developed that Etransit zones indistinguishable from ridiculous put-on accent native to no place in his book is full of evidence of not those in Connecticut or Oregon, he misses Texas), Wright insists that he does not live in having looked very hard. Wright goes the story in front of his face. Convenience- New York City or Washington because he is Ttottering here and there with potted store owner Arch “Beaver” Aplin III (“Bea- “too much of a rustic.” But he’s a funny kind biographies of Texas political and cultural ver” and “the Third” coming together to form of rustic: a rustic from one of the least-rustic figures, half-understood anthropologies of one of those wonderfully unlikely American backgrounds imaginable, a rustic who grew Houston and Dallas, reminiscences of a space names) built Buc-ee’s out of almost nothing in up with the founder of Neiman Marcus as a program about which he evinces almost no the 1980s, a time when the highways already family friend, a rustic who lives in a city with knowledge at all (and a strange contempt: he were well stocked with gas stations selling fuel a metropolitan population north of 2 million, recalls his disappointment at the pitiable sight and fare (in Texas, the gas-station burrito is a a rustic with a sideline business in Hollywood. of a space shuttle being carried by an airplane), food genre all its own, perfected by Allsup’s) The quest for authenticity often leaves one and a fair bit of padding that adds nothing and the market apparently saturated. How is vulnerable to fraud, and Wright has fallen for to what purports to be the argument. It has it that Aplin (who is the opposite of the ste- the very ersatz Texanism that he here intends the feel of a collection of memoirs that should reotypical businessman braggart and hardly to expose and flay—the idea that the “real” have been written by someone else. The an emissary from “a lowbrow society”) went Texas is to be found at some quaint out-of-the- book’s final chapter finds Wright shopping from owning one convenience store to owning way steakhouse rather than in a Dell facility for a cemetery plot, which seems appropriate. a business with hundreds of millions of dollars or Panhandle hydrocarbon cracker. Whatever power he may once have enjoyed in sales in such a mature market, while turn- God Save Texas is full of sloppy writing as a writer has been expended. If this is what ing up his nose at a huge share of high-paying of the kind that raises the question of what Wright can do, it would be better if he did not customers (Wright calls it a “truck stop,” but exactly it is that book editors are for: us- do anything at all. Let him retire to his fajitas Buc-ee’s in fact excludes commercial trucks ing staunch when Wright means stanch, ca- and bicycling, and tell his LBJ anecdotes to from its facilities) and paying remarkably high reen when he means career, jealousy when he whoever will listen. wages ($15 an hour) to car-wash attendants means envy, nonplussed when he means un- Or perhaps to a hermitage where he and cashiers? How many chain gas stations interested; deriding “Daddy Warbucks capi- might be more contented, maybe up around have admiring articles written about them in talism” as “heartless, rapacious, and preda- Woodstock or Big Sur. Texas, as it is—as it Bon Appétit? And how does a reporter in pos- tory”—the opposite of the benevolent ethic actually exists—does not suit him. And it session of a Pulitzer Prize stand there in the of Harold Gray’s self-made philanthropist plainly does not interest him, either, except middle of that story and never even think to in Little Orphan Annie; repeating the myth as a vessel for his contempt and disappoint- ask a question? that Texas enjoys a unique right to subdivide ment, neither of which seems to have a great Someone might have saved poor David itself into five states (Article IV, Section 3 of deal to do with Texas per se.
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