Pseudo-Texansand Other Fake CowboysI Have Known

[corporatewhore]

Pseudo-Texans
and Other Fake Cowboys
I Have Known

by Doc Cuddy, Editor
If America is a country that believes its own myths, so too is Texas. Except more so.

Cowboys, Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie, the Alamo, the Texas Rangers (the ones who existed before baseball), the oilwell wildcatters, the open range: figures and stories writ larger than life and still for many people in the Texas outback realer than life.
First generation Texans—that is, the children of people who move to Texas—are especially susceptible to the Texas myths, which are—let’s face it—powerfully seductive:one Texas Ranger per riot,
crazy geologists betting their third mortgage on a hole in a ground (and winning),
ragtag heroes stepping toward certain death across a line drawn in the sandof San Antonio.

That’s potent stuff, offering roles and meaning to young human beings awash in hormones and all too ready to believe that might makes right.
In the various middle and high schools I attended around West Texas, I repeatedly saw the effects of the old myths. Come rodeo week, everybody—old Texans and new—donned cowboy attire. After rodeo week, the only people still wearing the cowpoke duds were 1) the few remaining real cowboys, and 2) the offspring of the transplanted Texans.
If you doubt the power of the myths, let me remind you that proof exists everywhere today on the streets of America. Step outside and look. How many Vermonters really need four-wheel-drive pickups? How many suburbanites really need SUVs?
So powerful are the myths that they easily leap oceans: I call your attention to the Porsche Cayenne and rest this part of my case.

Meanwhile, back on the streets of Midland, Texas, long after the rodeo’s closed for another year, there goes our native-born first-generation Son swaggering along in his boots, his Levi’s and his Stetson, maybe occasionally with a plug of chewing tobacco in his jaw, and for sure of an evening with a Lone Star long-neck in his hand.
No doubt about this guy’s manhood. The only reason he hasn’t got a pair of Colt .45's slung low off his waist is because it’s illegal.That is the world George W. Bush grew up in, and those are the attributes of Texan-ness that he internalized. Son of an Ivy League war hero father, descendant of an old East Coast family that is the closest thing America has to aristocracy, plunked down in a hotbed of Permian Basin machismo, what could he do to excel but become a Real Texan.
Which he did, through and through.
Or so he—and the world—thinks.
I know the type. Oh do I know the type. When George W. Bush first appeared on the Texas political scene in 1992, running for governor against Ann Richards, I shuddered.

read the rest at http://www.texaschapbookpress.com/magellanslog66/Pseudo-Texans.htm

[DrBB]

1. I'm told that the correct idiom for Dubya and his ilk

...is "goat roper." Not being a Texan--born and raised in Minnesota--I'm not entitled to apply the term with authority. But I gather that's the shorter version of "All Hat, No Cowpoke."

Hey, he bought his ranch faire 'n' square. Almost before starting his presidential campaign. Gotta count for something. Too bad he can't ride. But he's a fiend for brush clearing.

[displacedtexan]

2. Back in the 70's

when my SO was finishing the doctorate at UT Austin, and I (native Texan) was teaching, I noticed that half of the license plates in Austin (and all over the state) were from other states.
The carpetbaggers were taking up residence and dressing up in cowboy attire from Leddy Brothers, Tony Roma, and Justin. They were a joke then, and they are a joke now. They wouldn't know decent BBQ if it bit them on the butt.
Yes, they brought biz to Texas, but they brought their own workers with them for the most part.