I Yam what I Yam

-or-
My Yam is Bigger than Your Yam....Scared?


Well, I am thoroughly back from my trip to Texas, The Lone Star State. Now that I am back, I will be turning around again to return tomorrow- this time to Austin for Easter/Passover instead of Houston. Due to the fact that I have been busy entertaining waves of visitors to DC since my return (the last one leaves today, if he catches his flight), I will not be telling you anything about Henry VI, or any other enumerated British monarch for that matter. Instead, I thought I'd share my thoughts and impressions of Texas, which will probably boil down to a harangue about the hubris of human nature, but maybe not. As the lady said to the sailor as she grabbed her make-up bag before abandoning the S.S. Titanic, you never know.

I wish I could say Texas was a place of riddles and contradictions, but I can't. Image-wise, Texas might be the nearest thing to black and white since The Jazz Singer. The closest thing I witnessed to a contradiction on my recent trip to Houston was both a Waffle House AND an IHOP in the same city. This is of course unheard of on the East Coast, where the IHOP-Waffle House divide is the 'Breakfast-Anytime' equivalent to the Mason-Dixon line.

Before I get too deep in the Big Muddy by offending the heavily-armed 2.3% of the US population who reside in those 261,914 square miles of a state, I must assure all up front that I had a Very Nice Time in Texas. Houston, as an example of post-World War II Boomsprawl, (appearing as it does to be the detritus from some nasty city zoning vomitorium), may visually represent the closest America gets to a decent argument for the gamma bomb, urban-development-wise. HOWEVER, I had a fun time, the people were nice, the weather was a-okay, the restaurants were excellent and plentiful, and the art museum was fantastic (and free on Thursdays!).

That said, I absorbed an unprecedented amount of marketing material in, by, and about Texas. Given the oh-so insightfully observant nature of the true blogger, I naturally analyzed all this material and now have humorous and searingly perceptive things to say about the state. So here goes:

Texas, more than anything else, is Texas. (I'll give you all a moment to let the profoundness of that statement sink in.....Ok. Ready?) I mean it. Texas really wants you to remember it is Texas. Specifically, everywhere we went, I was bombarded with reminders that:

a) I was in Texas.

b) Texas is big.

c) Very big.

d) Texas' flag is a work of art that should be viewed several times a day, and NEVER confused with the flag of Chile, particularly if your confusion occurs out-loud, in public, amid dozens of irate Texans, without a gratified Chilean in sight.

e) Texas used to be a country, is very independent in some vague indeterminate way that seems to involve spittoons and getting one's testicles knocked about astride an irate bovine, and only condescends to be a state in order to give the rest of the country easier access to Texas and Texans.

f) The geographical shape of Texas is very important, and it's aspect should preferably be in view at all times, via bumper sticker, key chain, cooking cutter, statue, T-shirt, screen saver, mouse pad, sun catcher, etc. (A careful study of the shape of Texas - inevitable during a visit - reveals some motivation behind their fascination with the outline of this increasingly Republican state. If you transform your beloved Texas cookie cutter into a Texas country-cutter and cut, you lose all those 'undesirable' elements: Texas is the shape of the United States, minus those grubby, leftist Northwesterners, progressive northern Midwesterners, decadent, high-fallutin Democrat New Yorkers, and Independent, liberal New Englanders. Coincidence or conspiracy? I merely report. You decide.)

g) Non-Texans are, under no circumstances, to 'mess' with Texas. This last reminder is so frequently proclaimed that the innocent tourist begins to wonder. What is Texas so afraid of? How could I mess with it? Why do they fear me?

If I was going to mess with a state, I would definitely mess with Ohio. I don't think much good has come out of Ohio since the Frosty, and Wendy's is probably so irreversibly a national chain by now that we could lose Ohio and still enjoy our frosty-cold, super-thick chocolate shakes. Other than that, what has Ohio given us lately? The Wright Brothers? The first flight was over one-hundred years ago, occurred in a different state altogether, and would have been achieved by someone else in no time at all, to say nothing of the nasty rumor that others got there first but were smothered by the Wrights' superior PR. Other than that, the only things I associate with Ohio are a great amusement park with kick-ass roller coasters (eminently reproducible outside the state), and tires. I went to the Ohio Tourism site just to make sure, and I couldn't find one interesting, unique thing about the Buckeye State (like we've ever figured out anything good to do with a Buckeye, anyway).

So fear not, Texas. It's all about Ohio.

My basic point is this: the Powers that Be are so busy letting you know how much you are in Texas, that you are not left to easily discover what that means. They shout at you from every corner: "We are large. Big! Texas is Texas-sized! Don't mess with us! Ohio is that-a-way!" What does it mean to be big? An empty message, all sound and fury, signifying nothing. (<-- Please note token Shakespeare reference for this week's entry.) I saw a particularly obnoxious (albeit entertaining) IMAX movie about Texas by the Texas tourism board. (Of course, it had to be an IMAX, in Huge-o-vision; this point was not lost on me.) The film bloodied my eardrums and pierced my eyeballs with Texas's image: it is bigger than France and Britain combined!; they sold land the size of 3 Rhode Islands to finance the building of their capitol, which is, naturally, the largest something or other in North America!; their big Texas phallic monument thingy (aka the San Jacinto Monument) is bigger than the US's big phallic monument thingy (aka, the Washington Monument)!; at any given time, EVERY CONCEIVABLE KIND OF WEATHER is occurring at once in the state! (Cool! I always wanted to see a tsunami!) This last claim made a few in my audience laugh. When the lights went up, a heard at least three people utter variations on: "Is Texas trying to - ahem -compensate for something?" And truth be told, I confess that I was at that moment thinking, "Wow! Texas must be the least well-hung state in the nation." Pardon the crudity; it was merely the logical thing to think after watching the film.

Before I begin my long, painful attempt to avoid death threats from those millions of Texans who read my blog each week, I will indulge in one more anecdote in Texas being somewhat obnoxious about the fact that it is black-and-white Texas. I was recently listening to a Spring Training game between the Houston Astros and the San Francisco Giants through the miracles of modern technology and MLB.com. I tuned in to the Astros' broadcast, since I am a fan of several of their players. During the break, a commercial came on encouraging fans to attend Astros' home games. It was then that I discovered the most enraging, offensive, and un-baseball like slogan I could conceive of. To whit, an announcer exhorted me to "come on down to Minute Maid Park to cheer on the home team. The Houston Astros: Root for the Good Guys!"

'Root for the Good Guys?' If you're not a baseball fan, you may not understand my outrage. But if you are, you know that baseball is not a game of good and bad guys. They are all good guys, playing day in and day out, and may the best team win. Even the most storied rivalries are all about love-hate relationships, not good and evil. In that most extreme of rivalries, New York - Boston, you could easily get a Red Sox fan to refer to the New York Yankees as the "bad guys". But that's about it. No real Red Sox fan or Yankees fan would seriously suggest that they are the good guys and the rest of the competition, like, say, the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, are actually Bad. You love your team, you may hate your rival (but this is by no means necessary), but there is no good-bad team-chotomy in baseball. Baseball is a game of inches, statistics, might-have-beens and possibilities, and it is also a game of dignity, fair play and honor. If it wasn't, Congress wouldn't be so up-in-arms about this steroid stuff. And besides, the closest the National League Central Division (where the Astros live) comes to a big, bad, dominating team that fans love to hate like the New York Yankees is MAYBE the Saint Louis Cardinals. The Cards are Evil? Pretty pathetic. Not only that, the Astros face off against the Brewers all the time. The Brewers are the Bad Guys? Have you seen that Sausage Race thing they do during the seventh inning stretch? And that beer barrel-cannon gimmick? Come on. Terrorists are bad guys. Baseball is a game.

Okay, I'm done with the baseball harangue. The slogan is probably no reflection on the people of Houston at all, just yet another Dumb Marketing Idea, but we all need outlets and this is mine.

Back to Texas. The marketing of Texas is too much of a hard sell; and the sell makes it too hard to get at the substance I know is there. My Texan friend (at least, he was a friend until he read this) told me that all the noise exists because Texans still believe and take pride in their individual, distinctive regional character. I buy this argument only somewhat. Texas is not the only state that feels this way. I lived in Charlottesville, Virginia for a year, home of Thomas Jefferson and the University of Virginia. While there, I was inundated by a pervasive marketing presence and local pride about what Virginia was and what it was to be a Virginian. The local public radio station played analyses of Virginian Civil War battles frequently. I saw a few disturbing bumper stickers about what the Virginian driver would like to do to my "Northern ass," but by and large the marketing campaign and regional preening did not bother me. Some of it I enjoyed, because I learned about the state and its riches, or gained insight into the mentality associated with the proud local Virginian. Just as much hoopla existed about Virginian-ness as I saw in Texas, but it had more substance and it wasn't slapped in your face every time you stepped onto the street.

I think many other areas of the country feel this way as well. I don't take much pride in being from Connecticut, but I'm proud to be a New Englander; I know what it means and what value it has. I've known people to take great pride in coming from Washington state, northern California, Idaho and Alaska. Each one could identify an individual, distinctive regional character they were proud of. So why does the Texas identity ring so hollow?

My previous trip to Texas occurred a few years ago over Thanksgiving. The Spouse and I were supposed to be going to Greece, but we wound up in Texas instead. (I won't go into the details here; I'm saving that story for my gripping autobiographical made-for-TV movie, starring Anthony Michael Hall, Minnie Driver, and (back from the dead) Morris in a cameo as The Cat.) We were lucky enough to wind up at our friend's house in the countryside of Texas. We shot things (targets, skeet, and theoretically at deer, although none of us ever fired), drank a bit, and generally caroused. Compared with my most recent trip, this first Thanksgiving trip felt much more like Texas. There was no marketing. No image, no hype. Just living, being, doing. It was certainly uniquely Texan. I can't imagine doing those things and feeling that way while doing them - feeling just right in one's skin, as the French say - anywhere but Texas. Texas, like so many of the world's great and fascinating locales, is place that needs to be discovered to be appreciated.

This time, I was in a city for my visit; an urban center with little cohesive identity and structure. Perhaps it was Houston that was compensating, and not Texas. But either way, the PR blitz does Texas a disservice. It annoys and numbs visitors until all they associate with Texas is vapid slogans and empty images. Someone in the Texas tourism industry take a memo. Stop diluting Texas' image by trying to put it on a bumper sticker! You're not a cheap date or a one-night stand, so stop acting like one. Cut out that leering, 'have I got something big to show you' self-promotion if you want us to appreciate you for the fine and beautiful state that you are. Let us discover you. You should take a lesson from Popeye: "I yam what I yam", with no apologies, explanations or justifications. We'll figure out the rest, and like you all the more for it. Here are some new slogans to try out: Less talk, more rock! Less tell, more show! Less navel gazing proclamations, more living by rough and tumble doing! (Catchy. If you tourism guys want to use that last one, we can discuss my cut.) And hey! We know you're big! Enough already. Take your electoral votes and zip it.

Texas' marketing strategy for success? In the words of one who no doubt loved everything about Texas and all things that we would today consider truly Texan (and, in fact, may have had a horse named Texas - I'm not sure and am too sleepy right now to research it properly), "Walk softly and carry a big stick."

Ohio should be so lucky.