Texas Manhood and Texas Womanhood

My experience of men from Texas is that they are strong and brave. They also however tend to be rash and injudicious, and they do stupid things.

One joke to that effect is as follows. A man from Texas comes to Alaska. A man at the bar says, “You wrestle a polar bear and have sex with an Eskimo woman and you will be one of us.” The next day the man from Texas comes all scratched up. The Alaskan man asks, “What the hell happened to you?” The man from Texas says, “Well, I found the polar bear, and I still don’t know where is the Eskimo woman you want me to wrestle.”

More serious is the behaviour of George Bush in Iraq. The military and the mercenary organizations hired by the military killed 600,000 Iraqi civilians. That is 600,000 lives lost for absolutely nothing. The military makes a legitimate military target; the civilians do not. What we see here is total bastardry, and it makes the people who are responsible for it out to be complete jerks.

What impresses me about Texas the most is not its men but its women. The ones I’ve known were absolute sweethearts. They also had inner toughness that they needed to have in order to deal with a violent culture. They were kind and they were strong. And that is the best possible combination.

As with any place, there are things that are right with Texas and things that are wrong with Texas. It is valid to be strong and brave; it is not valid to be rash and injudicious. The folks in Texas should not feel singled out for me scrutinizing them; I scrutinize everyone. What George Bush did in Iraq was wrong. And Texas stands to benefit from fixing its rashness habit.