The Carbon City: Dispatches from Houston

Tuesday, March 17, 2015

Houston's Tabloid TV News: If It Bleeds, It Leads

By Daniel Rigney
As an urban anthropologist I observe and interpret the cultures of the people I live among. I'll take my ethnographic insights wherever I can find them, including the grocery checkout line, where I like to browse the tabloids and occasionally buy one to take home for further scholarly analysis. Inquiring minds want to know, as Aristotle said.¹
The National Inquirer is only the best-known of these half-sheets. Many others, including niche publications like Lurid World and The Morbid Weekly News, compete fiercely for our time and eyeballs in the national and global attention economy.²
Most of my tabloid data come not from the traditional medium of newsprint, but rather from screens, and especially from cable television shows. As you very well know – and don’t pretend you don’t – tabloid television contains within its ample bosom a variety of subgenres. There is, of course, the celebrity gossip story. (See, for example, the potential rumor of a purely hypothetical Sheen-Lohan affair -- or Lohan-Sheen affair, as her agent would prefer -- as previously reported here in “How to Scoop-Search.”)
Then there is the conspiracy theory genre, ably represented by that guy who used to wrestle and govern Minnesota. September 11 was an inside job. The government is covering up alien invasions. That sort of thing.
Then there are the shows that feature the personal tragedy of the week, usually centering on a little blond girl from the heartland who’s “gone missing” (as they invariably say) and is feared kidnapped or worse. (A tip for tabloid television watchers: Always suspect the boyfriend or former boyfriend of the mother.) Nancy Grace and others who work her subgenre have no interests at heart but the interests of the victims, and of the viewers whose heartstrings they pluck like a country fiddle. I understand that they and their networks donate most of the show’s profits to charities that help children in dire need. Bless their hearts.
We could linger over other tabloid television subgenres, including voyeuristic programs devoted to crime, plastic and other surgery, wild partying, rehab, and what some have called political porn (also frequently heard on AM talk radio). But instead we take you now to a late-breaking story from the world of local tabloid news. We go to Houston, live, for this report.
It’s about 8:55, CT on Wednesday, March 31, and I’m watching the five- minute segment of local news that directly follows CBS’s Early Show on Houston’s KHOU, Channel 11. (See "Trend Anxiety" in a previous column here.)
The Channel 11 News, by the way, is the station I usually turn to for local events. The winner of several National Edward R. Murrow Awards for excellence in broadcast journalism (as it reminds its viewers frequently), Channel 11 is by no means the worst of its kind in this region. In fact, it may be the one of the best. But you be the judge. We report on the reporting. You decide.
What follows is my attempt at a faithful and honest rendering of this five-minute news segment. None of this is made up, although I have compressed my account for the sake of brevity. [My interpretive subtext is shown in brackets.]

If It Bleeds, It Leads³
And now for a five-minute update of your local KHOU News. A hit and run driver in southeast Houston has plowed into a group of people, knocking two into a ditch and sending one woman to the hospital. Ambulance footage accompanies the story. [Worry about your health.]
A youth was killed in a gang-related shooting yesterday evening following a powder-puff football game at a local high school. At least ten police cars appear in the aerial view of the scene. [Worry about crime, gangs, and dying.]
Today’s weather will be sunny and cool, warming to 76 in the afternoon.
Traffic update: There’s an accident slowing traffic in the HOV lane at Greenpoint at this hour. Traffic is also slow on other freeways and tollways throughout the city. Stay tuned for updates on your drive to work. [Worry about tolls, traffic accidents, health, dying, and being late to work.]

We'll Be Right Back After These Cultural Messages
Tune in to the new CBS comedy (“Chaos”) about the CIA. [Will national security anxieties be aroused? And will zany hijinks help us deal with them? I swear I'm not making up the premise of this series.]
Buy a used car at car.com, where confidence comes standard. [Good. I need a car I don't have to worry about. I'll go to car.com.]
Buy a “certified pre-owned” car from Audi. [Don’t call it a used car, and don’t buy one from car.com.]
Watch KHOU, because “KHOU Stands for Houston." This message is accompanied by a generic jingle with sample lyric: “Our Houston spirit reaches deep inside us.” [It does what?]
Enjoy the Reliant Energy Final Four and the Reese’s (chocolate candy) College All Star game at ncaa.com. [Nothing says athleticism like coal-fire and candy. Worry about your lungs, your caloric intake, and your receding youth.]
Stay Tuned For …
“Great Day Houston” with Deborah Duncan.
[It will be a great day if I’m not late for work, sold a used lemon, injured in a car accident, killed by a gun or worse. And it’s only 9 in the morning.]
Houston News. Keeping you informed. Because inquiring minds want to know.

NOTES
1, Aristotle (384-322 BCE), in The Metaphysics, observes that “All men [sic] by nature desire to know .”
2. The insightful term “attention economy” is from a book of that title by Thomas H. Davenport and John C. Beck, 2001. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
3 The phrase “if it bleeds, it leads" is not mine. A quick scoop-search (see "How to Scoop-Search" in a previous column) reveals that the phrase has been pervasive for years, both inside and outside the news industry, and especially among those who watch television with a critical eye. Likewise "tabloid television" and similar terms.

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local news, cbs, khou, houston, if it bleeds it leads, tabloid television, danagram, daniel rigney, comedy, gossip, open+call, technology

Gun Rider Shot Down in Texas

By Daniel Rigney
Should guns be permitted in the dorms and classrooms of Texas public colleges and universities? Believe it or not, a bill to enable students to carry weapons on campus legally has been slouching toward passage in the Texas Legislature over these past several weeks. Today there is breaking news on the story. Read on.
But first some background. If you know anything about Texas campuses, you know that Lone Star Beer and his good friend Jack Daniels are present in the student body every day, and even more so on nights and weekends.
Mix these ingredients with academic, emotional and personal stress, anger, and male (or female) ego. Add a dash of carelessness. Horseplay optional. Stir well. Serve hot and smokin'.
I’ve taught at three Texas colleges and universities, two of them public, over the years. In class I sometimes asked my students, “Would you feel safer right now if you knew that you or others in this room were packing heat?” The phrasing and the flagrant absurdity of the question brought an immediate and appreciative chuckle from students. They got it.
The Texas legislature is our state’s theater of the absurd. Senate Bill 1581, the bill that would allow guns on public campuses, is currently at a critical point in the legislative process. Republican Sen. Jeff Wentworth of San Antonio, normally a mild-mannered moderate (by Texas standards) conservative, appears to be playing to the state’s right-wing base on the school gun issue. Coincidentally, he has an election coming up.
Texas is the state, mind you, that once had an MLB franchise named the Houston Colt 45’s and a semi-pro football team called the San Antonio Gunslingers. Don’t mess with Texas.
This just in on last night’s Twitter feed, from Students for Gun-Free Schools in Texas: “Excellent news! The House parliamentarian ruled this evening that the guns-on-campus rider on SB 1581 was not germane and sent the whole bill back to the Senate.” Shooting down the gun rider on SB 1581 could mean the death of the bill. Wentworth and his friends may try to save it with amended language. But if this bill dies in Texas, zombie bills like it are less like to rise up in other states.
Stay tuned on this issue. And thank you, Lord, for Arizona, South Carolina, and a few other states in between. If it weren’t for them, Texas would be the most backward state in the country.
Meanwhile, in two related stories …
A Liberal Gun Club and website (theliberalgunclub.com) have been created “to provide a voice for gun-owning liberals and moderates in the national conversation on gun rights, gun legislation, firearms safety, and shooting sports.” The best man at our wedding – I’ll call him “Richard,” because that’s his name – is the very Jungian archetype of this rare but interesting species. He hunts and fishes like his daddy did before him in the small central Texas community where he grew up. And he’s what we call a “yellow dog Democrat” – a populist who would sooner vote for a dead yellow dog in the road than for a Republican. He loves huntin' and fishin'. As for myself, I do most of my hunting and fishing at Safeway.
The other story: An organization and website (pinkpistols.org) now exists to protect members of sexual minorities and to promote their safe and responsible use of firearms. Its motto: “Pick on someone your own caliber.”
Don’t mess with New Texas.

Creative Driving in Houston

By Daniel Rigney
If your town is like mine, driving a car is like playing a video game. Objects pop out from nowhere. Cars, trucks, buses, SUVs, bicycles, pedestrians and road hazards of every imaginable kind lunge out to get you, or to make you accidentally do something you’ll spend the rest of your life regretting, even after you get out of prison.
I’m not complaining. I’m a positive thinker. I firmly and sincerely believe that our lives are whatever we make them. We create reality in our own heads. I must have wanted Houston traffic to be a screaming nightmare from the underlife, or I wouldn’t have created it this way.
For all I know, I may be the driver from the underlife in other people’s nightmares. In fact, I’m pretty sure I am. Why else would they keep honking at me and shooting me the digitized message (00100) every time I try to drive creatively?
I thought creativity was supposed to be a good thing in America. What is this? Russia?
I deal with bad traffic in three simple ways. I leave the house as little as possible. (Did Emily Dickinson die in a car wreck? Think about it.) If I have to go somewhere, I drive between rush hour and rush hour. (In Houston, that’s between 1 and 5 a.m.) And I take back streets. Never, if I can help it, do I drive on freeways, especially in the city. Maybe a freeway through the desert if it’s not rush hour.
If you follow these three simple rules you’ll rarely go anywhere, but you’ll rarely be lost, and you probably won’t be among the 33,000 Americans in the U.S. last year who went to meet their automaker on our highways and byways.
As I’ve said, I’m a positive thinker, so I’ll put an encouraging spin on that traffic fatality statistic. It’s uplifting to know that the annual figure was 42,000 less than a decade ago. Our streets and highways have been getting safer and safer. I’m sure the reasons for this are complex. For one thing, I’m staying home more. I’m saving up for a trip to the gas station.
But if I must get into traffic, I try to drive creatively. I’ve perfected several four-wheeled maneuvers that boost me forward toward my short-term goals, like buying groceries. I don’t have time to go into all of my creative driving techniques here, but let me mention a few.
First, there is the diagonal parking lot shortcut. Go fast to beat competing vehicles to your parking space about a quarter-mile away. Just remember, though, that other drivers are also doing the creative cut-across from other directions.
Second, view stop signs and stop lights as driving suggestions, like they do in Rome and Mexico City. Too much regulation stifles the creative spirit. I’m against traffic overregulation on principle. Overregulation is any rule I don’t like.
Third, if you’re on the freeway, drive at the same speed as the rest of the traffic. Don’t recklessly obey speed laws by slowing to 60 from the more typical 85 (Houston Standard Speed). Obeying the law may put the lives of other motorists in danger. It’s okay to use others as an excuse to drive too fast, because they’re using you as an excuse to do the same.
Fourth, always know which lane you’re supposed to be in. If the lane you need is not available, make one for yourself. You’re in a hurry, and life is short.
Finally – and I can’t emphasize this too much – changing lanes should be viewed not just as a way to cut twenty seconds off the length of your trip, but also as an opportunity to display your driving skills and bust a few road moves: the Bob and Weave, the Dodge and Dart, the Bluff, the Brake Dance. You know, the usual driver’s skill set. You may even want to create some of your own signature moves. Surprise us.
You can show your appreciation for the creative driving of others by giving these imaginative road artists a round of applause-honks. Or by finger-texting them the digitized message (00100) as a way to recognize and honor innovative performance in a road show.
Meanwhile, I’m walking to the metro stop. Let somebody else play this video game. And hey. Be careful out there.*

*Exit line from “Hill Street Blues,” circa 1985.
-- Danagram, curating our precious comedy heritage since 2011 at open.salon.com/blog/danagram

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driving crazy, satire, humor, comedy, creative driving, freeways, driving video game, traffic overregulation, overregulation is any rule i don't like, positive thinking, positive driving, we create our own reality, screaming nightmare, underlife, shooting the digitized message 00100, giving the digitized message 00100, applause-honk, applause honk, emily dickinson car wreck?, traffic fatality statistics, encouraging spin, creative driving techniques, bust a driving move, bob and weave, dodge and dart, driver's bluff, finger-texting, digital finger, hill street blues, daniel rigney, danagram, curating our precious comedy heritage, driver's skill set, houston standard speed, houston metro, recklessly obeying the speed law, saving up for a trip to the gas station, diagonal shortcut, creative cut-across, rush hour 1 to 5 a.m., travel, television

Backyard Bar-B-Q Houston-Style

Recipe for Houston-Style Bar-B-Q
Semi-Fiction by Daniel Rigney
Twenty-first century Houston is a culinary crossroad. Cuisines native to Texas, such as barbecue* and TexMex, mingle casually and amiably with foods from other lands. But though our regional cuisines grow ever more varied, barbecue and Mexican food remain at the top of the Texas menu. On Sunday we observed Memorial Day with a traditional backyard barbecue at the Houston home of some good friends. As the temperature fell toward 90 degrees by late afternoon, we decided it was cool enough to cook and sit out back. The backyard pool had been inflated to the recommended air pressure and filled with agua pura for the younger kids, and the mosquitoes had not yet descended on us. We fired up the grill.
Here’s an authentic Houston recipe for Texas barbecue, faithfully remembered from Sunday night, that will make your mouth sing “Texas Our Texas” if you know the melody and lyrics.
Preparing the Charcoal
Preliminaries: One experienced Weber grill
One mess of charcoal briquets. (“Mess” is a common .                     though imprecise unit of measure in Texas.)
One container of two-stroke engine gasoline (not    .            recommended in real life)
Prepare gasoline mixture with 20 parts gasoline to one part motor oil. This will produce a blackish smoke, imparting a distinctive and regionally-authentic carbon flavor to the meat and vegetables. Houston is, after all, arguably the carbon capital of the world. How appropriate, then, that we should celebrate this feast day by grilling carne al carbon.
Drizzle briquets generously with two or three splashes of this Texas-style homemade lighter fluid. Throw matches, fade quickly, and enjoy the show.
Tonight our barbecue chef will be grilling a variety of meats, including two packages of Kosher hot dogs and several small succulent hamburger patties artisanally hand-crafted in the shape of Texas.
Preparing the Barbeque Sauce
If you haven’t procured a reputable barbecue sauce at the grocery store, just make your own. We enjoyed a traditional Texas homestyle sauce blending ketchup, vinegar, sugar and seasoning (to include salt, pepper, garlic, and whatever else you have on hand.) Or substitute these seasonings with Tony’s Cajun Seasoning, which is essentially the same thing. If your grocers don’t stock it, ask them to fly it in from Louisiana.
Grilling the Food
Tonight’s patio meal features not just the hamburgers and hot dogs mentioned earlier, but also fresh roasted corn in the shuck, potatoes, onions and zucchini.
The key to grilling Texas-style is to respect the Law of Irreversibility, which states that you can always cook something more if you need to, but you can’t uncook something that’s already been cooked too much. It’s really just applied physics.
Condiments and Beverages
Standard American accoutrements include mustard (choice of French mustard, French's mustard, or New York-style stoneground), onions, pickles, relish, and blue corn tortilla chips with salsa. For a walk on the wild side, why not try the four-jalepeno salsa on your burger or dog in place of ketchup, or in concert with it? Let cuisines join hands in friendship across borders.
Choice of cool refreshing beverages: Shiner or Shiner Bock (with sediment), Tsing Tao, Pepsi Max.
And a Surprise for Dessert
Slices of watermelon cut in the shape of Texas (That’s not the surprise, but it was mighty tasty.)
The surprise: Potato-chip cookies with chocolate chips, prepared with sidewalk chalk by the barbecue chef’s four-year-old daughter. Superb.
This is how we do barbecue in the authentic Houston style. Did I mention that the Texas barbecue chef and his family moved here recently from Connecticut?

*also sometimes spelled barbeque or Bar-B-Q. Some sources trace the word to Spanish via Haiti (barbacoa, from "framework of sticks") while others prefer the French etymology "de barbe à queue," meaning "from beard to tail" to denote spit roasting. Most English dictionaries, including OED, favor "barbecue," though as always, purists will insist on whatever version they learned first. I prefer "barbeque" myself, because the French etymology is more vivid. OED disdains the French derivation as an "absurd conjecture," but it creates a more memorable word-picture.

open.salon.com/blog/danagram

Drudge Alert! Houston Hits 105!

Drudge Alert! Houston Hits 105!
By Daniel Rigney
Matt Drudge, the influential aggregative journalist who knows more about climate than climate scientists themselves do, rarely misses an opportunity to publicize unseasonably cold weather events around the world on his popular tabloid website, thedrudgereport.com.
Drudge's greatest triumph to date in this regard was to report a few years ago that a winter blizzard had arrived in New York City just as carbon-industry critic Al Gore was in town to give a speech on global warming. Get it? Now do you see how ridiculous and fraudulent Gore and his chicken littles have been about weather?
In Drudge's mind, if New York or New Delhi has a much colder day than usual in winter, or an unseasonably cool day in summer, this means that what climate scientists believe about long-term warming trends in most regions of the world must be wrong.
Blizzards and unseasonable cold waves warm Drudge’s heart and the hearts of many of his readers, because such events call into doubt theories of human-influenced climate change that predict more erratic weather over time and an overall warming of the Earth’s temperatures (varying by region, etc.) in the coming decades or centuries. Most climate scientists seem to agree that these gradually rising temperatures over time are due in significant part to human activity, and particularly to a rapid global rise in the combustion of fossil fuels.
Drudge sometimes forgets to publicize unseasonably warm days in winter or unseasonably hot days in summer. Acknowledging that the world is warming and that human activity could have something to do with it might lead to complicated thinking about climate, and no one wants that.

I was worried that Drudge might overlook another opportunity to report record-breaking weather that broke the wrong way. I sent a message (three, actually) to thedrudgereport.com, through its response box, letting Matt know, if he did not know already, that the mercury hit 105 degrees yesterday in Houston, seven degrees hotter than the record high for that date set in 1977 according to the Chronicle weather page this morning.

Heat records were being broken north, south and west in the United States last week. As it happens, we were at Bush International Airport at about the time the National Weather Service was taking the city’s record-breaking temperature. Less than a week before we had hit 100 on the earliest date for that reading in Houston history. It's been a hot, dry spring here in Carbon City, and lately we seem to be be getting hotter earlier.

I bring up yesterday’s weather not because it has any significant long-term bearing on the climate change issue, but only to point out that by Drudge’s own logic, and the logic of many other conservatarian climate experts like him, this proves once and for all how wrong climate change deniers are on this issue. By Drudge’s own logic, Gore and his colleagues of the scientific persuasion should be running a victory lap in the sun just about now. And Drudge should be doing some fresh thinking. Don't count on that.

So Matt, you're wearing the asshat today according to your own implicit logic, revealed in the way you select and headline your weather stories. What does a hot, steamy day in Houston have to do to get its picture into your political tabloid?

Of course, in reality one day in Houston or one night in Bangkok doesn’t prove anything about long-term climate trends. I don’t care how hot or cold or wet or dry it is at any given place at any given time. The ragged sawtooth of daily statistics is not what we want to track here, but rather the longer, smoother trendlines that run through millions of data points to reveal unfolding patterns over vast areas, including the poles, over long stretches of time. Herein lies a difference between weather and climate, and between tabloid weather and climate science.

But it is nonetheless noteworthy, if only in the short-run where we live out our lives, that Houston – along with many other locales in the U.S. from Arizona to Florida and up from Texas through the Great Plains -- has never been so hot so early in the season -- and it's still spring.

For background on Drudge’s record as an enabler of climate change denial, why not start with Jesse Zwick’s “It’s Always Snowing on the Drudge Report” in the New Republic (Dec. 9, 2009)? And to see where Drudge hides some of his hottest weather headlines, check out the “Weather Action” button in the lower-right corner of his own page. It will jump you to the website of the National Weather Service, which reports inconvenient facts. Your tax dollars at work. Sincere thanks to NWS. No blindfold.
open.salon.com/blog/danagram

Driving in the No-NPR Zone

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Driving in the No-NPR Zone
By Daniel Rigney
Driving between two NPR cities, I’m losing the signal from Austin’s national public radio station. I cross into a liminal space between two known urban worlds as twilight approaches. I have just entered the No-NPR Zone.
The radio is silent. In this silence I resolve to make the most of my next three or four hours alone on the road to Houston. Aspiring to become what Saul Bellow called a “first class noticer,” I resolve to pay close attention to small details in the passing panorama, scribbling notes into my pocket-sized blogging pad as I drive with one eye on the road. I’m texting hazardously the old-fashioned way, with a ball-point pen.
I’ve taken this route many times. How come I never saw these things before?
Although I’ve lived in this state (Texas, not oblivion) most of my life, the only time I see the hinterlands of Old Texas is during infrequent trips from one metropolitan area to another by car. The windshield is my television screen, and today the passing scenery resembles a live PBS documentary on the subtle and sometimes unexpected signs of transformation that are sprouting in 21^st century rural and small town America.
Eye Catchers
Some things, I notice, remain constant even in the flux. With apologies to Ben Franklin, nothing is certain but flags in Texas. (This is, after all, home to the original Six Flags Over Texas amusement parks.) I see mostly U.S. flags, but also lots of Texas Lone Star flags (the Texas tri-color, I call it), and a few corporate flags, even in the middle of nowhere. I realize that today there are only three flags over Texas: U.S., TX, and INC. I quickly lose count of the scores of banners on the road as I continue observantly through the No-NPR Zone, heeding Yogi Berra’s advice that you can observe an awful lot just by watching.
Well out of Austin now, I see a fast food drive-through boldly displaying the national, state and corporate colors. (The corporate flag of Sonic Drive-in features the traditional red and gold against a retro-futurist-shaped white field evoking the Jetsons era.) A Mazda dealership pledges its allegiance with perhaps a dozen small U.S. flags surrounding one much taller mother flag. I'm amused by this ironic spectacle as I drive past in my Honda Civic, assembled in Canada.
Now I’m in observational high gear. I pass a tiny old frame house that might have once been a cowboy barber shop. It has a new coat of crimson barn paint and a big sign in front reading WEB SITE DESIGN. Even in rural America, the times they are updating. Nowadays, a good ranch needs a good web brand to compete effectively against foreign cows.
Flags stand silent watch over browning, sun-beaten pastures and Texas cattle. Ranch gates are typically flanked by one American and one Lone Star standard. Since September 11, 2001, it seems, even our cattle are more conspicuously patriotic and state-riotic than they used to be.
Flags stand guard at small-town gas stations. A ramshackle tin barn in an advanced state of dilapidation has a big sign out front: NATIONAL CONSTRUCTION SERVICES. I’m guessing this is not the home office.
There’s abundant road kill today – raccoon, possum, skunk, deer, and several specimens unidentified at a passing speed of 70 m.p.h. This topic is not for the faint of stomach. I had a good joke here about a Texas art museum fundraiser, but I’m going to let it go for your sake. Let’s move on, shall we?
To take my mind off of death on the road, I tune into local radio. There are no jazz stations in these parts, so I turn for solace to country radio station 92 FM (“Renegade Radio”) in LaGrange (population 4,641), a town made famous not only by the Broadway show and movie “Best Little Whorehouse in Texas,” but also by the classic rock tune “LaGrange,” performed by a little old band from Texas that we like to call ZZ Top. I listen to some old-school Texas swing music on 92, and a little Willie – the latter a musical and cultural bridge from Old Texas to the emerging New Texas (“It’s newer. It’s bluer. Get used to it.”) with which I identify, and whose very existence as a cultural entity I am now announcing publicly.
An ad comes on the radio urging listeners to listen to Radio – not just Renegade 92 in particular, but Radio in general, now also available on HD and the web. As radio stations continue to compete with each other for listeners, the radio industry as a whole now broadcasts advertisements on behalf of the entire medium. The radio business finds itself in a desperate commercial struggle for survival with other media technologies and industries to capture and hold onto scarce eyeballs and eardrums in the global attention economy.
I shouldn’t be surprised that Renegade Radio 92 proclaims itself “proud to be American and even prouder to be Texan.” This is all in keeping with Texas mythology, and in particular with the Myth of Texas Exceptionalism. The voice of 92 is a familiar one in Old Texas.
The Greening of Texas
What does surprise me is the public service announcement, sandwiched between country songs, offering tips on how to conserve energy during the winter months by greening your house. The pitch is not just that you’ll be saving your own money by patching air leaks, but that you’ll be doing something environmentally responsible for others as well, including future others. What a quaint old country notion: that there might be other compelling focal points in life than me and my money. I doubt it will sell.
Most useful tip: Check to make sure that cold air is not leaking in through your floor. It could be coming from inside the house.
I pass a classic car dealership, featuring a mid-fifties Thunderbird displayed on a platform high above a badly aging showroom. Then I pass more cows. Rosemary’s winery. More cows. More flags. More roadkill. And more evidence of the globalization and digitization of farm and market. Rural billboards now routinely promote the sponsor's website, and some roadside watering holes are hotspots. Texas has always had hotspots (It’s about 100 degrees here as I scribble), but now we have Wifi hotspots year-round in both town and country.
We're living now in the the future I heard about in my Texas public high school decades ago. It's not the future we expected. This future is a lot more interesting than the Jetsons, even if not as happy. But unlike the Jetsons, this future does have the virtue of being real.
As I near the end of my journey through the Zone, I attend to evidence of changing spirituality in the countryside. I find no roadsigns at all of the old “Repent Now or Roast Forever“ variety. The signs I see today bring a message of divine love. Coming into Columbus (population 4,305) I see a remarkable sign picturing a man crouching against a wall with his face buried in his despairing hands. The sign reads “Nothing is Too Hard for God.” But signs of hope are not easy to find in the present economy, and especially not in our dying small towns and rural areas.
Yes, I'm seeing signs of hard times here in the No-NPR Zone. Times are tough all over. It's interesting to me, though, that so few of the signs I've seen here today are explicitly political – unless you count flags. Flags have long since been thoroughly politicized, and now, more often than not, they are raised as strategic symbols promoting one or another denomination of conservatarianism. In Houston I often see them flying in front of large corporate buildings, like so many fluttering cloth billboards. American flag. Texas flag. Corporate flag. Some old-timers from World War II tell me that at one time the American flag was actually a uniting symbol. Hard to believe.
Old Texas and New Texas
Today I’ve seen old and dry cultural fields withering in the Texas drought. But I’ve also seen some new sprouts. I’ve seen remnants of 19^th and 20^th century Old Texas, but I’ve also seen signs of an emerging 21^st century New Texas.
In Columbus I look for the Texas Stop Sign (Dairy Queen), and I’m sorry to see that my familiar DQ, where I had stopped several times in the past, has been torn down and replaced with a new Jack in the Box. Quickly deciding to remain loyal to traditional Texas fast food, I pull into Whattaburger across the street for a large cup of coffee. You may know this size as a “Venti."
I notice the relaxed and comfortable ethnic diversity of the place – Anglos, Hispanics and Blacks integrated, sometimes “within booth.” I grew up on the edge of the deep South (would that make East Texas the shallow South?), in a time when restaurants were racially gated and segre-gated, and the sign in the window read “We refuse the right to refuse service to anyone.” That sign meant more than it said. I could tell you stories.
But times have changed somewhat in Texas, and they’re still changing. Somewhat.
As I pull onto Interstate 10 for the last leg of my journey, I flip on the radio again. This time NPR is within range. KUHF is coming in loud and clear from the University of Houston. I have just left the No-NPR Zone. Goodbye, Old Texas. I’ll be in New Houston soon.

http://open.salon.com/blog/danagram

Dispatch from Pride Houston

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Dispatch from Pride Houston 2011
By Daniel Rigney
“Pride Houston” sounds like an event the local Chamber of Commerce might have synthesized, but it’s actually the event formerly known as the Gay (or GLBT) Pride Parade. I'm participating in the parade this year for the first time, walking behind the banner of the Unitarian Universalist (UU) churches of Houston.
As I walk, I try to pay close attention to passing details, scribbling a few blognotes along the way as we follow the mile-long parade route across Westheimer, past the restaurants and bars and theaters and tattoo art houses, toward Houston’s sparkling night skyline.
It’s now 11 p.m., Saturday, June 25, 2011. I just got home, and I’m sitting down to rest my feet and collect my thoughts and impressions here on the word-jazz keyboard.
Our parade route has taken us through the heart of the Montrose. One of the many things that may surprise newcomers to Houston (as we are) is that the city has a fairly large and visible gay and lesbian community, centered in the Montrose area near the Museum District. Our popular mayor, Annise Parker, is an out lesbian, and I haven’t met anyone yet for whom that’s a problem. But then I haven’t met many Houstonians yet, and the ones I know here in my university and Unitarian social pods are not representative of Greater Houston.
Would that they were. I grew up not far from Houston, on the edge of the Deep South (Would that make it the Shallow South?), and I could tell you stories about what this region was like in the 1950’s and 1960s. Maybe another time. Even today, southeast Texas remains a conservatarian stronghold.
This morning’s Houston Chronicle played up the Pride parade on its editorial page. This is not just a gay event, the editors emphasized. It’s an event for the whole city. Well said. Houston -- and the country it’s in -- have come a long way since the Stonewall uprising, the birthing event that Pride Houston honors. In June of 1969, according to legend, gay patrons in a mafia-controlled New York bar refused to let bullying cops treat them like second-class citizens. They fought back. This was gay dignity’s Rosa Parks moment.
So we’re moving forward – gay and straight alongside each other -- in Houston Pride, a slow-flowing river of diverse humanity numbering in the tens of thousands, I would guess, if we count both walkers and curbstanders. They also serve who stand on the curb.
[Postscript: This morning's Chronicle estimates the crowd at 150,000. I later hear that New York is expecting a half-million today.]
Our Unitarian-Universalist pace car and limousine tonight is a stubby and wonderfully retro late-model navy-blue Plymouth PT Cruiser convertible with top down, its driver and passengers waving cheerfully to the noisy crowd. The limo is flying the six-striped "rainbow flag." I walk alongside pretending to be a secret service agent on a presidential motorcade.
Ahead of us in the parade is an armada of local affinity groups. I haven’t seen official Baptist or Catholic groups so far, but I’ll keep looking for their banners. And looking. I'm sure Baptists and Catholics are here. Just not officially.
Our UU group, banner forward, follows in the musical wake of a transgender float blaring Helen Reddy’s now-classic anthem “I Am Woman.” The transgender group is followed by a gay and lesbian support group from the University of Houston, and we in turn follow them. Behind us are representatives of a Houston law firm (any partners, I wonder?). Also in the mix are students from Rice University and a merry band of rifle-twirlers, mostly male.
The atmosphere is festive, even celebratory. This morning’s headlines have brought news of the passage of a an important gay marriage bill in the New York State Senate. Progressive politicians are seeing and being seen in the parade, sending a strong signal of their support for the gay love agenda.
Our river of moving humanity flows past cheering spectators standing on the concrete banks. They greet us with wild waves and a loud and continuous “Woooooohhh!” the entire way. Clapping, cheering, shouting. People in the street. People on the sidewalks, People on the balconies. People on the rooftops, people on scaffolds and in bleachers, yelling “Wooooohhh,” like a roaring communal Om. Or like a more politicized and less drunken and suffocating Mardi Gras.
People on the curb reach out to high-five me. I’m too socially flat-footed to respond quickly enough. About twenty young people along the route plead with me to give them the small rainbow flag I’m carrying. I quickly learn to say “Sorry, it’s not mine” with a regretful shrug.
The UU churches will collect these flags later to reuse in next year’s parade, and the one after that, and the one after that. The Pride parade is by now a well-entrenched annual urban, national and even international historical tradition. Not just a tradition, but a Tradition. Get used to it, as the saying goes.
The rainbow flag befits the crowd’s demographic diversity. Members of the crowd, each distinctive in some way, appear to be largely Anglo (as we say in south Texas), but also include large numbers of Black, Hispanic and some Asian celebrants as well. One group's banner, in fact, reads “Asians and Friends.”
I see people displaying a wide assortment of body sizes and physiques, of gender performances, of skin hues. Racially or ethnically mixed couples and groups, both male and female, are commonplace. This is the future my Southern grandmother warned me about.
The crowd is youngish, but with a few silverbacks like me in the blend. Hard to say whether there are more men than women. I don’t really know for sure who in this crowd is gay and who isn’t. Mostly gay, I would assume, but I didn’t ask. They didn’t tell. Who cares? This parade is not just about sexual orientation. It’s also about everyone's civil rights. And about having fun together.
Although this is my first Pride event, I'm an experienced veteran of other civil rights events, having attended many MLK marches with my family and university colleagues in San Antonio, a city that knows how to fiesta. I remember well the exhilaration I felt among kindred spirits in marches that drew more than 50,000 participants, heads bobbing as far as the eye could see. Events like these, apart from their symbolic significance, are amazingly interesting and entertaining and inspiring to me. The two events – MLK and Pride – are strikingly similar in many ways. Both are civil rights festivals. The MLK may be more political than Pride. MLK is explicitly a march, not a parade, commemorating those who marched in years past when doing so wasn’t safe, and was sometimes lethal. But then being gay has also been lethal at times, and not just in Wyoming.
MLK is also a bit more solemn, perhaps. Pride is a more exuberant and playful occasion, complete with dragsters (not the racecar kind), moms, dads, kids, religious and secular liberals, family and friends of gays and lesbians, Mardi-Gras-style bead-throwers, Democrats and Logcabicans, dancers, prancers, cupids and vixens.
Sorry no pets, unless you count the road-appleing horses (watch your step) carrying the mounted police, whose uniformed peacekeeping has been uniformly professional and helpful tonight as far as I can see. We’ve all come a long way since Stonewall and Bull Connor. Well, most of us have.
The sound system on the transgender float ahead of us strikes up another classic anthem: Kool and the Gang's “Celebration Time,” and then Sly and the Family Stone's timeless “We Are Family.” This event is one Unitarian-American’s idea of expressing family values.
We come to the end of the parade route. Some in my UU group disperse, but I swim to the banks of the human river to watch the rest of the parade. The age-old problem: How do you watch a parade while you’re in it? Solution: You find a way to do a little of both.
I take a place on the sidewalk near the end of the route and watch those who have been walking behind me all along -- among them the Houston Pride Band, the Macy’s employees (though this is no Macy’s Day Parade), a brigade of emergency medical personnel, and the Green Party, which proudly advertises a political platform that includes a plank supporting gay marriage.
The biggest cheer of the night greets a group of maybe forty or fifty NASA employees and their families. This is one Unitarian-American's idea of a patriotic moment.
But the most poignant moment, for me, comes when the PFLAG (Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) folks float past and a young man standing directly in front of me calls out repeatedly from the curb, “I love you, Mom! I love you, Mom!” A middle-aged woman from the PFLAG ranks walks toward him. They share a long, long tearful embrace and some quiet words.
Nothing can top that tonight. I’ve gone home to write about it.

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