My sister got married and moved to Texas. Almost 40 years ago. Don’t ask why; it’s complicated. The family would occasionally haul down to Texas to visit.
I can’t honestly say I relished those trips. Yes, it was educational to visit Dealey Plaza, where John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Seeing how compact the layout is, you go from “How could Oswald hit him twice?” to “How could he miss?”
But Texas is so .... my sister lives outside Dallas, which is not a proper city, like Chicago. The skyline, with its neon trimmed buildings, seems an inflatable backdrop, something the Army Corps of Engineers would set up overnight to create the decoy of a city.
Though one early visit stands out. We rented a Lincoln Continental — when in Rome — which I dubbed “The Fat Man’s Car,” thinking of that TV detective Cannon. He drove a Lincoln.
Back then, in the mid-1980s, Texans could drink and drive — they had drive-through liquor stores. At one point, my brother and I slipped away, picked up a 6-pack of Lone Star beer and tooled around, enjoying the full Texas cultural experience.
Steering with one hand and nursing a beer with the other was perfectly legal. Why? Because freedom. They would be gosh-darned if they were going to let some gubment bureaucrat tell them how to live. They not only drank and drove but celebrated the practice.
“Texans love to drive and drink,” Jan Reid wrote in Texas Monthly in 1983. “I’ve done it many times ... gained new vigor for the upcoming stretch of road from the rousing feel of a cold one wedged between your thighs ... the freedom to imbibe behind the wheel represents a level of personal liberty that is denied residents of more thoroughly urbanized parts of the country. We tenaciously defend our right to drink and drive.”
Tenacity slips, and personal liberty is on hard times in Texas. Not because they passed an open container law in 1987 (for drivers; passengers could imbibe until 1993). Having seen the ravages of alcohol up close, I applaud common sense so clear it even sank into rock hard heads of Texans, eventually.
But last week, if you had room for bad news beyond slaughter in the Middle East and the United States picking a sexist, insurrectionist Christo-fascist as speaker of the House, Lubbock County became the fourth and largest Texas county to forbid drivers from using the public highways for the purpose of taking a woman to have an abortion. Because completely banning all abortion statewide obviously isn’t enough.
That’s some major league dystopian, ummm, stuff going on there. They don’t ban outright driving your terrified teenage neighbor to New Mexico for an abortion. Such plainly unconstitutional laws tend to be thrown out. Rather, they facilitate the filing of lawsuits, deputizing abusive boyfriends and keyhole-peering busybodies of all stripes to serve God’s will via the courts of Texas.
Score another victory for the zombie army of imaginary babies, which has been marching across the country on a moral crusade, forcing conservative Christian religious practices upon women.
The giveaway in these laws is they don’t punish the women actually having the abortions. Doing that would imply that women have agency — that they are free-willed individuals fully capable of making decisions.
Which can’t be true. If they were, women might decide to terminate a pregnancy. Rather, they are volitionless vessels designed by the Lord God Almighty to carry any egg to term that any man has managed to fertilize.
That’s a downer, isn’t it? Let’s end on a more positive note. Getting back to my sister — Debbie is her name. I don’t write about Debbie much. It’s complicated. But we managed to have dinner last year. I happened to be in Dallas reporting a story and met her at a hip restaurant, Roots Southern Table in Farmers Branch.
The food was jaw-droppingly wonderful, starting with Southern greens — baby turnips, potlikker, smoked pork — and cast iron cornbread drizzled with Steen’s syrup. Jerk lamb chops and Hoppin’ John. An orange juice cake I think of to this day.
But best of all we sat and ate and laughed and talked, which my sister and I haven’t done much over the past half century. So Texas has that much going for it. Not everybody there is a crushed down Handmaid’s Tale serf waiting to be told when to breed. Yet.
