Lone Star

Driving home from the art museum, I passed flagpoles, big flags whipping in the spring winds. One pole with two flags, the stars and stripes above the lone star of Texas. Some places had two poles, side by side, with two flags, equal in size, the state flag flying just as high and proud as the national one. I remember my grandson, visiting from Chicago, commenting, “I don’t know what the Illinois flag looks like.” But he recognized the Texas flag, as do people throughout the World. (Thanks to Western movies.)

Texans are proud of their flag and of their state. As a child I was taught Texas was the only state whose flag can fly at the same level as the U.S. flag, “because we were once a republic.” The Republic of Texas only lasted for ten years, from 1836 to 1846. Texans never forget it.

I “escaped” from Texas more than 50 years ago. Since returning three years ago, I have been alternately amused and exasperated by how little Texas has changed. Politically the people, formerly Democrats, now vote as Republicans. Actually, they have no changed at all. Most Texans are deeply conservative.

Of the millions who live in Texas, 75% were “born and raised” here. Most never traveled out of state, except maybe to casinos in Oklahoma and Louisiana. The schools are poor and provincial. “Abstinence Only” is taught as sex education. Biology teachers are required to teach the “flaws in Darwin’s theory.” Many of them believe the World and all its creatures came into being in one week in 6,000 B.C. That’s what the Bible says, and the Bible was dictated word for word by God, and if you don’t believe that, you will go to Hell. They also believe that Jesus told them to go out and save the World, so instead of opening their minds to other points of view, they try to convert you to their warped way of thinking.

As Ian McEwan pointed out, “The best way to deceive someone is first to deceive yourself.” Daniel Zalewski added, “because you’re more convincing when you’re sincere.” My Texan friends are good people, honest, kind, generous, and totally sincere. I hesitate to humiliate them by telling them I am better educated, have read hundreds more books (maybe thousands), and have traveled and had wider experiences. Even as I understand their ignorance and admire their sincerity, it bores when they continue to try to convert me.

In 1983 I traveled Yugoslavia’s narrow, pot holed roads, the worst I subjected my new BMW to in Europe. In area smaller than Texas, I still drove hundreds of miles on bad roads through the mountains to Prestina and down to Titograd and up to coast to Rejeka. At that time Yugoslavia was still one nation – a Communist nation. Since then the people bombed and killed each other in civil wars. Yugoslavia is now half a dozen small “nations.” On a repeat trip to the Balkans in 2007 I saw shattered buildings in Croatia and Serbia. I do not know how many lives were destroyed in the conflict between Orthodox and Catholics I have only seen on television and read in magazines about the Serbs massacring Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo.


I keep thinking, “What’s wrong with those people?” Texas gave up its independence when it joined the United States (the only state to join by treaty) in 1846. Yet everyone knows Texas has not lost its identity. So here is the paradox. Texas is part of the United States, yet a Texan is still a Texan. Our fellow Americans put up with Texans, who are often ignorant and boring – and who remain blithely unaware that they are ignorant and boring, Too bad the Yugoslavs did not follow Texas’s – and America’s – example before one small nation became a half dozen tiny, ineffective “independent” countries – not to mention all the destroyed property and lives.