What is it about Texas that is so toxic?
Don’t mess with Texas?! What sane person would want to? It’s enough of a mess already. It borders on Mexico and seems to emulate its third-world, poltical style. I just wish it wouldn’t export its mess to the rest of the country, which is what the rest of us are allowing the thugs who come from there to do. If you’re from Texas, I’m sure you’re a fine person, but tell me, how can you bear it?
I wrote a piece
last October after the Miers nomination about how understanding it can
be a big help in understanding how the crony capitalist system being
promoted by our president is an extension of Texas society. (I also
wrote a piece about this called "The Southernization of American
Politics," which, if you’re interested, you can find here.) Along these lines, Sidney Blumenthal has an interesting piece in this morning’s Salon
that shows how Katharine Armstrong’s ranch plays a pivotal role in that
society–a subject at least as interesting as whether Cheney was drunk
or not when he shot Whittington.
The point is that royalty doesn’t have to live by the same rules as
the rest of us. Understanding the dynamics of a society ruled by
royals is what we really have to understand. Blumenthal’s article ends
with a paragraph, which I think draws an interesting analogy to Jean
Renoir’s film The Rules of the Game.
The
curiosities surrounding the vice president’s accident have created a
contemporary version of "The Rules of the Game" with a Texas twist. In
Jean Renoir’s 1939 film, politicians and aristocrats mingle at a
country house in France over a long weekend, during which a merciless
hunt ends with a tragic shooting. Appearing on the eve of World War II,
"The Rules of the Game" depicted a hypocritical, ruthless and decadent
ruling class that made its own rules and led a society to the edge of
catastrophe.
Understanding the quasi-banana Republic
mentality of the Texas political elites can give you a good insight
into the kind of place Bush, Cheney, Rove and their gang of plutocrats
want to take the country. Read Michael Lind’s Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics
if you want to read a more sustained argument about how this dynamic
in American power distribution is a key to understanding the shift to
the right since 1980.
Since Salon is a subscription only, I’ll excerpt some of
Blumenthal’s aricle here to give you some sense of the bloodlines and
alliances that determine the "rules of the game."
Both
the vice president and the deputy chief of staff [Karl Rove], as it
happens, owed their previous, lucrative jobs in the private sector to
their relationships with the Armstrong family. Anne Armstrong,
Katharine’s mother, was on the board of Halliburton that made Dick
Cheney its chief executive officer. Tobin Armstrong, Katharine’s
father, had financed Karl Rove & Co., Rove’s political consulting
firm. Katharine herself is a lobbyist for Houston law firm Baker Botts,
a major Texas power broker since it was founded in the 19th century by
the family of James A. Baker III, the former secretary of state and
close associate of George H.W. Bush’s. . . .Katharine Armstrong is linked to two family fortunes — those of
Armstrong and King — that include extensive corporate holdings in
land, cattle, banking and oil. No one in Texas, except perhaps Baker,
but certainly not latecomer George W. Bush, has a longer lineage in its
political and economic elite. In 1983, Debrett’s Peerage Ltd.,
publisher of "Debrett’s Peerage and Baronetage," printed "Debrett’s
Texas Peerage," featuring "the aristocrats of Texas," with the King
family noted as the "Royal Family of Ranching." The King Ranch, founded
by Richard King in 1857, is the largest in Texas, and its wealth was
vastly augmented by the discovery of oil on its tracts, making the
family a major shareholder of Exxon. The King Ranch is the model for
Edna Ferber’s novel of Texas aristocracy, "Giant."John B. Armstrong, a Texas Ranger and enforcer for the King Ranch,
founded his own neighboring ranch in 1882, buying it with the bounty of
$4,000 he got for capturing the outlaw John Wesley Hardin. In 1944,
almost inevitably, the two fortunes became intertwined through
marriage. Tobin Armstrong’s brother John married the King Ranch
heiress, who was also a Vassar classmate of Tobin’s wife, Anne, who
came from a wealthy New Orleans family.The Armstrong Ranch developed far-flung holdings in Australia and
South America. Meanwhile, President Ford appointed Anne, a major
Republican activist, U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom, and
President Reagan appointed her a member of the President’s Foreign
Intelligence Advisory Board. U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison is
reportedly Anne’s best friend, and Anne was instrumental in launching
her political career. Tobin, for his part, worked as an advisor to
Texas Republican Gov. William Clements, where he first encountered the
young Karl Rove and decided to give him a helping hand when Rove struck
out in the political business on his own.The Armstrong family’s Republican connections have continued and
strengthened down to the latest generation of Bushes. Gov. George W.
Bush appointed Anne a regent of Texas A&M University and Katharine
a commission member of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, the
agency that filed the report on the Cheney shooting. At Tobin’s funeral
last year, Cheney delivered the eulogy.
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