Texas Is Famous This Week

[white cloud]

Texas has arrived! Just look at the Newsweek cover, which blasts the state’s new marketing slogan, “Don’t Mess With Texas,” and features a picture of America’s oldest teenaged runaway, Rick Perry, showing off his indigenous footwear. (Free snake farm tickets for anyone who can decipher the boot hieroglyphics.) Inside there’s a bunch of articles about Texas, like this one about the wingnut-deluxes who always try to remove all the brown people from the social studies textbooks, and another that says everyone is moving to Texas now because it’s become America’s Camelot, MINUS state income taxes and PLUS independence. “‘I’m willing to tell anyone that will listen that the land of opportunity still exists in America, and it’s in Texas,” Newsweek reports Perry as saying all the time.

Read more at Wonkette: http://wonkette.com/414937/texas-is-famous-this-week#ixzz0li9t0asZ

[sonias]

1. Rick - "oldest teenaged runaway"

:spray:

I think Perry's pitch is like a used car salesman - never trust anything he says on face value. He's just trying to make a lot of money. (which he does on our taxpayer dime) :(

[WolverineDG]

2. New marketing slogan?

Don't Mess with Texas is an anti-littering campaign & has been in use for over 20 years.

dg

[sonias]

3. Good link in the OP to another Newsweek article

Article is written by Evan Smith the current editor of The Texas Tribune and former editor of Texas Monthly.

Newsweek 4/16/10
The Texas Curriculum Massacre
What a conservative rewriting of history tells us about how Texans view the world, which is, for them, Texas.
(snip)
All over the country, educators and progressives recoiled, believing that the befouled byproducts of this process would force changes to their own curricula, given the Lone Star State's massive footprint as a consumer of textbooks. Although the executive director of the Association of American Publishers has called the pervasive influence of Texas "an urban myth," the damage was done—as goes Texas, it was feared, so goes the country.

It's certainly true that some of this owes to conservative ideology asserting itself in a conservative state that Barack Obama lost in 2008 and would lose even more resoundingly today. But there's something else at work—and a clue to it can be found in another revision pushed by one of the most vocal participants in the process. Bill Ames, a conservative gadfly appointed by former board chair and creationism proponent Don McLeroy, attempted to rally everyone round the flag of American exceptionalism—which he described as the belief that America is "not only unique but superior," and that its citizens are "divinely ordained to lead the world to betterment."

May I suggest that a state-level version of this philosophy is behind the SBOE contretemps—and that it's part of a larger argument playing out all across Texas? Remember (would we ever let you forget?) that this is a state that was once a nation. It's a "whole other country," as the tourism slogan boasts, and a wicked independent streak remains a defining—perhaps the defining —feature of our character. Texas and Texans have never cottoned to answering to outsiders. We don't like being told what to do. And we don't like it when our ability to chart our own course, to control our own destinies or the way we live our lives, is in any way hampered.