Don't Mess With Texas!
I like Texas. I didn't think I would, but Dallas looks positively radiant after the dank gloom of Chicago and the monotonty of the Midwest. It's 27 degrees outside and what's more our Texan friends have planned a stay for us that doesn't just involve walking round and round JC Penney. On the contrary we spent the first day in the Sixth Floor Museum, which allows you, for a mere $8, to walk around the Book Depositary and look out of the very window from which Lee Harvey Oswald did or didn't (depending on which side of the debate you sit on) shoot JFK. The museum is surprsingly informative, bordering on the obsessive, detailing all the conspiracy theories and their pitfalls, but, refreshingly, not giving you a definite answer either way. You can see for yourself all kinds of sombe nick-nacks, from the place set out of Kennedy for his Welcome Dinner that evening, complete with menu and place card, to the cinecamera that recorded the famous images of the shooting.
Downstairs, you can have your picture taken on the very spot where the shooting took place, which has been helpfully marked out by a white cross in the road, though you have to coincide with the traffic lights or you will get killed by the tourist cars zooming down Elm Street as though en route to Parkland hospital - Kennedy's last journey. Apparently until recently there existed such a thing as the "JFK Experience," where for $20 you were taken in an open-top car the whole route from Love Field to Elm Street, where sound effects of shots would ring out before you were whisked at breakneck speed under the bridge towards the hospital. This has now stopped as apparently it was considered tasteless.
Food in Texas is fabulous. America is notably meant to be one of the fattest nations on earth, but I can see why - TexMex. I could eat it every day for the rest of my life (which would probably be quite short if indeed I did do that.) But there's a scary side to Texas, too, though. This is one of the most religious states in the USA and also one of the richest, and dodgy churches makwe a fortune out here. We passed a church every hundred yards or so, about a quarter of which were "megachurches", with vast congregations which tithe huge proportions of their salaries to the businessmen who run them. Our friends work in local hospitals and have seen first-hand patients who have refused treatment or stopped taking medication because "God has healed them", or, worse, God has "told" them he will heal them if they prove their faith by stopping treatment. Many have died, but one told my friend as her life ebbed away that she would rather be dead and in heaven than alive having disobeyed God and condemned to Hell/ There's a Catholic counter-argument to this, of course, where the body is deemed sacred, a gift from God that we should take care of, and we are being wilfully negligent if we take a course of action we know will cause irreparable damage when an alternative is available. These people would say that this is simply the Devil convincing me to lose trust in God, but then, I'm condemned already - I'm unmarried and I support gay unions, which I doubt will ever even be an issue worth debating in Texas. Also worthy of comment was an unexpected reaction to a play we saw in Dallas's Pocket Sandwich Theatre. One character, an alien (I won't bother to explain, suffice to say the play required a certain suspension of disbelief) comments that next time he comes to earth he will coincide his journey to participate in the Civil War, "but I think it would be much more fun if the South wins next time". Whoops and cheers from the audience, I hope out of a lack of thought for what this would actually have meant. We sat in silence.
There's one thing I have failed to do in the States. My boss, with his pink not-to-scale model of San Pietro still gleaming on his desk, has come to expect a tacky souvenir from each place I visit, but it must be below a certain limit, in this case $4. I expected finding something tacky in the USA would not be a problem, and I was right, but the trouble is that where the likes of Rome aims its tack at middle-income pilgrims, the USA seems to think that it's tacky souvenirs, along with everything else produced in the USA, are worth their weight in gold. The best I would come up with would have been a plastic Armadillo with "Don't Mess With Texas" written on its back, a mere $4.99. When I looked underneath it turned out it was made in China.
Downstairs, you can have your picture taken on the very spot where the shooting took place, which has been helpfully marked out by a white cross in the road, though you have to coincide with the traffic lights or you will get killed by the tourist cars zooming down Elm Street as though en route to Parkland hospital - Kennedy's last journey. Apparently until recently there existed such a thing as the "JFK Experience," where for $20 you were taken in an open-top car the whole route from Love Field to Elm Street, where sound effects of shots would ring out before you were whisked at breakneck speed under the bridge towards the hospital. This has now stopped as apparently it was considered tasteless.
Food in Texas is fabulous. America is notably meant to be one of the fattest nations on earth, but I can see why - TexMex. I could eat it every day for the rest of my life (which would probably be quite short if indeed I did do that.) But there's a scary side to Texas, too, though. This is one of the most religious states in the USA and also one of the richest, and dodgy churches makwe a fortune out here. We passed a church every hundred yards or so, about a quarter of which were "megachurches", with vast congregations which tithe huge proportions of their salaries to the businessmen who run them. Our friends work in local hospitals and have seen first-hand patients who have refused treatment or stopped taking medication because "God has healed them", or, worse, God has "told" them he will heal them if they prove their faith by stopping treatment. Many have died, but one told my friend as her life ebbed away that she would rather be dead and in heaven than alive having disobeyed God and condemned to Hell/ There's a Catholic counter-argument to this, of course, where the body is deemed sacred, a gift from God that we should take care of, and we are being wilfully negligent if we take a course of action we know will cause irreparable damage when an alternative is available. These people would say that this is simply the Devil convincing me to lose trust in God, but then, I'm condemned already - I'm unmarried and I support gay unions, which I doubt will ever even be an issue worth debating in Texas. Also worthy of comment was an unexpected reaction to a play we saw in Dallas's Pocket Sandwich Theatre. One character, an alien (I won't bother to explain, suffice to say the play required a certain suspension of disbelief) comments that next time he comes to earth he will coincide his journey to participate in the Civil War, "but I think it would be much more fun if the South wins next time". Whoops and cheers from the audience, I hope out of a lack of thought for what this would actually have meant. We sat in silence.
There's one thing I have failed to do in the States. My boss, with his pink not-to-scale model of San Pietro still gleaming on his desk, has come to expect a tacky souvenir from each place I visit, but it must be below a certain limit, in this case $4. I expected finding something tacky in the USA would not be a problem, and I was right, but the trouble is that where the likes of Rome aims its tack at middle-income pilgrims, the USA seems to think that it's tacky souvenirs, along with everything else produced in the USA, are worth their weight in gold. The best I would come up with would have been a plastic Armadillo with "Don't Mess With Texas" written on its back, a mere $4.99. When I looked underneath it turned out it was made in China.
posted by RLS at 2:48 pm
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