Purple Texas

Shame and despair. Those are, finally, the best words I can conjure. I’ve been sitting at the keyboard for a couple of hours now, straining my brain for some clever and catchy way to express how it feels to be a Texan right now. But it’s hard to be clever about an unfolding human catastrophe that appears unstoppable—and that’s exactly what Texas’ budget crisis amounts to. Only big, broad, dire words can capture the emotions of any decent Texan as we lurch headlong into a future of decimated schools, shuttered nursing homes, untreated mental illnesses, dirtier air, and a continent-wide gap between the richest and the rest. The shame stems from that. The despair arises from the sense of inevitability.

On Sunday, the cruelest and most crippling budget in Texas history passed the state House. The proposed budget rips, tears and tweezes $23 billion from current spending—nearly one-fourth of the state’s already rock-bottom funding for schools, roads, prisons and social services. Now that the House has done the devil’s work, it will be left to the Senate to scrounge around for new revenue sources—without raising taxes, which is forbidden by Holy Writ—to try to prevent the very worst: hundreds of school closings, thousands of teacher firings, and upwards of 300,000 lost jobs in the public and private sectors.

Most of the attention on this unfolding disaster has been focused on the big, bad hit to public schools. They stand to lose perhaps $8 billion, nearly one-fifth of their already-anemic funding. The long-term consequences of millions more undereducated Texans are staggering to consider. But the more immediate, visceral horror comes from even deeper proposed cuts to health and human services. Simply put, this budget is going to kill people. Not metaphorically. Literally.

Yes, I know: This is just the kind of talk that inspires Gov. Perry to poke fun at the “doom-and-gloom crowd,” those whiny babies who refuse to acknowledge that Texas is a magical realm exempt from universal laws of cause-and-effect. For instance, if we cut $6 billion from Medicaid, as proposed, fact-based doomsters calculate that the state will end up paying about 30 percent less per patient to doctors, hospitals, nursing homes and group homes for the disabled. Among other awful consequences, this could force one-half of the state’s nursing homes out of business.

What, exactly, does a sick old person on Medicaid do when her home closes—and when facilities that are still in business can’t afford to take Medicaid recipients anymore? If you ask our fine Christian governor, what seniors will do is thank the stars that they live in the kindest, gentlest place on Earth. “As Texans, we always take care of the least among our population—the frail, the young, the elderly. The people on fixed income. Those in situations of abuse and neglect,” the governor lied through his teeth at his latest inauguration. “They can count on the people of Texas to be there for them. We’re going to protect them, support them, empower them.”

Sure. With what? Here in the nation’s leading la-la land of anti-government ideology, any solution sweeping enough to close the budget gap—say, a state income tax—cannot even be seriously discussed. Many lawmakers are genuinely shaken by the nightmarish human impact of what they’re about to do. But the best they can do is suggest relatively small tweaks: systemic fixes that will save a little, cigarette taxes that will raise a little. Reps. Ryan Guillen, D-Rio Grande City, and John Frullo, R-Lubbock, have even proposed allowing the state’s imperiled parks department to find “official corporate partners”—in other words, as the Observer’s Forrest Wilder puts it, “Welcome to Exxon State Park, y’all.”

Maybe we should take that idea to its logical extreme. Parks are one thing; why not peddle the whole damn Great State to the highest-bidding “official sponsor”? A market-based solution! And consider the poetic justice, the fundamental honesty, of rechristening ourselves as BP Texas, or Wells-Fargo Texas, or Boone Pickens’ Texas.

But there’s really only one corporate moniker that would truly encapsulate our dominant culture and politics: Disney Texas. Think of the possibilities. We could set up state-line roadblocks and charge a steep admission fee to Americans and other foreigners eager to experience a hot, dusty, Technicolor fantasyland where bad things only happen to bad people, and Ayn Rand reigns as the Fairy Queen of Freedom. At least we’d be making the truth official: Human reality is unwelcome in these parts. And so is anyone who can’t pay the price of admission.

Last Friday, it looked like Bexar County’s Democratic chairman, Dan Ramos, had surely committed political suicide. In an interview with the San Antonio Current, Ramos equated gay Democrats with the “Tea Party and the fucking Nazi Party,” called them “termites” eating away at Democratic foundations, and sprinkled in some insults for African Americans and Anglos while he was at it. Boyd Richie, the state party chairman, quickly called for his resignation, along with the Stonewall Democrats. This morning, before Ramos held a press conference to address the matter, the San Antonio Express-News also called on him to step down.

Considering that even before the comments, Ramos’ eccentric and autocratic leadership style was causing division in the local party—a point Richie made strongly in his letter—resignation seemed the only logical step.

But Ramos, when the time came, did not even hint at leaving his two-year elected position. He would not resign or apologize.

How defiant was he? Let’s count the ways. How’s this for starters:

Ramos also referred to State Democratic Chairman Boyd Richie as a “racist bastard” and an “idiot” who’s been too busy to help the local party. “Gay people have been advising Richie,” he said, “and he slipped when he asked me to resign.”

Not only did Ramos refuse to apologize for calling gay Democrats “termites,” he defended his use of the term—and expanded on it:

Ramos reiterated that he believed that gays were like “white termites who have infiltrated the party much like termites infiltrate your house,” and were co-conspirators with direct involvement in the theft of over $200,000 from party coffers. …

“I’ve always tried to be politically correct, however the gays, through the Stonewall Democrats, have taken over the party. Hell, my opponent in the election, Choco Meza, she’s a lesbian,” Ramos said.

As QSanAntonio pointed out, Meza, his opponent in last year’s election, is not a lesbian. And, of course, taking a strong stand as Boyd Richie did against a county chairman who insults three of your major constituencies and tries to divide your party along racial lines—that hardly makes you a “racist bastard.”

During the conference, Ramos also tried to pin the alleged embezzlement of $200,000 from the Bexar Democratic Party on the gay Stonewall Democrats. The former county treasurer is charged with embezzlement. Whatever the sexuality of anyone involved, though, it sounds completely absurd for Ramos to claim, with no evidence, that the theft was some kind of organized gay Democratic scheme to destroy the party from within.

As sad as this situation is, there is one quote from Ramos’ unhinged press conference that inspires laughter:

“This was not a face-to-face interview, it was on the phone,” Ramos said of the Current interview, “How do we even know it’s my voice?”

How do we know? Probably because you sounded exactly the same way at today’s press conference.

As I mentioned in a previous post, it’s not easy to get rid of a county chair in Texas. There’s not much wiggle room for a state party that has one of its chairman turn into an outspoken bigot—and a potentially divisive force.

I asked Dan Graney, a party activist in San Antonio and head of the state Stonewall Democrats, what Democrats could do now. “My personal view is that a complaint should be filed with the State Democratic Party calling for Mr. Ramos’ removal as County Chair,” Graney wrote by email. “We may be on ‘thin ice’ legally to do this, but there is a process for doing this under the State Party Rules and a Bexar County Democratic voter must initiate the process to get it going.”

Ramos surely isn’t speaking for many people with his paranoid comments. But as party leaders who’ve worked with him told me, he’s not just shooting his mouth off randomly. Ramos is trying to tap into some Democrats’ unspoken resentments of their fellow Democrats. In a county as vital to the party’s fortunes as Bexar—one that’s home to many of the Democrats’ young leaders statewide—that’s potentially poisonous.

Will those young Democratic leaders—or older ones, for that matter—step up and make it clear they condemn Ramos’ tirades, and his attempt to foster racial divisiveness in the party? So far, not one has joined the party chairman in denouncing Ramos’ hate speech and bigotry.

A protest demanding that elected Democrats speak out against Ramos will be held tonight outside a Democratic fundraiser in San Antonio. (For details, go here.)

Some liberals love nothing better than a good protest. I’ve never been one of them. Don’t get me wrong: I’ve yelled against plenty of wars and sashayed through my share of Pride parades. I’ve protested executions and Ten Commandments monuments and international torture-training schools. But it’s never been my idea of a rocking good time. I don’t like holding signs with slogans any more than I like mouthing the lyrics to folk songs I’m supposed to have memorized, or responding in unison to the inevitable questions of seemingly every protest rally: “What do we want? … When do we want it?” Somehow, that 1967-era protest shtick always leaves me feeling like we’re never going to get what we want, no matter how much we chant for it.

But there’s a time to kvetch about style points, and there’s this time. It’s a time when Texas has a $27 billion budget deficit and a right-wing Legislature determined to balance the ledger by depleting schools and services. It’s a moment when every Texan who believes in building a better future rather than a second-world society needs to be getting up and out and organized. It’s a moment to stamp and holler and insist. To make the Tea Party’s rallies look like polite, lightly attended little affairs. To stand up or be streamrolled.

Of course, the facts of Texas’ budget crisis are so drastic and so grim that it’s hard to perceive any potential daylight through the gloom. How are rational Texans going to turn back a right-wing Legislature bent on using this enormous budget deficit as an excuse to eradicate social services, schools and other vestiges of civilization as much as they possibly can?

Well, for starters, we can make it vividly plain that there are Texans who aren’t going to sit back and silently watch it happen. That’s a powerful message by itself, as we’ve seen recently in Wisconsin, among other states. Right-wing Republican governors’ coordinated efforts to dismantle both organized labor and the social safety net have prompted vigorous protests elsewhere. But not yet in Texas, where there’s just as much at stake for vulnerable and middle-class folks as anywhere else.

The national context of Texas’ historic budget crisis—and its vital importance to moderate and progressive Americans everywhere—has largely been missed. The effort to break the unions in Wisconsin and other states is, at root, part of a larger push to replicate the “Texas model” across America. In nearly two decades under Govs. Bush and Perry, we have become the low-tax, deregulated, minimum-wage paradise of Wall Street’s dreams. And Perry has done such a hard sell of Texas’ economic miracle, on his perpetual national tour, that a whole lot of people still believe it’s true.

The national prominence of the Texas model—and the use to which the Republican right is putting it nationally—is one more reason for moderate and progressive and otherwise civilized Texans to start acting up. If we’re going to be used as a model for other states, how far back toward the 18th century are we going to let that model go?

And look: If you organize and the worst happens—you lose this budget battle—you still haven’t lost everything. If reality-based Texans can mobilize effectively, they will have built a base for the future. And they will have made an important fact known to legislators and Gov. Perry: that there’s a sizable number of Texans who think the right-wing ideologues are heedlessly destroying everything that gives Texas a future, not to mention many of the qualities that make it a state worth living in. The right is creating a place where the wealthy live one way, cordoned off from everybody else—and where everybody else lives harder lives with less. That place is not America, and it’s not Texas, and we refuse to live there. Saying that is not just important; it’s essential.

Stripping workers’ rights is one thing—and it’s a rotten, destructive thing. But here in Texas, we have our own brand of rotten. To balance the state budget, about one-fourth of our state spending would have to be cut if no new revenues are found. And that, folks, is something to organize around and protest and live on the Capitol grounds and even sing songs about. If there’s ever going to be a time for Texas progressives to fight like hell to reorient this state’s compass back toward the 21st century, here it is.

I was 12 when I fell for Ronald Reagan. It was the spring of 1976, when the B-actor and A-plus pitchman was mounting his right-wing challenge to the accidental president, Gerald Ford. After squandering an early lead in the polls and losing several key primaries, Reagan had to win my home state of North Carolina to salvage his chances for the GOP nomination—and his political career. So there he was, in my factory city’s plug-ugly auditorium, introduced by Jimmy Stewart and playing the role of a whole new Mr. Smith, eager to go to Washington and challenge the corrupt and godless enemy who’d stolen the freedom of everyday Americans: big, bad, grasping, evil Government.

The Gipper explained it all: How the Eastern liberal elites had ruthlessly conspired to steal the hard-earned wages of working stiffs like my daddy. How they’d used their ill-gotten gains to enrich welfare queens and union bosses and commie professors. But he conveyed this anti-democratic nihilism with a warm wide grin and an infectious, aw-shucks chuckle. I didn’t know it then, but Reagan was performing a terrible miracle: turning a rich man’s politics into an uplifting, flag-waving, Disneyesque populism.

I ate his bullshit up. And so did North Carolina Republicans, who gave Reagan a surprise victory and kept his hopes alive. But then, just a few months later, the strangest thing happened. Being a precocious little political geek, I watched every minute of the Democratic National Convention on our color-challenged TV—and was confronted, on its opening night, with a whole ‘nother brand of American idealism. It came in the form of the keynote speaker: a black congresswoman (say what?) from Houston, Texas. 

Like Reagan, Barbara Jordan spoke of “the feeling that the grand American experiment is failing, or has failed.” But the solution she offered was worlds apart. Where Reagan peddled black-and-white nostalgia, this shocking woman spoke of Technicolor truths, of racial, gender and class inequities. But she did not dwell on lamentations: “I could recite these problems and then I could sit down and offer no solutions,” she declared. “But I don’t choose to do that.”

What Jordan chose to do was inform the country that the government was not inevitably our enemy, for all its failures. “The people are the source of all governmental power,” she declared. If we didn’t take that power, she warned, we would “cease to be one nation and become instead a collection of interest groups: city against suburb, region against region, individual against individual.

“If that happens,” she asked, “who then will speak for America? Who then will speak for the common good?”

Where Reagan had tickled my fancy, Jordan had blown my tiny mind—and ruined a right-winger in the making. She’d delivered one of the greatest political orations in American history, a prescient antidote to Reaganism. 

But here in Jordan’s home state, 35 years later, we are now confronted with the dire consequences of the disastrous choice most Americans and Texans made—the embrace of a 12-year-old’s politics, of the simplistic fictions of the Reagans and Bushes and Rick Perrys. Millions of Texans suffer, every second of every day, while the rich get fatter and the corporations get meaner and the people’s government gets demonized. And those sufferings are about to be multiplied, as a $27 billion budget deficit created by Perry and his tax-slashing cronies threatens to decimate our already pathetic schools, to sentence our mentally ill to lives of desperation, and to condemn our impoverished elderly to die, uncared-for, in nursing homes with zeroed-out funding.

To care about any of this, we are told, is to be socialist, to be anti-American. Barbara Jordan told us something different: That we can either swallow the rich man’s lie that government is our enemy, or muster up the courage to make the government our own again.

Interestingly enough, in this centennial year of Reagan’s birth, it is also the 75th anniversary of Jordan’s. And as hard as it may be to imagine, we still have a choice—the one that Jordan articulated so masterfully on that July night of America’s bicentennial year.

“Are we to be one people bound together by common spirit sharing in a common endeavor, or will we become a divided nation?” Jordan asked. “There is no executive order, there is no law that can require the American people to form a national community. This we must do as individuals, and if we do it as individuals, there is no President of the United States who can veto that decision.”

No president, and no governor. The decision is still ours to make.

Call me a masochist—or just plain weird—but I’m an incurable right-wing radio addict. Maybe I just don’t like being one of those cloistered liberals who require smelling salts every time election results roll in and the “rational” candidate, whether it’s John Kerry or Bill White, gets steamrolled by a wingnut. Or maybe I have suppressed hairshirt tendencies and take a perverse pleasure in hearing my queer, socialistic, Obama-voting self relentlessly flogged. But whatever the reason, my days and nights are incomplete without heaping helpings of Rush, Sean, Laura, Michael Savage and Alex Jones.

Naturally, then, I rarely miss WallBuilders Live. Hosted by Texas’ own David Barton—historical guru of the Tea Party, professor at Glenn Beck University, teacher of Michelle Bachmann’s “Constitution classes” for freshman members of Congress, and former vice chair of the Texas GOP—the show mostly focuses on Barton’s longtime project of inventing a fundamentalist Christian version of American history. Named by Time as one of America’s 25 most influential evangelicals in 2005, Barton has made a lucrative career of cherry-picking quotes designed to show that the founding fathers committed a silly oversight when they left God out of the Constitution. In the counterfactual world of Barton’s wildly popular books, homeschool texts and videos-for-sale, church and state were always meant to be one and the same. Deists like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were the Pat Robertsons of their day. “He is to history what the creationists are to science,” said one of Barton’s most astute critics, Rob Boston of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Which no doubt explains why Beck has called Barton “the most important man in America.”

He is also one of America’s most important hatemongers. And Barton’s sharpest sallies are reserved—surprise!—for “militant homosexuals.” Last October on WallBuilders Live, Barton outdid even himself, calling on the U.S. government to “regulate homosexuality.” As Barton informed his audience, with all the scrupulous attention to facts that makes him Beck and Bachmann’s favorite Constitutional scholar, gayness is far more dangerous than smoking three packs a day or ingesting huge quantities of trans fats. “Homosexual/bisexual individuals are seven times more likely to contemplate or commit suicide,” Barton said. “Oooh, that doesn’t sound very healthy.” That’s not all: “Homosexuals die decades earlier than heterosexuals.” And there’s more: “Nearly one-half of practicing homosexuals admit to 500 or more sex partners and nearly one-third admit to a thousand or more sex partners in a lifetime.”

When Barton’s “regulate the gays” rant got picked up, and picked apart, by the likes of MSNBC, he immediately resorted to the haters’ last resort: claiming reverse victimhood. “If there’s a group in America that is hypersensitive, it is homosexuals,” Barton told his listeners. “They came after me in unbelievable ways.”

And now “they” are after him again. On the Jan. 24 installment of WallBuilders Live, Barton hosted Brian Camenker of Mass America, an anti-gay hate group, for a chat about the hot topic of bullying in schools. “Anti-bullying” initiatives, they heartily agreed, are actually just indoctrination tools used by the militant gays in their ceaseless recruitment efforts. As Barton said, “All this bullying stuff … it’s not the schools that are doing bullying, it’s the people from outside coming in and saying, ‘Oh, you got a bullying problem and we need to teach a course for you.’ “

“This is a very aggressive, fascist-type movement,” Camenker chimed in. “These guys define the term bullies.”

“Yeah, I think you’re right,” said Barton. “The perception out there is that they’re the only ones being bullied.”

Try telling that to Asher Brown’s parents. Last September, the 8th-grader from the Houston suburb of Cypress used his stepfather’s 9-mm Beretta to shoot himself in the head, becoming one of many gay teen suicides in 2010. His parents said he’d endured 18 months of non-stop harassment at Hamilton Middle School, and school officials turned a deaf ear to their complaints. Asher had told his parents he was gay. They were OK with it. “We didn’t condemn,” his stepfather said.

But loving parents are sometimes no match for the hatred stirred up and sanctioned by “Christian” bullies like Barton, who provide anti-gay tormenters with both  ammunition and “biblical” justification. Anti-gay bullies tormenting their fellow students are only doing God’s will, after all. They are helping to cleanse Christian America of its No. 1 health threat. And if you don’t believe it, tune in to WallBuilders Live. America’s “most important man” has a few things to teach you.