Houston - Got a Shotgun?
Concrete and steal arteries reach over vast planes of Texan desert, bleeding across the horizon. Houston is the car crash of the millennium waiting to happen. The motorcades of two million of the Space City’s patrons glide down six, seven, eight, nine lane highways. Even God gets stuck in rush hour traffic here.
In Los Angeles I garnered that it took half an hour to get to anywhere from anywhere. In Houston it takes forty-five minutes. And the scenery is a lot less pretty. Houston is like the practice range for placing highways anywhere in the world – I-10 version 1.0. In fact, highway is probably Texas’ third largest export after oil and drill parts. They build them out across the Beltway and ship them off to Abu Dhabi.
Of course, Texas has a ‘rich’ history with the Middle East. Back in the ‘90s Houston became the home away from home for the Sheiks, the Muftis and the Taliban, led in-hand by all those great Texan oil barons. Thanks to innovations in communication they no longer have to come here. Though, George Bush Senior still makes his home off some hazy highway, veritably curdling away in his anxiety, as his son launches a war on everything from free speech to ‘My Pet Goat’. The son sometimes makes his home here too, relinquishing his saddle to their old friend Dick Cheney when he’s not off hunting Democrats or lawyers.
They say as you steadily go from West to East in the United States, the layers of courtesy shed and by the time you get to New York you’re deep in the throws of a venom-spitting inhospitable waiter having a bad day. (Of course, New York is a lot closer to France than the rest are.) A thin layer of nicety lies over all off America in varying gradations. There’s something to be said though of that ‘Southern Hospitality’. It’s both infectious and sometimes nauseous. All of that “How are you doing?”, “Have a great day”, “Thanks for asking”, can be a warm welcome, especially when people in Sydney are generally assholes.
But a dark unconscious force broods; it’s been brooding since the last great slaughter of the Wild West. The twin desires of aggression and sex are not mediated well enough here. All the spite and angst that individuals need to cultivate a healthy mentality is getting buried underground with buckets of TNT and a shotgun to boot. There is a cumulative unconscious dark matter waiting to latch onto an ideology. Perhaps it has already found one, but regardless of creed, there is the ordinary fear of not God, but of the Other.
Those who can afford it bunker down behind large housing estates with several layers of wall and security. Everyone else has large walls surrounded by more walls. For Houstonians, most of the time spent outside of these walls is spent in one of their large cars. Everything one needs to mediate their consumption can be bought drive-thru or have Fed-Exed to them. Groceries, pharmaceuticals, even Starbucks; one never has to leave their car ever again out of the ordinary fear of not God, but the Other.
In Los Angeles I garnered that it took half an hour to get to anywhere from anywhere. In Houston it takes forty-five minutes. And the scenery is a lot less pretty. Houston is like the practice range for placing highways anywhere in the world – I-10 version 1.0. In fact, highway is probably Texas’ third largest export after oil and drill parts. They build them out across the Beltway and ship them off to Abu Dhabi.
Of course, Texas has a ‘rich’ history with the Middle East. Back in the ‘90s Houston became the home away from home for the Sheiks, the Muftis and the Taliban, led in-hand by all those great Texan oil barons. Thanks to innovations in communication they no longer have to come here. Though, George Bush Senior still makes his home off some hazy highway, veritably curdling away in his anxiety, as his son launches a war on everything from free speech to ‘My Pet Goat’. The son sometimes makes his home here too, relinquishing his saddle to their old friend Dick Cheney when he’s not off hunting Democrats or lawyers.
They say as you steadily go from West to East in the United States, the layers of courtesy shed and by the time you get to New York you’re deep in the throws of a venom-spitting inhospitable waiter having a bad day. (Of course, New York is a lot closer to France than the rest are.) A thin layer of nicety lies over all off America in varying gradations. There’s something to be said though of that ‘Southern Hospitality’. It’s both infectious and sometimes nauseous. All of that “How are you doing?”, “Have a great day”, “Thanks for asking”, can be a warm welcome, especially when people in Sydney are generally assholes.
But a dark unconscious force broods; it’s been brooding since the last great slaughter of the Wild West. The twin desires of aggression and sex are not mediated well enough here. All the spite and angst that individuals need to cultivate a healthy mentality is getting buried underground with buckets of TNT and a shotgun to boot. There is a cumulative unconscious dark matter waiting to latch onto an ideology. Perhaps it has already found one, but regardless of creed, there is the ordinary fear of not God, but of the Other.
Those who can afford it bunker down behind large housing estates with several layers of wall and security. Everyone else has large walls surrounded by more walls. For Houstonians, most of the time spent outside of these walls is spent in one of their large cars. Everything one needs to mediate their consumption can be bought drive-thru or have Fed-Exed to them. Groceries, pharmaceuticals, even Starbucks; one never has to leave their car ever again out of the ordinary fear of not God, but the Other.
posted by Daniel Grove at
5:00 PM
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