Describing Dallas in particular and Texas in general, native Texan Donald Miller writes in Through Painted Deserts:
From the south, there is no industry to indicate a great city is near. Soon we will crest a hill and beneath us will rest a modern skyline complete with a towering cluster of buildings, factories, and freeways in a grand display of the New South. Dallas is the Seattle of Texas. It is what Chicago used to be. But no single man built the coming town. Dallas blew in on the wings of a Gulf coast hurricane and rained glass and steel onto a field of bluebonnets. It’s an odd town, though. A big, Republican, evangelical city where you can’t drink, girls wear black dresses for dates on Wednesday, and the goal is to join the local country club like your daddy and his daddy before him. When you build a city near no mountains and no ocean, you get materialism and traditional religion. People have too much time and lack inspiration.
We crest a hill and there she stands, just as I recalled, puffed up and proud of herself, all bustling with activity and shining in the late morning sun. Cars line the distant freeways thick and slow, bumper to bumper, moving together as if they were connected like an endless train. The highway rolls straight toward city center, through suburbs, past parks and soccer fields and strip mall after strip mall after strip mall. If there is one thing they have in Texas, it is land. There is no need to build things tall and close together; everybody gets an acre; you get an acre to live on, an acre to work on, an acre to park your car in, and an acre in case you need an extra acre. Driving to work or the store may take you an hour because nothing is close together; no space is conserved because, save the cosmos itself, there is nothing quite as big as the state of Texas.
There is but one Texas, and for Texans there is need for nothing more. A country within a country, these people believe they have found the promised land. Businessmen wear thousand-dollar suits with ten-thousand-dollar Stetsons. They drive king-cab trucks to their office jobs while their wives drive SUVs filled with kids in transit to and from school, band practice and football practice and cheerleader practice, and so on. And they have these little white stickers on the backs of the cars that read, “Michael … Plano Football” or “Michelle, Redmond Cheerleader” advertising their child’s achievement like a political statement, teaching their kids that what really matters, what Daddy really loves, is what you do. Give me something I can brag about to complete strangers stuck in traffic. Brilliant. I will have to send my mother a sticker that says “Vagabond” or “Late Sleeper.”
What do I think of Miller’s assessment of his home state?
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