Texas, The Big, Bad Bastard of the South



The big bad bastard of the south, Texas is a land unto itself. Independent and brash and a total jerk-off.

The Good: There is a lot of good in Texas. And, no, weirdos, not just in Austin. Though, Austin is a great city with so much culture and verve and Whole Foodses that it is definitely one of The Good. But other than Austin there is other good stuff! Like, for example, the food. Holy hell the food! On one hand you've got sweet, sweet BBQ and on the other you've got the whole array of so-called Tex-Mex cuisine. All of it is delicious! Good grief can you eat well in Texas. You will be nine hundred pounds, but you will be happy. Texas has also provided us with a variety of terrific cultural touchstones, from Chainsaw Massacre to Dazed and Confused to Reality Bitesto Friday Night Lights. And, of course, a crazy amount of music. Like it or not, Texas helps make the country interesting.


The Bad: Welp, let's see here: Rick Perry, George W. Bush, the board of education, Cameron Todd Willingham, the culture of capital punishment as a whole, guns, religious zealotry bothinane and dangerous, smog-filled Houston, airless Dallas, scorched wasteland El Paso, and the way they treat their immigrants, their blacks, their gays, and their women. But mostly Texas is awful because despite all the miseries it inflicts upon the rest of the country (and its own citizenry), Texans rarely stop loudly and aggressively stating what a great, awesome, perfect place Texas is. The Texan ego is as big as the state, and no matter how much you point out to them that, uh, hey what about all this extremely terrible stuff, they will not listen. If you guys would just shut up about if for a while, the rest of us like you a little more.

** Might I add the traffic is terrible and the white men act like uncultured, bigoted brutes. And for some reasons the companies here have perfected extracting three to four times the work out of someone for bottom basement pay. Employees are put through sophisticated hiring procedures and background checks and through 'months' of training to learn sophisticated systems all to earn incredibly low wages for the amount of training and work they have to do. All because Texas and Texas companies are too damn cheap to pay for experience. They don't want to see "experience" walking through their door because they know they will have to pay for it. Why pay an experienced individual a 'decent wage' when a desperate 20 something year old can be trained to do the job for less than a third of the wage.  **