DAVID NYHAN

Deep in the heart of hexes

By David Nyhan, Globe Staff, June 23, 1999

Not all of my hexes live in Texas. But enough of them do so that I reflexively keep my left hand high when anything associated with the Lone Star State veers into my lane of life.

And Texas looms extra-large this season. Lord Stanley's hockey cup just went to Dallas, where humidity is more of a problem than high-sticking.

The estimable San Antonio basketball club looks on the verge of becoming world roundball champeens, in a state known more for broncs than buckets. And if Governor George Dubayah Bush was any further ahead in the presidential sweepstakes, they'd call off not only the 2000 election but 2004 to boot.

Texmania generally leaves me, if not totally cold, at least well below room temperature. Texas and me got off on the wrong foot the first day I ever set boot, as they'd put it, on Sam Houston's sacred soil. Hauled down to San Antonio for basic training by a military organization affiliated with the federal gummint, as they'd put it, I snuck into the john for a forbidden smoke and emerged to find my fellow enlistees marched off somewhere into the darkness, with me not having a clue where they'd gone.

That was the wrong way to embark on a military career, which may be why I am still typing for a living, not drawing a military pension, living in the Lone Star State, waiting for Saturday's gun show, and sucking Lone Star beer.

I didn't like Texas then, and we never got over it, despite dozens of forays over the years. What don't I like about Texas? Waking at 5, waiting on a noncom whose IQ hovered about 10 degrees over the temperature in an early December dawn. Loudmouth right-wingers. Bidness men, as they call 'em, who think anyone objecting to the rape of the landscape or the oil depletion allowance is a commie symp. Brothers who try to collar commodities, like the Hunt Bros. did silver. TV series that feature mouthy, pouty, or otherwise obnoxious Texans. Roger Clemens. Rhinestone cowboys. The Dallas Cowboys when they're out on bail, or unless they're playing Green Bay, when I'm for 'em. Is there anything I like about Texas? Plenty.

Jerry Jeff Walker. Ann Richards. Molly Ivins. Jim Hightower. Austin, the Cambridge of the Southwest, best stop between Boston and anywhere else out thataway. "Austin City Limits." My pal Roy Bode from East Texas. The term "goat roper," which Bode taught me meant someone from the East pretending to be someone from Texas. Rodeo riders. Rodeo animals. Rodeo, period. The term "panhandle," just a great word.

Texas humor, like the phrase for a poseur: "all hat and no cattle."

I thought a lot more of Texans when they elected Ann Richards governor. Her putdown of Bush Sr. -- "he was born on third base and thought he hit a triple" -- is an all-timer in my book. When Bush Jr. took her out in '94, when the Democrats crashed on gun control, incumbency fatigue, and the Clinton health plan, my esteem for the Alamo State went back to earlier levels.

There used to be a Boston-Austin axis, in which speakers of the House from Massachusetts (Joe Martin, John McCormack, Tip O'Neill) alternated with the likes of Sam Rayburn and Jim Wright. Mike Dukakis made Lloyd Bentsen his running mate in '88, but even that couldn't carry Texas against Bush Sr., who was born in Milton, Mass., and moved to Texas as a grownup.

Most Texas officeholders range from regular conservatives on the left, to the right-wingers in the middle, and the high-octane five-alarm-chili red-hots on the right.

Till George Bush Sr. won his one term in '88, Texans have been treated chillily by us non-Texans in presidential years. John Connally and Senator Phil Gramm found that big money was not the only friend you needed in national politics.

The Texas Tornado that makes this Bush campaign a political phenomenon is uncharacteristic. Bush's views on abortion (no, dammit) and guns (yes, dammit) are considered moderate by Texas standards. My own suspicion is that "compassionate conservativism" means "the kinda stuff I have to say on TV in order not to scare them Easterners."

When you run down the Texas congressional lineup, you run low on the compassion tank PDQ. Senators Gramm and Kay Bailey Hutchison are a matched pair, and when you throw in the No. 2 and 3 leaders of the House -- majority leader Dick Armey and whip Tom DeLay -- you've got yourself a regular boxed set of right-wingers. DeLay's job is aptly named, but his attitude suggests he'd like to have handy the thumbscrews and the rack to go with the whip.

DeLay's hate-filled invective against the Clintons in particular and Democrats in general mark him as a next Gingrich, a divisive politician to whom rhetorical extremism on cable television is no vice. With Armey twisting one arm and DeLay yanking the other out of the shoulder socket, hapless Denny Hastert of Illinois is a neutered corpse of an interim speaker, prisoner of the foremen in his own bunk house.

If Bush betrays any more sign of caving to the right wing like the GOP leadership has, he can forget about leaving Austin.