I so agree with the fabulous blogger "In the Pink", who notes that Rick Perry is a terrible candidate for president. Yes, he is. I beg your pity. For though my Oregon-born friends up here in the not-hot-enough Pacific Northwest could EVER understand my pain and suffering, it is TERRIBLE to be a Texan and be deprived of my birthright, Texas Pride. (I'm not talking about the beer. Incidentally, I once gave a can of Texas Pride to Tom Wolfe, who was a visiting speaker at my college in Minnesota, and whose tailor's son was my boyfriend at the time. So I had lunch with the two of them and gave Tom Wolfe the beer -- since he was a sort of a sociologist, I knew he'd think it was hilarious.) Anyway, when you grow up in Austin and you make regular visits to the Capitol to view the magnificent gigantic paintings of battles, and you color maps of Texas, and your brother plays the role of Stephen F. Austin in the third-grade Texas pageant, and you make drawings of "Come and Take it", and you sing "Texas Our Texas", and "Beautiful, Beautiful Texas" and you lie down in bluebonnet fields every spring, and you've actually seen (well, from a distance) Molly Ivins and Ann Richards and Gonzalo Barrientos around town, and your daddy hunts, and you call him your daddy instead of your "dad", and your legislature is funnier than anyone else's, and you get to eat the best BBQ in the world and the best Mexican food and when you're gone you always want to come home to the Armadillo -- well, you have Texas Pride.
And when George Bush comes along and claims to be a Texan (even though he grew up in the north, got a fake degree at Yale where I went to graduate school and found out that a C- average there -- like he got -- is really an F- average) -- and starts a ridiculous war and acts like such a stupid swaggering idiot and steals an election and gets so many innocent people killed -- well, it's really hard to have Texas Pride. I hate not being able to brag about being a Texan, but I had to stop it for eight long years. When people said "Ew, you're from Texas, how horrible" I would meekly explain that there were also nice people there, including African-Americans, gays, Democrats — I would make my 'rainbow' argument because all people up here could ever picture was "W" so they thought that Texas was populated by idiot white Republican males. And now, just as I am beginning to get my Texas Pride back, here comes Rick Perry. RICK, YOU'RE MAKING IT TOO HARD ON US TEXANS OF THE DIASPORA! PLEASE GIVE IT UP!!
I hereby confess that I do not much resemble the gal in the picture on my blog "mast-head". I chose the picture because I thought it was cute and I like the floating musical notes. I don't really have a pink iPod, and I'm too old for off-the shoulder tops (at least in public), and my dog doesn't wear a pink sweater. But there's a dermatologist in my town (and she's a very good doctor) who does use someone else's picture on her website. If I thought this cute redhead were the doctor, and made an appointment to see her for eczema or blotchy skin or folliculitis, I'd be awfully surprised when I got to the office and found that the real doctor is someone else entirely. Is this weirdly misleading, or am I just being cranky?
