a house divided - texasobserver.org · angela vazquez sandoval posted at texasobserver.org tea...

APRIL | 2015

A House DividedThe Fight for the Future of Home Schooling

BY PATRICK MICHELS

The Last Battle of the Civil War…IN BROWNSVILLE

FROM MAYTAG TO MAQUILASTHE FRACK MASTER TRIES POLITIC$

THE TEXAS OBSERVER (ISSN 0040-4519/USPS 541300), entire contents copyrighted © 2014, is published monthly (12 issues per year) by the Texas Democracy Foundation, a 501(c)3 nonprofit foundation, 307 W. 7th St., Austin TX, 78701. Telephone (512)477-0746, fax (512)474-1175, toll free (800)939-6620. Email observer@ texasobserver.org. Periodicals Postage paid in Austin, TX, and at additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER Send address changes to: The Texas Observer, 307 W. 7th St., Austin TX 78701. Subscriptions: 1 yr $35, 2 yr $60, 3 yr $85. Students $20. Foreign, add $13 to domestic price. Back issues $5. Airmail, foreign, group, and bulk rates on request. Microfilm available from University Microfilms Intl., 300 N Zeeb Rd, Ann Arbor MI 48106. INDEXES The Texas Observer is indexed in Access: The Supplementary Index to Periodicals; Texas Index; and, for the years 1954 through 1981, The Texas Observer Index. INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING is supported in part by a grant from the Open Society Institute. BOOKS & THE CULTURE is funded in part by the City of Austin through the Cultural Arts Division and by a grant from the Texas Commission on the Arts.

REGULARS

01 DIALOGUE 02 POLITICAL INTELLIGENCE 06 STATE OF TEXAS 08 STRANGEST STATE 09 EDITORIAL 09 BEN SARGENT’S LOON STAR STATE

07 GREATER STATESegregation Texas Styleby Michelle García

26 CULTUREKids in Sports on Film by Abby Rapoport

30 FILMThe Cult of Bob Byington by Josh Rosenblatt

32 THE BOOK REPORTOf Maytag and Maquilasby José Skinner

34 DIRECT QUOTEWords on a Stageas told to Jen Reel

42 POEMAmong Antiquesby Margie McCreless Roe

43 STATE OF THE MEDIAAtwitter at the Capitolby Andrea Grimes

44 GUANTANAMO DIARY A Day in Courtby Ellen Sweets

45 EYE ON TEXASby Robert Shults

OBSERVERONLINE Check out the Observer’s con-tinuing coverage of the 84th ses-sion of the Texas Legislature at texasobserver.org

10 A HOUSE DIVIDED Home schooling is all grown up. Now a new generation fights for its future. by Patrick Michels 20

THE MASTER OF FRACK Breitling Energy CEO Chris Faulkner has a story to sell. Who’s buying?by Steven Bodzin

ON THE COVER: ILLUSTRATION BY RACHEL IDZERDA

LEFT: A pontoon bridge over the Rio Grande at Brownsville, circa 1866, during federal occupation. An African-Amer-ican soldier from the 114th U.S. Colored Troops stands in the foreground. Photo attrib-uted to Louis de Planque. SMU ROBIN STANFORD COLLECTION

36 POSTCARDSAt War’s End in Brownsvilleby Tom Zoellner

IN THIS ISSUE

A P R I L 2 0 1 5 T H E T E X A S O B S E R V E R | 1

Everyone an Immigrant“I never imagined that in the United States they would treat people this way. If we had

had weapons it would have given them cause. But we had no drugs, no weapons. We

were only coming to work.” Every time I read a heartbreaking story of the injustice

shown toward people trying to find a better life in the U.S. and how they are abused

(“Death on Sevenmile Road,” March issue), I remember: My grandparents were

immigrants, my spouse’s parents, too. We and our children enjoy privileged lives in

America. We want to share our good fortune. Naomi Dagen Bloomp o s t e d a t t e x a s o b s e r v e r . o r g

Goodbyes to Bobthank you for doing justice to bob armstrong’s life and legacy (“This Land is His Land: Remem-bering Bob Armstrong,” March 5, texasobserver.org). In addition to all the wonderful things he did for Texas and the USA, he occupied a warm, lov-ing space in the world full of stories and music and grace. He was a great friend and a wonderful man who will be missed.

Jana Prewitt p o s t e d a t t e x a s o b s e r v e r . o r g

Last spring, three of us backpacked for three nights on Big Bend Ranch State Park land. We saw no other humans and a vast array of high desert beauty. Thank you, Bob Armstrong. May I pay it forward somehow in both care and action.

Carol Muhlp o s t e d a t t e x a s o b s e r v e r . o r g

Throwing Grades a Curveone of my kids went to a middLe schooL with a Low performance rating (“Public School Advocates Give A-F School Rating System an F,” March 12, texa-sobserver.org). That school had the most caring, compassionate, hard-working teachers we’ve seen at any school, and an administration that jumped through hoops to meet the needs of my child and provide growth and leadership opportunities. My child got a better education there than at the other two higher-performing middle schools my kids at-tended. Which leaves me to believe those ratings ef-fectively mean nothing about the actual education!

Angela Vazquez Sandovalp o s t e d a t t e x a s o b s e r v e r . o r g

Tea Party, Awake!maybe the tea party foLks wiLL finaLLy begin to wake up as this betrayal of their “principles” begins to dawn on them (“Committee Hears Bill to Allow Ken Paxton to Toss Local Ballot Initiatives,” March 11, texasobserver.org). One can hope, anyway.

Candyce Byrnep o s t e d a t t e x a s o b s e r v e r . o r g

You Too, Wimberley. Wake Up!in the news again and so soon, wimberLey! (“hiLL Country Water Torture,” March issue). When Aqua Texas levied a surcharge on our bill to repair the pump house and lines, our neighbors thought that was fine. I wondered: What part of predatory pric-ing did my neighbors not understand? If this is the cost of the sleepy little town waking up, let it be so.

Sheva Kuvet Hartp o s t e d a t t e x a s o b s e r v e r . o r g

VOLUME 107, NO. 4

FOUNDING EDITOR Ronnie DuggerEDITOR Joe CutbirthPUBLISHER Emily WilliamsMANAGING EDITOR Brad TyerASSOCIATE EDITOR Forrest WilderMULTIMEDIA EDITOR Jen ReelSTAFF WRITERS Melissa del Bosque, Emily DePrang, Alexa Garcia-Ditta, Christopher Hooks, Patrick MichelsCONTROLLER Krissi TrumeterMEMBERSHIP MANAGER Jacqueline GalvanAUDIENCE DEVELOPMENT MANAGER Michael SchrantzART DIRECTION Chad TomlinsonPOETRY EDITOR Naomi Shihab Nye STAFF CARTOONIST Ben SargentCOPY EDITOR David Duhr CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Lou Dubose, Saul Elbein, Michelle GarcÍa, Andrea Grimes, Alex Hannaford, Carolyn Jones, Steven G. Kellman, Robert Leleux, James McWilliams, Bill Minutaglio, Priscila Mosqueda, Rachel Pearson, Robyn Ross CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS Alan Pogue, Matt Wright-SteelEDITORIAL ASSISTANT Beth BondINTERNS Cody Alder, Lana BaumgartnerLEGISLATIVE FELLOWS Kelsey Jukam, John Savage, Alisa SemiensTEXAS DEMOCRACY FOUNDATION BOARD Carlton Carl, Bob Frump, Melissa Jones, Susan Longley, Vince LoVoi, Jim Marston, Mary Nell Mathis, Ronald Rapoport, Peter Ravella, Katie Smith, Greg Wooldridge, Ronnie Dugger (emeritus)OUR MISSION We will serve no group or party but will hew hard to the truth as we find it and the right as we see it. We are dedicated to the whole truth, to human values above all interests, to the rights of humankind as the foundation of democracy. We will take orders from none but our own conscience, and never will we overlook or misrepresent the truth to serve the interests of the powerful or cater to the ignoble in the human spirit. CONTACT US 307 W. 7th St., Austin, Texas 78701, (512) 477-0746

DIALOGUEOBSERVER

A JOURNAL OF FREE VOICES since 1954

Sound [email protected] comment on facebook.com/texasobserver and texasobserver.org

2 | T H E T E X A S O B S E R V E R W W W. T E X A S O B S E R V E R .O RG

POLITICAL INTELLIGENCE

dina nuñez, a 51-year-oLd mother of three and hu-man rights organizer, used to go to the Planned Parenthood clinic in her hometown of Browns-ville for her yearly checkup. The clinic closed in 2012 because of a $70 million budget cut in 2011 to the state’s family planning program that provides low-cost or free birth control, cancer screenings and other preventive care for uninsured and un-derinsured women.

Because of the closure, and after encountering long

wait times at the remaining clinics in Brownsville, Nuñez missed a yearly screening. She finally found a clinic that could see her right away in McAllen, an hour’s drive from her home. When she went for her appointment, she received some bad news. “My outcomes didn’t turn out well,” she said. She had an abnormal Pap smear that required more testing. Nuñez made the trip two more times for follow-up appointments, costing her even more in gas money and hours lost at work. Before, at Planned

WOMEN’S HEALTH

Ready for theNext Round

Women, families and students gathered near the Gateway

International Bridge in Brownsville in early March to celebrate International

Women’s Day. A march and rally highlighted women’s access to health care in

the Rio Grande Valley. PHOTO BY ALEXA GARCIA-DITTA


POLITICAL INTELLIGENCEParenthood, her health screenings had been free. Now she pays $30 for every visit in addition to the gas money it takes to get to the clinic.

In the Rio Grande Valley, where it already was difficult to find women’s health services, it has now become even harder. The funding cuts resulted in the loss of more than 50 clinics statewide, and at least nine in the Valley. Despite some funding being restored in 2013, not every clinic has reopened. Many of them can’t because of lengthy start-up times and high fixed costs.

For undocumented women who don’t qualify for publicly funded programs such as Medicaid, health screenings are difficult to come by. A pro-posed consolidation of the state’s three women’s health programs has providers and advocates wary of restructuring such a fragile safety net, and a budget proposal aimed at defunding Planned Parenthood would jeopardize a state breast and cervical cancer program for low-income women.

Abortion access was dramatically reduced in October 2013 by Texas’ omnibus abortion bill. Full implementation of the law, which is pending in the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, will leave no abor-tion clinics in the Rio Grande Valley or in West Texas.

Since finding the clinic in McAllen, Nuñez has encouraged her friends to schedule their appoint-ments the same day, so they can carpool to save money on gas.

But women in the Rio Grande Valley aren’t stand-ing idly by, said community health care worker Paula Saldaña. They are organizing around kitchen tables, in community centers and in churches, edu-cating one another on their remaining options for health care.

Saldaña is an activist with the Latina Advocacy Network at the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health. She hosts reproductive health education classes in border cities and remote colonias often neglected by the state of Texas. She teaches Valley women how to give them-selves breast exams, answers their basic health care questions and connects them to the few service providers that still exist in the border region.

She also encourages women to get involved politi-cally. Saldaña’s organization, which has had a presence in Texas for nearly a decade, encourages its clients who are directly affected by the Legislature’s politick-ing to fight for increased health care access.

“I’ve seen the transformation of a woman that wouldn’t even open the door [to the community group] to a woman that is now talking to legislators, lawmakers, and organizing rallies,” Saldaña said. “This fight was already fought many, many years ago. Now, we’re needing to fight again.”

—aLexa garcia-ditta

TOP PRIORITIES

On Border Security and Boondogglesthe state’s repubLican Leaders have made border security their top priority and are prepared to spend millions, perhaps even billions, on it. Now if they could only agree on what securing the border means.

In late February, the Senate Finance Committee began debating the state budget for the next bien-nium. But the state’s top budget analysts, the Legislative Budget Board, told the committee that since the state lacked any consensus on—or defini-tion of—border security, it was nearly impossible for them to track expenditures or determine how effec-tive the funding has been.

Despite the confusion, the Senate is proposing to spend as much as $815 million on border security in its draft of the budget. State Sen. Kirk Watson (D-Austin), a member of the committee, said at the hearing that it was unclear to him why the extra funding is needed. “We’re crafting this out of a very vague set of numbers and comments,” he said. “Recently we had an influx of young children crossing the border that resulted in the reaction of putting a whole lot of money at the border. Now we’re doing something different … We all need to know what the goal looks like, not just, ‘The more money we put into it the tougher we are.’”

Senate Finance Chair Jane Nelson (R-Flower Mound) said she left the draft budget vague on pur-pose. “My goal was to increase funding significantly, which we did … and to cover certain areas, but to leave it up to the committee’s discretion how we do that. … We do have a very clear goal and that’s a secure border,” Nelson said.

From the meeting it also became evident that the debate over border security spending isn’t entirely a partisan one. State Sen. Kevin Eltife (R-Tyler) said he wanted to see clear goals and performance measures before voting on more money for border security. “On this subject in particular I’ve heard people say it polls well and that’s what voters are demanding. I get that,” he said. “I don’t care what it polls. Every dollar we spend has to be accounted for. We’re dealing with all of these contract fiascos. I don’t want to come back in another two years after spending $800 million to find out we have another boondoggle on our hands.”

Eltife has cause for concern. No-bid border security contracts have been doled out in the past. In 2012, the Austin American-Statesman revealed that the Texas Department of Public Safety had given at least $20 million in no-bid contracts to a private Virginia consulting firm called Abrams

TRIVIATEXAS Another baseball season gets under-way this month, and barring a Texas Mir-acle in the Rangers or Astros clubhouse, 2015 won’t be either team’s year. Still, we can take heart in all that Texas has done for the national pas-time over the years.

All but one of these major baseball innova-tions have roots in the Lone Star State. Which one doesn’t?

a. Ballpark nachosb. Dot racingc. Batting helmetsd. AstroTurfe. Big League Chew

chewing gumf. A train that

celebrates home runs by hauling a load of oranges past left field

ANSWER: e. Big League Chew was invented by Portland (Oregon) Mavericks teammates Jim Bouton and Rob Nelson. Ballpark nachos topped with pumpable cheese-like sauce were first served at a Rangers game in 1976; dot racing, precursor to the modern mascot race, began 10 years later on Arlington Stadium’s scoreboard. Austin’s own Willie Wells wore a miner’s hardhat in a Negro Leagues game in 1926, which many historians consider to be the first use of a batting helmet. AstroTurf, though in limited use as “ChemGrass” in 1965, took its name from the Astrodome one year later before spreading to other Major League parks. For some reason, the Astros’ home run train celebration has yet to catch on.


TALK OF TEXAS

“I think it’s critical that we understand what this [SB 185] will do to everybody in this state. This will basically give someone the opportunity, if you will, to racially profile or just stop you for driving while brown. And that is not good for Texas.”—State Sen. Sylvia Garcia (D-Houston) at a Capitol news conference, March 9.

“We refer to it, and I think some of you refer to it, as the ‘show me your papers’ bill.”—State Sen. José Rodríguez (D-El Paso) to reporters at a Capitol news conference, March 9.

“People are dying because of sanctuary city laws in our state.”—Jeff Morris, chairman of the Young Conservatives of Texas, in a March 10 news release.

“Our bill is simple. Cities cannot pick and choose the laws they want to enforce; public safety, not political correctness, should be the priority.” —State Sen. Charles Perry (R-Lubbock), author of Senate Bill 185, also known as the “sanctuary cities” bill, in a statement.

SHOWING SANCTUARY THE DOOR EDITION

Learning and Information Systems Inc. (ALIS). The company, founded by retired Army Gen. John Abrams, is one of the main architects of the Texas border security plan.

After the 2012 revelations, the Public Integrity Unit at the Travis County District Attorney’s Office began to investigate the ALIS contracts. But the unit was forced to end its investigation in 2013 after then-Gov. Rick Perry vetoed $7.5 million for the anti-corruption agency. —meLissa deL bosque

DEPARTMENT OF PARANOIA

Forever Agenda 21in 1992, the united nations adopted a nonbinding sustainable development plan called Agenda 21. Then-President George H.W. Bush, along with sev-eral dozen other heads of state, signed the plan.

In addition to promoting environmental con-servation, Agenda 21 aims to combat poverty and promote public health. Like many U.N. initiatives, it contains lots of high-minded ideas, but not much in the way of an enforceable plan of action.

But according to a growing number of Texans, Agenda 21 represents something more sinister: a plan for U.N. global domination via a Soviet-style world government.

State Sen. Bob Hall (R-Edgewood) and state Rep. Molly White (R-Belton) have filed identical bills that take aim at the program. Their efforts suggest that outrageous anti-Agenda 21 conspiracy theories aren’t confined to the lunatic fringe. (Or perhaps that the far-right wing of the Texas GOP may actu-ally be the lunatic fringe.)

The bills would forbid any government entity from accepting money from, giving money to, or entering into a contract with any organization implementing Agenda 21 programs. The effect of the legislation remains unclear.

Michael Barkun, a Syracuse University political science professor and author of several books about conspiracy theories, says that Agenda 21 is simply an innocuous, nonbinding declaration of environ-mental principles.

“People imbue to this program a degree of power that it simply doesn’t have,” Barkun says.

White disagrees. “Agenda 21 is an overreaching, anti-American, anti-individual-rights plan to glo-balize the world using the fictitious global warming theory,” she wrote in a February Facebook post.

Conspiracy theories often offer a very simple solution to a broad range of problems, Barkun says. There’s something comforting in the belief that a secretive organization is responsible for all the world’s ills, he said.

Hall’s office didn’t respond to multiple interview requests, but the Observer did speak with John Marler, a former Georgetown mayoral candidate who says he has had numerous discussions with Hall and has given him “tremendous input” regard-ing Agenda 21.

Marler described himself as one of the five lead-ing national experts on the U.N. program.

“[Agenda 21] is developing a Soviet-style über-government,” he said. “If you take Russia for a

READ about the ALIS investigation and the Public

Integrity Unit at txlo.com/abs

A P R I L 2 0 1 5

perfect example … the government appoints panels that regulate all the way down to whether or not the toilets should flush.”

Of course, some have been trying to save Texas, and the nation, from the specter of U.N.-controlled, Soviet-style toilet-flushing panels since long before Texans elected White and Hall. Texans famously attacked U.N. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson on a 1963 visit to Dallas. And in the 1950s, Barkun said, popular Texas urban legend held that U.N. troops were amassed in Mexico preparing to invade.

“This fear of imminent occupation by the U.N. has been around virtually since the organization began,” he said, “but obviously Texas is not occupied by U.N. forces.” —john savage

TRANSGENDER RIGHTS

DNA Testing at the Stall Door?a proposaL from state rep. debbie riddLe (R-Spring) would make it a Class A misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail and a maximum $4,000 fine for anyone to use “a locker room, show-er facility, or toilet facility designated for use by persons of a gender that is not the same gender as the individual’s gender.”

Riddle’s House Bill 1748 also would make it a state jail felony punishable by up to two years in prison and a maximum $10,000 fine for a building manager to “repeatedly allow” a transgender person to use a facility based on the gender they identity with.

Riddle didn’t return phone calls or emails seeking comment about the bill, which is an apparent response to city ordinances prohibiting discrimination based on gender identity in public accommodations.

Houston transgender activist Cristan Williams said the bill is a response to a problem that doesn’t exist, adding that it’s already illegal to enter a rest-room with the intent to cause a disturbance.

“There have been no verified incidents of bath-room harassment that these bills would address,” Williams said. “It’s about firing up their base. … It’s a dog whistle.”

She added that restroom use has been the subject of civil rights fights for decades. Examples include the white-only facilities during the era of Jim Crow, the unisex bathroom meme that helped defeat the Equal Rights Amendment, and fears about sexual assaults in showers used as an argument against gays in the military.

“It absolutely meets the dictionary definition of hatred,” Williams said of the bill. “The only kind of safe group to openly subjugate, to openly mock, to openly and proudly create laws that make the exis-tence of these people illegal, is trans people.”

Williams added that HB 1748’s definition of gen-der is scientifically flawed. The bill defines a male as someone with at least one Y chromosome, and a female as someone with no Y chromosomes. However, those definitions are at odds with the lat-est medical research and don’t necessarily take into account people who are intersex.

“They’re seeking in a very real way to set up some sort of McCarthy-esque society where every-one is policing everyone else’s biological makeup,” Williams said.

According to UCLA’s Williams Institute, approxi-mately 81,000 people in Texas are transgender. Thousands more are likely intersex.

Dave Welch, executive director of the U.S. Pastor Council, which led opposition to LGBT protections in Houston and Plano, said his group supports the con-cept of Riddle’s bill but is still reviewing the language.

“We do not believe or support the premise that you can alter your gender,” Welch said. “We believe that in God’s created order, men were created men, women were created women, very specifically, and a society that doesn’t recognize that is bound for destruction.” —john wright

Exceptional organic & cooperative coffee roasted to order in Austin.

Consider a planned legacy gift that will protect investigative journalism for years to come. Learn more by contacting

Publisher Emily Williams at 512.477.0746.

Give likeMolly

Molly Ivins remembered us in her will and we hope you

will too.THE TEXAS OBSERVER L E G A C Y S O C I E T Y

ILLUSTRATION BY JOANNA WOJTKOWIAK

INSTEAD OF ADDRESSING the underlying causes of kids missing school, Texas—almost alone among the states—is treating truancy as a criminal matter. But a growing body of research shows that using adult criminal courts to punish students and their parents is not just overly punitive and inequitable, but also ineffective.

STATE OF TEXAS: Hey, Judge, Leave Those Kids Alone BY FORREST WILDER

SOURCE: Texas Appleseed

Truancy cases in Texas vs. the rest of the nation (2013)

Texas and Wyoming are the only states that treat truancy as a criminal matter to be handled in adult criminal court. And the numbers are staggering.

FTAS and Parent Contributing to Non-Attendance filing, attendance and graduation rates (2011-2012)

Sending kids to court for missing school appears to have little effect on attendance or dropout rates. School districts with some of the highest rates of filing truancy charges against students and their parents also have persistently high dropout rates and mediocre attendance.

SAN ANTONIO ISD 16.1% 95.0 81.8DALLAS ISD 19.3% 95.5 83.2BROWNSVILLE ISD 2.2% 96.4 87.6ALDINE ISD 0.4% 95.5 81.6LEWISVILLE ISD 0.3% 96.8 94.0

BLACK/AFRICAN AMERICAN

19.7%

12.7%

HISPANIC/LATINO

63.9%

51.8%

WHITE

13.6%

29.4%

SPECIAL EDUCATION

13.2%8.5%

ECONOMICALLY DISADVANTAGED

79.4%

60.2%

Reported FTAS vs. enrollment (2013-2014)

Criminal prosecutions of truancy fall disproportionately on certain groups: African Americans, Latinos, and economically disadvantaged and special-ed students. For example, black students compose about 13 percent of the statewide student body but receive roughly 20 percent of all truancy filings.

FTAS Filings

FTAS+PCN FILING RATE 2011-2012

ATTENDANCERATE 2012

4-YEAR GRADUATION RATE,

CLASS OF 2012SCHOOL DISTRICT

Enrollment


MICHELLE GARCÍAGREATER STATE

Segregation Texas Style

In 2014, the state’s

demographer put it plainly:

Latinos have lower

educational levels and

are less represented

in high-skilled occupations

than other groups.

We texans are a tribaL bunch with a strong state identity. We also are defined by a unique brand of disunion. Our culture of exclusion explains why Texas metro areas—San Antonio, Dallas, Houston and Austin topping the list—are among the nation’s more economically and education-ally segregated. ¶ In these cities, the wealthy have walled off themselves from the working class, and educated professionals rarely share a

neighborhood sidewalk with laborers, according to a study by the Martin Prosperity Institute at the Uni-versity of Toronto. “It is not just that the economic divide in America has grown wider,” writes urban theorist Richard Florida. “It’s that the rich and poor effectively occupy different worlds, even when they live in the same cities and metros.”

In Texas, white and brown belong to two worlds. In 2014, the state’s demographer put it plainly: Latinos have lower educational levels and are less represented in high-skilled occupations than other groups. More than 2 million Texas children attend segregated schools that easily belong to the era when Jim Crow was the law of the South.

But the Texas brand of segregation not only divides, it defines the contours of a Texas identity. What distinguishes Texas segregation from, say, New York City, where I lived for many years, is a Texas identity that was born fighting against “the Mexican.” Remember the Alamo! At the same time, Texas segregation allows the two worlds to join in the embrace of cultural appropriation, which explains why some equate “Texas Mexican” not with people deeply rooted in the state, but with a salted mug, a sizzling platter and a bowl of queso.

Our cities and streets reflect the unique interde-pendence of two worlds, side by side. In Remembering the Alamo, Richard Flores describes San Antonio’s historic downtown streets as a contrast between “the new, the modern, the American … while the old, the traditional, the Mexican is dissolved into the folk-loric, the quaint, the foreign.”

It shouldn’t come as a surprise then that a fraternity at the University of Texas at Austin recently hosted a “Border Patrol”-themed party, ostensibly inspired by tales of the Old West. When partygoers donned sombreros, draped their shoulders with serapes or dressed as construction workers, they were reflecting back to us the segregated world they inhabit, one in which Mexicans and U.S.-born Latinos occupy low-paying jobs and serve an ornamental role.

Apart from its cultural weight, the entrenchment of Texas segregation served an economic purpose, fueling the expansion of the farming industry of the early 20th century, when Mexicans picked cotton on white-owned fields. “Race ideas … also provided a basis for control of the Mexican, a critical element for the stability of the new farm order,” wrote David Montejano in Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986.

Fifty years ago, President Lyndon B. Johnson invoked the Texas social order in his address to Con-gress after the civil rights march in Selma, Alabama. His intimate experience with the misshapen hand of segregation, he said, began while teaching at a Mexi-can-American school in Texas: “Somehow you never forget what poverty and hatred can do when you see its scars on the hopeful face of a young child.”

Decades later, the tech industry has become an economic engine and, like cotton farming, it reflects a segregated social order with Latinos mainly occupy-ing the rungs of laborers—cleaning offices and serving up breakfast tacos—while the farms of the new Texas economy largely belong to whites.

Despite our bifurcated world, low voter turnout among Latinos is blamed on apathy or a cultural shortcoming. How many reporters venture into seg-regated communities to probe why voters shun the political system of their divided cities? Segregation studies underestimate the reach of Texas’ culture of exclusion across class lines. Segregation can’t begin to explain the experience of witnessing a nightclub filled with older whites clear out when a Latin jazz band takes the stage. Within moments, the room is packed with Latinos—young professionals, graduate students, hipsters and at least one underpaid writer.

That’s the most insidious part of segregation, the obliviousness to it. Simply consider the much-cele-brated coming-of-age film Boyhood. The story tracks 12 years of a white family’s life in Central Texas, in which we see them at school, at work, and playing with friends—somehow completely without any encoun-ters with Latinos, except for one with the “help.”


STRANGESTSTATENOTES FROM FAR-FLUNG TEXAS by Patrick Michels

Visit texasobserver.org/strange for more “Strangest State” and links to original stories. Got a local oddity or some small-town news to share? Tips are welcome at [email protected].

ROUND TOP // “While many Fayette County residents will spend Holy Week in church seek-ing spiritual renewal, others might be worshipping at a different altar,” reported The Fayette County Record, thanks to a planned show by an “all-male erotic dance troupe calling itself ‘American Cowboy Las Vegas Revue.’” Round Top resident Stephanie Welch booked the act to help liven up the annual antiques festival, but some locals told KXAN-TV the antiques show was doing just fine without semi-nude country dancing. Innkeeper Kiki Teague complained that the planned performance “just doesn’t fit. ... That’s just not really what Round Top’s been about.” The town of about 80 residents is otherwise best known for pie and antiques, and former Gov. Rick Perry is building a house nearby. County Judge Ed Janecka told KXAN that the show’s timing on Easter weekend, and its location across from a church, “really makes it distasteful to me and the vast population.”

LUFKIN // The new film Fifty Shades of Grey might more aptly be titled “50 Shades of Sin,” according to some East Texas pastors’ recent sermons. “God is not gray, he’s black and white,” Harmony Hill Baptist Church Pastor John Greene told his congregation in late February. “I don’t think anyone can see the movie and leave unscathed.” Fredonia Hill Baptist Church Pastor Pat Kelly sermonized, “It is por-nography. It is sickening. It will destroy marriages, OK? Can I just say that?” KTRE-TV’s Blair Ledet explained that the pastors “agree that seeing the film would stir up emotions that shouldn’t be stirred. … Mr. Grey’s version of submis-sion was very different than the Bible’s use of the term.”

GOLIAD // Rev. Darryl Edwards of Fannin Street United Methodist Church was in the midst of eulogizing church member Sally Bland with a “sermon about God’s timing and love, mention-ing that anyone, at any time, can be called to heaven,” when he collapsed and died. “He was talking about how you need to be ready for death because you never know the day or hour,” Edwards’ sister Sheila told the Victoria Advocate, “and about then, it happened.” According to family members, Edwards, 55, had spent his adult life ministering to the Goliad community, at nursing homes, traveling on his motorcycle, or by donating meals from his restaurant, Hack’s Backyard Barbecue. “Those who knew him best say Edwards died doing what he loved. And if he had to die, they wouldn’t have wanted to see him go any other way,” the Advocate reported. “He always said you never know when you’re going to go, so you have got to do what’s right, right now,” his sister said. “His life and death is a ministry.”

MIDLAND // Upon wak-ing in a West Texas hos-pital bed, a boy discov-ered the likeness of the Virgin Mary imprinted on his arm. Bedsheets had apparently left the mark, either by coincidence or divine intervention, NewsWest9 reported, and though the boy and his family declined to speak with the station, “a friend acknowledges the faith instilled in the family after seeing this image.” Monsignor James Bridges of St. Stephen’s Catholic Church in Midland testified to the power of personal revelations, even when the rest of the world expresses doubt. “Others may not be convinced even when they see what you’re pointing out,” Bridges said. “They may not get the same impression.”

WEST COLUMBIA // Brazoria County’s The Facts explored young romance at West Columbia Elementary School on Valentine’s Day, finding the students generally ill-equipped to answer questions about the matter. “That’s because they relate more to having a crush than being in love,” reporter Andy Packard learned. According to his report, second-grader Hailey Eulenfeld’s sister Kayla has a crush on someone, and second-grader Rhett Roundtree claims that two girls in his class like him. Though none were plan-ning to attend the fifth-grade Valentine’s Day dance, the children did provide secondhand confirmation that “dancing and kissing” were common. Having satisfied The Facts’ inquiries, the children then returned to class. “It turns out,” Packard concluded, “the one love they already embrace awaited them back in their classroom: Candy.”

GRANBURY // The annual Handsome Hunks of Hood County benefit was a great success, the Hood County News report-ed, raising $83,000 for Ruth’s Place Clinic by giving some of Granbury’s leading male citizens a catwalk and an audience for suggestive dancing. Firefighter Todd Lane beat out H-E-B manager Pat Wilson and Dr. Romeo Bachand for top honors from the judges. “As the evening wore on at the packed Granbury Resort Conference Center, inhibitions seemed to lower,” the News reported, and emcees were forced to halt one performance after “Granbury City Council member Gary Couch engaged in a 50-Shades-of-Gray-like [sic] dance routine with a woman who seemed to have lost her skirt.”


The university of okLahoma beat the hell out of the University of Texas recently with its response to a video that showed racist culture celebrated by one of its prominent fraternities. On a matter this serious, we are glad to set sports rivalries aside and

enthusiastically say: “Boomer Sooner.”UT President Bill Powers noted the decisive action

by OU President David Boren renewed questions about a “Border Patrol” party where some UT fra-ternity members dressed in costumes that mocked Mexican-American culture. Powers said UT deans have “worked extensively with the group” and pointed to a recent “day of service” involving the fra-ternity and the Latino community.

Still, the perception exists that UT remains slow off the mark in addressing this type of behavior.

UT and OU are flagship schools, which makes it critical that administrators respond the way Boren did when he appeared on campus with a bullhorn, closed the fraternity and expelled two students. A song about hanging a black person from a tree is not harmless; it can’t be written off as simply “boys being boys.” It invokes the history of lynching: a disgraceful and criminal act used to intimidate people of color.

Still, a larger question of how these ideas hide and fester in society remains. We are quick to denounce individual acts of hate and bigotry, but systemic and institutional racism are a different matter.

It has been 20 years since state lawmakers passed a resolution directing the State Preservation Board to include a permanent monument to African-American Texans in its master plan for the Capitol grounds. Yet, as the Observer recently noted, none of the 30 monuments there recognizes the contributions of African Americans to Texas. Twelve are tributes to the Confederacy.

There is nothing noble about the Confederacy. Anyone who has read the historical record knows it was a political institution formed to sustain a violent, racist and immoral practice—slavery—that subjugated human beings. The fact that Texas joined it is a dark and shameful moment in the otherwise proud and glorious history of a great American state.

Texas lawmakers will consider legislation this session to replace Confederate Heroes Day with a broader reminder of everyone who fought in the Civil War. It’s not enough, but it’s a small step on a long journey Texas has waited too long to take.

—the editor

A song about hanging a black person from a tree is not harmless; it can’t be written off as simply “boys being boys.”

EDITORIAL Institutional Racism

LOON STAR STATE Ben Sargent


A House Divided

A GENERATION AFTER TEXAS LEGALIZED HOME SCHOOLING, A NEW CROP OF LEADERS FIGHTS FOR THE BOOMING EDUCATION MOVEMENT’S FUTURE. BY PATRICK MICHELS PHOTOGRAPHS BY PATRICK MICHELS

Amy Ott, left, and Jill McKeever supervise Fal-

lon Stanislawski during a computer lesson at

the Austin Area Home-schoolers Friday Co-op.


UntiL Late september, james and Lisa pennington Lived with aLL nine of their chiLdren, ages 6 to 24, in a charming country house outside Kerrville. James ran an accounting practice in town and managed the books for religious and home-school organizations. Lisa handled the children’s education and decorated the house in a modern homespun fashion, with reclaimed wood and glass, freshly painted antiques and inspirational mes-sages—“relax,” “laugh,” “discover & explore”—scattered around the walls. Her blog, “The Pennington Point,” turned a godly, pastel-tinted lens on the lovable chaos of their life. When the chickens started pooping on the Penningtons’ new front deck, Lisa wrote about covering the wood with a new rug, which she then hand-painted with a tiny houndstooth pattern. In a how-to post, she demonstrated how to stencil a wall with quotes from Chap-ter One of the Book of James. She and her daughters dressed with stylish modesty: high necklines, long skirts, and many-layered sleeves that projected a coffee-shop artsiness. It was the sort of home and family that could inspire other Christian families, which was partially the point; from their home, the Penningtons ran a ministry dedicated to foster-ing what they called “home-oriented relationships.” Lisa once explained their approach: “It is a little like the desert island challenge. If you were stranded on a desert island with nothing but the Bible as your guide, how different would your life look?” Five years ago, the Texas Home School Coalition named Jim and Lisa “Leaders of the Year.”

Unlike many home-school-ing families, their practice is quite public. James once ran as a Constitution Party can-didate for state comptroller. Lisa speaks at home-school conferences around the coun-try, giving advice on parenting, education and blogging. Her posts often veer into the per-sonal, covering weight loss and health, and the right way to spank a child—in a since-deleted post, she describes a 30-minute bout with “a little back scratcher that barely stings, but it’s great for babies”—and the relief she finds in the Young Living brand of essential oils she endorses on her site. So last fall, Lisa began writing frankly about her recent pain and struggle, how the family was still reeling from what happened on Sept. 24, when her 18-year-old daughter Alecia Faith ran away from home.

“She gave us no warning, no signs that it was com-ing. She didn’t try to talk to us about it or work with us. She, with the help of my parents, just left. And with her she took pieces of my heart that had been torn to shreds,” Lisa wrote. “We have been making an effort to find our new normal without her. It has been really hard and we all miss her terribly, but I have learned a lot about how to deal with grief throughout the past month.” She got through it all, she says, with prayer, the love of her children and essential oils.

Lisa’s confessional posts drew hundreds of sup-portive comments. But the story is better known from

Alecia’s perspective, because of a video the runaway daugh-ter recorded in February. In front of a white door and a plain white wall, Alecia, who was by then 19, faces the cam-era and explains that she can’t get a job, fly on a plane or get a driver’s license because she has no proof of her own iden-tity and her parents won’t

help. From someone at the Texas Vital Statistics department, she says, she’s learned there’s no record, of her birth. The midwife who delivered her at home apparently never filed a birth certificate. Alecia had no Social Security number. She had no school records, either. “I didn’t pick this situation for myself,” she says in the video. “I just have to deal with the conse-quences, and I don’t know how to fix it. I don’t know how to get out of this.”

Her video spread fast: Within days, it was the top video on Reddit, drawing a massive online commu-nity that tended to treat her case as a mystery with her parents as the suspects. As of mid-March the video has been played on YouTube nearly 1.4 million times, and as her story spread this spring, Alecia did find herself with a new identity. Back home, she’d been Faith, alongside her sisters Grace and Hope, one of nine kids gathered around the table. But her video introduced her to the world with her full name, and as Alecia Faith Pennington—or often just Alecia—she’s found a place alongside Tim Tebow and

ABOVE: In a homemade video, Alecia Faith Pen-

nington asks for help proving her identity.

YOUTUBE

RIGHT: Home-school co-op parents lead children

in nursery rhymes and parachute games.


the Duggar children of 19 Kids and Counting fame as a public face of home schooling.

It’s been 100 years since Texas, following the lead of all but two other states, made public school com-pulsory and banned children under 14 from working. The law included exceptions for private and paro-chial schools, but not home education, so it was as outlaws and radicals that 1970s progressive activ-ists first began home schooling, beginning a grand experiment in American education that has quietly exploded over the last generation. Child-centered “un-schoolers” fleeing the factory of public school bureaucracy were followed shortly by a movement in the Christian right that popularized home school-ing as an escape from secular influences. Home schooling is, by nature, difficult to generalize about or quantify; even the count of home-schoolers in the country varies wildly depending on your source. The most recent federal estimates say between 3 and 4 percent of students—about 1.77 million chil-dren—were home-schooled in 2012. More than 300,000 kids are home-schooled in Texas, according to home-school advocates, which is even more than attend private schools.

Only 11 states require parents to register as home-schoolers, and Texas isn’t one of them. Home-school regulations here are some of the weakest in the nation: Unlike their peers in public schools, home-school students don’t have to take standardized tests or submit any proof of their work. Parents aren’t bound by state standards; they can use any curriculum they like, and anyone can be a home-school teacher. This

freedom is the result of hard-fought court battles in the 1980s that spawned groups such as the national Home School Legal Defense Association and the Texas Home School Coalition, which work to prevent new home-school regulation.

Today, the first large generation reared in this well-organized and often rigidly patriarchal system is graduating into adulthood, and for the first time, a significant number of home-school alumni are taking on leadership roles in the movement, with dif-fering ideas about where to lead it. Some are fulfilling the dreams of its founders, defending the movement that raised them to fight for parents’ rights above all. Others, such as Alecia Faith Pennington, are calling for change on behalf of the next generation.

The origin story for texas home-schooL-ers begins in 1981, when a lawyer at the Texas Education Agency looked over the state education code and determined that home education wasn’t legally allowed. Since 1916, Texas has required children to attend public school unless they are disabled, severely ill, or at pri-vate school instead. The law said nothing

about home schooling, and in 1982 a higher-up TEA lawyer told prospective home-school parents that “all of our legal research concludes that a person may not teach their children at home simply by calling their home a private school.” From 1981 to 1985, local districts charged 150 home-schoolers with truancy violations, taking about 80 of them to trial. When

More than 300,000 kids are home-schooled here in Texas, according to home-school advocates, which is even more than attend private schools.


the State Board of Education finally held hearings in 1986 to define qualified home schools, thousands of parents swarmed the hearings in Austin, rallying for what they called the “Austin T.E.A. Party.” Home-schoolers fought back against the state’s attempted regulation with a class-action suit led by Arlington parents Cheryl and Gary Leeper. The court heard testimony from, among others, Rousas Rushdoony, godfather of the Christian Reconstructionist move-ment, who favored strict biblical justice and trusted in, as he once said, “dedicated minorities who stand unconditionally on their faith” to recover a Christian past. Home schooling was integral to his vision. Rushdoony reminded the state’s lawyers that American education had only recently become a cen-tralized bureaucracy. “Attempts to define a school too precisely are always dangerous because you can define a school and you wind up with a shell, with a building, with so many teachers, with so many hours of instruction, and there is no guarantee that all of these things will provide learning,” Rushdoony explained. “This is the problem of our time.”

The Texas Supreme Court ruled in 1994 that any home-school setting with a curriculum that teaches reading, spelling, grammar, mathematics and good citizenship could qualify as a private school. (By then, the state had long since scrapped its anti-home-schooling policy.) Home-schoolers hailed it as a great victory, and still do today. The Texas Home School Coalition’s recent animated history of the Leeper case is called “The Legacy of Freedom.” Many other states require home-schoolers to register, to take tests or submit work portfolios at the end of the year, or to submit to periodic mental health check-ups. Not in Texas. Here, home schools are regulated like private schools—which is to say, not at all.

Former Texas Education Agency General Counsel David Anderson joined the agency just months before the Leeper decision, and here’s how little oversight of private and home schools he had: “If I decide tomorrow morning that I want to be a private school,” Anderson says, “and I just hung up a sign outside my house, I would have some issues with zoning, I think, with the city of Austin, and the health department would probably say my sinks aren’t big enough if I’m serving food to the public. But I would not have to get permission from anybody. A private school can just do that.”

A vision of what the original home-schoolers intended plays out every Friday morning in Austin’s Hyde Park neighborhood, as about 100 home-school children arrive for class at the Trinity United Methodist Church. For three class periods, in a dozen classrooms, they’ll learn in groups from one another’s parents, as part of one of the many home-school co-ops in town. Almost 3,000 families stay connected on an email list for Austin-area home-schoolers, and co-ops such as this one take place every day of the week.

I visit on a Friday in February, when small children are singing and running in circles with a giant para-chute in a small gym, while in another room, older girls with hair dyed in various combinations of pink, purple and blue sit around tables learning to make

comic strips on iPads. High-schoolers in the world history class upstairs had just taken a long memorial diversion into Star Trek memories after getting the news of Leonard Nimoy’s death before moving on to the business of the day: presentations on the battles of World War II. Sitting on couches or stretched out on the floor around a giant world map, the five teenagers take turns reading their reports aloud. Shannon Rizzo, the mother of a girl in the class, explains that she’s more facilitator than teacher in this “flipped” classroom. Students handle the lesson prep—in fact, the course offerings each semester are determined by a student vote—and the punishment for showing up to class unprepared is, in the words of one student, “looking like a fool.”

“I don’t think we think in terms of consequences,” Rizzo tells me. She says she began home schooling because she didn’t believe 5- and 6-year-olds should be sitting behind desks all day. As they grew, her children enjoyed this informal approach, full of edu-cational road trips and projects built around their evolving interests. “They’ve had the freedom to pur-sue their own curiosity, and they’re never burnt out on learning,” she tells me.

This 25-year-old home-school co-op is a throw-back to the first days of secular home schooling. Students can learn about the Renaissance, parkour, geopolitics and wizardry. A parent here—well, in the parking lot across the street—once taught a class on playing with fire. There are more young children here than high-school-age kids because many enroll in public schools in later grades. Though they recog-nize their debt to organizations that fought to protect their rights, and still beat back regulation attempts, most parents here seem uninterested in the politics of the home-schooling movement.

That’s left the legal crusades, the seminars and the leadership mostly up to religious home-schoolers, who populate a parallel world of co-ops and sports leagues. (Surveys suggest that well over half, even up to three-quarters, of home-school parents are driven by religious conviction.) To the biggest home-school advocacy groups, home schooling is less about pedagogy than personal rights and freedom from government nannying. The Leeper case allowed for the possibility of regulating home schools—even using test scores to assess students’ learning—but it would be up to the Legislature to create the system. Thanks to home-school defense groups, it’s hard to imagine that happening.

Nicholas Maddox, who was home-schooled in Conroe for his entire childhood, thinks that ought to change. In South Texas Law Review last year, Maddox argued that because education is a right guaranteed by the Texas Constitution, the state is “duty-bound” to ensure that students get at least a basic education. “Currently in Texas,” he writes, “an individual who is a recently convicted felon or partially mentally incapacitated is not allowed to own firearms or even vote, but is allowed to home-school his children for their entire childhood.” Maddox, who now works at the Houston law firm Thompson & Horton, tells the Observer he doesn’t


want the state to stand in the way of unconventional home-school learning, but that the state needs to set some basic learning requirement and enforce them. “I think there’s kind of two classes of home-schoolers,” Maddox says. “One is home education, and the other is non-education—the parent who calls up the district one day and says, ‘My child’s being home-schooled, leave me alone.’ Because the state sees these two groups of home-schoolers as one and the same, no one looks into the genuine intent to educate by the parents. … These children are just existing and time is passing.”

“We say that home-schooling parents should have the right to choose how to educate their children, but not the right to choose whether to educate their children,” says Rachel Coleman, who directs the Coalition for Responsible Home Education, a new network of home-school alumni. Coleman was home-schooled as a child as well. Now she works to put more legal safeguards in place to prevent abuse in home schools—physical abuse, but also behavior that’s sometimes sanctioned by religious groups, such as wielding overbearing control of grown children or raising young women only for lives as subservient helpmeets to their future husbands. That puts Coleman’s group in direct opposition to the biggest home-schooling groups, which answer to parents, not children. “Home-school children don’t really have a voice. They can’t really step forward and say, ‘Hey, I’m 14 and I can’t read,’” she says. “What’s in the best interests of the parents is not necessarily in the best interests of the kids.”

The watchmen are waiting for me under-ground, one floor below the Capitol rotunda. I’m late, but if they’re upset about it, they’re too polite to say so. Six of them in dark suits, hair all neatly trimmed and styled, they look a bit like one of the a cappella singing groups that sometimes perform here. Friendly, professional and eager, in a rush they extend their hands in

greeting, and reaching to shake one hand, I repeatedly bump into another. These are the Texas Home School Coalition’s foot soldiers at the Legislature, all recent home-school graduates, ages 18 to 22, who’ve risen to defend the rights their parents’ generation secured—not only for minimal home-school regulation, but for parental freedom more generally.

At 22, the coalition’s policy director, Jeremy New-man, is the oldest and the only paid Watchman. He embraces the group’s parents-first approach. “You have to be willing to protect the right of the parent to parent,” he tells me. That’s the core of the coalition’s mission, and with the right to home-school secured by Leeper, the Watchmen are on the lookout for other attempts to wedge the state into the family’s business. That’s at the heart of a bill they’re push-ing this session, a “Parental Rights Act” to make it harder for other family members to gain custody of children whose home schooling they disapprove of. But it’s also why the coalition opposes mandatory vaccinations and daytime curfews. “Sometimes we get questions or complaints about using resources on [Child Protective Services] issues,” Newman says.

State Rep. James Frank (R-Wichita Falls) talks legislative strategy with Texas Home School Coalition lobbyists, from left, Ryan Parke, Stephen Howsley and Jeremy Newman.

“Attempts to define a school too precisely are always dangerous. This is the problem of our time.”


“Our response has always been, ‘Your right to home-school only exists because we have the presumption that parental rights exist.’”

Newman recognizes that some parents make bad decisions about their children’s education, but says the answer isn’t tighter policing by the state. “You cannot fix relationships between people with legisla-tion.” Newman says his group prevents educational malpractice by providing curriculum resources and a community for new home-school parents.

Collectively, the Watchmen seem to comfortably embody what I’d imagined to be an uneasy balance: the precociousness encouraged by a home-school education and the conservative values of home-school politics. One Watchman, 18-year-old Greg Guggenmos, says he first learned to read upside-down. He believes he’s the youngest registered lobbyist ever in Texas, and is now fact-checking his claim with the state. Another, Josh Newman (Jeremy’s brother), tells me he was in eighth grade when he first became

concerned about America’s future. They are living together for the session in a South Austin apartment. The six seem reasoned and sharp in conversation, confident as any of the power brokers wandering past us. When I ask about their own home-school upbring-ings, the six laud the power of self-driven education to spark critical thinking and thwart conformity—though they seem to fit in well enough at the Capitol, preaching the gospel of limited government in signet rings and expensive-looking watches.

I follow at their brisk pace through the Capitol’s underground extension, down to the office of sopho-more state Rep. James Frank (R-Wichita Falls), so I can see the crew in action. Frank is one of a few home-school parents in the Legislature today, and, together with a growing number of home-schooled staffers, he represents an unprecedented network of home-school sympathizers. But as much as conserva-tive candidates prize a Texas Home School Coalition endorsement, the group still must fight for attention among the competing interests at the Capitol. A seri-ous attempt to regulate home schooling surely would draw an army of home-school parents. (Home-schoolers overloaded the U.S. Capitol’s switchboard in 1994 to beat back a bill that could have threatened home schooling nationwide.) But there’s no such threat in Austin this year. For the second session in a row, the group is trying to give home-schoolers access to public school athletics through a “Tim Tebow bill,” named in honor of the college football star who was home-schooled in Florida by his con-servative Christian family but played football with the local public school. More than two dozen states have adopted Tebow bills in recent years, but the measure was never brought up for debate in the last legislative session here.

Frank is working with the Texas Home School Coalition to gather support, and Tim Lambert, the coalition’s president, is down from Lubbock to help. The two are chatting in Frank’s office when I arrive with the Watchmen. Three of them wait in the hall as the rest of us find seats in Frank’s office, a sparsely decorated white room with a big family portrait on one wall and a white board on the other. Frank has good news: He’s heard the Tebow bill is almost certain to get a hearing with the House Public Education Committee—which is just a first step, but more than it got last session. Frank is rallying sup-port for the bill, and the Watchmen are drafting a set of bullet points to help him, including the high cost of youth sports and the fast growth of Texas’ home-school community. Frank hopes to convince a majority of the education committee to pledge support in writing, which, in turn, could help him convince committee Chairman Jimmie Don Aycock to get behind the bill. Aycock is a rural Republican and a former Killeen school board member who generally is more interested in traditional public schools. Folks like that—Frank, of course, doesn’t mention Aycock specifically—aren’t usually sympa-thetic to home-schoolers.

“What’s funny is they’re very concerned with the

Andrew Roblyer, home-schooling

accountability activist


5 million kids who are [each] costing $11,000 a year. But the 300,000 kids that are costing the state noth-ing are not our issue at all,” Frank wonders aloud, perhaps for my benefit. Even worse are the folks who’ve worked in the public school system and see the dropouts and miscreants whose parents only claim to be home schooling. “They’re seeing a very small fraction of home schooling but it’s a very—it’s not indicative of the rest of home schooling,” Frank says. “Most of the ones that are quote ‘good home-schoolers,’ there’s very little engagement between us and the public schools. So they never hear about ’em.”

Amateur sLeuths on reddit and face-book trying to make sense of Alecia Pennington’s case—the runaway Texas woman who can’t prove she exists—were surprised to discover that the Penningtons aren’t recluses holed up in some remote bunker, but public figures active in the home-school com-munity. In his only comment to the

press, James Pennington told The Daily Beast he had avoided registering with Social Security for political reasons, but would help his daughter get what she needed. James and Lisa each posted videos on You-Tube—since made private—denying they ever tried to hurt or control their daughter. State Rep. Marsha Farney (R-Georgetown) has filed a bill that would help people in situations like Alecia’s get copies of their birth certificates. Buoyed by the attention, Ale-cia recently announced she’d secured pro bono legal help and was close to getting her documentation.

But the more surprising revelation in Alecia’s story, to many, is that she’s not an anomaly—it’s just that few in her situation are lucky enough to get such attention. Until a few years ago, their stories might have never been heard. In 2013, four home-school alumni who’d met one another on the Christian debate circuit, including two Texans, organized as Homeschool Alumni Reaching Out (HARO) to give voice to abused and neglected home-schoolers. HARO began publishing stories, including Alecia’s, in which parents maintain control of their grown children by withholding government and school records. The phenomenon is called “identification abuse,” and a survey the group took in February netted many alumni who said their parents did the same thing. “I left due to physical abuse and they refused to give me any documents as punishment,” one respondent wrote. “Withheld Social Security card to control relationships and keep me from get-ting a job,” wrote another.

Reading stories from other home-schoolers, many alumni are shocked to recognize familiar behaviors, things they thought were quirks of their own upbringing. Texas-raised home-school alumni contacted for this story recalled parents removing the door from their bedroom, controlling their food portions or tracking them outside the house. Seeking reform, these home-school alumni are sharing their stories of abuse, control and neglect in the hopes

that leaders in the home-school movement will accept that they allowed these crimes because they defended near-limitless parental rights. There are troubled families at any sort of school, of course, but the reformers point to particular aspects of the home-schooling community today. Home-schooled children may not have anyone outside the home, such as a teacher, to check on their well-being. Some leaders in the Christian patriarchy movement encourage parents to build isolated family empires, require strict obedience from all children, and raise girls to be submissive and not necessarily well-educated wives.

The home-schooling movement began as a celebra-tion of the empowerment of parents, many of whom dreamed of raising an army to fight for America’s Christian future. Michael Farris, a key leader in the movement since the early ’80s, has called these now-grown children the “Joshua Generation.” “Just as Joshua completed Moses’s mission by slaughter-ing the inhabitants of the Promised Land, ‘GenJ’ would carry the fundamentalist banner forward and redeem America as a Christian nation,” Kathryn Joyce wrote in a 2013 American Prospect story on the “homeschool apostates” who have broken that “GenJ” mold. In the wave of home-schooled chil-dren coming of age today, many are less concerned with carrying their parents’ torch than with speaking up on behalf of kids like themselves. Their stories, publicized by HARO and a few other groups, have illuminated patterns of harmful behavior that would otherwise have remained locked away at home. Some old-guard home-school leaders have bristled at the criticism. Kevin Swanson, a leader in the movement’s most conservative wing who was home-schooled in the ’60s and ’70s, has called them “homeschool whiners” and “traitors” to “the cause of freedom.” As founder of the Colorado ministry Generations with Vision, Swanson has built a speaking and writing career on the promise of a Christian awakening that will return America to its Puritan days.

Andrew Roblyer, who cofounded HARO with three other former home-schoolers, says Swanson’s unwillingness to engage the new generation’s con-cerns is a dangerous, but common, approach. “It’s such a core part of the identity that when you chal-lenge home schooling, I think a lot of parents feel like you are accusing them, each individual par-ent, like everyone is equally part of the problem,” says Roblyer.

Roblyer grew up in a military family, moving often until they reached College Station, where he finished high school and still lives. He was glad to take schoolwork at his own pace, and to avoid the social uprooting he would have faced switching from school to school. Like HARO’s other founders, Roblyer was a devoted competitor on the national Christian debate circuit. Farris encouraged debate as a way to prepare the Joshua Generation for its future in politics. Roblyer’s family weren’t devoted home-schoolers or even conservative Christians; debate was a hobby, not a solemn vocation. But he

“Our parents’ generation really had to fight for the right to home-school, but I think that fight has made them very defensive. What HARO is saying is, we can address these problems without advocating for some widespread policy change.”


debated religion and public policy with students from more fundamentalist backgrounds—a com-mon policy proposal on the circuit was defunding the Department of Education—and he says his debate training taught him to think critically about the institution of home schooling.

“Our parents’ generation really had to fight for the right to home-school, but I think that fight has made them very defensive,” Roblyer says. “What HARO is saying is, we can address these problems without advocating for some widespread policy change. … We sidestep that entire conversation and say, ‘OK, let’s remove the government from the picture and look at what we can do to make the community better.’”

The group is building a set of lessons on LGBT acceptance, recognizing learning disabilities, and how to speak out when parents encounter a child suffering neglect or abuse. HARO repeatedly applies for, and is often denied, space at home-school confer-ences, including a Great Homeschool Conventions seminar in California last year. Roblyer says the home-school establishment is skeptical of anything that could crowd out a parent’s rights—especially if it involves reporting another parent to the state.

“There have been cases, regardless of how few and far between, where home-schoolers have been dis-criminated against,” Roblyer says. “And when that happens once, it becomes the rallying cry. So, there’s a lot of fear that if they give any ground, they’re going to end up giving a lot more.”

there are signs that home-schooL Leaders are pay-ing attention to concerns about hidden neglect, as Joyce noted in The American Prospect. While the Home School Legal Defense Association may not be interested in touching issues rooted in religion—“Some of the grievances I am reading now against home schooling seem to be merely differences of philosophy in child-rearing,” HSLDA attorney

Darren Jones told Joyce—the group has created an online guide to recognizing evidence of abuse and intervening. (Joyce points out that the guide still suggests confronting the parents before alerting Child Protective Services.) Meanwhile, some old gatekeepers of the far-right home-school move-ment are dying off. The San Antonio-based Vision Forum, which for years propagated the dream of a patriarchal fiefdom in every home, collapsed in 2013 under the weight of founder Doug Phillips’ sex scandal. No comparable organization has stepped in to take its place.

Research on contemporary home-schoolers sug-gests that growth in the movement isn’t being driven by the Joshua Generation of large Christian families, but by a new group that embraces home schooling as just one option in the broad menu of school-choice possibilities. Historian Milton Gaither describes a shift from “homeschooling” to “home schooling,” where learning happens to take place in the home, per-haps online, or in a community college, a weekly co-op or a seminar on pyrotechnics in an adjacent parking lot. All these options leave parents and students less dependent on the institutions that first secured home-schoolers’ rights.

The Texas Home School Coalition’s Watchmen agree that there’s a growing diversity of thought in the home-school community. Jeremy Newman recalls a phrase Tim Lambert uses to describe par-ents who want to avoid any engagement with state regulation—he refers to their “free-floating anxi-ety.” Newman says home-school parents are getting bolder, empowered by their growing numbers and less rooted in a Leeper-era fear of the state. As his brother Josh says, the shift of opinion reflects a recognition that home schooling today, complex, big and diverse, can’t survive on ignorance. “Being forgotten by the government,” Josh says, “doesn’t get you freedom.”

From left, Heather Rizzo, Monk Duro-Landry, Allie Mc-

Nally, Evangeline McFarlin and Isabella Rizzo discuss World War II battles in a world his-tory class at the Austin Area

Homeschoolers Friday Co-op.

“Currently in Texas, an

individual who is a recently

convicted felon or partially

mentally incapacitated is not allowed

to own firearms or even vote,

but is allowed to home-school

his children for their entire

childhood.”


C nn internationaL host richard quest strides across the studio and extends his hand to his round-faced, goateed guest. “Breitling Energy is a U.S. company that goes into fracking in a big way,” Quest says. “We have the man who’s called the ‘fracking master’ because you do so much of it.” And so continues Chris Faulkner’s seemingly endless series of TV interviews. ¶ Faulkner is CEO of Breitling Energy Corp., and during the last three years he has become the

media’s go-to voice from Texas in favor of hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking. His 45-minute Powering America show and one-minute “Oil and Gas Today” spots were heard all last year on KRLD, the CBS radio affiliate in Dallas-Fort Worth. As Quest got almost right, Faulkner goes by the moniker “Frack Master.”

Outlets that have turned to the Frack Master for news and commentary include CNBC, Bloomberg TV and the BBC. The New York Times cited him eight times in 2014. He’s quoted by reporters for Reuters and in stories by the Associated Press.

He’s sharp and snarky with an impressive memory for facts and figures. And he’s unusual in the energy industry; while most executives dodge the press, Faulkner is happy to appear on a chat show to discuss the latest in oil prices or rig counts.

Faulkner alternates between Rush Limbaugh-style self-righteousness and sympathetic acceptance of criticism. He says people have a right to worry about noise, earthquakes and mysterious fracking fluids. But he says that fracking can be done well, and that it should be.

“These environmentalists have done a hell of a job educating folks on fear,” Faulkner said in an

interview for this story. “And I think no one in this industry is willing to stand up and take that target, and I’m willing to do so.”

Faulkner is many things: tech entrepreneur, TV star, publicity genius and international fracking advocate. He also is passionate about standing up for himself in court, whether against a competitor who accused him of defamation or against a Dallas zoning board.

His first big success story was C I Host, a provider of websites and server space. The company’s value swelled with the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, but became the subject of a bitter fight for most of the 2000s. Faulkner launched C I Host before he was 25, but it wasn’t his first foray into the world of business. Before he was 18, he had built and sold a baseball card trading company and a firm that repaired video games and rented them to small businesses, he said.

While many companies distance themselves from the controversial term “fracking,” Breitling Energy embraces it. Records from the United States Patent and Trademark Office show the company has sought to trademark the names “Frack Master,” “Frackmaster” and “Frackman.” In one trademark application, Breitling seeks exclusive use of

Chris Faulkner brings his brand of bravado and lots of cash to the Texas Capitol. So, what’s he really after?By Steven Bodzin ILLUSTRATION BY KEVIN WHIPPLE

TheLite Guv and the Frack Master


“Frackmaster” for uses including video games, comic books and “positionable toy figures.” (“At this time we’re not going to do a comic book,” Faulkner said.)

If Faulkner were just a self-promoter, he’d barely stand out from the Dallas crowd. But he’s raised his profile during the past two years by getting involved in politics. When the Denton City Council debated a municipal fracking ban, Faulkner showed up and recommended that the city regulate, rather than ban, the method.

Faulkner has also become a high-dollar contribu-tor to several statewide officials and members of the Legislature. Texas Ethics Commission records show he has given almost $300,000 to state candidates. That includes a gift of $5,000 to George P. Bush’s race

for Texas Land Commissioner. His $100,000 con-tribution to the campaign of Railroad Commission candidate Ryan Sitton made him Sitton’s biggest indi-vidual donor. He also gave $87,500 to Dan Patrick’s campaign for lieutenant governor and a combined $65,000 to two candidates for state attorney general.

The Breitling website shows photos of U.S. Sens. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Marco Rubio (R-Florida) at the company’s offices. Faulkner also held a reception last year for House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio). He donated $5,200 to U.S. Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kansas), according to the Federal Election Commission.

The push into politics began to pay off in January. Before he was even sworn into office, Patrick, in a Jan.


15 press conference, announced an energy advisory committee to be chaired by legendary oil-and-gas man and philanthropist T. Boone Pickens. Patrick said the panel was meant to contribute a broad range of opinion, and not just be “Dan’s team.” But of the eight initial members, seven were Patrick donors. Though his name wasn’t on the original list, Breitling Energy announced a week later that Faulkner had been appointed to the panel.

Faulkner’s transition from dot-com promoter to member of a committee that has the ear of the lieutenant governor of Texas was a giant accomplish-ment. “That’s the pinnacle of his career,” said Thomas Miller, vice president of communications at Breitling. “That’s the highlight of everything he’s ever done. … And there’s no business that will come. He won’t make a dime off that, but just to be at that table speaks a lot to the networking.”

But Faulkner’s seat at that table was fleeting. Just two months after Breitling Energy announced on its website that Faulkner had been tapped for the post, the lieutenant governor’s office told the Observer that Faulkner had tendered his resignation. The move came after a lengthy examination by the Observer of Faulkner’s background and qualifications.

Faulkner resigned on a Friday in mid-March with no widely distributed statement from Breitling. The story behind the resignation—including whether Faulkner was properly vetted, and what the lieuten-ant governor knew about him prior to naming him to the committee—remains a mystery. It does, however, open a window onto how things work at the capitol, particularly in the office of the lieutenant governor.

Buried under scores of flattering news stories, corporate press releases and websites that tout Breitling’s bright future, the Observer found another story. State and federal court records in Texas, Oklahoma and Illinois show a litany of lawsuits by angry creditors and former employees as well as a minor arrest. Additionally, and central to the question of whether Faulkner met the criteria Patrick touted for his energy committee, in a series of interviews for this story, Faulkner and his spokesman painted a more limited picture of the company’s activities than some public statements by Faulkner and the name Frack Master might imply.

the frack master has a short history as an oiL-man, but he’s been an entrepreneur for decades.

Faulkner said his first business was a sports memo-rabilia retail store in Bedford, which he built up at age 15. (His mother, attorney Carole Faulkner, reg-istered the name Scoreboard Sports Cards in 1990, when Chris was 13.)

“It was a big craze, collecting sports cards, base-ball cards, all that,” Faulkner said. “I’d buy them at wholesale through these sports memorabilia shows that would travel around and [then I’d] sell them at the retail store.”

He went on to rent out video arcade games. Later, shortly after starting college, he founded the web-hosting company that would become C I Host. These endeavors were what Faulkner called “the successful ones,” saying he has started some 200 companies with “plenty of failures along the way.”

He started at Southern Methodist University in 1995, but his career there ended in a legal storm after just three semesters. According to documents in a lawsuit that Faulkner filed against the school, his chemistry professor claimed in an honor code com-plaint that Faulkner tried to boost his grade by turning in forged quizzes.

Faulkner sued the university for defamation, for false advertising (promising but not providing ten-ured professors), and for thwarting his plan to become a doctor. The school had cost him $10 million in life-time earnings, he said in the suit. He demanded $69 million. Faulkner’s lawyer was his mother, Carole, who had graduated from Baylor Law School seven years earlier.

In November 1998, the court dismissed the case and said Faulkner would “take nothing from defen-dants.” Faulkner said in an interview that he won the case with a settlement. He declined to elabo-rate in response to a follow-up email. SMU General Counsel Paul Ward didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.

by then, fauLkner had aLready found his passion: the emerging Internet. He registered chrisfaulkner.com and began publishing The Unit Shifter, a fan page for the band Nirvana with master-level trivia questions such as, “What was the name of the Medical Examiner who examined Kurt’s body?”

Faulkner spent a term at Baylor and a year at the University of North Texas before dropping out to focus on his web-hosting company. He started it from home, annoying his landlord by receiving thousands of bill payments every month, he told The North Texan Online in 2004.

Faulkner appears on conference programs as “Dr. Christopher Faulkner.” In an interview, he said Concordia College in California granted him an hon-orary degree in 2004. The database of the California Postsecondary Education Commission contains no Concordia College. A spokesman for Concordia University in Irvine, California, said it hasn’t granted Faulkner an honorary degree.

Faulkner married Tamra Freedman, whose LinkedIn profile says she is a marketing executive at Breitling Energy, in 2007 in Cabo San Lucas. Video of the big week can be found for $1.99 on iTunes as Season 3, Episode 2 of Platinum Weddings. In the

Faulkner in a September 2014 CNN appearance.

CNN


show, Freedman says that the two met in 2000 and fell in love at first sight. The show notes expenses—DJs, a tequila party, a Carolina Herrera gown and gift packs—that add up to almost $290,000.

The couple has worked together on at least two commercial ventures, including BigVideos.com LLC and Porn Toys Corp., where records at the Texas Secretary of State show they were president and vice president.

By late 2005, the domains bigvideos.com and porntoys.com were registered to C I Host in Bedford. Archived versions of the websites at archive.org show that BigVideos carried the “best selection of high-quality adult DVD movies, anime, hentai, fetish and gay titles,” while Porn Toys carried a broad range of adult toys, including penis pumps.

“Chris had no day-to-day involvement,” his spokes-man wrote in an emailed response to questions. “It was a profitable business, [Tamra] operated it respect-fully meeting a market demand for a product that consumers buy. She made money at it, and sold it.”

during the past decade, fauLkner has made a re-markable shift from high-profile Internet entrepre-neur to higher-profile Frack Master. Along the way, there’s a public record of lawsuits from creditors and former employees demanding millions of dol-lars. And the fracking? During a series of interviews Faulkner and his spokesman confirmed that the company has interests in hundreds of fracked wells, but that it op-erates very few of its own.

Faulkner recounted the origin story of C I Host in a 2003 interview with the Fort Worth Business Press. “I had 10 phone lines set up in my apartment,” he told the newspaper. “I wanted businesses to think that I had a large company, so I would use differ-ent names and pretend to be different employees of C I Host. I would say, ‘Hello, this is Joe in technical support’; ‘Hello, this is Chris in technical service’; or ‘This is Mark in sales.’ The customers didn’t even notice that the voice was the same. I was doing everything, including billing. I did this for three years and hardly ever slept.”

The Bedford-based company eventually grew to 250,000 clients, Faulkner said. But even as it became a major web host, both the company and Faulkner kept ending up in court either as plaintiff or defen-dant. All told, Faulkner’s Internet companies or Faulkner personally are named in dozens of lawsuits in courts in Texas, Illinois and California.

In one case, former employees at the company’s Chicago data center sued in federal court for unpaid wages. Case documents show they won a $90,000 set-tlement from C I Host, two other related companies, and from Faulkner personally. Plaintiff Joe DePaola, reached by phone in Illinois, said the judgment was never paid. Asked about DePaola’s statement, Faulkner’s spokesman wrote in an email, “… at the time of this case, Chris was no longer involved in the company’s operations.”

Backbone Communications, a California telecom firm, won a judgment for more than $700,000 that

was certified by a state district court in Texas against Faulkner and two companies. Backbone has never managed to seize assets, Lisa Derme, general man-ager of Backbone, said in an interview.

Faulkner’s spokesman downplayed the case. “Chris was the personal guarantor of a contract that C I Host canceled due to multiple service disruptions which negatively impacted C I customers, and was out of C I Hosting’s control,” Faulkner’s spokesman wrote in an emailed statement. “C I lost the case and became responsible for the entire length of the contract. They disagreed and did not pay the settlement, so it was forwarded to Chris as guarantor. He still vehemently disagrees and refused to pay. The case is over 10 years old and has no impact on him personally at this time.”

There’s also the case between Faulkner and his for-mer driver, Bobby Lee Clemons. Clemons claimed in records in Texas state court that “On the last weekend in March of 2007, Mr. Faulkner instructed plaintiff to pick up two packages … and deliver one to his home and deliver one to Mr. Faulkner in Florida. On inspec-tion of the package, [an illegal substance] was found to be the contents. The package was left in Mr. Faulkner’s car in Texas.” Faulker denied all of Clemons’ claims and said in an interview, “You can look at those records.”

Clemons claimed in his suit that Faulkner had given him a car to keep, but Faulkner reported the car

stolen. Additionally, according to the suit, Faulkner “sent (or caused to be sent) a mass fax to the public asserting that Plaintiff was a convicted felon” wanted for “grand theft auto” and was a “fugitive.”

Clemons’ claims were never tested in court, as the sides settled in 2009. Extensive searching for Clemons, including visits to his former home in Sachse, Texas, failed to turn up contact informa-tion, and he didn’t answer a message sent to an email address that appears in case paperwork.

In a 2004 case in Tarrant County, Faulkner’s Internet company sued Erin Bullock, claiming her website Slackjawed.net posted false, defama-tory material. The case was dropped a month later.Bullock, reached at home, declined to comment.

Bullock claimed in court records that she was a cofounder of C I Host. Starting in 2000, she and Faulkner traded lawsuits for more than a decade, with Bullock claiming a share of the company and Faulkner denying her claim. In court filings, she accused him of mismanagement and of engaging in a “legal and psychological blitzkrieg.” He said, “I call it a divorce. We were high school sweethearts if you will. She claimed ownership of the business that she didn’t start, and we ended up in litigation.”

Faulkner said he ends up in court a lot because he doesn’t like bullies. “I’m not one to back down from a

“These environmentalists have done a hell of a job educating folks on fear. And I think no one in this industry is willing to stand up and take that target, and I’m willing to do so.”


challenge,” he said. “I stand up for what I believe in. My mom taught me that from an early age. A lot of people get pushed around. It’s unfortunate some people who get pushed around don’t have the resources to push back. I’ve been fortunate to have those resources.”

there aLso was the arrest. Late on the night of June 9, 2011, a police report shows, Faulkner was a passenger in a car that was stopped for doing 88 mph in a 60-mph zone in Irving. The driver was booked for DWI and Faulkner was taken to the Irving jail.

At the jail, according to the report, an officer found a baggie of white powder in Faulkner’s wallet. Faulkner was charged with public intoxication and posses-sion of a controlled substance. He pleaded guilty to attempted possession and was given deferred adjudi-cation, court records show. Under such a program, a suspect can serve probation without a formal finding of guilt. After two years of probation, his record was left clean.

Faulkner said he doesn’t, and didn’t, use cocaine. “There was an issue with some individuals I was in an automobile with,” he said.

In Faulkner’s rich paper trail through the early 2000s, one thing is conspicuously missing: fracking. In testimony to the Denton City Council, Faulkner said, “My company has done it for 10 years without incident or upset.” And in an interview about oil and gas wells, he told the BBC, “We’ve fracked a thousand of those personally.”

Oklahoma state corporate records show that Faulkner started an energy company, Southwest

Energy Exploration LLC, in 2004, and in 2010 changed its name to Breitling Oil and Gas LLC. But Texas Secretary of State records show Breitling Oil and Gas Corp. was founded in Dallas in 2009. Faulkner told the Observer that he started to spend all his time working on Breitling in 2008.

Even today, Breitling is a relatively small oil com-pany. Faulkner said the company has interests in 607 wells, most of which have been fracked. The company began to operate its own wells only at the end of 2013, and as of January 2015 had seven oil and gas wells pumping the equivalent of 600 barrels a day, he said. By comparison, EOG Resources, Texas’ biggest oil producer, pumps 239,000 barrels oil a day in Texas.

to hear tom smith teLL it, the speciaL something in Texas politics is cash. Smith has spent 35 years as Texas director of Public Citizen, a nonpartisan group with offices in Washington, D.C., and Austin. Public Citizen monitors the way political campaigns are fi-nanced and works to reduce corporate influence in government. In 2013, Public Citizen had a $15 mil-lion budget, according to its website, and half its do-nations came from individuals.

Public Citizen takes the position that fracking can contaminate drinking water supplies with cancer-causing chemicals and significantly deplete freshwater aquifers. A primer about fracking posted on Public Citizen’s website claims, “natural gas extraction poses a grave threat to families, communities and eco-systems.” And that puts Public Citizen at odds with Faulkner and other contributors to Dan Patrick’s

Chris Faulkner, chief execu-tive officer of Breitling Oil &

Gas Corp., poses for a photo-graph following a Bloomberg

Television interview in London, U.K., on Friday, Nov. 30, 2012.

BLOOMBERG PHOTO


campaign who later were named to the lieutenant gov-ernor’s energy advisory committee.

Texas law allows individuals to give virtually unlimited contributions to nonjudicial statewide elections and to legislative candidates. Candidates are required, however, to report contributions to the Texas Ethics Commission. It also is perfectly legal—in fact it is common in Texas—for a statewide officeholder to appoint a contributor to a state board, agency or commission. “Texas has a long tradition of pay-to-play politics,” Smith said.

Faulkner’s 2014 giving spree, on record at the Texas Ethics Commission, was impressive: $45,000 to Railroad Commissioner Barry Smitherman; $10,000 for John Carona’s failed bid to keep his state sen-ate seat; and $5,000 each to state Rep. James Keffer (R-Eastland) and Railroad Commissioner Christi Craddick. Ken Paxton, who defeated Smitherman for attorney general, received $30,000. Faulkner threw $6,247.50 behind state Rep. Kenneth Sheets (R-Dallas) and $1,247.53 to state Rep. Cindy Burkett (R-Sunnyvale). Representatives for Bush, Sheets and Smitherman didn’t respond to messages. Dick Clements, Carona’s treasurer, said he knew little about Faulkner except that he had donated. Keffer declined an interview, saying in an email that he doesn’t know Faulkner well.

Patrick’s campaign received $87,500 from Faulkner, according to Ethics Commission records. Nominees for most state boards, agencies and commissions are vetted by a confirmation process in the Texas Senate. Advisory boards such as the six created by Patrick are not. So, the vetting process happens privately, if at all.

At a Capitol news conference the day he announced the committee, Patrick said, “The private sector is asked for help by a candidate, but after they get elected, there’s not much follow-up. … Why would you want a legislative body to disconnect themselves from the private sector?”

Patrick said that not all of his panel members are Patrick supporters.

It may not hurt that Faulkner comes to Austin with an international reputation. He testified before a committee of the British parliament and spoke to a side event at the Council of Europe.

Faulkner’s high profile started with a barrage of press releases and reliable availability. Few oil executives discuss the news of the day on TV, so the Frack Master filled a vacuum. “He looked around and there’s nobody out there talking about this,” Breitling’s spokesman said in an interview. “He decided, ‘If nobody is, I will.’”

The results have been impressive. In late 2011, Faulkner was featured in Pipeline & Gas Journal, which included his Concordia College doctorate in its lead paragraph. In January 2012, he was quoted by Bloomberg News in a story on oil markets. From there, it was off to the races—Fox Business, NBC, ABC, BNN, CNBC, BBC.

But joining the committee may be more about networking than anything else. “Once you become a member of that club, then many of those people become added to your business friendships,” Smith, of Public Citizen, said. “In the clean-energy world

where I work, certainly a lot of the relationships between my business colleagues who have served on those boards have been particularly useful to them in making deals.”

If nothing else, being on the board gives Faulkner a new legitimacy. Or rather, gave. In March, roughly six weeks after his appointment, Faulkner left the committee on the same day he responded to fol-low-up questions from the Observer about his past. Patrick’s office responded to a similar inquiry with a short statement.

“Until recent questions were raised, we were not aware of any issues involving Mr. Faulkner,” Keith

Elkins, Patrick’s communication director, wrote in an emailed statement. “Mr. Faulkner is no longer serving on the committee. He tendered his resigna-tion on Friday.”

Faulkner’s spokesman explained in a one-sentence email: “Out of respect to Dan and the other members of the committee, Chris chose to step aside because of time demands related to expansion plans at Breitling Energy and to devote time to his family.”

Leaving the commission may not have been in Faulkner’s plan, but the Frack Master is in his element dealing with adversity.

“I’ve got thick skin and I love challenges,” he said earlier during an interview. “When things are going great and humming along good, I feel sometimes as CEO I have nothing to do. So when there are chal-lenges I rise to the occasion. This is a fun time for me.”

Despite the large public persona, Faulkner doesn’t share much of his private life. He seemed at home as he launched into a description of his company his-tory, oil reserves and shareholder relations. But he was more circumspect speaking about his family, his personal history, even the wedding that was taped for broadcast. About being on Platinum Weddings, he said, “I don’t know if I’d call it fun, but I’d call it inter-esting.” Indeed, one of Faulkner’s most recent lawsuits shows his desire for privacy—he sued the Dallas Board of Adjustment for refusing to grant him permission to build a 6-and-a-half-foot fence around his home.

Asked about his plans for the future, Faulkner turned the conversation back to Breitling. “Right now I’m 100 percent focused on energy,” he said. “Right now, with what’s happening with the downturn, is we need to punch the gas, looking for acquisition targets, gaining market share. We’re not levered up. We have very little debt. So we’re in a good position to survive this downturn. It gives us an opportunity. It’s not just about weathering the storm, it’s about how we come out of this after the storm passes.”

Steven Bodzin writes about the energy industry from Montreal. His work has appeared in Vice, Columbia Journalism Review, Mother Jones, The Christian Science Monitor, and Bloomberg News.

“I’ve got thick skin and I love challenges. When things are going great and humming along good, I feel sometimes as CEO I have nothing to do.”


CULTURE


30 FILM 32 THE BOOK REPORT 34 DIRECT QUOTE 36 POSTCARDS

42 POEM 43 STATE OF THE MEDIA44 GUANTANAMO DIARY45 EYE ON TEXAS

Growing up in the south, hockey was not a major sport of my child-hood. I never learned to skate without a rail nearby, and I never understood the penalties. But if I ever needed inspiration, whether to compete in nerdier endeavors

such as Battle of the Books or simply to get into the “can-do” spirit, I always channeled my favorite scene from one of my favorite movies: Charlie Conway’s winning shot in 1992’s The Mighty Ducks.

Charlie isn’t the most talented kid on the ragtag team, but he’s got “heart.” When the big game is on the line, Charlie has the chance to win with a pen-alty shot. The cynical lawyer-turned-coach, Gordon Bombay, having realized that winning isn’t every-thing after all, says he believes in Charlie, no matter what happens. And then, suddenly, victory is theirs. If that doesn’t warm your heart, it’s harder than a hockey puck.

If it weren’t for the outdated technology, clothes and slang, The Mighty Ducks would be a perfect movie for my 10-year-old stepson. Like plenty of Texas kids, his world revolves around sports: the real sports he actually plays (attested to by the piles of equipment accumulating on our porch), the games he watches on television, the video games he plays on the iPad, and the portraits of athletes he draws at night. My husband and I spent the fall watching his flag football matches, winter weekends trekking to his basketball games, and soon we’ll be back outside watching his baseball games from the bleachers.

We talk with him about being a “good teammate”—not just on teams, but also with friends. We cast teachers as “coaches” who deserve admiration for their skills, and we explain homework as “an away game.” My husband even tries to spice up the study of frac-tions and decimals with lessons on baseball statistics.

My stepson and his friends would seem to be the perfect audience for sports movies. In sports, kids are their own heroes, learning bravery in the face of intimidation and self-respect in disappoint-ment. And given the lessons that such narratives can impart about teamwork, hard work and doing

your best—never mind sport’s intersection with the national obsession for health and wellness—it might seem that there should be plenty of sports movies to watch with kids.

But in fact there’s very little these days in the way of sports movies for the 10-and-under set. At best we get movies about the pros—movies in which athletes, by virtue of talent, win fame and money. When we want to watch something sports-focused as a family, odds are we wind up settling for 15 minutes of ESPN’s SportsCenter and crossing our fingers that there’s no mention of domestic abuse or sexual assault.

LAST YEAR WE saw 42, the 2013 Jackie Robinson biopic. We’d waited almost a year after the film came out in theaters so that we could view it at home, pause button at the ready, but even so, watching a Jim Crow-era period piece with a 9-year-old is a complex affair. He enjoyed it, but at the one-hour mark he was already fidgeting. The movie is rated PG-13 and con-tains a number of racial slurs and epithets, in addition to disturbing portrayals of segregated America that sometimes made him so uncomfortable he had to leave the room. The film was well done, to be sure, and is filled with teachable moments, but it’s hardly what I’d call a kids’ movie.

But 42’s mature themes are certainly preferable to the alternatives. One day last year, with school canceled for weather, I agreed to watch Cloud 9, a saccharine made-for-TV confection from the Disney Channel about a rich girl who discovers she never really earned her place on the snowboarding team, and then, as predictably as possible, learns the meaning of hard work and fair play. It might be a measure of his desperation for any depiction of kids playing sports that my stepson chose a movie about “a rich girly-girl” who plays a sport in which he doesn’t even participate. As I suffered through one of the worst viewings I can remember, I realized that when it comes to sports movies for kids, we were scraping the bottom of an empty barrel.

There are, on the other hand, plenty of sports dra-mas for adults. Thanks to the Esquire Network, my husband and I can watch Friday Night Tykes, which is

The golden age of kiddie sports movies pretty much ended in 1995. Maybe it began to seem far-fetched to imagine kids playing sports without a bunch of helicopter parents stealing the show.

All Grown UpWhere have all the kids’ sports movies gone? by Abby Rapoport

Coach and his young players on Esquire Network’s Friday Night Tykes.COURTESY ESQUIRE NETWORK


among the more disturbing shows on television. The series features teams from the Texas Youth Football Association, which has fewer regulations about weight and age than other pee wee football leagues.

The first season, which premiered in 2014, included nauseating scenes in which kids are forced to run until they nearly vomit and children cry as coaches scream profanity-laced rants. The current season contains slightly fewer scenes of coaches encouraging children to hurt each other, but concussions, win-first values and flat-out-crazy coaches still abound. Not surpris-ingly, the cameras focus mostly on the coaches and parents—their dreams for the kids, their tempers and their eagerness to be No. 1. We watch it occasionally, guiltily, wondering if we’ll see someone we recognize. The show also delivers the self-congratulatory satis-faction of knowing that, compared to the people on screen, we’re model parents.

There’s clearly an audience for this kind of thing. The show has done so well that Esquire now offers The Short Game, in which little golf prodigies strive while parents and coaches behave badly.

The classic of this genre, of course, is Dance Moms, now in its fifth season on Lifetime, which documents an ostensibly prestigious dance school where moms vie to ensure solos for their daughters through a bizarre blend of backstabbing and coddling, all under the watchful eye of dictator—erm, dance instructor—Abby Lee Miller. The show has spawned a variety of spinoffs, including Dance Moms: Miami and Abby’s Ultimate Dance Competition.

Even as kids’ sports are becoming more and more competitive at earlier and earlier ages, movie stu-dios have stopped making films that showcase youth sports, films in which underdog misfits overcome the odds without parents hovering in the background to gain not fame or money but a sense of accomplish-ment and self-respect. Parents can watch Friday Night Tykes and learn what not to do, but there’s

not much media that models youth sports as an avenue for having fun and putting in the work to improve. Without such models, kids are increasingly reliant on pro and col-lege sports for their sense of what sport represents: contract disputes and marketing deals that position athletes as brands.

Where the hell is The Mighty Ducks when you need it?

THE EARLY ’90S was the golden age of kids’ sports movies. I was raised on Rookie of the Year, The Sandlot and, yes, The Mighty Ducks. I wasn’t much of an athlete—just a few medio-cre seasons of rec-league softball and basketball—but I loved and respected youth sports as an arena for grit and earnest effort. It was hard not to, since every year several movies came out to reinforce that message. From 1992 to 1995, there were at least a baker’s dozen wide-release, kid-

friendly films about sports: The Mighty Ducks (1992), The Cutting Edge (1992), Rookie of the Year (1993), The Sandlot (1993), Rudy (1993), Cool Runnings (1993), Little Big League (1994), Major League II (1994), Little Giants (1994), the Mighty Ducks sequel D2 (1994), The Air Up There (1994), Angels in the Outfield (1994) and The Big Green (1995) .

The youth sports film canon is made up of movies about love of the game, movies in which the stakes attached to winning and losing are typically low. (I would warn readers here about spoilers to come, but the outcomes of these movies are obvious from the opening credits.) The little sluggers of The Sandlot are playing for neighborhood bragging rights—no more, no less. They don’t even have a coach. What coaches do exist in this genre usually help turn a group of mis-fits into a competitive team, but not before both kids and coaches have learned valuable lessons about the importance of just having fun and giving it their best. The Big Green and Little Giants, about soccer and football respectively, follow similar themes.

Even the golden-age movies about pro sports aren’t really about the pros. In Rookie of the Year, 12-year-old Henry Rowengartner, a Little League failure, breaks his arm, which heals in such a way as to give him new-found pitching ability. He joins the Chicago Cubs and helps them win the pennant before his magic arm gives out. Along the way, he reminds the team’s owner about the importance of simply loving the game. When the movie ends with Henry happily back on his Little League team, the audience is slammed over the head with the message: Sport isn’t about winning and losing. Sport is about having fun. Similarly, Little Big League is about a baseball-loving kid who becomes the manager of the Minnesota Twins and nearly forgets the importance of fun and love as he begins to take professional sport too seriously.

These movies weren’t just childhood favorites; they were cultural touchstones. Throughout college,

Billy Bob Thornton, Lucas Black and Lee Thompson Young in Friday Night Lights (2004).

COURTESY UNIVERSAL PICTURES


friends made frequent reference to the famous plays we learned from these films: “The Flying V” of The Mighty Ducks and “The Annexation of Puerto Rico” from Little Giants. Whenever I find my heart pulled into a game—whether it’s watching 10-year-olds ner-vously approach the plate with the game on the line or the Kansas City Royals come this close to a World Series title—I remember the feelings I got watching Little Big League and Rookie of the Year.

Other movies may be more artful or subtle, but nothing beats an early-’90s kids’ sports movie for sheer emotional stakes. Unlike just about anything else, you can’t play sports ironically. You can’t be an ironic fan. Love of sports, as a player or a spectator, is earnestness incarnate. Those movies had flaws, to be sure—they were formulaic; the main characters were nearly always white boys—but all the same I recently found myself paraphrasing Rick Moranis’ Little Giants speech to a backseat full of 10-year-old boys: “Even if they beat you 99 times out of 100, that still leaves one time.”

The idyllic if imperfect picture these movies painted stands in increasingly stark contrast to the changing realities of youth sports culture. By 1994, Hoop Dreams—a documentary about two high school basketball players in Chicago with shots at college careers and the NBA—was presenting a decidedly less happy look at the world of kids in sports. Hoop Dreams was a movie for adults, not children, and instead of inspiration, it revealed the high price of sports culture, and what happens when dreams fall flat, no matter how much a kid might love the game or invest the hard work.

The pressure cooker that drove the drama of Hoop Dreams has only continued to grow. According to Demetrius Pearson, a professor of health and human performance at the University of Houston who has written about sports culture and sports movies, kids are getting into organized sports at ever younger ages. “The expectations we have for these kids can never be lived up to, because they’re so young,” he said. College team recruitment letters now begin arriving as early as sixth grade. Seven- and 8-year-olds try out for elite “select leagues” open only to the best players, with parents willing and able to pay high registration fees, ferry kids to constant practices and travel far and wide for games.

The sports movies of the early 1990s can offer an important counterweight to the increasing pro-fessionalization of youth sports. “Kids need to be exposed to some of these kinds of movies as they’re growing up,” Pearson says. “That way they don’t see it as win or else, California or bust.”

THE GOLDEN AGE of kiddie sports movies pretty much ended in 1995.

Maybe it began to seem far-fetched to imagine kids playing sports without a bunch of helicopter parents stealing the show. Maybe the idea of watching people play sports for any stakes lower than a state championship just stopped hitting studio execs with enough force.

In their place, a series of far darker, more nuanced and significantly more adult movies began to set a

new tone for how sports is portrayed in film. Jerry Maguire came out in 1996, offering viewers a glimpse of sports through the lens of agents, sponsorship contracts and signing bonuses. He Got Game (1998)showed a convict let out of prison by a governor to convince his basketball-whiz son to go to the state university. Then, in 1999, there were Varsity Blues and Any Given Sunday, sexed-up films about high school and pro football, respectively. More and more sports movies arrived with PG-13 or R ratings, and the dark side of sports increasingly became the only side that audiences were shown.

Now, of course, the big business of pro athletics is ubiquitous, and marketers are fiendishly good at tar-geting kids with the trappings. I doubt we’re the only household to have serious discussions about why $30 LeBron James-endorsed “Instinct Elite” socks aren’t actually necessary for playing basketball. And while we watch game after game, the only narrative rep-resentations of sports we can find tend to showcase high-level athletes at the peaks of their careers. These days, Mighty Ducks coach Gordon Bombay wouldn’t hesitate to cut his crew of adorable losers in favor of kids who’d already attended expensive hockey clinics over spring break. The kids of The Sandlot wouldn’t get any playing time at all, since a select team would already have the lot reserved for practice.

The few contemporary kid-friendly sports movies that do see wide release are rarely about kids. Last year’s Million Dollar Arm was Disney’s first sports film since 2006. The movie, marketed to families, was about a major league scout looking to recruit Indian cricket players for baseball. In a similar vein, 2002’s The Rookie featured an aging Dennis Quaid tak-ing his last stab at the majors, and 2006’s Invincible showcased an older Mark Wahlberg getting a chance to play for the Philadelphia Eagles. These are mostly movies about old men looking to reclaim lost glory. That’s no message for young kids.

I WENT TO SEE Disney’s latest with low hopes. McFarland, USA is the first wide-release Disney movie in 15 years to feature high school athletes. It’s the story of the 1987 McFarland High cross-country team—a team composed of Latino kids who work as field hands before and after school. They become contenders for the California state title. The movie is based on a true story, and there are plenty of cri-tiques to be leveled at the film’s oversimplifications and flirtation with “white coach savior” narrative. (Notably, it’s also among the first mainstream mov-ies I’ve seen in which a white character uses the word “privilege” to describe his own life.)

It’s also the first movie in a long time in which kids strive not for fame and glory, but for the pride that comes from attempting something difficult. The end of the movie includes epilogues about each kid’s life after high school. Not one of them is now a rich pro athlete. Their efforts paid off in less dramatic but no less important ways.

We’re going to see it as a family as soon as we have a night free from practice.

Freelance writer Abby Rapoport’s work has appeared in The American Prospect and National Journal.

Unlike just about anything else, you can’t play sports ironically. You can’t be an ironic fan. Love of sports, as a player or a spectator, is earnestness incarnate.


FILM

The Unmistakable Worlds of Bob Byington by Josh Rosenblatt

I have a friend who wouLd happiLy watch a two-hour industrial film about warehouse safety if Wes Anderson directed it. That’s how deeply he’s convinced that the director’s vocabulary was created to speak to him especially. Every slow-motion scene set to a song from the ’60s, every fussy bit of dollhouse set design,

every delicately composed static shot, every whoosh-ing horizontal tracking shot, every deadpan exchange: My friend believes it’s his lan-guage Anderson is speaking. Even regarding the films he can admit are misfires, his devotion remains intact. His love is unconditional. It transcends petty distinctions between good and bad.

There may be fewer of us who see and hear in Bob Byington’s cinematic language that same sort of very personal familiarity, that sense of connectedness, but we exist. We’re a small cult, but an avid one.

Over the last decade, as Robert Rodriguez, Richard Linklater and the Duplass brothers have risen to Hollywood’s heights, their fellow Austinite Byington has remained just to the side of success, quietly shooting four features over the last seven years. He’s a marginal figure revered by those who’ve discov-ered him, but not quite able or willing to break into the mainstream. To fans, this obscurity is part of

Byington’s appeal. We feel like we’re in on a secret. Considering how compelling a filmmaker Byington

is, his relegation to cult status must be due to the atti-tudes of his heroes, who are sarcastic, acerbic and contemptuous of just about everything. The title char-acter, “RSO,” in Registered Sex Offender; Harmony in Harmony and Me; Max in Somebody Up There Likes Me—they all use sarcasm to keep the world at arm’s length and mockery as a tool of self-defense, lashing

out and blowing off. Byington’s white, male, shaggy-headed hipsters live to provoke.

Larry, the hero of Byington’s latest feature, 7 Chinese Brothers, which had its world premiere a few weeks ago at South by Southwest, is no different. Larry, played by Jason Schwartzman, is the perfect embodi-ment of the Byington protagonist: mocking, mordant and full of biting contempt for the world. Fired from his job at a chain Italian restaurant for stealing and boozing, Larry starts working at a nearby lube shop, where he shows his affection for his new boss the only way he knows how: by ceaselessly antagonizing her.

Byington’s relegation to cult status must be due to the attributes of his characters, who are sarcastic, ascerbic and contemptuous.

ABOVE: Jason Schwartzman in 7 Chinese Brothers.

YOUTUBE

RIGHT: Kevin Corrigan in 2008’s RSO [Registered

Sex Offender].IMDB


He’s the same with his best friend, his co-workers, even his grandmother.

Arguably the most cynical of Byington’s films, 7 Chinese Brothers is a character study of a young man in a slow collapse of his own making. To Larry, social conventions are lies best lampooned or ignored—so what if they lead to compassion or intimacy or human connection? He dismisses everything that everyone else holds dear: work, sex, money, family, tradition. But his attacks are just masks for depression, a thou-sand and one mirrors deflecting light and love.

Somehow, despite Larry’s faults, we keep root-ing for him. Much of the credit for this goes to Schwartzman, who proves once and for all that he’s incapable of being unlikable (though he’s trying his best). But making unsympathetic characters relat-able is a skill Byington has been cultivating since 2008’s Registered Sex Offender, which dared viewers to not hate an unrepentant pedophile. What redeems Byington and his heroes is his idiosyncratically dead-pan sense of humor and elliptical, episodic approach to storytelling—in other words, his singular voice. Byington defies any number of filmmaking conven-tions, such as, say, narrative arc. His movies are more like collections of ironic koans than stories, inscruta-ble shrugs that, taken together, add up to something meaningful, even if it’s hard to put your finger on just what the meaning might be.

It takes a particular talent and a special aesthetic conviction to devise your own language as a film-maker and to call on that language in every one of your films, so that each is unmistakably yours. As a movie fan, there’s nothing quite as rewarding as entering the world of an artist who has accomplished this, who owns a distinctive voice that gets richer and more varied with each film. Bob Byington, quietly, and mostly under Hollywood’s radar, has spent the last decade constructing a universe of comic misan-thropy that could be mistaken for no one else’s.

Josh Rosenblatt lives and writes in New York City.

To fans, obscurity is part of Byington’s appeal. We feel like we’re in on a secret.

DONATEyourRIDE THE TEXAS OBSERVERto

Your vehicle donation is tax- deductible and supports some of the sharpest reporting in the strangest state in the union! TOLL FREE 855.500.RIDE

To learn more please go totexasobserver.org or call


THE BOOK REPORT

Like many a good horror story, Boom, Bust, exodus begins with an ominously peaceful scene: Galesburg, Illinois, in the early 1970s, a locale described in a 1974 Chicago Tribune article as an “industrial Eden” peopled by “mid-Americans straight out of a Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post cover,” the very epitome of “stability in [the] heartlands.” The area’s economic mainstay was Appliance City, a unionized manufacturing plant producing Admiral, Maytag, Magic Chef and other familiar home-appliance brands. ¶ A less halcyon stability reigned in

the area to which author Chad Broughton next turns our attention: the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas. Drawing on “remarkably thorough and balanced reporting”

Reaping What Was Sowedby José Skinner

BOOM, BUST, EXODUS:

The Rust Belt, the Maquilas,

and a Tale of Two Cities

By Chad BroughtonOXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS408 PAGES; $29.95

by Ronnie Dugger and others in the pages of The Texas Observer, Broughton describes the farm-worker strikes of the late 1960s and the period that followed the crushing of these strikes by growers and Texas Rangers. It was in this post-strike period that multimillionaire onion grower and self-described “conservative visionary” Othal Brand began his 20-year mayoral command of McAllen, using police brutality, backroom deals and political favoritism to cement his rule and enforce the peace.

Broughton gives the devil his due by allowing that Brand modernized McAllen, if not in the toy-village manner of Galesburg, at least by paving the streets and building such amenities as an airport next to a mall—a mall that would become the most profitable in the country on a per-square-foot basis, thanks to well-off Mexicans who could fly in, shop, and fly home. With his eye fixed on trade with Mexico, Brand established the McAllen Economic Development Corporation (MEDC) to smooth the way for companies wishing to build maquiladora assembly plants in Reynosa, where workers would be paid a fraction of the wages paid to those in U.S. factories such as Appliance City.

The 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement further opened the border to maquiladora-produced products, and NAFTA, coupled with Maytag’s trans-formation from a family-run, customer-centered, paternalistic company to one obsessed with “share-holder value,” helped signal doom for Appliance City. In October 2002, Maytag announced that it would shut down its Galesburg operations and move them to Reynosa. “It was like somebody telling you that your father’s dead,” said plant manager Kirk King. “It just knocked me out.” Keith Patridge, today the pres-ident and CEO of MEDC, was unsympathetic. “There is no right to a living wage,” he told Broughton flatly.

Right or no right, if a living wage had been subtracted

from Galesburg, it had hardly been added to Reynosa. Rather than take MEDC’s claim of $2.60 an hour for maquiladora workers at face value, Broughton, a sociologist, interviewed workers and examined their pay stubs, verifying what Reynosa’s director of industrial development had told him: The average maquiladora pay before overtime is about 78 cents an hour. (Maquiladora wages, adjusted for inflation, have remained stagnant since the early 1980s.) Pablo Lara, a fervent follower of James Dobson’s evangeli-cal Focus on the Family programming, said of his own circumstance, “This job doesn’t pay nearly enough to raise a family. My family’s economic situation would never allow me to buy one of the refrigerators I make. I don’t have enough to buy fruits and vegetables.”

Because maquiladora boosters kept telling Brough-ton how much better workers have it in Reynosa than in rural Veracruz—whence many of them, including Lara, had come—he traveled to that state to see for himself. And, indeed, it wasn’t good. He found that what had previously been communal ejido land was now privatized; to enter NAFTA, Mexico had bowed to pressure from the U.S., the International Mon-etary Fund and the World Bank and reversed the land reforms of the Mexican Revolution. And those landholding campesinos who remained could not compete against American corn subsidized by the U.S. government, or Florida orange growers who used their “influence to get special protections in the so-called free-trade deal.”

“With the Mexican and U.S. governments against them,” Broughton writes, “and prices plunging, many campesinos and other rural folk headed north.”

But Reynosa, the main city up north, was a mess: overcrowded, crime-ridden, lacking in infrastructure. As Broughton writes, “With economic globalization, companies like Maytag had found a way to slough


off not only union wages, pension obligations, taxes, and regulations, but also any sense of obligation to the place where they made their money. In Reynosa, Maytag could be practically anonymous in a sea of factories that did nothing to address the urban anar-chy their presence had spawned.”

Laid-off workers in Galesburg, meanwhile, went on food stamps and Medicaid and took entry-level jobs, though even menial work proved hard to come by. Maytag CEO Ralph Hake (“poster child for what’s wrong with CEO pay,” in the words of executive compensation expert Fred Whittlesey) parachuted to a McMansion on the 11th hole of the Anthem Country Club in Las Vegas with at least $10 million in severance and millions more in stock after overseeing Maytag’s sale to Whirlpool, where he had formerly held executive positions. “He came into Maytag from Whirlpool and absolutely ruined it in a three-year period,” Doug Dennison, a union negotiator at Appliance City, told Broughton. “He ruined so many lives.”

It’s hardly a secret that the world’s wealth chasm is widening. This is dramatically illustrated by Oxfam’s recent revelation that the planet’s 80 richest individuals now have as much wealth as the 3.5 billion poorest combined, and that by 2016, if current trends hold, the 1 percent will own more than the other 99 percent. In the U.S., in the 30 years after 1977, the 1 percent received 60 percent of the increase in national income, and that percentage is growing. Between 1950 and 1980, before the rise of the U.S. political right and the full flowering of its political agenda, the average family income of the bottom 20 percent of Americans rose 138 percent; from 1980 to 2010, it shrank by 7 percent.

The story told in Boom, Bust, Exodus suggests that this chasm is not the result of inevitable and intrac-table market forces, as free market ideologues would have us believe, but the product of calculated politi-cal actions that include union-busting, tax loopholes for corporations, rollbacks on capital gains taxes, the delinking of executive pay from company perfor-mance, deregulation of financial markets, and trade agreements such as NAFTA, all of which have ensured that increases in productivity enrich only owners, not workers. The rise in inequality can be attributed almost entirely to stagnant wage growth.

It took Broughton more than 10 years to research and write this book, and he has crafted a narrative that reads like a novel, well paced and free of polemic. He puts a human face on economic inequity, and by showing that it is politics that brought us to the current predicament, he lets us see that it is through politics that we can find our way out.

José Skinner’s writing on border issues appeared most recently in Our Lost Border: Essays on Life Amid the Narco-Violence (Arte Público). His second collection of short stories, The Tombstone Race, will be pub-lished by University of New Mexico Press in 2016.

4 67 89001809-1 W. ANDERSON LN. 78757

1401 B ROSEWOOD AVE. 78702

M E N U

Consistently rated one of Austin’s top pizza shops:

Austin American-Statesman, Austin Chronicle, ThrillistATX,

The Austinot, culturemap Austin, and Eater Austin.

5312 AIRPORT BLVD. STE G 78751

www.eastsidepies.com


Brett Parker diving for golf balls at The Lakes at Castle Hills golf course in Lewisville.

Ebony stewart is a 32-year-oLd poet, performer and three-time Austin Neo Soul Poetry Slam Champion. Recently she’s begun performing fewer slam poetry events in order to concentrate on advancing her career touring uni-versities and organizations across the United States, where she discusses sexual health, gender and body-image

issues through performance and workshops. ¶ “When my parents were going through their divorce, it was a very dif-ficult time and I wanted to write to get away from everything.

So I was journaling and writing and jotting down thoughts, just to get it out. I was 8. I remember distinctively sitting in my closet when my dad was being abusive towards my mom. I would close the door and sit in my closet and sit on top of my shoes with my teddy bears, and I would read them these entries I would be writing. It was a way for me to zone out when all these things were happening around me.

“Initially I thought I was going to be a rapper. I would write my best friend letters in rap form, and she was like, ‘Can you just write me a regular let-ter? Does it have to rhyme? Really?’ I was like, ‘OK, you’re right. ’Cause it takes me a long time to write you back, I get it.’ … But music was very fulfill-ing for me, and that stemmed from my father as a drummer, and so music was a very big part of me. So it was, ‘What kind of music can I create?’ and my poetry became the music. Without the harmony or the instruments, but the rhythm was there.

“I talk a lot about relationships, sex-ual health, body image, women. I talk about black history because I’m a black woman, right? I talk about a lot of dif-ferent things. I write about my life or what experiences transpire through-out my life. It might be a memory that jogs me to write about something.

“For me, [slam] wasn’t always some-thing that made me feel good, because I started getting more concerned about the points rather than the poetry. So I was like, ‘I need to take a step back from it.’ … It’s also good for me not

to get validation from slam, you know … but just rather, ‘I did this ’cause I wanted to. I did this for me.’ And nobody gets to take that away. Nobody gets to judge that.

“I always want to be the woman that brings that fierceness and that fire so other women can get lit. Women are these matches and they don’t even know. I want to bring that fire and come to women in a way that isn’t nec-essarily gentle but that’s honest and recognizable. ‘We can work together on this.’ You know, I never want to go into a slam or a performance and let someone think that because I’m a woman I’m weak. Nobody has said that to me, but in the back of my mind I’m thinking that’s what’s being thought. For whatever reason, I’m obligated in my head to be, ‘Naw, I’m going to show you, tell you how it is.’

“How I approach anything I share is because that’s what I want to share. … I’ll do this poem about empower-ing women because I know what it feels like to not be empowered. And then hopefully in that poem, not just women but people will relate and it will be a poem that everyone gets.

“I think that for me, in my poems, I just want to keep pushing that message over and over again. And I don’t know, people might get tired of these stories I tell or these poems I write, and maybe I’ll get tired of them when things change completely, but until then I’m good with it, and I’m going to keep writ-ing them the way I’m writing them.”

Interview has been edited and condensed.

DIRECT QUOTE

Words on a Stage as told to and photographed by Jen Reel

36 | T H E T E X A S O B S E R V E R

POSTCARDSBROWNSVILLE

War is fuLL of ironies, not the least of which is that infantrymen are asked to spill blood for the sake of occupying a piece of earth that wouldn’t be worth a glance on any other day.

“We go to gain a little patch of ground that hath in it no profit but the name,” complains a captain marching off to war in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. “To pay five ducats, five, I would not farm it.”

So it was with an unremarkable patch of salt prairie to the east of Brownsville, where on May 12 and 13, 1865, a Union advance was beaten back by

Confederate artillery fire. About 800 troops were involved at what came to be called the Battle of Palmito Ranch.

Fights for otherwise useless ground were com-mon during the American Civil War, but the Battle of Palmito Ranch stands out for several reasons. For one, it took place 34 days after Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia and 29 days after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination—in other words, about a month after the war had effec-tively ended.

Furthermore, the clash on the open coastal plain was a decisive rout for the Confederates. The last gasp of the rebellion was a victorious scream.

This was also a battle that featured a confus-ing array of French nationals, Yankees, African Americans, Tejanos and hardcore insurrectionists fighting each other for reasons that were hazy to most everyone concerned. No other land battle of the war was fought so close to an international bor-der, and none was as racially diverse.

Perhaps the greatest irony of Palmito Ranch was that the final land battle of the Civil War was fought in Texas, a teenage state whose relationship with the Confederate States of America was never especially strong, and whose role in the four-year conflict was mainly logistical.

End of an ErrorEast of Brownsville, an unassuming patch of ground hosted the final, pointless battle of the Civil War.by Tom Zoellner

May will mark the 150th anniversary of the end of the Civil War at Palmito Ranch, a battle derided by the eminent historian Bruce Catton as a “final, lonely, meaningless little spatter.” The sesquicentennial will likely pass unnoticed by all but the most diligent of Civil War fanboys.

Curious about the largely forgotten spot east of Brownsville and its status as an unlikely footnote in American history, I went to visit the property one day in the company of Wilson Bourgeois, an easygoing IT technician and ex-Navy man who also happens to be the chair of the Cameron County Historical Commission.

Bourgeois pointed to some trees that concealed the north bank of the Rio Grande. “Those small rises over there? That’s where you had the first skirmishing,” he said, then turned toward open field to the east. “Now that,” he continued, “was where the Confederates were coming on the road from Brownsville. As you see, there’s no cover. The Union had to stay hiding in the chaparral. Then the Confederate artillery came out and rained hell on the Union.”

A modern observer can, in fact, easily see how the rebels won this final engagement of the war. The battlefield has remained practically untouched since 1865, because its value as farmland—or any-thing else—is virtually nil. It sits today square in

the middle of the South Texas Refuge Complex managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and is further protected under the National Register of Historic Places. Texas can therefore boast not just the scene of the war’s conclusion, but an unusually well-preserved battlefield unobscured by marble obelisks or Waffle Houses.

Bourgeois is a methodical historian who wrote a master’s thesis on Palmito Ranch and once walked every inch of the battlefield with his legs tied together with a 2-foot cord so as to maintain the exact stride of a 19th-century infantryman. He is also waging a campaign to celebrate the upcoming sesquicenten-nial with the huzzah it deserves. A symposium and a battlefield ceremony have been planned. But the governor’s office declined a gubernatorial appear-ance and the Fish and Wildlife Service said no to a uniformed reenactment—too much possibility of

Brownsville occupied by the Union army under General Nathaniel Prentice Banks, November 1863.COURTESY STAR OF THE REPUBLIC MUSEUM

May will mark the 150th anniversary of the end of the Civil War at Palmito Ranch, near Brownsville, a battle derided by historian Bruce Catton as a “final, lonely, meaningless little spatter.”


introducing invasive plant species via horse dung, according to the agency. So the reenactment will take place on an ersatz battlefield behind a former shopping mall called Amigoland on the other side of Brownsville.

Perhaps the small-scale remembrance is appropri-ate, because the slaughter was wholly unnecessary to begin with, and was almost certainly hatched as a vanity project by a hotheaded Union colonel eager for some 11th-hour valor and undiscriminating about where to pick a fight.

A 30-year-old Minnesotan named Theodore Bar-rett had been given command of the 62nd Regiment of U.S. Colored Troops—composed of free blacks and former slaves—and ordered to stand guard, along with a regiment of Indiana soldiers, on Brazos Island at the mouth of the Rio Grande. There wasn’t much to do on Brazos Island in the spring of 1865 except count the days and swat mosquitos. The war’s end was a cer-tainty. An unwritten truce along the Texas coast had already been brokered by Union Gen. Lew Wallace.

On May 11, Barrett ordered a detachment to the mainland to “round up cattle.” For reasons unex-plained to this day, those troops began marching toward Brownsville, where they encountered a line of Confederate cavalry. Shooting started early on the morning of May 12, and Union soldiers advanced slowly through the gunfire to a ranch, where they burned buildings and made camp.

Word of the skirmish reached the rebel commander in Brownsville, a leathery former Indian fighter named John Salmon Ford, who as a Texas Ranger had earned the nickname “Rip” for signing so many death notices with the initials R.I.P. He was also a frontier newspaper editor who loved a good brawl. That night at dinner, his commanding officer, James Edwin Slaughter, told him he saw no point to resisting the Union advance, preferring a retreat into the interior to prevent useless bloodshed. Copies of the New Orleans newspaper, The Picayune, containing news of Lee’s surrender had made their way to Brownsville, though no official orders had yet materialized.

“You can retreat and go to hell if you wish,” Ford told Slaughter, according to books by historians Jeffrey Hunt and Phillip Thomas Tucker. “These are my men and I am going to fight. I have held this place against heavy odds. If you lose it without a fight the people of the Confederacy will hold you accountable for a base neglect of duty.”

It is worth pausing for a moment to consider why Ford cared so much about Brownsville. Lodged as it is at the very bottom of Texas, it might have been an unremarkable dot on the grasslands except for one critical geographic advantage: as a trade link to Mexico. The U.S. Navy had set up offshore

perimeters around Charleston, Norfolk, Savannah, Galveston and most other ports, choking off rev-enue-generating exports of cotton and tobacco to Europe. The blockades had been some of the most successful military endeavors in American his-tory up to that point, and they had destroyed the Southern economy, which was dangerously reliant on cash crops. Confederate blockade-running, while romantic, made barely any difference.

Brownsville, however, offered easy access to the wide-open Mexican city of Bagdad, a grimy port that had sprung up to meet the smuggling demand. The federal navy could not touch it. Local profiteers, including Richard King and Mifflin Kenedy of King Ranch fame, got rich shipping mile-long wagon trains full of cotton to Brownsville and exchang-ing it for gunpowder and medicines to sell to the Confederate army. Within a few years, the price of cotton soared from 16 cents to more than $1.25 a pound. But as Hunt has pointed out, the cross-bor-der trade was always hampered by bandit attacks and high Mexican tariffs; it was not nearly the lifeline the Confederacy had hoped it would be.

Neither was Brownsville a hotbed of secessionist fervor. No cotton was grown in the Rio Grande Valley back then, and there were just seven known slaves in the entirety of Cameron County. When the U.S. Army seized control of the Mississippi River in July 1863, splitting the Confederacy in two, Texas was effectively closed off to the rest of the sputtering rebel economy. Brownsville was therefore only a symbolic prize. But Barrett had broken Wallace’s gentlemen’s agreement not to march on the town, and he would pay.

“You can retreat and go to hell if you wish,” Ford told Slaughter.

“These are my men and I am going to fight.”

John Salmon “Rip” Ford (1815-1897), photographed

near the end of the Civil War in the uniform of a

Confederate colonel. COURTESY SOUTHERN

METHODIST UNIVERSITY DEGOLYER LIBRARY

A P R I L 2 0 1 5 T H E T E X A S O B S E R V E R | 39www.tamupress.com • 800-826-8911

CHAMPION OF THE BARRIOThe Legacy of Coach Buryl BatyR. Gaines BatyIn this poignant memoir, Baty tells the story of the late El Paso head football coach who inspired his athletes—all Mexican Americans from the Segundo Barrio—against the era’s deep-seated bigotry. Buryl Baty died tragically in 1954, just as the team was in a position to win a third district title.256 pp. 40 b&w photos. Index. $24.95 cloth

UNBRANDEDBen MastersOn an epic 3,000-mile journey through the most pristine backcountry of the American West, four friends rode mustangs border to border, from Mexico to Canada, experiencing firsthand the complex conservation issues involved in preserving, protecting, and sustainably managing public lands and the wild horses that roam them. In Unbranded, they tell their improbable story of adventure and self-discovery. 9x10. 188 pp. 165 color photos. $40.00 cloth; $24.95 flexbound

I’VE BEEN OUT THEREOn the Road with Legends of Rock ‘n’ RollGrady Gaines with Rod EvansGaines speaks candidly about his sixty-year music career and life on the road supporting some of the biggest names in blues, soul, and R&B.160 pp. 31 b&w photos. Index. $23.00 cloth

CADDOVisions of a Southern Cypress LakeNarrative by Thad SittonPhotographs by Carolyn BrownForeword by Andrew SansomIn a stunning tribute to one of Texas’ most enigmatic waterways, a veteran East Texas historian and a professional photographer have created an homage to a lake like no other.11x10. 188 pp. 109 color photos. Map. Bib. Index. $30.00 cloth

HEADS ABOVE WATERThe Inside Story of the Edwards Aquifer Recovery Implementation ProgramRobert L. GulleyForeword by Andrew SansomGulley describes how a large and fractious group came together to resolve one of the nation’s most intractable and longstanding water problems.256 pp. Map. Index. $29.95 cloth

N E W B O O K S f r o m T E X A S A & M

Phot

o by

Ben

Mas

ters

, fro

m th

e boo

k U

nbra

nded


Despite the illogic of the pride in play, Ford was likely having the time of his life on the morning of May 13, when he sent men out to halt the Union advance. It wasn’t the first time he had seen an incur-sion along this road—his forces had beaten back an earlier federal attempt on July 30, 1864. This time, he was aided by the incompetence of his adversary, Col. Barrett, who had unified his columns and was advancing at dawn into Confederate rifle fire. The march was hot, slow and dangerous.

“It was all walk and fight, walk and fight,” said Bourgeois. “It was an all-land movement, which was their mistake. As you can see, there’s no place to hide. They had to lie flat in the chaparral.”

The closer Barrett’s line drew to Brownsville, the more he cut himself off from his supply base. Morale among his 500-man force was waning. At around 3 p.m., when “Rip” Ford arrived on the field with 12-pound artillery guns on caissons trundling behind

him, the Confederates got a new burst of energy. “Men,” Ford yelled, “we have whipped the enemy in previous fights and we can do it again!”

He ordered a flank attack, which struck Barrett’s men from the north—a tactic that had always worked against the Comanche—and dozens of Texans screamed the Rebel Yell for the last time. Coordinated artillery fire and a cavalry charge added to the blanket of confusion surrounding the hapless Union soldiers. “Never before had these Federals, veterans or rookies, been more unready for battle than now,” according to Tucker.

Union soldiers both white and black were driven to the banks of the Rio Grande, where, incredibly, French soldiers then occupying Mexico under the puppet emperor Maximilian I began taking potshots at them from across the river. At least a few French officers were said to be on the north side of the Rio Grande helping the Confederates aim their cannons.

The casualties were never accurately counted, but there were reports of blue-uniformed corpses choking the river. The Union lost up to 30 soldiers that day, compared to none for the grays.

ABOVE: Historian Wilson Bourgeois at

the site of the battle.PHOTO BY TOM ZOELLNER

Map of the Battle of Palmito Ranch.

USFWS ILLUSTRATION

A P R I L 2 0 1 5

The casualties were never accurately counted, but there were reports of blue-uniformed corpses chok-ing the river. The Union lost up to 30 soldiers that day, compared to none for the grays, and Barrett was immediately held up for blame. One of his men wrote to a Nashville newspaper that the young colonel had ordered the foolish attack “to establish for him-self some notoriety before the war closed.” Palmito Ranch’s second day of fighting coincided with the day that Texas’ governor agreed to the surrender of his state, and Brownsville was quietly passed to the control of the U.S. Army just three days after the last shots were fired.

Barrett tried to shift attention from himself by

calling a court-martial against a junior officer. Before disappearing to Indiana and a failed political career, he left some gracious words of praise for his African-American troops, who had refused to panic under heavy fire. Ford retired to a quiet life as a newspaper editor. “There were reasons on both sides that made it preferable to forget” the battle, “and so it was,” con-cluded historian T.R. Fehrenbach. The Union was embarrassed about the ingloriousness of the point-less carnage, and while the Confederates drew some pride in giving the Yankee interlopers one last lick-ing, it happened in the twilight hours of their dying national dream.

That the Confederacy should have flickered out in Texas was, in its own way, a testament to how far the state was from the Confederacy’s primary theaters. Other than its supporting role as a smuggling base for cotton and a supplier of horses for cavalry, the state was mainly an object of future hopes. Jefferson Davis wanted to use it for a railroad to the Pacific and an extension of slavery into California. Texas produced only one native-born general—Felix Robertson—and never wielded much influence in the Confederate capital of Richmond, though it is worth noting that the only Confederate cabinet member who did not desert Davis was Postmaster General John Reagan, a Texan who fled the capital at the president’s side in front of advancing Union troops and was cap-tured with Davis in a grove of trees near Irwinville, Georgia, on May 10, just days before the shooting started at Palmito Ranch.

Plantations and slavery never ruled the Texas economy. The Underground Railroad never made

Presenting Sponsor

By Pulitzer Prize-winner ROBERT SCHENKKANThe Texas Premiere of the

Tony® Award-winning LBJ Play

Starring

STEVE VINOVICHas President Lyndon Baines Johnson

Directed by Dave Steakley

A powerful, political drama with Civil Rights at its heart. The story of Lyndon Baines Johnson’s first year as President.

April 8 - May 10 | zachtheatre.org | 512- 476-0541 x1 | Austin, Texas

This project is supported in part by the Cultural Arts Division of the City of Austin Economic Development Department.

Carl and Claire StuartExecutive Producers

Mindy EllmerBrian McCall

Producers


a dent here, and most of Texas’ slaves had been imported from the east by their refugee owners dur-ing the war. Yet there was considerable enthusiasm for secession among its young men at the beginning of the war—to the point that even the revered Sam Houston, an ardent Unionist, was physically escorted out of the Capitol when, as governor, he refused to swear an oath against the U.S. Such passions waned as the economy weakened, and Texans began to des-ert their units after the bitter fighting of 1863. The Confederacy also showed no interest in helping Texas defend its western borders against the Comanche, to the resentment of many. Only one battle of con-sequence was fought in the state, the second battle of Sabine Pass in September 1863, when a small con-tingent of Confederate gunners sank part of a river flotilla and stopped an invasion in its tracks.

The state’s comparatively light experience with battle on its own soil meant that Texas was spared the worst psychological blows of defeat.

Texas would soon be concerned with other mat-ters. With a proud tradition of independence behind it and oil, technology, urbanization and space explo-ration yet to come, the state never really got caught up in the Lost Cause narrative that still haunts the collective memory of the other separatist Southern states. Had the Battle of Palmito Ranch been fought

in Alabama or Mississippi, the place would likely have been turned into a shrine littered with monu-ments and gift stores. Instead, it lives on mostly in the memoir of Jefferson Davis, who wrote, “Though very small in comparison to its great battles, it deserves notice as having closed the long struggle—as it opened—with a Confederate victory.”

In Texas, meanwhile, the site of the struggle’s close remains nearly forgotten, accessible by a secondary road near the Brownsville Ship Channel and marked with a roadside plaque.

For Bourgeois, the legacy of Palmito Ranch is broader than its significance as an asterisk:

“This was the end of a really terrible time,” he told me. “This was the end of disunion.”

Tom Zoellner is an associate professor of English at Chapman University in Orange, California, and the author of five nonfiction books, including the recently published Train: Riding the Rails that Created the Modern World, from the Trans-Siberian to the Southwest Chief.

H A S A NEW!

STORE

THE TEXASOBSERVER

www.texasobserver.org/storeAvailable on T-shirts, Koozies, and Tote Bags at

CHECK OUT OUR NEW DESIGNS!

H A S A

T-Shirts

$15-$17.50

AMONG ANTIQUESby Margie McCreless RoeWe could comb the spirit with this tortoise shell comb. The spiritgets caught in tangles, and old things sometimes set it free.

We could put something worth saving in the silk purse with jet bangles.

If we live without measure, perhaps the cloth tape with painted numeralscould help us.

This waste basket made of metal wireis nearly full of past calendars,where pencils might march from square to square.

Today’s calendars flash and change colors. When they are antiques, will anyone think this was a simple time?

Old Texas, still available to us in quirky stores packed with time-rich goods: vintage, faded, weather-beaten, precious. I love the quiet swerve at the end of this poem—reminder to look at what we have and use right now. A moment ago. —Naomi Shihab Nye

Margie McCreless Roe, from Cedar Park, has published widely in journals and anthologies and is the author of two books of poetry.

Had the Battle of Palmito Ranch been fought in Alabama or Mississippi, the place

would likely have been turned into a shrine littered with monuments and gift stores.


ANDREA GRIMESSTATE OF THE MEDIA

A Capitol Atwitter

When state rep. jonathan stickLand proudLy decLared himself a “former fetus” a few weeks ago by posting a sign over the nameplate near his office door, the first people to notice were habitués of the #txlege hashtag on Twitter, a repository for all news—and jokes—pertaining to the Texas Legislature. If you waited for the inevitable Texas Tribune story to catch up on the political posturing, you

were already hours out of the loop. ¶ Don’t let it happen again. Keeping an eye on

If you ever wonder how

Sen. Donna Campbell’s mind

works—and who doesn’t?—

her @Donna CampbellTX

account offers insight (and

Bible verses, because she’s

#blessed).

#txlege is a must for policy wonks, politicos and peo-ple who don’t want to miss the latest Photoshopped Dan Patrick selfie. But the sheer volume of informa-tion parading by at #txlege—everything from daily news reporters posting their latest stories to your tea-partying uncle wildly tweeting his 50 favorite Obummer memes to Jonathan Saenz screeching about the gays—can make it more than a little diffi-cult to parse.

First, rather than using Twitter in your browser, get an app like TweetDeck, which makes it easier to manage lists of Twitter users and separate the wheat from the chaff. In TweetDeck, you can set up and monitor customized feeds and easily put spammers on mute. I recommend setting up an overall #txlege hashtag feed, and then making a dedicated Twitter list for the best of the #txlege tweeters.

Many lawmakers have accounts, but most rarely use them or post nothing but self-congratulatory blather and humblebrags. Your best bet is to follow lawmakers who at least appear to run their own accounts. If you ever wonder how state Sen. Donna Campbell’s mind works—and who doesn’t?—her @DonnaCampbellTX account offers insight (and bible verses, because she’s #blessed). Other legislator accounts to watch, not just for the tweets, but for the shares and retweets, include Beaumont Rep. Joe Deshotel (@RepJoeDeshotel), Austin Sen. Kirk Watson (@KirkPWatson), Houston representatives Jessica Farrar (@JFarrarDist148) and Gene Wu (@GeneforTexas), and Dallas Rep. Jason Villalba (@JasonVillalba).

Lawmakers aside, the Capitol press corps is teeming with reporters sharing their work via #txlege, but you need to follow just few folks to keep up with the goings-on. The Houston Chronicle’s Lauren McGaughy (@lmcgaughy) misses nothing on education, LGBTQ and gun-policy issues; The Texas Tribune’s Alexa Ura (@alexazura) is a fine follow for big-umbrella political issues; ditto Tribune executive editor Ross Ramsey (@RossRamsey). If you’re wondering what the left-leaning kids are into

these days, Burnt Orange Report’s Joe Deshotel (son of Rep. Joe; @joethepleb) has you covered. The Austin American-Statesman’s Kiah Collier (@KiahCollier) breaks down wonky fiscal issues and is a dedicated live-tweeter of committee hearings. And Austin freelancer Kimberly Reeves lives up to her @edwonkkimmy username on education issues and much more.

On the policy side, the Center For Public Policy Priorities’ Dick Lavine (@dlavine) is a must-follow for perspectives on weedy fiscal issues. Texas Right to Life lobbyist Emily Horne (@missemhorne) tweets about the latest anti-choice machinations in complete sentences and without creepy fetus memes. And if anything’s happening on the other side of the fight for reproductive rights, Amanda Williams (@fullfrontalfem) is probably tweeting about it.

For a look behind the scenes, you’ll want to fol-low staffers, schmoozers and satirizers: Texas Legislative Service Capitol correspondent Robyn Hadley (@capitolcrowd) seems to be everywhere all at once, while Total Staffer Move (@StafferMove) is an ostensibly satirical account that offers snarky but salient insights into the day-to-day Capitol. Actual staffer Antonio Marcus (@AntonioMarcus_) brings humor and verve to his chronicle of an often thank-less job. And professional progressive Harold Cook (@HCookAustin) offers a meaty mix of insight and side-eye developed over decades—sorry, Harold—of dedicated Lege-watching.

Sadly, true jokester accounts can be hard to maintain on the ever-ephemeral platform that is Twitter, but I really hope the folks behind Dan Patrick Selfies (@DanPatrickTX) stick to their schtick: ’shopping the lieutenant governor’s head into a bunch of places it should never go. And no, I’m not talking about the Senate chamber.

But if #txlege ever gets to be a little too much to swallow, remember that you can always take a break and check in with Gov. Greg Abbott’s dogs, @OreoAbbott and @TexasPancake. You know, for when the going gets ruff.

What? That joke killed on Twitter.


GUANTANAMO DIARYELLEN SWEETS

Sometimes characterized as “high-value detainees,” they are the alleged masterminds of 9/11. Also nearby is the only known military “black site” on American soil. A place where torture happened.

We are here to see the quintet some might call the 21st century’s most reviled alleged felons. Already convicted in the court of public opinion, they are still awaiting their day in military court. We’re here to see how far the hearings will get this time. We’re scheduled to be here for two weeks. It is the first time the hearings have been convened since August of last year.

President George W. Bush—purportedly egged on by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld—decided to forgo proceedings that follow principles of law and rules of evidence traditionally applied to criminal cases in U.S. district courts.

Now, almost 15 years later, I’m reporting on the hearings designed to bring these men to trial and ultimately to justice. Our group includes: observers from human rights groups; survivors of relatives killed on 9/11; an author writing a book about concentration camps; a reporter from The Miami Herald who probably knows as much about this military tribunal as its participants; one from the Associated Press who covers the Middle East; another from NPR; and a three-member crew from Fox.

By evening we have settled into our quarters in a canvas-covered, Quonset-like building reminiscent of lodgings at a summer camp. For the first time I become aware of how racially mixed the workforce and diners are. I have seen more black people here in 24 hours than I see in a week in Austin.

sunday: An afternoon press conference with Brig. Gen. Mark Martins, the government’s lead prosecutor, goes on for more than an hour. Snatched into service within months of retirement, he answers questions succinctly and directly. Where a response would expose strategy, he demurs. I find myself surprised by his candor, and I have a pretty good bullshit detector.

monday: We head to court, barely a 10-minute walk

from Camp Justice, passing through a melodramatic four-point sequence of identification stops before being directed to assigned seating behind triple-paned bulletproof glass. The detainees are brought into the courtroom one by one. Each man sits at the end of a row, one behind the next.

All seems to go swimmingly until the third per-son queried, Ramzi Bin al-Shibh, says he recognizes a newly installed translator as a CIA linguist from a previous black site where he and others were tortured. Shocked silence. The hearing is recessed until 9:33 a.m., resumed at 10:40, and recessed for the day at 10:57.

tuesday: No public hearing; closed sessions. The CIA guy’s name, previously published by Reuters, is now a state secret and has been retroactively declared classified information. So much for transparency.

wednesday: The hearing is recessed until April. The press conference with defense attorneys is as informative as it can be, since they cannot answer questions about torture.

thursday: We tour Radio GTMO (“Rockin’ in Fi-del’s Backyard”).

friday: Packing. Lunch. Dinner with a retired of-ficer, who whipped up a splendid meal of corn and crab bisque, oven-roasted salmon, tortellini salad, prosciutto-wrapped asparagus, and peach cobbler with French vanilla ice cream. If she thinks Guanta-namo should be shut down she doesn’t say so.

saturday: Seven days shy of our scheduled depar-ture, we’re reversing our field.

Back at Andrews, luggage is collected, goodbyes said. Everyone heads off to wherever. Except one.

He Who Cannot Be Named stands alone, face con-cealed and bundled up against the wicked Arctic air whipping across the airport grounds. Waiting for his CIA connection?

I wave. He doesn’t wave back.

Ellen Sweets is a former reporter for The Dallas Morn-ing News, St. Louis Post Dispatch and The Denver Post. She is the author of Stirring it up with Molly Ivins.

Undercover Operative Spoils the Show

Guantanamo bay navaL base, cuba — we arrive midmorning on Saturday. Some of us have been traveling since before dawn to get to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, then on to a three-hour flight to Cuba, a 30-minute ferry ride to the base, and a 25-min-ute drive to Camp Justice, the encampment where we will live. ¶ A few miles away are detention facilities, including the one housing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four co-conspirators.

All seems to go swimmingly

until the third person queried,

Ramzi Bin al Shibh, says he

recognizes a newly installed

translator as a CIA linguist

from a previous black site

where he and others were

tortured.


EYE ON TEXAS Robert Shults

THE SUPERLATIVE LIGHTIn a cavernous complex buried three stories beneath the University of Texas, an almost inconceivable piece of technology known as the Texas Petawatt Laser produces the most powerful laser pulse anywhere in the world. With a peak output nearly 2,000 times greater than the capacity of the entire U.S. electrical grid, this massive device releases a luminous force that constitutes the brightest known light in the universe. With this intensely focused beam, an elite company of scientists produces the sort of dense matter found at the center of stars and recreates conditions characteristic of planetary cores. They observe the blast waves of scale supernovae and chart how such forces form galaxies in their wake. In this photograph, physicist Gilliss Dyer and laser technician Ted Borger discuss an experimental configura-tion of the laser’s target chamber during a recent experiment intended to generate the same neutron fusion reactions that power our sun. The Superlative Light, a show of Shults’ photographs, is on display through April 11 at the Art Science Gallery in Austin.

See more of Austin-based photographer Robert Shults’ work at www.texasobserver.org/eyeontexas. CALL FOR ENTRIES: Seeking Texas-based documentary photography. Please send inquiries to [email protected].

a house divided - texasobserver.org · angela vazquez sandoval posted at texasobserver.org tea...

Documents