Am I the only one who will go a little out of the way for weird landmarks? We were in West Texas and I wanted to see the namesake of the James McMurtry song. It’s pretty much as described.
One of the indicators of really small town is a sign bragging about whatever high school team won a state championship back when, and Levelland is no exception. When I see these signs, I don’t expect to see much in terms of local businesses (but I do expect a Dollar General, one of which is just down the street from this sign). I also expect that the area went at least 60/40 for Trump in the last election. (Levelland is in Hockley County, and the 8K voters there went 80/20 Trump in 2020.)
Like this one, it’s not uncommon for the sign to reflect long-ago glory, since a lot of these towns no longer even have a high school. Instead, the few remaining kids are probably bused to a consolidated school in the middle of a field somewhere, equidistant from the towns it serves.
Anyway, in an environment of loss and pain like this one, it’s no wonder that some demagogue came along to turn those feelings into targeted hate. In most cases, the hate and targets were probably already there, and Fox et. al. just channeled them.
Are there good people in towns like these? Sure — hell, they might even be the majority. But there are also plenty of haters who will never change, and the only influence they have is political, so it’s no wonder they’re all about minority rule led by someone who’s openly trying to steal elections.
(BTW, McMurtry says that he wanted use Floydada Texas instead of Levelland in the song, but he couldn’t make the lyrics work.)
germy shoemangler
Dollar store isn’t even a dollar anymore:
Leto
Leto
JD Vance Suggests People in ‘Violent’ Marriages Shouldn’t Get Divorced
The Ohio Republican Senate nominee claimed people “shift spouses like they change their underwear,” and that it had damaged a generation of children.
germy shoemangler
@Leto:
I’d rather come from a broken home than live in one.
Leto
Officer running for state Senate drops out after punching opponent
Baud
@Leto:
I hope Mrs. Vance kicks his ass regularly
ETA: Also too, I doubt Vance’s supporters change their underwear that often.
Scott
Ronnie Jackson, US Congressman Republican whack job and former physician to Pres Trump is from Levelland.
Cameron
McMurtry wrote this back when Dubyuh was president. Remains one of my favorite McMurtry songs.
youtu.be/Szclr2caFG8
Ken
I passed one of these signs once, where the sport was track and the dates were something like 1981, 1982, 1983. My thought was “and then he graduated.”
raven
I like Robert Earl Keen’s cover.
raven
@Leto: Can you non-violently attack someone?
Xavier
McMurtry’s dad was pretty good at chronicling places like Levelland too.
Super Dave
I was in high school in one of those little Panhandle towns in the early 60’s. Two of my teachers, a married couple, were “Matador Mose” and “Floydata Frankie”… Mose was a mean SOB who physically abused kids, especially the girls. My sister lives in that little town now, and the politics there are a lot like those in Levelland.
Marmot
It’s the middle part I don’t get—the general “we’re struggling” to “let’s oppress our enemies and invent some too.” The rhetoric about people taking “our” jobs is mostly about immigrants, not trans kids and soy-product imbibers. But the correlation of small-town impoverishment and political hostility is plain to see.
Also, thanks for pointing out this is about small towns everywhere in our country, not just blaming Texas (or wherever). I’ve been beating that drum for years. And I saw it throughout the northeast and Midwest (and Ontario) on a trip this summer.
raven
Six o’clock silence of a new day beginning
Is heard in a small Texas town
Like a signal from nowhere the people who live there
They’re up and they’re moving around
Suzanne
Make sure to stop in the Levelland Diner and ask people how they feel about gas prices.
raven
@Xavier: God Cloris was great!
Barbara
@Leto: He apparently hasn’t met many people from the current generation, many of whom have given up on marriage altogether. Hence, they don’t need to get divorced.
Suzanne
@Barbara: The social conservative nutcase right is also incredibly pissed/jealous that the cohort that is getting and staying married is…. educated liberals in two-income families.
O. Felix Culpa
@Suzanne:
Exactly. The divorce rate among “good” evangelicals is high.
Layer8Problem
Gahd, those signs. “Look on our works ye mighty, and despair!”
Marmot
@Suzanne: Hahaha.
I kind of doubt there is one—that’s much more of a Northeast-Midwest institution. And another thing that bothers me about those interviews!
Wait—does Denny’s count?
Barbara
@Ken: I know. Apparently Madison Bumgarner’s high school won the state championship every year he was there and I would bet they haven’t even come close since. It’s hard sometimes to realize just how outlier professional athletes are.
jonas
This little Texas town’s claim to fame is a championship *women’s basketball* team back in the 80’s? I didn’t think Texas high schools even acknowledged the existence of any kind of sportsball other than football, much less a women’s version of it.
Suzanne
@Marmot: Denny’s absolutely counts. As does Waffle House.
Marmot
@jonas: It’s a big wide world out there, huh?
eclare
@raven: That is nice.
Ocotillo
Floydada eh? Their claim to fame is they grow pumpkins in that part of Texas.
You know what they say about west Texas? The wind doesn’t blow there, it sucks.
Barbara
@Suzanne: William Julius Wilson predicted way back when that the “marriage problem” among African Americans was an economic problem, and when white people encountered the same economic headwinds, they would experience the same family and social upheaval. But it was so much easier to point fingers at “them” and their heathen ways.
Suzanne
@O. Felix Culpa: It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so sad….. social conservatives get divorced all the time, and yet it’s still something they’re so judgmental about. Like abortion, okay for me but not for thee. “My divorce is Biblical, but everyone else just doesn’t really love their children.”
Jinchi
He’s busy fighting the battles of 1980. Cursing the now 60 year old sexual revolution and complaining about divorce rates, even though they’ve been declining for 40 years now.
My guess is that he’d be perfectly fine ending the nearly 1 million marriages made possible by Obergefell, though.
Ohio Mom
@raven: Well there is verbs abuse. Depending on the circumstances and frequency, that can be extremely cruel and psychologically disabling.
But I suppose that could fit under the larger category of violence.
Ocotillo
And when one of these Jed Clampetts actually find some oil, they don’t head to Beverly, the mean sumbitches bring their wrath down on the rest of us.
CNN story
trollhattan
Loboettes does not seem a name to strike fear into one’s opponent. “Aww, look a the little wolf puppies.”
Were there already Lobos one county over?
Marmot
@Suzanne: Guess I always assumed they’d just write “at a Denny’s.”
I just visited the Saddest Denny’s in the World in Arkansas, and all the archetypes were in attendance. Aside from the Sikh dude, it looked like a pretty tilted sample. I can’t imagine thinking I’d find a representative sample of attitudes.
germy shoemangler
But enough about the Trumps
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Marmot:
They are angry. They are struggling, but they’ve been told for years they are the ‘real’ America, a superior culture to the decadent, criminal, and/or lazy urban folks. Yet, their communities are dying. Its easy with that kind of disconnect to convince people that nefarious forces are at work to keep them down.
I honestly don’t know what to do about communities like this. We need farmers and those farmers need basic services. However, with mechanized and corporate farming, these communities don’t need as many people to work the land. That is why they are emptying out. There isn’t a job base to support the population. Like some people in decaying urban cores, they want the government and corporate America to bring the jobs to them. Its not going to happen. Its expensive to build and maintain infrastructure in far flung communities. Plus, these are not communities many people, especially talented young people, want to live in. The density of cities, even small ones, enable so much more culture, entertainment, and food choices.
We do a lot as it is to prop up these rural communities, with all sorts of subsidies (even the less obvious ones, like the fact that maintaining their roads involves more square miles for fewer tax payers than more dense areas). Part of me thinks we should just continue to let these communities die. Yet, the longer the death of these towns is dragged out, the angrier they get. Part of me thinks we should try to be more strategic about making sure people have the basic services they need, like better telehealth care, etc. I just don’t know. I don’t think those people are ready to admit many of these towns are going to be ghost towns. They just aren’t necessary any more.
Leto
New Mothers Against Gregg Abbott video is pretty blunt, and super effective.
Following that video is this report out of Texas:
Because of Texas abortion law, her wanted pregnancy became a medical nightmare
germy shoemangler
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony:
When we called their homes “The Heartland” it sort of went to their heads.
Barbara
@trollhattan: I assume that the Loboettes are the Lady Lobos. Or maybe the middle school Lobos.
Jinchi
Very true. SIL’s first husband was a devout Catholic who believed divorce was absolutely forbidden by God.
So he had the Church declare it never happened.
SIL received a letter from the church asking her not to consider her children illegitimate (which hadn’t actually occurred to her until they brought it up).
trollhattan
@Barbara: That could be–at least we know they got all the As, four of them!
raven
@jonas: Tell that to Baylor.
Tony G
@Marmot: Yeah, not only the “red states. I “grew up” in the sixties and early seventies in a small blue-collar town only about 10 miles from New York City. My parents, thankfully, were good people, but there was a lot of bigotry and hatred in that town. A lot of bitter men hitting the bars (and probably hitting their wives and children). Nixon’s “silent majority”.
raven
@Tony G: Hell the western burb of Chicago were the same.
WaterGirl
@Leto: Goosebumps on the video.
no comment
@trollhattan:
@Barbara:
They are the female team. Have to add -ette at the end or Lady in front so people don’t attend a game with girls by accident. /s
Old Man Shadow
@Leto: Conservatives don’t really care about the fetus as much they care about twisting the thumbscrews on women for daring to try to be free of the shackles Conservatives kept them in for millennia.
Ohio Mom
@Jinchi: My SIL got an annulment from the Catholic Church for her first (relatively brief, childless) marriage sometime before she met my (Jewish, never-married, also childless) BIL.
She insists that filling the required pages and pages of self-analysis was a “growth experience.” But in recent years, the uncovering of entrenched child abuse broke her and she joined an Episcopal church.
sdhays
@Jinchi: So farcical. “Divorce is bad, but the Church can just declare a marriage never happened, even though there are children from that marriage, which never happened, and our Calvinball standards allow us to declare which children are ‘legitimate’ upon our whim.”
Such a disgusting, offensive farce.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: He is married to an Indian woman. I wonder what she finds in that pudgie wudgie gasbag full of hate
That would describe many an Indian RWNJ, so perhaps not so surprising.
Matt McIrvin
@schrodingers_cat: As with many professional cultural-conservative blowhards, his own marriage seems very much to be a “blue state” type partnership of educated professionals (unlike the catastrophic ancestral cultural background he gained fame by writing about).
O. Felix Culpa
@schrodingers_cat:
Because I wanted to see it again.
Barbara
@germy shoemangler: Seriously, it’s like their protective sheen of denial is so thick they can’t even see out of their own head.
Leto
@WaterGirl: that spot needs to be on tv, non-stop 24/7 until the sun goes cold. And to keep it current, all they have to do is replace Abbott with whatever shitstain R the TX populace puts in the governors mansion.
Matt McIrvin
@Jinchi: I have a friend who’s an ex-Mormon and is still pissed off that the LDS church won’t annul her former marriage even though her husband is married to someone else–so as far as they’re concerned, she’s in a polygamous marriage. She likes to point out that the church’s vaunted abandonment of polygamy was only to the extent that it’d piss off the government. She said it wouldn’t matter to her except that the church pumped so much money into killing same-sex marriage in California–the hypocrisy of it all is what gets her.
HinTN
@Ocotillo:
Here’s some west Texas for you
youtu.be/7-In_dXPQ84
Just One More Canuck
The saddest place I was ever in is Morton, Washington. We were on our way to Mt. St. Helens and stopped for lunch. Every person we saw looked like they had every reason for existence wrung out of them and were simply waiting to die
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Ohio Mom: my dad’s devout Catholic cousin insisted on an annulment of her 40+ year marriage. I don’t know any of her six kids well enough to ask how they felt about it. She’s a very sweet lady, approaching ninety, and I’d bet fifty bucks if I asked her, she’d say Benedict is still her pope, not that hippie.
Barbara
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Most people don’t bother unless they want to get married again. Maybe if her husband was the one who left, getting an annulment gave her feelings of validation.
kindness
As a Californian, I can’t really drive across Texas unless I really enjoy talking to the police in every town I would drive through. California plates and all that. There are places in Texas I want to go to. Austin & the Gulf coast. Maybe a renowned BBQ here and there. Really all the Texans I have met have been fine people. I figure thats because the right wing nuts there don’t spend their free time in California. What ever. Right now, with the politics of what is going on in that state, I’m not spending a dime of my money anywhere there. I have better places to blow money at rather than support fascist dominionists.
eclare
@Matt McIrvin: I have no idea about LDS rules, can she not get a divorce?
Barbara
@Matt McIrvin: It’s probably too easy for me to say this, but she should stop giving them so much power over her life. It’s a voluntary organization, one that should have to earn her allegiance.
Brit in Chicago
I don’t doubt that the closing of a local high school is a source of pain and alienation to a lot of people. I wonder whether they connect it with the structure of the tax system (local schools mostly being funded by local taxes, and so on), and with their own reluctance to see taxes raised.
To make a larger point: the things that local taxes mostly pay for (education, law enforcement, health care) are not things that see large increases in efficiency from the use of technology. (Contrast, e.g. the manufacture of autos—and most strikingly anything for which computing power is a large cost.) So relative to other things, the costs of things that local taxes pay for goes up over time. Hence taxes will have to go up to maintain the same level of services—or the tax structure will have to change.
mvr
@Cameron: I really like McMurtry in general and this is a great song. I’m trying to figure out if I can pull off going to Omaha to see him this evening. I just got back from a 2 week vacation and lots is going on.
Betty Cracker
@Jinchi: Did he have money to donate to the church?
My husband’s family are Catholics, and an aunt’s husband was wounded in Viet Nam — a severe brain injury that left him bedridden and in a nursing home for constant medical care, unable to get up, recognize anyone, speak, etc., until he died 15 years later. The priest told the aunt it was God’s will that she have no male companionship or sex life for all of those 15 years.
Meanwhile, I’m pretty sure members of the Kennedy family and other rich and prominent Catholics were able to get annulments when it suited them. It is/was a racket, IMO.
Another Scott
@Marmot: Yeah, it’s infuriating.
Bob Evans, Cracker Barrel, Denny’s, etc., are the places many retired (white) people in the Midwest go on Sunday for a treat after church. You’re not going to find many single moms with 2.3 kids working 2 jobs and taking online classes, there.
Another example of “… but the light’s better here” – choosing the venue obviously slants the outcome. Especially when the interviews are done during usual working hours. That’s the whole point.
“We wanted to hear the view of average Ohioans, so we stopped by the IGA in NW Dayton on a Saturday morning and talked with …” – says FTFNYT, never.
Cheers,
Scott.
jonas
@Suzanne: As the great Patton Oswalt once observed, “You don’t ever *go to* Denny’s. You *end up* at Denny’s.”
mvr
@germy shoemangler: I hate all of that way of talking, whether it is “heartland” or “homeland”. Both of those ways of talking foster a bad way of seeing the world, other people, and the problems we all have to deal with. They lend themselves so easily to propaganda, and that is why they are often used. (Our “heartland” state has the motto “The Good Life” – implying that those who live elsewhere somehow have defective lives.)
The Department of Homeland Security particularly gets my goat, and we can thank moderate “Democrats” (among many others) post 911 for that coinage which reminds me of German government rhetoric in WWII.
But I’m never going to win the battle to stamp these terms out of our political discourse.
Marmot
@kindness: Um, this is happening all over the country—hell, the continent. But take a detour to express your state-specific distaste, sure.
Have you even seen Redding, CA?
The Moar You Know
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: Move the inhabitants out to someplace decent, bulldoze them into rubble and haul it all away. There’s really nothing else to be done.
kindness
@Marmot: Sure I’ve been through Redding. That’s were I cut off 5 and go over the hill to Eureka/Arcata on 299. I live in Red California, the Central Valley. But out here in this state, the crazy right wingers are outnumbered. I’m not threatened by them
And it isn’t distaste. It’s that I don’t want to pay fines or end up in a Texas jail because I have a California ID and a car with California plates. It happens. Don’t deny it.
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin:
The LDS Church — the mainstream one, not the FLDS — still holds that men can be “sealed” to more than one woman. A man can get a Temple marriage, aka Sealing, to a woman, divorce her, and then get another Temple marriage.
“For time and all eternity”. No “till death do us part” for the Mormons.
A friend’s mom actually asked her ex-husband not to “break the seal” when they got divorced because she was concerned about afterlife.
Kelly
A guy from my high school made it into Major League Baseball. My high school won the the state baseball championship his senior year. He was an amazing athlete in our small town but merely adequate in the majors.
Suzanne
@eclare: LDS can divorce, but you’ll get gossiped about in denser LDS communities. But “sealing” is a separate thing from legal civil marriage/divorce for them. Sealing only happens in the Temples.
You also find out your “real name” when you get sealed. Go look that shit up.
Jager
@Ken:
My high school hockey team won 16 straight state championships (there are a lot of reasons for that streak) The coach (I played for him in the 60s) realized when the 2nd high school was going to be built, he’d lose most of his starters to the new school. He did a strategic retirement. he was right, the new high school won the state championship in their first year of competition. By the way, we didn’t have any signs of the winning streak anywhere.
Another Scott
@Suzanne:
Speaking of “sealed”, PetaPixel – Only known photo of Joseph Smith found in locket.
Quite different from the painting, but it’s clear that it’s the same person.
Cheers,
Scott.
Suzanne
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony:
Why do anything about them? Encourage people to leave and those who stay can endure shitty conditions.
J R in WV
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I’m not gonna ask how they “annul” a 40-year marriage. I know the rules are built in and mostly depend upon the opinion of an elderly male virgin (in theory, anyways~!!~) with a funny get-up to wear. Bishops mostly, I guess.
Been to one Catholic church service, Wife’s co-worker got married, was kind of amazing to a guy raised mostly as UU. I liked the incense pretty well, but wondered if it wasn’t pretty pagan…
schrodingers_cat
@O. Felix Culpa: Thanks! I am glad you liked my metaphor.
Boris Rasputin (the evil twin)
My hometown still has a sign crowing about twin brothers who were Olympic champions in 1984. The vaunted foo’boll and wrasslin’ teams haven’t done much since then.
The town is full of people who see no irony in Springsteen’s song “Glory Days”. Hell, it’s played at every reunion, and cheered loudly.
schrodingers_cat
Going to India after almost 8 years and I am a mess. It is always emotionally draining but also rewarding. So looking forward to it and not at the same time.
I miss Mumbai more than anything in the world. For me it will be home like no other place ever will be. I have lived in 4 states and 6 towns other than Mumbai and I grew fond of all of them. But Mumbai will always be my first love. Also, when I say Mumbai I mostly mean South Mumbai where I grew up. The old part of the city with Arabian sea on all 3 sides and dotted with many relics from the British era. This is the first time in 25 years I will be in Mumbai in monsoon. Mumbai in the monsoon is the best.. You can check it out for yourself whether I am exaggerating (may be I am, a little)
Rimjhim Gire Sawaan
Ishq Bulava
Is it strange to miss a place rather than a person. Am I strange.?
opiejeanne
@eclare: Mormons tend to live in clusters in neighborhoods, at least in SoCal they did. A Mormon couple whose six kids went to school with ours got a divorce, and according to LDS rules, she had to ask her ex-husband’s permission in order to remarry if she wanted to stay in the religion she grew up in.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
Have a good trip. You are not strange.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Thanks!
opiejeanne
@schrodingers_cat: You’re not strange. I still miss a particular neighborhood we lived in, the neighbors and friends, but especially the house.
schrodingers_cat
@opiejeanne: I lived minutes away (about 20 min or less) from the iconic Marine Drive on the Arabian Sea, where the last scene of the song in link 2 was shot. I remember the long walks in mornings and evenings.
VOR
Minnesota used to have a program called “Star City” for economic development. A bunch of small towns posted signs claiming to be a Star City. Nobody knew what it meant. My siblings used to claim it meant they had a Dairy Queen.
Just One More Canuck
@schrodingers_cat: I haven’t lived in Victoria (BC) in over 30 years and I miss it every day
Ksmiami
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: we’d be much better off letting the small towns go to seed faster
Matt McIrvin
@eclare: She’s long since divorced and not in the church any more, just annoyed that the church continues to consider her married to this guy
From the church’s perspective, they’re doing her a favor–being “sealed” will get her into a better grade of afterlife!
satby
@schrodingers_cat: Enjoy! I love India, miss it, and I’m not even from there! I hope in spite of all the religious stuff planned that you don’t like, you have lots of happy things to do and enjoy.
Major Major Major Major
Always get a kick out of the big sign when you enter Redwood City, CA: Weather Best by Government Test!
Paul in KY
@schrodingers_cat: Nope. Just soak it all in. Assume you may never be back.
evodevo
@germy shoemangler: yep…I was just in the Dollar General up the road – there is a LOT of cheap stuff, but, like Big Lots, it’s way more expensive than it used to be…Big Lots has gone upscale compared to the old days lol
kalakal
@schrodingers_cat: Not strange at all,
I still miss bits of West Yorkshire, espescially the area around Settle. Not been there in decades but I still love it.
Enjoy you’re trip, it’s a place I’d love to see
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Suzanne:
That is the question. I think actively encouraging them to leave (including offering incentives) is an option. I just think something needs to be done. Ignoring them is making them angrier and more radicalized, and the right wing loons and white nationalists are capitalizing on it.
Martin
I’m currently in one of these towns taking care of my dad after a heart attack. It’s only marginally Trumpy in population, but the Trumpers are VERY loud.
A lot of these places had their glory days when extraction industries were good sources of middle-class jobs, but extraction falls quickly to commodification and automation. Rather than invest in industries that would add value to those extracted resources, they invested it in, well, their high school baseball team. And so when those industries had the profits squeezed out of them, they had no money to recover the town, so it’s slowly died until some casino could come in and at least provide *something*.
Cities fare much better, in part because they can’t be too dependent on extraction (which requires land) but more because there’s always someone who eventually figures out how to sink cash into the next endeavor. NYC used to be heavily industrialized. They had a really rough period after that collapsed and went to finance and white collar, and now are diversifying with tech. Basically, cities are big enough to always have someone with money to build. Smaller towns kind of just have to get lucky.
But it’s hard to watch. I personally have enough money and not-too-shitty ideas and could probably save this town (it’s tiny – doesn’t need much). But why would I do it here? If I lived here, okay, maybe. But why wouldn’t I just pick somewhere else? There’s nothing distinctive about this place that makes it a better location. As such, the towns need to save themselves. City council needs to do that job – write grants, work out a path for the town, steer the town down that path. That’s too much socialism, though. Ban storing your boat in your front yard to improve tourism? No, that’s too far. So they stay stuck because it’s more important to preserve their personal needs over that of the town.
Kayla Rudbek
@schrodingers_cat: you are not strange at all for missing your home place. I’ve been in Northern Virginia for over a decade now, and I still miss Minneapolis. I don’t think that I can get Mr. Rudbek to move back there, though.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Martin:
People with that ‘get up and go’ to make improvements, got up and went to another place, probably a city.
Miss Bianca
@schrodingers_cat: Nope, it’s not strange. I moved away from Paonia, CO to a series of other small towns over the course of the last 15 years, and I still consider Paonia my “hometown”.
evodevo
@Jinchi: Ah, yes…annulment…the Catholic version of the talibangelical get out of jail free card (Jeebus forgave me all the stuff I did, so there). I’ve never figured out how that worked, when you were usually married by a priest and had kids. What kind of mental gymnastics would that involve?
Kineslaw
Levelland High School currently has ~750 students, and if it was winning 4A girl’s basketball championships that long ago, it would have been at least that big.
I’d be pretty happy consolidating a lot of towns in Texas. You have to move people in family/community units, because that is the reason so many people stay, and understandably so.
I’m starting to think of life in small towns in a similar way to thinking about older people staying in their own home. As a society we tend to idealize it, but that level of isolation is good for very few people.
My parents haven’t made friends in their new apartment building, but they are constantly petting dogs and talking to people in the elevators and are getting some of their friends to think about moving because of how much Mom & Dad enjoy it. Could they have stayed in their house – yes. Do they agree moving has improved their quality of life – most definitely. I suspect the same could be said for people stuck in small towns.