Why Texans Dress Like Cowboys [View all]

[True Blue Door]

Something has always bothered me about the State of Texas - and I mean something more subtle than the naked fascism, Orwellian moral inversion, and Satanic cruelty that are otherwise synonymous with it. It's something most people never think about or mention, because it seems so innocuous: In Texas, it's considered normal (i.e., not at all insane) for fully-grown adults to dress like people from the 19th century (cowboys) on days that aren't Halloween and in places other than a ComicCon.

Moreover, they don't do this in a whimsical, being-weird-is-cool sort of hipster way, but in the same way you decide to wear a t-shirt and jeans, as if they have no comprehension that this is utterly bizarre and out of whack with reality. See, there's a word for cowboy clothes in the 21st century: Costume. These countless people walk around their communities and jobs wearing a costume - one denoting a profession they don't have, have never had, and never intend to have - and no one sees anything awkward or cock-eyed about it.

And their motive is readily identifiable, as far as it goes: They see the cowboy costume as an expression of cultural identity. But let's think about that in the context of the rest of the United States of America - who else does this? Do millions of Californians walk around dressed like 1840s gold miners?

Can't say I've seen a lot of these guys in daily life in 21st century California:

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Have you seen many of these guys on the streets of Miami lately:

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And, of course, Massachusetts is just swarming with these:

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Can't even throw a brick without hitting someone dressed like this in Chicago:

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And good ole New York, with its vast and deep cultural history, surely its streets in the 21st century are swarming with these guys:

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Seen many 18th century French fur trappers lately in Louisiana, Missouri, Arkansas, etc.? Do people walk around Minnesota dressed like 19th century Scandinavians?

If we go worldwide, one would expect to find Tokyo full of people dressed either partially or completely like Edo samurai; the streets of London brimming with medieval peasant garb; France with Merovingian Franks; and normal people in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden going about their everyday lives in Viking battle armor with not a single askance look cast in their direction.

But of course, that doesn't happen, because pretty much everywhere on Earth with a developed economy, people dress like the century they're in. Because their culture is not batshit insane. They might put on a traditional outfit for ceremonial holidays, but that's it. And within the United States, even that is pretty rare.

And it isn't like Texas is generally open-minded to all forms of anachronism: People would definitely stare if you walked around Dallas looking like a Roman centurion or a medieval knight. In fact, it isn't even really an option to dress like any other period from Texas' own history. Looking like Davy Crockett would be extremely conspicuous. And dressing like someone from after the cowboy era, like say the 1920s, would also be extremely conspicuous.

No: Texas has simply chosen this costume to aggressively express its sense of group identity, which no other place in the country does. So you wear boots evolved for horse riding even though you've never even touched a horse, put on that douchebaggy, facepunch-worthy hat designed to protect a person from the elements on the Open Range even though you live in suburbia and work in an office, and that's considered normal, everyday, non-psychiatric-referral behavior.

Is it Texas' massive inferiority complex that clings to every superficial method of holding itself apart, desperately highlighting even the flimsiest, most fictionalized idea of past cultural merit to contrast with the ugly reality of its character repeated over, and over, and over in modern American history?

See, Texas never thought much of cowboys when they actually existed in any numbers. Why would they? Cowboys were poor (and we know what Texas thinks of poor people). They were also overwhelmingly Mexicans and blacks (and we know how Texas feels about them too) - nothing more than bottom-rung hired hands from the underclasses doing shitty work in a time before the minimum wage. They were basically hobos with a few skills, drifting from one area to the next and one greedy, sociopathic employer to the next.

But now the useless nth-generation spawn of the landowners walk around in plastic facsimiles of what they imagine their former serfs wore, pretending to possess the idealized virtues they fantasize were created in their ancestors' victims by the terrible circumstances imposed on them. They try to turn the ugly, degrading, sadistic reality of their state's cultural roots into some kind of noble mythology that makes them noble by association - a fantasy past they can channel by partly or fully wearing Halloween costumes year-round.

Nowhere in America is free from ugly history, and nowhere is entirely free from self-gratifying illusions, but nowhere other than Texas in this country is such an impenetrable thicket of neurotic cultural perversions, destructive lies, and ass-backwards attitudes to every single thing in life. Dressing like 1950s Western TV characters in normal life is just one of the more bizarre and conspicuous signals of that general asshattery.