5 Reasons to Stop Talking Sh*t About People From the South and Midwest

[Manifestor_of_Light]

256. Another native Houstonian here!

It's not states, it's urban versus rural.

Houston, Austin, San Antonio, El Paso and the Rio Grande Valley are all liberal. Even Dallas and Fort Worth are coming along. Dallas has always been a lot more conservative than Houston. The John Birchers used to be quite active there and it's still pretty conservative. But it's better than it used to be. Fort Worth looked like a lot of nothing the last time I was there but they have three really good museums and the Van Cliburn piano competition every few years. And there are a whole lot of smaller college towns with liberals because the state school system is quite large. San Antonio used to be run by the minority of rich white people who lived on the north side, but Henry Cisneros was their first Hispanic mayor, and since then the Hispanics have gotten more powerful.

I believe that Houston is now majority Hispanic. It's incredibly diverse if you know what neighborhoods to go to. There's a Vietnamese hood and a Chinese hood. They've made the street signs bilingual in those areas.

As a music freak, I've taken music lessons and gone to various types of concerts since I was a small child, and almost everyone who was a big-name act in any kind of music comes through Houston. So I saw a lot of famous people in classical, opera, blues, rock and jazz starting in the sixties and seventies. And it's still got plenty of culture. It used to just be rich people throwing their oil money at the symphony, opera and ballet, but they weren't educated about music. They were extremely conservative and just wanted their Beethoven and Brahms.

Back in the mid 60s, when I was going to the symphony as a child, they didn't want any Carl Nielsen or Gustav Mahler played. Gustav Mahler died in 1911. He's considered to be Late Romantic period music. That was too radical. And they fired Andre Previn for playing twentieth-century classical music in the twentieth century. They couldn't handle Stravinsky or Prokofiev because that was radical. Ooh! Strange rhythms! Strange harmony! Dissonance! I learned about 20th century classical music from playing it in college and community orchestras, not from hearing it at the professional symphony.

Now the performing arts have grown up and they did their first avant-garde Wagner production this spring as the first year of the Ring Cycle with Das Rheingold which Houston Grand Opera is doing. What was interesting was that the old people hated it and the young people loved it. They had 12 25 foot tall by 15 foot wide LCD screens on stage in two rows of 6, one on top of the other, to project the backdrops on it. It was definitely strange and interesting. Spectacularly weird.

The other thing you have to know when you live in Houston, besides the fact that it's mind-bogglingly big geographically and the traffic is insane, is that you have to drive like a son of a bitch to get out of the way of the other maniacs on the freeway, or you'll get killed. It helps if you have a car with lots of acceleration. You have to drive like a nut to keep your Native Houstonian Card.


As DamnyankeeinHouston said, there are lots of art outlets, and the Art Car Parade is the most famous part of it. There are lots of old warehouses and factories that are subleased for artists' spaces, a film festival called WorldFest, and plenty of art galleries and exhibit spaces. There is also an Art Car Museum. There are diverse theater groups such as the Ebony Opera Guild and Teatro Bilingue of Houston. I have appeared in one play at TBH. Most of the plays are in English with a lot of Spanish thrown in. They also have Day of the Dead exhibits and such. The Da Camera Society promotes chamber music and jazz. Their first two concerts of the season were Chick Corea and the Saint Lawrence String Quartet, which are artists in residence at Stanford.


If you want to insult Southern rednecks, go right ahead. Racism is not confined to the South, it's just socially acceptable in the rural parts of Texas. The racists have to be mad at somebody and it's minorities, and the President, and whoever else is not just like them. I think that's a terrible way to live. They could take that energy and learn something or do something constructive but they are ignorant and proud of it. I avoid those people.


My parents and I worked hard for the Democratic party and were very active. My parents tried to get Henry B. Gonzalez nominated for Governor way back in 1958, at the State Democratic Convention. I was a delegate to the State Convention in 1980 and was a Teddy Kennedy delegate that year. Because that was radical, my precinct chairman refused to speak to me. So the problem is not the Democrats of the past. Sometimes they've gotten their act together and elected Ann Richards, but since then the Republicans and their dark money have taken over and the Democrats don't even run a candidate in the rural areas because it's hopeless.