NJ in the Lone Star state.

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The city in the distance is Dallas-Fort Worth. Been there myself. A huge relief from the northeast.

The city in the distance is Dallas-Fort Worth. Been there myself. A huge relief from the northeast. (Photo credit: Michael from Exit 5.)

New Jersey people are natural pilgrims, whether it strikes them early or late. We go elsewhere because we’ve been taught there’s something wrong with Jersey. We almost always come home again, but not because there’s anything wrong with the new places. Only because, when all is said and done, this is where we’re from.

But maybe that’s changing now. Such a thing as being too true blue a blue state. We, my wife and I, wish all the best for the latest exiles. Texas has much to offer. Like hope for the future and people who want more talented and decent people for neighbors.

Best of luck to Michael and Genevieve. They deserve that large sky and the promise of wide open spaces. And just maybe there’s a new launching pad for Josh there too.

8 thoughts on “NJ in the Lone Star state.”

  1. Bon voyage!

    I’ll continue to visit Texas for things like the Texas Star Party, as well as Arizona and New Mexico for their beautiful night skies. But leave New England? Not going to happen. We like *seasons* here, bad as it is for us politically. PA or NJ, perhaps, if the right situation arose. But I do miss the cloudless, dark, star-filled skies.

    With the feds uber alles, does it really matter where you live these days? I guess Texas is going to secede, yeah.

    • New England? Yeah, I get you. You never leave. The difference with NJ. We do leave. We’ve got quaint and historical too, and beautiful autumn leaves and clear dark night skies, but we don’t live in a tomb.

      Sorry to sound so tough, but it’s the “never” I hear that raises my hackles. New England is the HQ of zombie USA, dead people in every direction you look. You’re not from there. You should know better. You should shake yourself awake and look around.

      • Who said never?! Only you.

        I grew up in PA, so I’m a New England non-native. We’ve thought about Alaska, seriously, went so far as to look at schools there. But is that the right move for our kids?

        You’ve settled in one place but I shouldn’t? Tell me more about how it’d be better to uproot my family at this moment than put roots down…

        You think it’s changed me, do you? No. I’m the one making the changes up here. Not for your lost generation or mine, but the next one. The one that needs to have their fingers pried off the trigger of the suicide of thought. The people we despise send their most treasured possessions (yeah, right) to me, and I get to save them. Or die trying.

        I’ve accepted a long tour of duty behind enemy lines. Don’t think that I’m taking the easy way out.

        • There’s an article you might want to read.

          http://www.nationalreview.com/article/363178/kanye-kim-lena-and-us-interview

          And another one:

          http://glovesoff.blogspot.com/

          It isn’t in New England anymore. It might be elsewhere. Why it’s okay to look.

          Some of us, including “bigoted idiots” like du Toit, can’t help remembering ladies. They were our mothers and grandmothers, our friends’ mothers and grandmothers, and they had no idea they were prisoners of a vicious sexist culture. They knew how to smile, how to make strangers and shy ones feel welcome, they knew how to dress up for a party, how to dance to ballroom music, how to practice countless skills that made houses into cheery homes, and we loved them. In every possible way they exemplified the essential human virtues and mediated their children’s vulnerability through their own. They were playing a life-and-death role, especially in those first six years, and one that fathers couldn’t play because their role back then was different. Fathers weren’t second-string mommies, always playing catch-up on the sensitivities not born into men. They were, when all was said and done, judges — the ones charged with preparing the children to be strong against the institutional temptations and corruptions that were coming after the time of safe haven was over. Their job was not to be taken in the way mother could be by an artful grin or pleading. Their job was to say no, to describe the consequences, to levy the punishment so that the lesson would be learned in the home, not in the dangerous realms of the outside world.

          “Before” there were fathers and mothers. “After” we have “deadbeat dads” and a plethora of lawyers, doctors, journalists, executives, and bureaucrats, all with ticking biological clocks and an enduring confusion about the difference between home and government. If they can’t be in the home, then they want the world as a whole made as safe as a home. They want more laws, more protections, more services. They beg the government to come deeper into the home, inside the car, into the chemistry of their children’s brains. Your post hoc ergo propter hoc analysis is dead wrong. The women’s vote has played a pivotal role in the rise of nanny government precisely because they’re always looking back in the direction of a home that is no longer what it was.

          And as I’ve said, you’re perfectly welcome to prefer the “after” to the “before.” It is just that the certitude you display about your preference for what has been a very recent drastic change is as shallow as it is rigid. The so-called return of the right-wing has not rolled back the clock in any material way in any part of the culture. GW Bush is proposing and signing levels of entitlement spending that would have made him a leftwing Democrat “before,” and in his domestic policies generally he can only be called conservative by a contemporary leftist. Your apparent blindness to these contradictions in terms is what makes you seem naïve. And to some of us, probably, you also seem presumptuous in your automatic assumptions about the world reactionaries would like to have back, at least in part.

          Doctors made housecalls. People who went out to dinner at nice restaurants dressed up for the occasion. Fathers were as stern about the importance of being a “gentleman” as they were about the importance of being a man. To hit a girl or to swear in public was not just wrong. It shamed you.

          Shame was apparently a function of class oppression, because now there is no shame. Why did so many of us rightwingers hate Clinton so much? Because he was obviously no gentleman, and the president should always be a gentleman (or a lady). Then he proved it and shamed the nation before the whole world. What did we rightwingers really want to happen with the Lewinski scandal? What we couldn’t ever have. We wanted him to resign because that would have been the right and gracious thing to do. A fanciful archaic throwback of a notion? Maybe. But if Clinton had resigned, then perhaps President Gore might have focused more national attention on a certain piece of violent Arab street trash and prevented a few thousand deaths.

          Funny how being a gentleman can sometimes also be a pragmatic and positive act. If Al Gore had been a gentleman like Nixon (!) before him, he would have disdained to contest the results in Florida. He would still have won his popular vote victory, despite the electoral defeat, and he would have been well positioned, even admired, as a candidate for 2004. (Pause: Compare this scenario with the erratic hide-and-seek irrelevancy Gore has since become.) Meanwhile Bush might have been spared the rancor and bile of the Democrats, and the new “tone” everybody had hoped for might have been achieved. And by the time foreign policy decisions became so horrendously critical, the Democrats might have had a respected advisory role to play. Hell, they might even have played a respectable role. Instead of seething on the sidelines, characterizing every single presidential decision as a new low in corrupt right wing power politics. If a few more of our leaders had behaved like gentlemen, in fact, our foreign policy might be more successful at this very moment.

          “Hey, hey, LBJ. How many kids did you kill today?” That’s our tone. It’s been our tone ever since. It was the tone of the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. It’s the tone of civil rights leaders since the assassination of Martin Luther King (though it wasn’t his tone). It was the tone of the Watergate scandal. It was the tone of about 2,000 book-length feminist screeds about men and the unfairness of being born with a uterus. It was the tone of the Reagan haters. It’s the tone of both sides of the abortion debate. It was the tone of the Thomas and Bork hearings. It was the tone of the impeachment debate. It was the tone of the 2000 presidential election aftermath. It’s the tone now. And some of us are tired of that tone precisely because we remember the time before it was there.

          It’s the tone of spoiled kids, boys and girls, who are just plain pissed at not getting their way, at not having every obstacle removed from their path by someone else. They should get their way because they’re entitled. And we have made that principle the basis of our great secular religion, the religion of “after.” Never mind the consequences. Even though the economics is slam-dunk against women in divorce, never mind that. Fire them up about their freedom to throw the bum out if he has an affair. Never mind that she, and her kids, will be paying for his affair forever. And by the way, don’t teach the boys about being a gentleman — even in courtship and marriage — because that’s an elitist term, and if we start talking about gentlemen, then somebody else might be tempted to start talking about ladies, and everyone knows that women have to be free to do whatever in hell they want, regardless, damn the consequences, because that’s what equality is all about. And if they want, they can dress like sluts from grade school on, and talk like sluts from grade school on, and act like sluts from grade school on, and do all the drugs that any slut might want to do, and have as many abortions as any slut would want to have,.and marry the first idiot who asks, and divorce him when he cheats, and marry the next one, and maybe do some cheating herself, and have a kid, and divorce the next one, and then set up shop as a bitter single mother who has it on good authority that all men are no-good bums. Now, how about all those government programs she’ll need to get by as a single working mother…? And isn’t this absolute paradise compared to the days when women weren’t free, and men weren’t permitted — by their fathers or each other — to be total, irresponsible slobs?

          In fact it’s all working so well that we can try another experiment, and start bringing the boys up to be more like girls, so that they can dress like sluts from grade school on, and talk like sluts from grade school on, and act like sluts from grade school on, and do all the drugs that any slut might want to do, etc etc. After all, the only difference is that girls have sockets and boys have plugs, and they can start connecting to one another (and calling each other slut and ho and bitch) from grade school on, because that’s what freedom and self esteem are all about. And look at all the other progress we get with this approach: no more toy guns, double the cologne sales, and a fantastic new growth market in condoms.

          Of course it’s better. That’s how we can be absolutely sure it’s okay to sneer at the idiot Republicans who hearken back to the evil racist sexist “before,” because we all know what they really miss is being able to use the N-Word on the servants, and commit secret incest with their daughters, and treat their wives like slaves, blah, blah, blah.

          And because we also know that it’s very very dangerous to allow ourselves to consider, for even a moment, that maybe most women were better suited to the old way, and maybe only a small percentage actually belong out here in the nasty rough-and-tumble, and maybe our kids and all our home lives would be better, happier, if we could admit that the nuclear family is the indispensable foundation stone of an entire civilization, and that dynamiting it away without a single forethought might have been a criminally stupid thing to do.

          But no. It’s always been this way. For everyone 40 and younger. It’s the right way. The conservatives are stupid, bigoted, immoral, and wrong. “Hey, hey, LBJ. How many kids did you kill today? Not as many as we’re going to kill in the next 50 years…”

          Forgive me. Yes, we get heated. That’s because we’re so stupid. And wrong. And immoral. Maybe you could bear that in mind, and treat us dinosaurs with a little kindness. Like a gentleman.

          Wherever this lost world is, it’s not in New England. All I’m saying. Try Texas. Try Nebraska. Try Indiana. But give up on Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts. They’re the pits, filled with harpies, eunuchs, and twits.

          • “http://www.nationalreview.com/article/363178/kanye-kim-lena-and-us-interview”

            I’ve been trying to pin down why I have a distaste for tattoos. The best tattoo artists are truly artists. And some — not all, maybe not most, but some — tattoos represent the bearers’ attempts to make permanent a cherished memory or a guiding principle, the same intention as lies behind a tombstone epitaph or an AA member’s “One Day at a Time” bumper sticker. Yet mostly they just piss me off, for no clear reason.

            The best explanation I can figure is — ironically enough — early exposure to The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, which isn’t exactly a bastion of conservatism. “And please don’t show us no tattoos, no hearts and flowers on your thighs — it’s downright tacky… Brands belong on cattle, and that’s not what we’re sellin’ at Miss Mona’s.”

  2. I’m from (and in) TX. It has its good points. Weather is not one of them. TX is a mean state. Everything here is trying to kill you: plants, rocks, weather, animals. Everything but the people, most of whom would share their last meal with you if you were hungry. Most of ’em descended from folks who’d been lied to about what a wonderful paradise Texas was for settlers, and had spent every cent they had getting here. They depended on each other for survival. Texas breeds tough, resourceful, independent, kind, and charitable folks, for the most part. Everyone else died pretty soon after arriving.

    Just so you know, though, Dallas is kind of a fluke. Too many damn Yankees have moved here. Messed the place all up. You gotta get outta Dallas to really meet Texas.

    Leastways now your friends stand a chance at getting some decent barbeque. Although Austin’s better for that sort of thing, really.

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