“The Alamo,” the new movie starring Jason Patric and Billy Bob Thornton, doesn’t dismiss the heroism of Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie, William Travis and the others who died fighting a Mexican dictator. (Wait, oh, 10 years or so for that one.)
But it does, perhaps not surprisingly, given the times, go to some lengths to raise questions about the morality of the war and the men who fought for Texas independence.
In one of the film’s most dramatic moments, Patrick Wilson, the young actor playing Col. Travis, asks the defenders of the Alamo to think about “what brought you here that you’re willing to fight — and possibly die — for.” That, the young commander tells the men, is what being a Texan means.
It’s been 168 years since that battle, and people — some people, at least — are still conflicted about what it means to be a Texan.
Last month, in a political column in this paper about Europe’s infatuation with Sen. John Kerry, the Democratic Party’s presumptive presidential nominee, a French man is quoted as saying that he likes the Massachusetts senator because “he doesn’t look like a Texan.”
“Doesn’t look like a Texan”?
What’s that supposed to mean? Is it the way he walks? The shoes? The cut of his suit?
Never mind. Just rhetorical questions. Fact is, most of us understand exactly what he’s saying — especially those of us who, like me, hail from the Lone Star State.
We tend to get a lot of this stuff, these goofy assumptions and expectations about how a Texan acts. Or dresses. Or thinks.
Usually, it’s pretty harmless, even flattering — all those romantic notions rooted in all those thousands of Western movies, wrapped up in all those Louis L’Amour books and painted in the lyrics of all those Buddy Holly songs.
Every so often, though, as with the comment from our French ami above, you get an ugly little glimpse of something else. That sneering condescension that certain circles in places such as New York City or Washington or Paris, France, reserve for folks from such places as Dallas or Waco or Paris, Texas.
You get used to it.
Still, it makes you cringe sometimes. Because you know how dunderheaded that stuff is, how divorced from reality.
You know because you’ve sat on the tailgate of a pickup in a grassy meadow outside Kerrville, watching the meteors shoot across a star-filled sky while listening to Lyle Lovett strumming a guitar.
Or because you’ve hiked down an endless stretch of uninhabited, undeveloped Padre Island seashore south of Corpus Christi.
Or hunched down on a damp deer hunt with your father, deep in the dark woods of East Texas and watched, quiet and still, as the sun climbs into the sky behind the pine trees.
Or swum in the ice-cold springs at Austin’s Barton Creek; taken a pretty girl out on Saturday night in Houston; or raked leaves and then stuffed yourself on fried chicken and pies at the “cemetery-working” in Kirbyville.
There’s something majestic about the love affair between Texans and the glorious, myth-driven idea of what the state is.
“The Alamo,” even if it is predisposed to make a few politically correct points along the way, gets that part of the story. The film is rich with genuine, heartfelt flourishes, from the authentic German accents of the Hill Country Texans to the furious fiddle playing of Billy Bob Thornton’s Davy Crockett to the stirring, patriotic speeches of Travis and Gen. Sam Houston.
I’m guessing that’s in large part because the man who directed — and wrote much of — the film, John Lee Hancock, is himself a native Texan.
That idea, that myth of what the state was, what it is and who you are if you live there — it’s powerfully seductive. It soaks in, whether you’re a writer, a baseball pitcher, a country singer — even the president of the United States.
Lots of national media types are skeptical of President Bush’s well-documented appreciation for clearing brush on his spread in Crawford.
But life is in the details, and a lot of folks who come from such places, places where history still matters and folks feel a responsibility to honor the past — whether it’s Texas or Virginia or even New York City — they understand why the president’s so connected to that scrubland he calls a ranch.
Does anyone, even his harshest critic, think for a moment that George W. Bush, when his political career is over, whether that happens next January or four years later, will stay here in Washington? Or move to New York? Or California?
Of course not.
He’s going home. He has a place. He belongs.
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