In the heart of Bushland







Also in this series:
Bush against Bush  (Apr 30, '04)
Kerry, the Yankee muchacho  (May 7, '04)
You have the right to be misinformed  (May 8,  '04)
An American tragedy  (May 11, '04)

"The values Midland holds near to its heart are the same ones I hold near to my heart ..."
- George W Bush
 
MIDLAND, Texas - God is everywhere. The First Baptist Church. The Universalist Church. The First Presbyterian Church. The First Methodist Church. Even the Cowboy Church ("a new way to experience Jesus!").

It's a long, straight road from El Paso to Midland. The temptation to fall asleep at the wheel on I-20 is enormous. Then, suddenly, we're in the middle of a forest: a mechanical zoo of nodding donkeys and small pipelines, Pipelineistan in cowboyland, West Texas Sweet Crude sprouting from the Permian Basin, a true geological wonder. And then, after 20 minutes, on the distant horizon, we see the contours of a mini-Manhattan, a true geometrical rape of the flat desert, a true incarnation of the American Dream. Welcome to Midland, the heart of Bushland.

It's been a long way since the Comanches - the fiercest and most feared warriors in the Permian Basin - raided settlers along the Comanche War Trail, and Captain John Pope, in 1865, tried unsuccessfully to drill artesian water for a proposed transcontinental railway. The oil rush only kicked off in the 1920s. Disputes at the time were settled the Winchester way. Then the oil boom engineered a clash of titans: Wild West cowboy landowners turned millionaires vs an armada of East Coast-educated newcomers - engineers, geologists, businessmen. But the geological miracle ensured that united they stood to get rich quick.

One of these newcomers, in 1948, was of course George Herbert Walker Bush, sent to the "middle of somewhere" (the uneasy official municipal slogan) by his father, senator Prescott Bush, at the time chief executive officer of the top oil-equipment firm in the world, Dresser Industries. Historians have already extensively documented how the Bush family soon became seriously rich. But few have examined the ramifications of so-called West Texas values - the key heritage of the original settler population that coalesced into a political philosophy of extreme individualism. After all, oil and wealth are just around the corner. All it takes is hard work and unbounded optimism. Thus "the sky is the limit".

To have and have not
The Midland ruling class, strictly WASP (white Anglo-Saxon Protestant), lives spread out around Golf Course Road: impeccable suburbia, manicured gardens, a flag and a sport-utility vehicle (SUV) in every home, a protected universe enveloped in blissful harmony the secular middle class in Baghdad cannot even dream of. A TV highlight is the new ad for the US Marines ("The Few. The Proud"), a mix of Iwo Jima iconography with some cool Tom Cruise-in-Mission Impossible rock climbing.

The "other half" - which includes a substantial presence of blacks and Hispanics - lives literally on the other side of the tracks, just as in countless blues songs. Exit the golf courses, replaced by nondescript urban wasteland. Exit the SUVs, replaced by an army of battered pickup trucks. But most of Midland anyway is an overdose of car dealers, gas stations and burger joints where a Hungr-Buster sells for 99 cents.

At a filling station on the wrong side of town - with people visibly worried about the rising price of gasoline - a young black man put some things in perspective: "You should know that West Texas was the last place in the US where they were forced to admit that racial segregation was against human rights." In his book Made in Texas, Michael Lind, a researcher at the New America Foundation in Washington, writes that George W Bush grew up in West Texas and absorbed popular Texas culture as much as the world vision of the members of the WASP elite. But "all the western imagery of the Bush ranch" should not deceive anyone, he says: "Midland, Crawford and Waco are not in the Great West, but in the Deep South, the most racist and most reactionary."

Shura Lindgren, vice president of Visitor Development, assures foreigners that "Midland is the town President George W Bush fondly recalls as his childhood home, and the place where he learned that 'the sky is the limit'. A town where smiles are abundant and everyone is welcome." The smiles are indeed abundant. But there's always that nagging feeling that everything in a flash could turn into a David Lynch movie.

The officially sanctioned Bush story reads like a sort of fairytale: man quits drinking, man rediscovers God, man falls in love with home-town girl Laura the librarian. Midland is where Bush found the roots of Messianic faith and found his own, personal Manifest Destiny. In Midland his Bible-reading group taught him to divide the whole world, the whole cosmos for that matter, into Good and Evil. You're either with us or against us. Bush himself offered a mild version of his own enlightenment in January 2001, shortly before his inauguration: "It is here in West Texas where I learned to trust in God. There's so much optimism in this place, such a passion for the possible."

So it comes as no surprise that virtually every Midlander cannot but praise a man who "says what he does and does what he says", in the immortal words of a lady at the Petroleum Museum. Unlike John Kerry, who in the words of Bush himself "reminds me of the old Texas saying, 'If you don't like the weather, just wait a few minutes and it will change'".

The George W Bush tour of Midland could not but include a visit to the George W Bush childhood home on 1412 West Ohio, where he spent his "formative years", from 1952-56, along with brother Jeb. Official historiography tells us "the Bush family lived the West Texas culture, savoring other people's friendship and relishing the back-yard barbecues". Bush lived in at least six more houses in Midland, from 405 East Maple in 1950-51 to 910 Harvard Avenue in 1985-87. Mella McEwen of the Midland Reporter-Telegram, the local paper, confirms that real estate "continues to be the strongest portion" of the Midland-Odessa Regional Economic Index. If there is an economic crisis in large swaths of the United States, Midland has not been warned.

Moral certainty
In the exceptionally wealthy Petroleum Museum - boasting some great interactive exhibits - the Hall of Fame of oilmen, "dedicated to those who cherished the freedom to dare" and sponsored among others by Texaco, Chevron, Exxon, Phillips, Arco and Halliburton, praises George H W Bush, but not his son. An oilman with fabulous rattlesnake cowboy boots who insists on remaining anonymous departs from the official script and confirms that Bush Jr, unlike his father, was a champion of bankruptcy - always rescued by the FOBs (Friends of Bush): "The funny thing is, he always got off each of these deals with more money."

One of the exhibits at the museum includes - irony not intended - a poster of The Thief of Bagdad, by Douglas Fairbanks. West Texas oilmen, as a rule of thumb, believe there's one chance in 15 of finding a very small oilfield, and one chance in 1,000 of finding a big oilfield. In the case of Iraq, of course, there was always a 100 percent chance of finding - and keeping - anything one might have wanted.

The fascinating intersection between big oil and car racing is alive at the new Chaparral Gallery. "Chaparral bird" is an alternative name for the West Texas roadrunner of Warner Brothers cartoon fame, and the Chaparral car was the Ferrari of West Texas. The cars were built by Midland's finest, Jim Hall, and became an icon of the Can-Am motor-racing series in the 1960s. Racing enthusiasts will remember in awe how the Chaparral 2E, launched in 1966, had a gigantic wing floating on slender struts high above the rear: Chaparral engineers used the air flowing around the car to produce downforce and increase cornering speeds. The Chaparral 2J, the famous "sucker car", used two fans together with sliding skirts to create low pressure under the car: Scottish racing legend Jackie Stewart described it as "just bloody amazing". Nowadays, the only Chaparrals roaring out of Midland are Christian rock sessions.

Apart from the Bush clan, other notable Midlanders include Gulf War II supremo General Tommy Franks - though central casting would certainly prefer resident Midlander Tommy "The Fugitive" Lee Jones for the leading role in a Hollywood remake.

On the oil patch itself, life hasn't changed much for the past 80 years. It is basically a family operation, a low-level Dynasty. Some of the wealthier firms own a couple of hundred oil wells around the Permian Basin. For the smaller independent operators a barrel of West Texas Sweet Crude higher than US$35 is a blessing: high oil prices are the official religion. With their expanded margins, some can even think of investing abroad - usually in former Soviet republics. These people are simply not concerned with politics, just business. "I don't care about Iraq," says a survivor of the oil patch in the middle of a labyrinth of oil derricks straddling both sides of I-20. "What I care is that everybody needs to buy oil."

For the ruling class, life in Midland entails a job in the oil business, a marriage in the early 20s, at least four kids, a couple of SUVs and church every Sunday. Cultural life is sketchy. In early April there's a "Family Literacy Style Show" at the Petroleum Club. Early this month there was the Texas Gun and Knife Show. In mid-December there's The Nutcracker by the Midland Festival Ballet. There are a couple of mediocre art galleries. There's not a single bookshop - which may lead cynics to explain why, when he was about to invade Iraq, Bush still didn't know the difference between Sunnis and Shi'ites. A football match between the white collars of Midland and the blue collars of neighboring Odessa passes for a major cultural event, but not as much as the staggering mutual hatred. No nightclubs, no lap dancing in Midland. Roughly there's absolutely nothing to do except pray to the Lord. To have some fun, one has to drive 300 miles (about 480 kilometers) west to El Paso or 315 miles (507km) east to Austin. Moral certainty is Midland's main currency. Smiling residents are not terribly upset by the sexual-humiliation scandal at Abu Ghraib prison - as they were upset by Bill Clinton's White House oral sex, a Sodom and Gomorrah antic so despicable that the nation simply could not survive unless the sinner was expelled from his job. Baptist, Episcopal, Presbyterian Midlanders manifest "disapproval" of what happened in Iraq - and no more. Meanwhile, with the United States totally polarized on key issues concerning religion, race and marriage, George W Bush continues to use his Evangelical Christian credentials very effectively to attract voters - at least those who go to church every Sunday.

Midland is a living demonstration that with Bush as cowboy-in-chief - always expanding the frontier, unwilling to subscribe to any treaties, sending in the cavalry to secure the Fort Apaches - many Americans feel indeed very secure. In virtually every poll in the current statistics deluge, Bush scores very high in terms of vision for the country and sharing the moral values of most Americans. But as one leaves Midland, there's no way of escaping the uncomfortable direct connection between Bush's brutal world vision and the geographic and intellectual vacuity of this oil patch "in the middle of somewhere".

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