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THE MAN FROM MIDLAND
for
THE MAN FROM MIDLAND
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Bush says goodby to Texas today and moves on to Washington. But he's not saying goodby from Austin, where he's never felt comfortable, nor Dallas, where he's seen many baseball games, but from Midland, his home town where he grew up, way out there in West Texas. As one of his spinners said yesterday, he decided to say goodby to Texas from Midland because it's "where he was taught the values that he's going to bring to the White House." What are these values? The following stories should help to answer that question. --Politex, 1/17/01
"I come from a different place and it has made me a different leader. In Midland, Texas, where I grew up, the town motto was, ``The sky's the limit,'' and we believed it. There was a restless energy, a basic conviction that with hard work, anybody could succeed and everybody deserved a chance.
Our sense of community -- our sense of community was just as strong as that sense of promise. Neighbors helped each other. There were dry wells and sand storms to keep you humble, lifelong friends to take your side, and churches to remind us that every soul is equal in value and equal in need.
This background leaves more than an accent, it leaves an outlook -- optimistic, impatient with pretense, confident that people can chart their own course in life....
The largest lesson I learned in Midland still guides me as governor of Texas: Everyone, from immigrant to entrepreneur, has an equal claim on this country's promise." --George W. Bush, Acceptance Speech, 8/3/00
Midland, Texas. Bush's "Shining City on the Hill." According to a Bobby Burns, ex-Mayor of Midland, Bush " had the most plain, most uninteresting office. Not a thing on the wall, that I can remember." This hardly made Bush a strange character; on the contrary, says Burns, "He seemed like one of us." He fit right in, because for all the romance of oil and opulence, Midland was still Midland: a plain, isolated city....If those of us born after 1960 have at times doubted whether the dull, conformist culture of the fifties could have existed in the monochromatic form given to us in books, Midland suggests that it did, and maybe still does. Poppy Bush once called it "Yuppieland West" in a letter, while in 1969 D. W. Meinig, a scholar of geography and culture, called the city's unbearable whiteness of seeming perhaps the purest example of the "native white Ango-Saxon Protestant" culture in Texas....Just as the textbook picture of the fifties adheres to this city more than others, sociologist David Riesman's label of "other-directed man," for that era's creature of the crowd, may fit Bush even better than it fits other politicians. "On the whole West Texas is a strongly conservative political area, with a form of conservatism which very directly reflects the more general history and character of the region," wrote Meinig in his book Imperial Texas, "...a combination and blending of the provincial, rural, folk conservatism of the native Texan-Southern tradition with the strongly ideological economic conservatism of the newer wealthy class." Ivy-league frontiersmen like George H. W. Bush brought Republicanism to Midland long before the rest of the state fell for the G.O.P., and as it turned out oil and Goldwater mixed quite well. Author Larry L. King, who went to high school in Midland, described the city for the Observer in 1964 as "where the oillionaires and neanderthal Republicans with low, sloping foreheads and angry John Birchers (in full tremble over flouridation of drinking water and impeaching Earl Warren) play, and the skies are not cloudy all day."...In Midland, a city built by the uprooted upper class, the virtuous-capitalist mystique remains strong. If George W. Bush is a native Texan, then dewey-eyed boosterism is his native tradition." --Texas Observer
Will The Liberal Press Ever Get Over The Fact That Laura "Ran A Stop Sign, Inadvertently Killing A Friend"? ..."This carefully managed image of Laura Bush begins with a core, undisputed narrative, related in nearly every media profile by the same set of family friends and White House insiders. The daughter of a homemaker and a homebuilder, Laura hails from "unpretentious folks" in Midland, Texas, where children ran in the street until twilight, when they returned home to unlocked doors. Laura's was a storybook upbringing marred only, as all have breathlessly reported, by an eerie brush with death not long after her seventeenth birthday. (She ran a stop sign, inadvertently killing a friend.) [more below] Not long after, Laura left Midland for Southern Methodist University, where she was part of the "cusp" generation whose rebellion went no further than smoking Winstons and wearing peasant blouses. She then spent ten years teaching, earning a graduate degree in library science, and ostensibly not caring if she married or not." --New Republic, 8/13/01 Questions Still Surround Laura Bush's Midland Tragedy from THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS, May 4, 2000 "Report Finds Fatal Crash Attriutable to Mrs. Bush" "The wife of Gov. George W. Bush was responsible for a traffic accident that killed a high school classmate in Midland 37 years ago, according to a newly released accident report. Investigators said a 1963 Chevrolet driven by Mrs. Bush - then Laura Welch, a high school senior - ran a stop sign and struck a Chevrolet Corvair driven by Michael Douglas. Copies of the accident report - parts of which are illegible - were released Wednesday by Midland City Attorney Keith Stretcher after state Attorney General John Cornyn held that the information was public....Mr. Stretcher, the Midland city attorney, initially declined to release any information about the accident on the grounds that it involved minors and therefore was exempt from disclosure under the Texas Public Information Act. He also contended that disclosing the information would violate the parties' privacy rights. Police listed two violations as contributing to the accident, both by Mrs. Bush. One checked box read "disregard stop sign or light," and the other was illegible....Both drivers were Robert E. Lee High School students. Neither was drinking, and no citations were issued, according to the report." (more from DMN) in GLOBE, August 8, 2000 "Bush's Wife Still Haunted by Death Crash Nightmare" Presently available on newsstands, this story reviews material found in the DMN story documented above and an AP story on the same day, as well as a relevant interchange from a Barbara Wolters interview with Laura Bush on 20/20 the next day. A partial copy of the original Midland police report is included, along with photographs of the crash scene. Judy Dykes, a friend of Laura Bush who was in the passanger's seat at the time of the accident, was unnamed in the DMN story, but told the DMN reporter, "[The story] is not worth digging into.It was an accident, a horrible, horrible accident years ago, and it has no relevance." The GLOBE appears to believe relevance may possibly be found in its reporting of comments made by two unnamed members of Texas' law enforcement community. One wondered why no ticket was issued by the Midland police. The other wondered why no grand jury was convened by the City or County of Midland. --Politex, 8/7/00
When Poppy and Barb were away from Midland, the Bush kids were looked after by "Julia Mary Cooper and Otha Fitzgerald Taylor, black maids in a city that was, by and large, white and prosperous. The African-American population in Midland was almost nonexistent; the Hispanic population was small, and most of its members were employed, out of sight and out of mind, as ranch hands or in the service industry." Odessa, "the blue-collar side of things," was twenty miles down the road. George W. Bush lived in "white-bread, white collar Midland....Everybody knew the slogan: "You raised hell in Odessa, you raised your family in Midland." --Bill Minutaglia, FIRST SON (Times Books, 1999), pp 26-32.
"Midland is probably where [George W. Bush] first got the mistaken idea that doing well in business is the solution to America's problems, that is, what's good for business is good for America. 'Opportunity and business fortune for all' isn't really true for everyone....It was for [the Bushes]. --Randall Rodin, 9/14/98 in Minutaglia, p. 31.
Politex, I used to live in Midland, Texas. I have family that still does. Last night Bush spoke glowingly about this city that taught him his values. Midland, Texas, at the time he grew up in it, was one of the most divided cities anywhere between black, hispanic, and white. The minorities and the poor lived, and still do, on one side of the railroad tracks on the south part of town. The wealthy live on the north side. The only interaction is when the poor came over to clean the rich people's homes. Midland has the very wealthy oil people who live in the Raquet Club. At the time Bush grew up in Midland, the schools were seggregated. The black and hispanic schools got the hand me downs from the white schools. The words "nigger" and "mescan" fly wildly to this day in Bush's Midland, Texas. Midland is one of the most bizarre places you'll ever see. It is the epitome of the caste system. Remember, [Bush] is the same guy who vetoed a "hate crimes" bill. --Name Withheld, 8/5/00
A WORLD OF MILLIONAIRE OIL BOSSES AND THE TOWN CREATED IN THEIR IMAGE By the early 50's Midland had become the corporate center for the West Texas oil boom. The two main undustries in the town were creating oil companies and building tall buildings to house the companies. Junior's father was involved in the former, Laura Bush's in the latter. The bosses lived in Midland, the grunts in Odessa. Midland was a town of around 20,00 people. "One out of every forty-five people in the town in the late seventies had reached millionaire status." Odessa, on the other hand, was murder capitol of the nation one year, "with 29.8 homicides per 100,000 residents, gunn[ing] its way past Miami to take dubious honors as the most perilous city in the nation." Poppy Bush's story in Midland was pretty similar to the others who lived in Midland. A young man from the East, educated in the better schools, who succeeded where others failed because he had the needed connections and money to make it through the rough spots. The city of Midland pretty much became a physical reflection of such men. The Midlanders had "Eastern roots that often included four years at St. Paul's, or Choate, or Lawrenceville or Andover, followed by four years at Harvard or Yale or Princeton or MIT. Men with...teeth sharpened to razor points by years spent dutifully at the knee of their good daddy capitalists back East. Although he turned out to be the most famous among them, George Bush was just one among friends. As the years passed the place because even more exclusive. Residents named streets Harvard and Princeton. They played at the Polo Club, which had been started by a graduate of St. Paul's and Princeton whose father had been an executive at U.S. Steel. They clearly saw their town as the one exception in an area of the country" best known for its ignorance. --H.G. Bissinger, "Friday Night Lights," (Addison-Wesley, 1990), p. 213.
"To the Editor, NYT: "George W. Bush waxes nostalgic about the values of the West Texas town where he grew up, declaring that "anybody could succeed, and everybody deserved a chance" (transcript, Aug. 4). "I also remember the West Texas of the late 1950's and early 60's, when my family and many other Mexican-American families migrated to the region to pick cotton. "I remember the signs on the restaurant windows in Lubbock and other regional towns that warned us, "No Mexicans or dogs allowed." "This same region had official policies for segregated schools during the time that Mr. Bush is memorializing. "So what does this say about Mr. Bush? That he didn't know these things were happening? Or that he knows but that they don't factor into his vision of the past because they didn't matter?" ELMA GONZçLEZ Culver City, Calif., Aug. 4, 2000 The writer is a professor in the department of organismic biology, ecology and evolution, University of California at Los Angeles.
MIDLAND IS THE RAPE CAPITOL OF TEXAS, from the Midland Reporter-Telegram, 7/2/00 "Of the hundreds of rapes reported in Midland County each year, very few involve perpetrators who are complete strangers to the victims, said Betty Dickerson, executive director of the Midland Rape Crisis Center. Thursday's rape shares some similarities with two unsolved rapes within the last three years. All three involved strangers with similar physical characteristics. For almost seven years, Midland has retained the unwanted reputation for having the most rapes per capita in Texas, Ms. Dickerson said. In 1999 alone, 950 cases were reported to local authorities -- almost double the 488 cases reported in 1997." --7/2/00
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BUSH IS "THE MAN FROM MIDLAND"