West Texas Repudiate
One might expect that with all of the time that George Bush has spent in Crawford, Texas, that he would have strong ties to the community and a few close friends there. As this New Yorker essay notes, neither seems to be true.
The plainspoken Dubya—who cleared brush, drove a pickup, and, by implication, was rooted in rural America and red-state values——and a Republican front-runner for President—bought fifteen hundred and eighty-three acres of riverfront property for an estimated $1.2 million....
Downtown Crawford, as locals refer to Main Street, is about eight miles from the ranch. It does not amount to much—a two-block-long business district, with several gift shops, a bank, two gas stations, a café, a granary, a video store, a custom-sign shop, and the Great Shapes beauty parlor. A blinking red stoplight on Main Street is the town's only traffic signal. East of the railroad tracks are the sagging frame houses and hard-packed dirt yards that belong to Crawford's few, mostly elderly, black residents. (The town is eighty-eight per cent white.) Rusted grain silos and a water tower make up the town's meagre skyline. Neighboring Coryell County is home to a training range for Fort Hood, the largest armored Army post in the nation, and what sounds like thunder is often the shudder of ordnance exploding across the plains.
The storefronts along Main Street, a sunburned, treeless stretch of State Highway 317 that runs along the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway line, were mostly vacant when I came to Crawford this spring. Of the seven gift shops that once hawked "Mission Accomplished" coffee mugs and "This Is Bush Country" refrigerator magnets and "Lovya Dubya" bumper stickers, three had gone broke. Only two, the Red Bull and the Crawford General Store, still kept regular hours. The Red Bull's manager, a sturdy woman named Jamie Burgess, sat on a bench outside the store. "They're closed, but we’re open!" she shouted down the street one afternoon as I peered in a rival store's window.
What makes the description of Crawford particularly pathetic is the extent that the Bushes used Crawford as a huge stage prop for a couiple that was dramatically out of place in rural West Texas.
During the 2000 campaign and his first term, Bush used to make regular, if highly choreographed, trips into town. Crawford was a backdrop ready-made for Karl Rove stagecraft. The President shook hands at the Coffee Station; signed legislation, flanked by hay bales; and chopped cedar in the height of summer as a White House photographer captured the look of steely resolve under his sweat-stained cowboy hat. The White House press corps broadcast standup TV reports in front of a pasture, dotted with bales of hay, that was not outside the ranch but in town, next to the high-school running track....
At Crawford High School's graduation[...] there was no mention of the President, who had delivered the commencement address eight years earlier. When Kevin Noack, the superintendent, spoke to the audience about how this fall would mark "the end of an era for Crawford," he was referring to the retirement of Mary Keltner, the school’s longtime custodian....
Bush's primary home, once he leaves office, will be in Dallas, a hundred and twenty miles away. His Presidential library will be there, at Southern Methodist University, not at Baylor University, in nearby Waco, as locals had initially hoped. (Waco, a city eager to rebrand itself after the 1993 Branch Davidian standoff, had posted a sign in its visitors' center that boasted, "How do you spell Waco? Well, it starts with a Dubya." It was later taken down.)
In July, at a closed-door Republican fund-raiser in Houston, Bush was caught in a video, taken by a guest, talking about the economic downturn. "Wall Street got drunk... and now it's got a hangover," Bush said. "We've got a housing issue," he went on, and then added, in a tone of mock gravity, "Not in Houston, evidently not in Dallas, because Laura's over there trying to buy a house today."
And the man who has publicly said that Jesus changed his life? "Bush has apparently gone to church in Crawford three times in eight years, once at the Methodist church and twice at Canaan Baptist."
What a guy, and what a neighbor.
Labels: Crawford, George Bush, stupid advertising tricks, Texas
