This defensiveness shines through the state’s adopted slogan, Don’t Mess with Texas, a phrase born as part of an anti-littering campaign, but quickly taken up as the state’s spiritual motto, a preemptive warning. It’s like an inverse of the Napoleon complex, with Texas forever touchy about being so big, and so dumb. This is the state where moms hire hit men to whack their daughter’s cheerleading rivals, where marching bands have generation-spanning blood feuds, where even speech and drama tournaments are occasions for war. I want to focus on an underexplored corner of the Great Lone Star State trait known as Texas Competitiveness, chronicled most famously in the world of high-school football, where whole towns live or die under Friday Night Lights and…you know the story.īut Texas competitiveness isn’t restricted to just football.
When you hear “the great state of Texas,” I expect you to conjure a whole dossier of information, all drawn from the broadest stereotypes and absolutely true: urban cowboys driving luxury trucks to daddy-daughter day at the gun range quarterbacks so fast they can outrun rape charges textbooks edited by Creationists and an exorbitant, state-wide pride in all of this because we’re Texas. This story takes place in the year 1986, in the great state of Texas.
