(Community Matters) I’m behind on my book reviews. Just reading about Gail Collins latest, As Texas Goes.
In “As Texas Goes . . . ,” Collins, an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times, describes a benighted place that is less one of the United States than a state of mind. It’s the mind-set that inspired bellicose slogans like “Don’t Mess With Texas” and oleaginous epics like “Giant” and “Dallas.” With its zest for guns, military adventures, right-wing dogma, regressive taxes, deregulation and privatization, Collins’s Texas is an ideological oil slick. And, as surely as those expanding red splotches in 1950s newsreels warning against the spread of Communism, it will pollute the entire body politic if left uncontained.
