Separated At Birth: Texas and New York.

When I moved to New York, people asked if the culture shock might be too much. Hell no. New York was easy. Why? because contrary to conventional wisdom, Texas and New York are so much alike. The two places hate each other so much, not because they are so different, but because they have so much in common. This Texan would have suffered far more serious culture shock in one of those earnest taciturn upper Midwest states like Minnesota or Wisconsin.

People hate New York and Texas for the same reasons. Both places think that they are the Center of the Universe with all the planets and galaxies revolving around them. Both Texans and New Yorkers feel sorry for anyone who isn't them. The inhabitants of both places can be loud, vulgar, arrogant, and insufferable. Both places are full of people who can be astonishingly rude (although in my experience, Texans are more aggressive in their rudeness). Both Texans and New Yorkers can be very neurotic (New Yorkers can be very whiny and prosecutorial while Texans always walk around with giant chips on their shoulders). People can also be surprisingly friendly in both places. New Yorkers are never nice, and neither are Texans though they won't admit it, but people in both places can become real friends very quickly. People in the Midwest, in my experience, can be very nice, but are not always very friendly (I've heard the same complaint about Californians).

I've only seen a couple of real differences between Texans and New Yorkers. The first is in hypocrisies about money. Texans are far bolder in their hypocrisies about filthy lucre than New Yorkers. Wealthy Texans will feed you steak and lobster for lunch just to impress you with how rich they are. By contrast, very rich New Yorkers will serve you left over spaghetti on paper plates to show you how little they think of you. While rich New Yorkers always try to buy a measure of culture and class that they don't really have, Texans loudly proclaim that they are rich as Croesus by Divine Right. God gave them all that loot for being so righteous and believing so correctly. New York, by contrast, has a kind of reverse hypocrisy with people frequently pretending to be worse than they really are. That guy on the corner who looks and dresses like a hit man almost certainly isn't, and probably takes his mother to daily Mass. The woman in the store dressed like a femme fatale probably takes care of younger brothers and sisters together with some other kids in the neighborhood.
The other difference is that Texans are acutely self conscious and very prickly about what other people think about their state. By contrast, New Yorkers genuinely couldn't care less about what other people think about their city or about them.

I know that almost everyone who reads this blog hates Texas (and probably New York too). So this month, think of the Red Cross as your swear jar. Go ahead and complain about Rick Perry and Dubya and all those insufferable mean old rattlesnakes who don't believe in Global Warming or gravity, and be generous and swear enough to make a whore blush. Here's the Red Cross site. Please be generous.