Posted on 03/07/2003 7:21:05 AM PST by dead
Texas is Bibles and guns, patriots and born-again Christians, righteous folk who believe in just retribution for murderers, whether in Dallas or Baghdad. Paul Sheehan looks at how Lone Star values shape George W. Bush's view of the world.
Richard Williams knew he was about to die last week. So he didn't watch his weight. His last meal was two chilli cheese dogs, two cheeseburgers, a double order of onion rings, french fries, turkey salad and jalapeno peppers. Then chocolate cake, apple pie, butter pecan ice-cream, egg rolls, a peach and three Dr Pepper sodas.
He died the next day, Tuesday, February 25, killed by a mixture of sodium thiopental (a sedative), pancuronium bromide (a severe muscle relaxant) and potassium chloride, which stops the heart. The drugs cost $86.
On February 6 Henry Dunn had also faced death with a hearty appetite - 25 breaded fried shrimp, a cheeseburger with extra cheese, a tray of french fries, two banana splits with chocolate syrup and four cans of pineapple juice. He was later administered a lethal injection, the method of execution in Texas since 1972, when electrocution was declared a "cruel and unusual punishment" by the US Supreme Court.
The process of emptying Death Row is implacable in Texas. On Wednesday, Delma Banks is scheduled to be strapped to a gurney at Huntsville prison, the 300th execution in Texas since the death penalty was resumed in 1982. Yet both the two lead prosecution witnesses have since recanted their testimony, new evidence has emerged and the former director of the FBI, William Sessions, has filed a brief to have the execution stayed. Such life-and-death dramas are common here in Texas.
Another 447 men and women have been sentenced for capital crimes and await their fate. Their names and the details of previous executions and capital crimes are punctiliously set down for the public record by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, including the last meals requested by those about to die. A flicker of the mythical spirit of Hannibal Lecter entered this process on January 29 when Richard Dinkins, a double murderer, requested a last meal of liver and onions with two double meat hamburgers and bacon.
Thirty-eight states have the death penalty but only one stands out. Over the past 20 years, Texas has carried out more than three times as many executions as any other state (Virginia, with 81, ranks second). Texas is big - with 22 million people and a sense of cultural sovereignty, it is, in some ways, a nation unto itself - but it executes more people than all the other states combined.
It is a righteous anger. Texas and the other states which comprise the top 10 in terms of executions are all among those with the highest proportion of evangelical or born-again Christians, a group that has grown enormously to more than 100 million Americans, and whose political influence has surged proportionately.
Now President George Bush, who did not disturb the flow of state retribution when he was governor of Texas, is seeking the execution of a foreign murderer, Saddam Hussein.
And the sixth angel sounded, and I heard a voice, saying, loose the four angels, which are bound in the great river Euphrates. And the four angels were loosed ... And the number of the army of the horsemen were two hundred thousand thousand.
Book of Revelation (9:13)
BY A REMOTE fluke, on the flight from Sydney to the US, the two people sitting next to me were Texans, Jim and Pat Morton. They were going home to Waco, where I was also heading. Jim is a dentist; Pat is a member of a lay Christian ministry. During the Vietnam War, Jim volunteered for the US Army. They both voted for Bush. They both were friendly, polite, and in the context of Waco, utterly mainstream.
On my first day in Texas, listening to talkback while heading down I35, the state's main artery, the big news was the capture of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the planner of the September 11 attacks. "I want this sucker tortured," said syndicated talk host Greg Knapp. On the next shift, the next host, Glen Beck, picked up the same theme: "If he has any fingernails left, we're not doing our job." Beck noted the large amount of hair on Khalid's back and suggested variousways of removing it.
As I crossed the central Texas flatland that was once prairie, two themes repeated themselves again and again, not just on the radio but on a staggeringly large number of flags, road signs, bumper stickers and churches small and large - patriotism and salvation. The gun and the Bible.
The soul of Texas has been shaped by war more than any state in America. Its historians describe "a frontier of continual war", first with the plains tribes, then with Mexico (Texas fought its own War of Independence and is the only sovereign nation to have joined the Union), then the Civil War with the Union itself and, through all this, the 50-year war with the Comanches, an adversary that one historian called "a long-ranging, barbaric, war-making race".
Like Australia, Texas was only settled in large numbers after 1820, but its formative decades were marked by bloody conflict. Every woman taken prisoner by the plains tribes was, without exception, raped. In 1850, the Comanches were still raiding the state capital; the last raid was in 1869. The bloodbath and defeat in the Civil War left an indelible mark. As recently as 1948, the most powerful man in Congress, the legendary House Speaker, Sam Rayburn of Texas, had a photograph of Confederate general Robert E. Lee in his Capitol Hill office. Texas sent a disproportionately large number of men to combat in World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War. Once again, the state plays a disproportionate role among the forces deployed for an invasion of Iraq.
The financial power of Texas oil wealth has also sent a disproportionate number of Texans to the White House in the past 40 years, each of whom has led the US into hot wars: Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam, George Bush in the Persian Gulf and George W. Bush in Afghanistan.
On September 11, 2001, the current Commander-in-Chief recorded in his personal diary: "The Pearl Harbor of the 21st century took place today." He believes the eight years of the Clinton administration left a legacy of dangerous passivity. "The antiseptic notion of launching a cruise missile into some guy's, you know, tent, really is a joke," Bush told Bob Woodward for the latter's latest book, Bush At War (2002).
"I mean, people viewed that as the impotent America ... a flaccid, you know, kind of technologically competent but not very tough country that was willing to launch a cruise missile out of a submarine and that'd be it.
"I do believe there is the image of America out there that we are so materialistic, that we're almost hedonistic, that we don't have values and that when struck, we wouldn't fight back." No one believes that any more.
And a mighty angel took up a stone like a great millstone, and cast it into the sea, saying, Thus with violence shall that great city, Babylon, be thrown down.
Revelation (19:11)
IF IT WERE possible for Bush to move to an even more hard-core, fundamentalist Texas than the one he grew up in, he managed to do it three years ago. Highway I35 runs between the largest and wealthiest metropolitan area of Texas, Dallas-Fort Worth, down through the centre of evangelicalism, Waco, to the state capital, Austin, then to the traditional centre of Mexican Texas, San Antonio.
George and Laura Bush took the exit at Waco. They bought a 650-hectare cattle ranch on Prairie Chapel Road, near Crawford. "This is the place," he said, "where I will live the rest of my life." They built a new home. And the people who built the home all came from a nearby Christian commune, Homestead Heritage, which looks and feels like a modern variant of the Amish, with pick-up trucks instead of buggies.
All the women have long hair and long skirts; all the children are schooled at home; nearly all the men practise skills and crafts that enable the community to be self-sufficient. One of the craftsmen who built the President's home is Lyn Fritzlan, a blacksmith, carpenter and sweet-natured Christian. "We build barns the old way, using oak pegs and not one nail," he says.
Bush's adopted local town is Crawford, population 705, dominated by a grain silo, a railway track, some churches, a scattering of prefabricated homes and, until the First Family arrived, a little main street of brick storefronts where the Depression arrived in 1929 and never left.
Since November 2000, Crawford has gained a new restaurant, the Coffee Station (chicken fried steak, chicken fried chicken, fried hot dogs, fried jalapenos, french fries and burgers), a new corner emporium and five souvenir shops. Each store has a sign in the window: "Support Our Troops." The Yellow Rose has a much bigger sign at its front door: "We will not tire. We will not falter. We will not fail."
If there is failure, if too many bodybags come back, the pain will not be hard to find. The largest army base in America, Fort Hood, home to the elite First Cavalry, is just 30 minutes' drive to the west. This base has sent 29,500 men and women to the Gulf, a cause of massive angst and economic pain to the district. If there is a charge into Iraq, the tanks of the First Cavalry will be at its head.
Crawford sits between Fort Hood and, to the east, Waco, the nearest city. Waco is dominated by a single institution, Baylor University, which is dominated by the Baptist Church. Baylor is the Harvard of the Baptists, and favoured to be the site of the G.W. Bush Presidential Library. The city has one other landmark, the Texas Rangers Hall of Fame. The gun and the Bible.
It has another landmark it resents deeply. On April 19, 1993, the city (named after the Waco tribe) became globally known after a former Seventh Day Adventist called Vernon Howell, aka David Koresh, led a fundamentalist sect called the Branch Davidians into a gun battle and siege with the federal government that would end with Koresh, 80 of his followers and four federal agents dead.
No signs mark the way to the bleak field where the tragedy unfolded. The site is marked by a memorial chapel, a ruin, a burnt-out bus and a memorial to victims of the "holocaust" erected by the "Northeast Texas Regional Militia". In a bizarre footnote, the only surviving Branch Davidian still living at the site is an Australian, Clive Doyle. Originally from Melbourne, Doyle, 62, has a caravan next to a lonely little visitors' centre. "I accepted David as a prophet," he says, "and someone needs to tell the world what it was all about."
A very different version of this story is told by a second memorial on the site, an inscribed red granite stone which serves as an anti-monument to the militia movement: "In remembrance of all the men, women and children who were victimised and brutally slaughtered in the bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building, on April 19, 1995." The Oklahoma bombing, timed for the anniversary of the "holocaust" at Waco, was the worst act of domestic terrorism in American history until then, and an act of symbolic retaliation.
The gun and the Bible. Righteous vengeance. Some 448 men and women await execution in Huntsville prison and there is something achingly poignant about the details of the last meals of those who have gone before them.
But it would be a disservice to the state of Texas not to mention why these people were on Death Row. Richard Williams, who ordered two chilli cheese dogs, two cheeseburgers, onion rings, peppers, chocolate cake, apple pie and ice-cream the day before he died, carried out a contract killing of a 44-year-old woman he did not know, stabbing her repeatedly with a steak knife, and left her body in the middle of a street. Henry Dunn, who ordered 25 breaded fried shrimp, cheeseburger with extra cheese and two banana splits, abducted, with two accomplices, a 23-year-old clerk, took him to a deserted location, made him strip, stole his wallet and shot him between nine and 15 times.
Richard Dinkins, who ordered liver and double meat burgers with bacon, shot two women dead after an argument in a therapeutic massage parlour. Texas considered these cases, and the offenders' previous crimes, and made a moral decision: do unto others - kill them all.
Texas is not a caricature. It is a source of real power and forceful beliefs. More than 20 years ago, Robert Caro, in the first volume of his magnificent history of Lyndon Johnson and Texas politics, both explained and predicted when he wrote: " ... the rise of Lyndon Johnson sheds light on the new economic forces that surged out of the South-West in the middle of the 20th century, on the immense influence exerted over America's politics, its government institutions, its foreign and domestic policies by these forces: the oil and sulphur and gas and defence barons of the South-West ... By 1941, the influence of these new forces on national policy would only be beginning to be felt, but the pattern had been established."
And the pattern has been maintained. Three of the last eight presidents have been from Texas, and Caro, writing in 1981, could have been writing about the 2000 presidential elections, and the enormous swell of money and political organisation on which George W. Bush rode to victory.
On the main street of Crawford, most of the stores have "Bush 2004" stickers in the windows. But if the forces that the President has massed around Iraq fail to deliver a quick and decisive strike, there will be no Bush victory in 2004.
Much more than this is at stake, so the gathered forces are massive, and the CIA is already inside Iraq, just as it was in Afghanistan before the bombers came.
Some of these CIA agents appear in Bob Woodward's Bush at War, which ends with a scene inside Afghanistan, where a group of agents had built a stone tombstone over a piece from the World Trade Centre: "One of the men read a prayer. Then he said, 'We consecrate this spot as an everlasting memorial to the brave Americans who died on September 11, so that all who would seek to do her harm will know that America will not stand by and watch terror prevail. We will export death and violence to the four corners of the earth in defence of our great nation."
I really hate coming in second place. Clearly we need to try harder here in the Commonwealth.
…Texans to the White House in the past 40 years, each of whom has led the US into hot wars: Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam…
News to JFK.
Texas is the only sovereign nation to have joined the Union
News to Hawaiians.
Richard Williams.......
On March 24, 1997, Williams, Jeanette and the Gillmores drove to the Third Ward in Houston, apparently to buy cocaine for Jeanette and Michelle Gillmore. While Bruce Gillmore stayed in the car, Williams and Michelle Gillmore pushed Jeanette in her wheelchair toward the corner to supposedly purchase the drugs. Williams then grabbed Jeanette's forehead from behind and, using a nine-inch steak knife, slit Jeanette's throat. Once Jeanette fell from her wheelchair, Williams repeatedly stabbed her in the chest. Bruce and Michelle Gillmore drove away and left Williams at the crime scene. They drove to Blueford's house and told him that Williams was crazy, and that Williams had murdered Jeanette. The Gillmores gave Blueford $400 to give to Williams as payment for the murder. They also instructed him not to tell Williams where they were going. MORE HERE.
On February 6 Henry Dunn had also faced death with a hearty appetite......
On the evening of Nov. 30, 1993, Nicolas West borrowed a red Nissan truck from his roommate, Lara Heidelburg, but never returned home. Henry Earl Dunn, Jr., Donald Aldrich and David McMillan kidnapped West from a Montgomery Ward parking lot in Tyler, Texas, and then drove to a clay pit where they fatally shot him. MORE HERE
He also mentioned them in the context of "righteous vengence" slyly comparing their executions to the supposedly "righteous vengence" that inspired unnamed Texans to blow up the Murrah building Oklahoma City.
News to Eisenhower. He sent the first 'advisor' to Vietnam in response to the 'dangerous and threatening situation in Southeast Asia'. (quotes form Wall Street Journal, Nov. 1957)
What sloppy writing. Glenn Beck is syndicated, too, and lives in Philadelphia. So this guy quotes two out-of-state radio hosts to prove --- what? That Texans are bloodthirsty?
Either JFK wasn't the first, or LBJ wasn't the third, unless you're counting the phantom president that came between.
Eisenhower sent personnel (advisors, etc.). I am not sure if he sent troops.
I believe JFK was the first to send troops.
LBJ was definitely the third to send US personnel.
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