San Antonio has a riverwalk, a shady carless oasis snaking along below street level and lined with restaurants and bars, a refuge from the heat and traffic of the surface. The banks of the river are fully paved, and it is crisscrossed with bridges. Little tour boats and water taxis chug along, ducks beg for potato chips, and this time of year, workers in climbing harnesses are stringing up Christmas lights on the trees.<\/p>\n
The spirit of Texas is very different from the spirit of the South. The South, as I have mentioned, has a defeatist, fatalist, pathos and sense of loss, as evident in the obsession with the Civil War and the weepy country lyrics about being down and out and dumped and broken-hearted and drunk and locked up. \u201cThe South will rise again\u201d presupposes that the South is down.<\/p>\n
Texas, on the other hand, is about the winning of the West, full of bluster and bravado, more up than down. Of course, the Alamo was a defeat for Texan forces in 1836, but the rallying cry \u201cRemember the Alamo\u201d led to a rout of the Mexican army in the same year so the Alamo can stand in for triumph in a way that no Civil War battle ever can, neither a loss for the south like Gettysburg nor a temporary success like Bull Run. The North still lords it over the South (putting a black man in the White House, no less), but neither the Indians nor the Mexicans pose any remaining threat to the American West.<\/p>\n
Thus, Texans walk tall. Egon spots a t-shirt with a picture of a revolver proclaiming that \u201cIn Texas, we don\u2019t dial 911.\u201d Norwegians believe deeply in the rule of law (in fact, they introduced us to it: the very word \u2018law\u2019 is imported into English from Old Norse), and the philosophy behind this t-shirt is so completely wacky to the Norwegian mentality that Egon doesn\u2019t know whether to laugh or cry.<\/p>\n
It is no coincidence that Texas leans strongly toward Romney, but again I see fewer pro-Romney bumper stickers than anti-Obama ones (\u201cRestore our freedom: Defeat Obama\u201d; which is really too defeatist for Texas; they should follow Stephen Colbert\u2019s lead in his simply brilliant book title: \u201cRe-becoming the greatness we never weren\u2019t,\u201d which lets him have it both ways).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
San Antonio has a riverwalk, a shady carless oasis snaking along below street level and lined with restaurants and bars, a refuge from the heat and traffic of the surface. The banks of the river are fully paved, and it is crisscrossed with bridges. Little tour boats and water taxis chug along, ducks beg for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":85,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-293","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-travelog"],"featured_image_src":"","featured_image_src_square":false,"author_info":{"display_name":"Svenonius","author_link":"https:\/\/blogg.uit.no\/psv000\/author\/peter-arne-svenonius\/"},"rbea_author_info":{"display_name":"Svenonius","author_link":"https:\/\/blogg.uit.no\/psv000\/author\/peter-arne-svenonius\/"},"rbea_excerpt_info":"San Antonio has a riverwalk, a shady carless oasis snaking along below street level and lined with restaurants and bars, a refuge from the heat and traffic of the surface. The banks of the river are fully paved, and it is crisscrossed with bridges. Little tour boats and water taxis chug along, ducks beg for […]","category_list":"Travelog<\/a>","comments_num":"0 comments","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogg.uit.no\/psv000\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogg.uit.no\/psv000\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogg.uit.no\/psv000\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogg.uit.no\/psv000\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/85"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogg.uit.no\/psv000\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=293"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogg.uit.no\/psv000\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":295,"href":"https:\/\/blogg.uit.no\/psv000\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293\/revisions\/295"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogg.uit.no\/psv000\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogg.uit.no\/psv000\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogg.uit.no\/psv000\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}