Well, it’s all over but the lying. It is pretty much official that Texas Gov. Rick “Good Hair” Perry will seek the GOP nomination for president. A spokesman for the state’s longest-serving governor — like the old Wolf Brand Chili commercial said “And that’s too long” — will make his announcement on Saturday somewhere at some kind of event full of Republicans.
The only good I can see come of this is if he eventually resigns as governor. I hope I hope I hope that doesn’t happen because he’s been elected president. I can’t take another term of a “Rexall Ranger,” what we used to call “drug store cowboys” or “goat ropers.” Oh, I know Perry was supposedly raised on a farm. He might have even been in FFA and have engaged in some of those supposed “Greenhorn initiations” with a chicken. Who knows what folks will find if they look far enough back. Why there was even this big rumor going around about five or six years back questioning the sexual orientation of both Perry and his Lite Gov. David Dewhurst. Whether any of it’s true or not, I don’t care. Well, maybe except the part about the chicken. Chickens are for eating, don’t you know?
We are going to hear a lot in days and weeks and months to come about how Perry practically reinvented this great state and put every last soul to work. I know that’s a lie because I was unemployed and sleeping in my pickup truck for a couple months under his governorship. Oh and he has done such a stellar job with immigration, hasn’t he? It was especially nice that he let those thousands of migrant workers come up here to Southeast Texas and put roofs on houses which were blown away by Rita and Ike. Let’s see what else he did. Oh, caused mayhem in the education system because he would rather “save a little for a rainy day” than make sure Texas schools had plenty of teachers. Need I go on? I think I will.
There are tons of issues that Perry ignored during subsequent legislative sessions such as the future of water in Texas, making sure Texas isn’t one big environmental s**thole. Instead, he declared that an emergency existed that pregnant women needed to see an ultrasound of their fetus because it just “might” change their mind. I’m not being judgmental. But I’m just saying.
We will hear a lot about this guy. Perry will have the Texas “Marlboro Man” mystique about him, for awhile at least. Let’s see, Perry would make, what, two Texas presidents who were male cheerleaders? Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Sometimes I wish I could just do a Rip Van Winkle and go to sleep for a long, long time. Unfortunately, when I woke up, things would probably be either the same, or perhaps even worse.
It was, sort of, by accident that I stayed at a hotel on Saturday that was just a block or two from Reliant Stadium in Houston. That was where our Texas Gov. Rick “Good Hair” Perry was holding a semi-large prayer meeting. I say semi-large, the semi-official draw to the free event at the Houston Texans football home was about 30,000. That is about 15,000 less than Joel Osteen preaches to in person at the Lakewood Church at what was once known as “The Summit” and “Compaq Center” which is, I am guessing, about 4 miles to the northeast as the crow — or white dove– flies. I must point out as well that I once saw the Grateful Dead in concert in The Summit. It was during a break to buy a very overpriced beer during that concert that the sweet lady selling me the brew told me out of nowhere: “You don’t look like you’d listen to the Grateful Dead. You look more like a Merle Haggard fan.” Well, I told the sweet lady, I am indeed a big Merle fan. In fact, I once helped Merle get out of jail after he got tanked up on Lone Star Drafts and some unknown black tablets in a bar up in Cut and Shoot, in Montgomery County or Liberty County or wherever, and he shot out every light bulb in the place and then went to shooting out car lights along Highway 105. If you see a crease on the Cut and Shoot city limit sign, just about halfway between the city sign and a smaller sign pointing out that Cut and Shoot is “a NRA All-American City” that was where Merle missed when I took the Colt .45 from his speeding hands just after he fired his last shot.
Now, everything I wrote after I wrote “I am indeed a big Merle fan.” is a lie although I did stop once at a bar in Cut and Shoot with my good friend, now gone for more than a decade, Waldo.
I am getting off track here, but needless to say, Rick Perry didn’t fill up Reliant Stadium with his bunch of shady preachers. I did walk down to the Metro rail stop just outside Reliant to catch a train. When I returned to Reliant and the old fading Astrodome from visiting the Houston Fire Museum and a very cool eatery called Natachee’s Supper and Punch, a fellow wearing a bunch of pins and ribbons, told me to “come on.” He meant for me to come with to the prayer meeting and this fellow added: “I was down at 9/11.” I guess he saw my El Paso Fire Department cap that my friend Rene gave me. I was down at Gee Dubya’s Ranch entrance outside of Crawford on 9/11 talking to some nervous Texas State Troopers. I don’t really know if homeboy who was going to the prayer meeting really had been at the World Trade Center or there abouts on 9/11. I have spent a lot of time around present and former military folks, both while serving in the Navy and as a writer who covered the military and veterans. If I was going to bet with myself, and I would probably lose at that, I’d have to wager that the fellow might have been at the trade center in his mind on 9/11. I remember getting back to the office that terrible morning after returning from the “Prairie Chapel Ranch” only to discover more than 300 New York and New Jersey firefighters were likely dead at Ground Zero. I couldn’t grasp that number because I once worked for a small fire department with only four stations, at the time, and a total of about 60 personnel.
I bring up all this malarkey about lies and the truth and the good truth and the bad truth and the ugly lies and the ugly truth. And so forth, Kurt Vonnegut!
What Rick Perry was trying to do leading a prayer meeting at the Reliant Stadium is beyond me. I think he’s got a bad case of the “cutes.” He is trying to be the cutest presidential candidate what’s never yet run. “Oh I got to me drag this thing out and who knows, I might follow the footsteps of that reprobate George Bush? Eeeeeee. Well, that isn’t how Perry talks. But it should be.”
I have nothing against prayer. And Ricky Boy was not doing his prayer meeting on behalf of the Texas State government. Still, we don’t know all the details as to who is paying for his security and whether or not those Houston police officers or Harris County deputy sheriffs who were out there on Fannin or just off the South Loop directing traffic. But we do know from what Perry and his preachers said, that they were talking up a storm about our government, our national government.
Furthermore, I can’t look into Rick Perry’s heart, into his soul, and see how much of his talking was about his own spirituality and how much was motivated to bring in the “Holy Rollers” who might, at the very least, help Perry get enough support for the GOP vice presidential candidate. I can’t see into Rick’s soul just as I can’t look into “Ground Zero’s” heart.
Are people jivin’ us? Are they telling us little white half-thruths? Beats me. I could have followed Ground Zero into the “Conniption” or whatever Perry called his thing. But I walked on down to the hotel and rested my weary body.
I have talked face-to-face with Rick Perry on several occasions. Each time I looked at him, and asked him a question, it seemed as if I could look right through him. Beyond that hair, beyond that weathered face and beyond that Texas A & M cheerleader “good looks” — I probably should have erased that — I have seen nothing but transparency. I am not talking about transparency as in an open book, I am talking about transparent as nobody’s home.
That is what I see in our coy boy governor who, in our Texas vulgar vernacular, I wish would s**t or get off the pot. Run for president. Run for dog catcher. Run for the border. Are you telling us the truth Ricky Boy? Would you know the truth if it slapped you in the face? I don’t know. I do know that if somehow Rick Perry, as close to nothing as anyone I have ever known, ends up being sworn in as president of these U.S. of A., then, I am going to need a change in scenery. A change in nationality.
