Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream (32 page)

A week after the game, Republican presidential candidate
George Bush came to the Midland-Odessa area for a campaign appearance. The scene on the tarmac at the airport wasn't as
feverish as the one at the parking lot of Ratliff Stadium, where
Permian fans had been lined up for two nights to buy tickets.
Some things, after all, would always be more important than
others. But it did have the aura of a Friday morning pep rally.

Shortly before noon the parking lot outside the south terminal was filled with people carrying cardboard signs that read
MIDLAND LOVES BUSH or Moto LOVES BUSH. There were little
boys dressed in white shirts and blue ties, and high school girls
wearing lovely red velvet dresses with white shoes. There were
baby strollers decorated with American flags. And there was a
whole bus full of kids from Midland Baptist Temple School, the
girls in red dress uniforms that went to the knee and the boys
in blue ties and red cardigan sleeveless sweaters that made
them look grandfatherly. There was a smattering of people in
cowboy hats, and a man in a PHILLIPS 66 cap, and another man
who wore a military-style cap that said BRAZOS VALLEY WAR
GAMES. When he took it off during the rally to put on a free
one that said BusH/QUAYLE 88, he didn't look any different.

Cheerleaders from Midland High milled about in their uniforms, which made them look a little like old-fashioned movie
ushers, and in the middle of it all sat a red Mercedes convertible
with a paper sign taped to the side: LEE HOMECOMING DUCHESSES WELCOME HOME GEORGE AND BARBARA BUSH.

There were almost no blacks or Hispanics in the audience.
There were no signs of poverty, no signs of homelessness, no
signs of drug abuse, no signs of the social fissures that were
tearing apart America's urban centers to the east and west. The
country was perfect and unblemished on this day. As the crowd
eagerly awaited the arrival of Air Force II, it snacked on the free
hot dogs and cups of Coke that were neatly laid out on long
picnic tables sprinkled with brimming bowls of mustard and
onions. Everything was neat and orderly. Everything you could
have wanted was there.

As the time drew near, the Midland High and Midland Lee
bands moved past a fence onto the runway. The Midland High
band played "Deep in the Heart of Texas," then "Come a Little Bit Closer" to the accompaniment of hundreds of little American flags bobbing up and down. The cheerleaders erupted into
a spontaneous little cheer of "Midland High, yeah, Midland
High!" and then Air Force II came into view.

"There he is, the next president of the United States!" said
the emcee of the rally. "Let's go! We want George! We want
George!"

"We want George! We want George!"

"Come on, West Texas, louder!"

"We want George! We want George!"

The excitement was in part due to Bush's being something of
a native son. After his graduation from Yale he and his wife
had moved to Odessa, where Bush worked as a salesman and
clerk for an oil field supply company. They lived in Odessa for
about a year in a little shotgun house on Seventh Street that was
next to a whorehouse. They became quite popular, which could
perhaps be attributed to their down-ho►ne personalities, or to
the fact they had one of the few working indoor toilets on the
street. Bush had then moved to Midland, where he got into the
independent oil business, and lived there for about ten years.

Many in the audience were there because they considered
Bush's visit a kind of proud homecoming, his visit a claim to
fame to an area of the country that most people had to look up
in an atlas to find out where the hell it was. But beyond all that
there was something in the air, an outpouring that seemed unusually powerful, almost desperate.

The Lee and Midland High bands both broke into "Deep in
the Heart of Texas." Bush, wearing a blue suit, stepped off the
plane onto the gangplank and for the briefest of moments
looked like Notre Dame coach Lou Holtz coming home after
leading the Irish to a national championship. He started waving. In return, all the little American flags and the handmade
signs started bobbing up and down again.

By the standards of the national press, Bush said virtually
nothing to those gathered at the airport in Midland, Texas. It
was simply another campaign stop, another orchestrated mo ment; the only difference, as one correspondent wearily put it,
was that this particular rally had two high school bands instead
of one playing at full throttle. Bush's speech contained nothing
newsworthy about drug policy, or Nicaragua, or the Federal
Reserve, or balancing the budget, or social ills, or the homeless.
But no one cared. They weren't there to listen about problems.

Bush said everything, everything that the people assembled
at the airport wanted to hear, so tired had they grown of the
litany of how American education was failing, how the Japanese
were taking over, how America couldn't compete anymore,
couldn't feed its own anymore, wasn't strong anymore, just
wasn't any damn good anymore. In his simple remarks he confirmed for them that America was still great, still number one
in the weekly top twenty poll, whatever the threat of the Japanese and the Germans and OPEC. He also confirmed for them
that what they believed in, what they cared about, was the very
essence of what it meant to he an American. It took almost no
time for him to get his astonishingly simple message across.

"I believe that I am on the side of the American people and
the state of Texas in terms of values!"

The crowd erupted in cheers, and the cheers only intensified
as he listed some of those values: prayer in the schools, the right
to own it gun, the outrageousness of furloughing dangerous
prisoners, particularly dangerous-looking black ones like Willie
Horton. He took out the dreaded I. word and planted it
squarely on the forehead of his opponent, Michael Dukakis.

"I am not going to be deterred by one or two liberal columnists or the liberal governor of Massachusetts!"

The word came out with a sneering nastiness, as though he
were spitting out it rancid piece of food, and it successfully
conveyed the desired effect: being it liberal wasn't just a political state of mind, but was something threatening, something
dangerous.

"Texas is on the way back!"

It was an absolutely mystifying statement given t,ie precipitous drop in oil prices at that very moment and news the same week that yet another Texas bank, MCorp, had announced that
it could not go on unless it received a billion-dollar bailout from
the FDIC. The announcement meant that nine of the state's ten
largest banking organizations now needed an aggregate sum of
money from public and private sources well into the tens of
billions to stay afloat. The problems of MCorp and the other
banks were nothing, of course, compared to the S & L crisis,
which according to one estimate was going to take $65 billion
to solve. But it didn't matter.

People liked hearing that Texas was back, that they were
tough and could take it and were up on their feet again. Fact
and fiction merged. They liked George Bush in the same way
they absolutely worshiped Ronald Reagan, not because of the
type of America that Reagan actually created for them but because of the type of America he so vividly imagined. As Tony
Chavez pointed out, it was an amazing illusion, as contradictory
as Reagan himself becoming the great promoter of the family
despite his own life as a divorce and a father whose children
hated him, as contradictory as Bush's passing himself off as a
down-to-earth Texan despite an upbringing in the ultra-rich
ozone of Greenwich, Connecticut, followed by sojourns at the
equally elite Andover and Yale. There were more cheers, more
frantic wavings of tiny flags.

"Thank you for the magnificent welcome home. I'm glad to
he back. God bless you."

The two bands once again broke into "Deep in the Heart of
Texas." The five hundred or so people who had come out for
the five-minute speech then left to go home, happy and satisfied. In that brief interplay, it was easy to see why the election
was over. Dukakis, with his painfully methodical, low-key approach, didn't have a prayer.

Bush then left to give a speech at the Petroleum Museum to
an audience of independent oilmen. He talked about his time
in Midland and his wife Barbara's "world record as the mother
that watched the most Little League games." He talked about a
community pulling together in the fifties when times were not simply tough but "pretty darn tough." Mostly he talked about
"values," the most important buzzword to he added to the lexicon of American politics in the 1988 election.

"My values have not changed a bit since I was your neighbor
in the fifties. My values are values like everyone here that I
think of: faith, family, and freedom, love of country and hope
for the future. "Texas values. Some just call it just plain common
sense.

"I am an optimist and I'd much rather go around the United
States of America talking about how things are on the move
and that we can do better ... than in telling everybody how sad
everything is because my faith in this country has never varied
We I learned from many of you what it is to take a risk and
build something and to get out there and do something for the
community.

"I've stood shoulder to shoulder with many people here today in starting the first YMCA in Midland, Texas, and then let
that liberal governor ridicule me about a thousand points of
light but it is neighbor helping neighbor, it is community, and
Odessa and Midland stand for community and we are right!"

It was the same thing he had done at the airport. He created
an image of a country that was still as good, as fundamentally
sound as it had been in the fifties, when Bush and thousands of
others had watched the American Dream blossom before their
shining, ever-hopeful eyes, days when the United States produced 44 percent of the world's oil, when the most dominant
force affecting price was the Texas Railroad Commission and
not OPEC since there was no OPEC, days of heaven that no
longer existed.

Their belief in him seemed ironic, perhaps even crazy. Far
from blossoming, the economy of Midland-Odessa had fallen
apart during the Reagan-Bush administration, and it was hard
to think of any other single area of the country that had suffered as much. The price of oil had plummeted, and there were
theories that this had happened because of an orchestrated
maneuver by the Reagan administration, in concert with the Saudis, to reduce oil prices as a way of stimulating economic
growth. If that was true, Bush was part of an administration
that, far from protecting the oil industry, had pulled the rug
out from under it.

The estimated drop in spot oil prices in 1986, from about $24
a barrel to $8 a barrel, resulted in a savings to consumers nationwide of about $200 million a day. With a 2.5 percent drop
in the consumer price index, everyone around the country had
a great deal more money to spend, except in Midland-Odessa
and other oil-producing regions, where life under the ReaganBush administration became as bleak as it had been during the
Depression.

The statistics were numbing. In 1986 unemployment in
Odessa shot up to 20 percent. The number of bankruptcies
filed with the federal court in Midland went up by 65 percent.
The price of housing in the Midland-Odessa area fell the most
of any area in the nation, 11.4 percent. More gripping than the
statistics were the images: hundreds of people waiting outside
the Permian Bank in Odessa after it had failed to see if they
could get their money out; a row of once-proud oil field workers who never in their lives had dreamed of applying for unemployment stretching down the block like a bread line; an
FDIC auction featuring the complete inventory of a failed Toyota dealership-14 mobile homes and more than 150 cars and
trucks; a full-page newspaper ad by Fannie Mae advertising
great deals on sixty-eight houses that were in foreclosure-not
the lavish palaces that everyone associated with the Texas oil
boom but starter homes bought by people trying to grab a piece
of the dream.

And yet when it came to the election none of the devastation seemed to matter. "The Republicans have done nothing
to help the Texas oilman for the last eight years," said Clayton Williams, a Midland oilman. "But when it comes down to
voting for a liberal versus a conservative, most oilmen are
conservative.

"If other oilmen are like me, they're probably going to bitch and scream and moan. And then go ahead and vote our
principles-conservative."

Voting on principles was hardly a new phenomenon, but it
seemed to go a step further in 1988. In Odessa and Midland,
as in other places, liberalism had come to be perceived not as a
political belief but as something unpatriotic and anti-American,
something that threatened the very soul of the hardworking
whites who had built this country and made it great. And
Dukakis, by the very way he looked and acted, embodied every
bad stereotype of a liberal-brooding, clenched, frowning,
swarthy, hairy, a man who came across as one gigantic, furrowed eyebrow.

As election day neared in Odessa, the antagonism toward
Dukakis and all that he represented became more and more
venomous. Ever since the college was built for the Pennsylvania
Methodists in the 1880s, there had been nothing but distrust
for Yankees in Odessa. And Dukakis was as Yankee as they
came, from Massachusetts, or Taxachusetts as it was derisively
called, with a Harvard background, surrounded by Harvard
people who all spoke high-and-mighty Yankee talk and treated
simple, earnest people like the citizens of Odessa with as much
respect as they did the hind rear of a donkey. The tone of the
comments and the campaign literature about him went far beyond simple dislike for a presidential candidate because he was
a Democrat. Even the jokes about him seemed bitterly cruel.