Houston Folk are Now in Charge of Texas, Should we be Worried? Ron Reynolds, Dallas Morning News
The city can be a very insular, self-centered place, unconcerned with the goings-on of those not within the gravitational pull of Loop 610.
Meh. The truth is Dallas is a self-centered city as well, only concerned about it's Cowboys (who reside in Arlington) and keeping up an image burnished by a long-ago television show that was really good, and really inaccurate regarding Dallas as a whole.
Part of the problem is that there's never been a "Houston" television show. If there was it would be fascinating, depicting the life of the unproductive class riding around on the light-rail system from brain-session to brain-session endlessly trying to figure out a way to glom onto the next taxpayer-subsidized project in order to put food on the table.
But, I digress....
Both Houston and Dallas are fine places to work, and horrid places to live.
Houston has sprawl and swamp-heat and gross traffic, coupled with really bad services and inept municipal government that has trouble figuring out how to handle basic services, like fixing pot-holes for example.
Dallas has sprawl and North Texas weather, which brings the dynamic of snow into the picture and inept municipal government that has trouble figuring out how to handle basic services, like fixing pot-holes for example.
The old lie is that Dallas is white-collar while Houston chugs along with it's blue-collar dynamic. The truth is not that simple. Both Houston and Dallas are ruled and controlled by a moneyed gentry, who are serviced by a courtier class whose sole job is getting themselves invited to parties on a semi-regular basis. You might know these people as "the media".
It's the media's job to prop up the gentry, what passes for nobility in Houston/Dallas, painting on them lavish praise and layers of respectability through the dodgy use of glossy pictorials about "best dressed" or "most philanthropic" or what not. What all this really means is that they have the money and connections to throw a helluva shin-dig at fancy places the writers wouldn't otherwise attend because they can't afford it.
Below the writers are the unproductive class. They typically come from some money, somewhere up the familial food chain, they typically don't have "jobs" in the traditional sense but have been declared "experts" in fields such as public transportation and urban planning because they either a.) once wrote a blog that had some pretty graphs attached to it, or b.) have hung around "think-tanks" for long enough that the stink of respectability clings to them like the smoke smell in your clothes after you've barbecued a rack of ribs.
The unproductive class is especially sneaky, because they don't have jobs they can spend all of their time helping the politicians figure out how to divert more of your money to the moneyed gentry through tax takings while trying to convince you that it's "for the children". Of course, when all of this turns out to be a boondoggle (see DART) they find someone to dutifully write a story about Dallas vs. Houston which gets the chattel all fired up and concerned that the sky is falling because Houston/Dallas has SOMETHING that Houston/Dallas doesn't have and it's threatening to blow Houston/Dallas' stink of world classiness into the garbage.
And, as we all know, losing world classiness is like losing a bond election. It will require Billions of dollars of self-sacrifice on your (not their) part to ever get it back.
It's the circle of Dallas/Houston Municipal life, and one of the keys to getting elected to local office is now to pledge fealty to the system.
From that perspective, Houston and Dallas are identical twins.
