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© 2004 Barbara Davidson, The Dallas Morning News Introduction Essay for Texas 24/7 That Texas Mystique By Steve Blow It's a little embarrassing to recall that genre of old jokes known as "Texas brags." According to one of them, you should never ask a man where he's from. If he's from Texas, he'll tell you soon enough. And if he's not, you shouldn't embarrass him. Mercifully, jokes of that sort went out of vogue a good while back. But in truth, their sentiment lives on. Heaven help us, we're just flat proud to be Texans. Oh, we've got our worries. Remember the Alamo? That was Texas's first war for independence. Another one is under way right now. This is a war for the independence of Texas spirit and character in this cookie-cutter land. In other words, can Texas survive Starbucks? Can we hang on to our icehouses and chili parlors? We don't want to be the Clone Star State. For that matter, can Texas survive its own allure? The state is awash with transplants these days. They flow in from the north. They flow in from the south. Old-time Texans can hardly recognize the place. The corner café has turned into a taqueria. And "y'all" is slowly losing ground to "you guys," an abomination to many ears. (The taquerias we're warming up to.) Grudgingly, many Texans will admit that transplants have changed the place for the good. Knocked the corners off our chauvinism a bit. Put some zing in our fading cows-and-oil economy. But we fret about losing that Texas mystique. There's no denying the state has changed. The wildcatters striking it rich today are young high-tech entrepreneurs like Michael Dell and Mark Cuban. Republicans fully control state government for the first time in 130 years. Houston, a city that is infamous for its lack of zoning, has a revitalized downtown--thanks to some savvy, just-in-time city planning. Fort Worth just opened a nationally acclaimed modern art museum. And Big D has a flourishing rail transit system, of all things. Texas is a much more citified place now. Draw a triangle with Houston and San Antonio at the bottom and Dallas-Fort Worth at the top, and you've roped two-thirds of the population in just a little sliver of the state. We still love our ranching-and-roughnecking image, but the fact is that most Texans now ride herd over a cubicle. When we boot up, it's on a computer. But that doesn't tell the whole story, not by a long shot. That urban triangle may represent the economic heart of the state, but it doesn't begin to capture the enduring, epic heart of Texas. That lies out to the east, in the cathedral-like quiet of East Texas's piney woods. It lies to the west, in the barren, heart-breaking beauty of West Texas. It's the lonely highways of the Panhandle, the lively fiestas of South Texas, and the shrimp trawlers out on the Gulf. These are just some of the things we cherish. The pages that follow feature many more. Texas is a thousand miles across. And it's that many more from top to bottom. There's no measure of all that we hold dear, deep in the heart of Texas. Browse    View All    That Texas Mystique    Hearth & Home    Hard at Work    Texas at Play    Reason to Believe Photos: 148 Photographers: 52 Towns: 65

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