Texas Chronicles

I was in Texas for a friend’s wedding a few weeks ago.

In a 1960 essay for National Review, Joan Didion lambasted what she viewed as typical European criticisms of the United States, describing a Times Literary Supplement special number on the subject as “an indelibly British blend of gross clichés, vapidity, and startling misconceptions about the nature of American experience—one more round in that old Anglo-French game, Understanding America.” This author is neither English nor French, but a few weeks ago, I was in Texas for a friend’s wedding and found myself oscillating between admiration and unease.

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Arriving in the US is always memorable. The walk from the plane contains a noticeable amount of water bottle-filling stations. I think I saw four before arriving in the immigration hall, where a flag befitting HMS Victory at the Battle of Trafalgar hangs from the ceiling, as is usually the case in American airports. Then, there is the customary one-and-a-half-hour wait to get through the checkpoint. No more than 60% of the desks are staffed every time I have been in a US immigration hall, presumably causing said delay. Once at the desk, the Department of Homeland Security takes my fingerprints and snaps a photo. A few questions are asked, such as the reason for visiting and address while in the country. The officer chastises me for having put down the hotel name instead of its address, and, for a moment, the tone shifts, resembling how a police officer might question someone suspected of a crime. Nonetheless, I am let through.

I have noticed that American citizens do not wait as long in the immigration hall. They require less scrutiny to pass immigration, but they also benefit from more open desks despite faster processing time per individual. I have, moreover, heard a woman’s voice declare over loudspeakers that US citizens can request to delete the photos taken of them at the immigration checkpoint.

This discrepancy is more than bureaucratic. It is a demonstration of power. What is being communicated is that we, the lucky ones in the hall, are entering the Indispensable Nation. Walking out of Houston International Airport, I feel like a Frankish tribesman, an ally of Rome but still a barbarian.

On the shuttle bus to the rental car garage, I feel ashamed that I have been overwhelmed by the United States’ display of power. My girlfriend is clutching my hand. It calms me.

Our grey Toyota Corolla Cross glides down the road towards downtown. Large flags are visible on both sides of the highway. Some fly at half mast to commemorate Jimmy Carter—others do not. The US flags look particularly imposing in the afternoon breeze. The sounds of Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter from the car speakers add to the sense of grandeur, and I again feel the weight of America coming over me.

Should I not? The United States exerts tremendous influence worldwide, perhaps even more than many US citizens coasting through immigration realise. In Europe, culture, food, sports, and politics are all becoming Americanised. Almost all the movies I watch, songs I listen to and video games I played when I was younger are from the US. For now, I cannot escape feeling impressed. Things do, indeed, seem bigger in Texas.

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The wedding day is here. Well, actually, it’s the second wedding day. My friend and his fiancée already tied the knot in a quaint outdoor ceremony last June—held on a meadow under the sun, the Nordic weather unusually forgiving. Naturally, however, as their marriage is progressive, vows are required to be recited on both Swedish and American territory.

This second wedding day is held in various locations across the Lower Rio Grande Valley in southern Texas. The ceremony takes place in Brownsville, where I, in my exalted role as best man, carry the rings. It is not lost on me that this duty is usually reserved for babies or pets. There is a three-hour break, after which we head to Weslaco for the party. As for the venue, it is the opposite of a Swedish meadow. Suffice it to say that I count 29 chandeliers and enough flowers to fill a small room.

It would be easy to criticise such a display as one of American decadence, but there is no denying that the core of this day is love. The first dance is beautiful, the bridal pair descending from opposite staircases, running into each other’s arms as smoke from two fog machines slides across the chequered floor.

It is quite peculiar to watch someone I met 15 years ago dance with his new wife in this palace on the other side of the world. I think the peculiarity of the situation makes it even more powerful—a sort of homage to internationalism in times of shrinking global ties.

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As our grey Toyota Corolla Cross pulls out of the hotel parking lot, beginning the four-hour journey from Harlingen to San Antonio, Donald Trump is inaugurated as President of the United States. His second term feels different, focused on the task at hand. The proposed liquidation of USAID, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and other government agencies is motivated by a larger plan to shrink the federal government to stop “wasteful” spending and align the state apparatus with Trump’s personal goals. The political motivations are obviously nefarious. But so, too, is the economic rationale because it looks to remove the state’s responsibility to protect its citizens under the guise of improving public finances.

Using budget deficits as an argument to further this endeavour is nothing new. Less than a decade after the end of the American Civil War (1861–1865), white supremacist movements, including the Ku Klux Klan, used violence and intimidation to seize power in the South again. One of the more effective arguments these racists used to legitimise the “redemption” of their states to the Northern public and the federal government was that the overthrown Reconstruction administrations were loaning and spending too much money.

While it is true that southern states upped their deficits during Reconstruction, the money was needed to fund public schools—which had not existed before—hospitals and to rebuild infrastructure. Southern states collected almost no tax revenue before the Civil War. Wealthy plantation owners had provided for themselves, self-assessing the value of their property to pay no taxes, condemning the lower classes, freed and enslaved, to poverty. To pacify the mass of impoverished white people, racial animosity was cultivated. The great American paradox is that ”all men are created equal” depends on the inequality of others, of the slaves, or, more recently, minorities and immigrants.

We are only in San Antonio for a day, so there is plenty of time to see the River Walk, the Alamo, and the Tower of the Americas. The entry fee for the latter attraction is $35 per person. We walk by a building where Barack Obama, then a US Senator for Illinois, held a speech during the 2008 Texas Democratic presidential primary. He would win the day, and later the presidency by running a campaign based on achieving meaningful, long-term change in a time of crisis. Ultimately, he failed to deliver.

Political polarisation in the US has only increased since Obama’s time in office, with Texas a pertinent example of the country’s urban-rural divide. The state voted Republican as a whole, but five of its six largest cities were blue in 2024, including Austin—the Texan capital. Walking on a street behind Allens Boots, one of Austin’s premier western wear shops, I see a Moms Against Ted Cruz sign staked into a lawn. A few miles up South Congress Avenue, at the State Capitol, the House will convene at 2 pm. I sit in the gallery and watch as the lawmakers say a prayer and pledge allegiance to the American and Texan flags before proceedings commence. “God bless Texas,” someone shouts from out of view. This is not the same building where Texas declared its secession from the United States in 1861 to uphold slavery. That site burnt down 20 years later. The new chambers have, however, seen the passage of numerous anti-trans laws, a near-total ban on abortion and the creation of a severely regressive tax system.

On the road from Austin to Dallas, the final stop on our journey, we pass through areas that, frankly, are in a state of decay—old paint discoloured by the sun, windows boarded up. Strikingly, these structures have big, shiny trucks parked in front, mostly likely paid for with credit card debt. The awe I felt at Houston International Airport is long gone.

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Amy Goldstein’s Janesville: An American Story is an unlikely source of empirical evidence against negative views of human nature. The book follows how Janesville, Wisconsin, is devastated by the closure of a General Motors plant in 2008, which employs many of the city’s inhabitants. The most compelling takeaway is how quickly Janesville’s social cohesion disintegrates when economic insecurity increases. Within five years of the plant shutting down, a city known for its communal spirit and low levels of class antagonism becomes politically polarised and highly unequal. This could be interpreted as highlighting people’s selfish tendencies. I think it shows the opposite—that people want to cooperate and help others but are constrained by the precarious conditions imposed on them by, in this case, a global financial crisis.

The sun is high as we exit Interstate 35, and our snack bag is depleted. Following Main Street into downtown Dallas, we arrive at the John F. Kennedy Memorial around noon. The monument, designed by the architect Philip Johnson, stands alone, solemn. It takes 2 minutes to walk to Dealey Plaza, where JFK was assassinated on 22 November 1963—shot from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository building by Lee Harvey Oswald. The two points of impact are marked with large Xs on Elm Street. Later, we will drive over them.

JFK is often mythologised as a symbol of a more hopeful and united America. A time before the great cultural and social upheavals of the 1960s thrust the contradictions of “all men are created equal” into the mainstream. Today, 62 years later, the spell enchanting the American Dream has been broken. You can feel in the air. Particularly, I sense it at the George W. Bush Presidential Center in north Dallas. Inside the main exhibition hall, sponsored by Boeing, large displays on the Iraq War and the War on Terror under the heading “Promoting Freedom Abroad” line the walls. They appear disingenuous at best. Bush the Younger represents a divided America, where ordinary people are squeezed harder and harder.

There will be no verdict, just an admission: The US now seems to me ordinary. The large flags on the side of the highways no longer look impressive, and the affluence appears less extreme. Some Americans embrace their country’s myths of exceptionalism, negative or positive—others do not. At heart, people are just people, regardless of how quickly they pass through immigration.

// Adrian