Texan Tempest

As any Texan knows, the Lone Star State is the biggest, richest, toughest and most cultured in the land, with the prettiest women; Texans learn all this at their mothers' knees. But last week, in a free-swinging, heavy-handed piece of low humor, Esquire (circ. 819,000) took exception. The article, under the pen name Bernard Dorrity and the title "Let's Secede from Texas," described the state as a "geographical hemorrhoid." Its cotton land "is now poor and desolate," its grazing lands "worthless," its "mean, mangy and narrow" citizens are "boors when sober [and] downright dangerous when drunk." If Texas women "are pretty, they're Mexicans. If they look like horses, they're Texans . . ." Texas cowboys can't even ride horses; on the last U.S. equestrian Olympic team, the "members came from Connecticut, New Jersey and Pennsylvania."

No sooner had the first copies of Esquire reached Texas last week than columnists and editors all over the state let out a howl of protest--as Esquire had doubtless expected. The Houston Press streamed a banner across Page One: HEY, TEXANS! THEY'RE SNIPING AT us AGAIN!! It compared Author Dorrity to "a wino on an overdose of Sterno [who] lashes out at everything in sight ..." Said East Texas' Kilgore News-Herald: the article "sounds as if an agent for Joe Stalin wrote it." In the Dallas News, Columnist Paul Crume, carefully misspelling the author's name, wrote: "We think the thing to do is to laugh and take comfort in the fact that, since Esquire published the article, Mr. Dorrit didn't get much money for it . . . Esquire is one of those magazines where, when you've botched an article so badly that nobody else would look at it, you aren't ashamed to send it."

Many a good Texan agreed with Columnist Wes Izzard of the Amarillo Daily News: "No bunch of smut merchants can hurt Texas . . . They decided to insult somebody to get their magazine back in the limelight . . . Don't play into their hands by buying a copy." But such warnings did little good. When Esquire hit the stands, Texans flocked to buy it.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.