#1623 Reflections on the Nation of Texas

Listening to America

History, Politics, Unitedstates, Society & Culture, American

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 28 October 2024

⏱️ 56 minutes

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Summary

Clay discusses his foray into Texas on Phase Three of the great John Steinbeck Travels with Charley 2024 tour. How is Texas different from other states? Can anyone really eat at the Big Texas Steak Ranch and survive? Is the Cadillac Ranch near Amarillo as worthy as Carhenge in Alliance, Nebraska? Why are Texans nicer IN Texas than when they drive their giant white pickups into other states? The program includes Clay’s interlude in Birmingham, Alabama, where he toured the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, including an encounter with the actual steel bars of the jail where Martin Luther King wrote “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” Plus, Clay’s guide to the 2024 Presidential Election.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone and let me welcome you to this week's podcast edition of
0:03.8	listening to America. I'm Clay Jenkins and I'm in a hotel room somewhere in
0:07.2	Texas. What I've discovered is that I need whole days to sit in a coffee shop or
0:11.4	sit in a hotel lobby to write.
0:14.0	This experience has been so rich, so overwhelming.
0:17.8	It's not over yet.
0:19.0	I've had one of the greatest years of my life
0:21.5	beginning on April 27th.
0:22.9	You've been part of it.
0:23.7	Thanks for following along.
0:25.1	Thanks for your patience.
0:26.8	Please visit our site, L.T America.org,
0:29.6	sign up for the newsletter.
0:31.1	This is an extraordinary journey I'm having and it's the beginning of
0:34.3	several years of such journeys. I could not be more pleased. I'm a little
0:38.8	tired. I'll be ready to have Thanksgiving in my own home back in what what was it, North Dakota that I used to live.
0:45.0	I've been on the road more or less continuously since the last days of April and now I'm lost in Texas.
0:51.0	Texas, what a huge, strange, wonderful, exasperating and fabulous place Texas is.
0:59.3	Here's one of my discoveries, of course I'm operating from very little experience, but Texans seem nicer in Texas than they tend to seem elsewhere.
1:06.5	When I see Texas license plates in Colorado and California and Utah and Wyoming, I get a certain catch in my consciousness. and
1:15.0	I get a certain catch in my consciousness and I think here's a proud aggressive
1:18.0	alpha male Texan in a giant white pickup
	...

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