Friday Night Lights

by H. G. Bissinger

  As the time drew near, the Midland High and Midland Lee bands moved past a fence onto the runway. The Midland High band played “Deep in the Heart of Texas,” then “Come a Little Bit Closer” to the accompaniment of hundreds of little American flags bobbing up and down. The cheerleaders erupted into a spontaneous little cheer of “Midland High, yeah, Midland High!” and then Air Force II came into view.

  “There he is, the next president of the United States!” said the emcee of the rally. “Let’s go! We want George! We want George!”

  “We want George! We want George!”

  “Come on, West Texas, louder!”

  “We want George! We want George!”

  The excitement was in part due to Bush’s being something of a native son. After his graduation from Yale he and his wife had moved to Odessa, where Bush worked as a salesman and clerk for an oil field supply company. They lived in Odessa for about a year in a little shotgun house on Seventh Street that was next to a whorehouse. They became quite popular, which could perhaps be attributed to their down-home personalities, or to the fact they had one of the few working indoor toilets on the street. Bush had then moved to Midland, where he got into the independent oil business, and lived there for about ten years.

  Many in the audience were there because they considered Bush’s visit a kind of proud homecoming, his visit a claim to fame to an area of the country that most people had to look up in an atlas to find out where the hell it was. But beyond all that there was something in the air, an out-pouring that seemed unusually powerful, almost desperate.

  The Lee and Midland High bands both broke into “Deep in the Heart of Texas.” Bush, wearing a blue suit, stepped off the plane onto the gangplank and for the briefest of moments looked like Notre Dame coach Lou Holtz coming home after leading the Irish to a national championship. He started waving. In return, all the little American flags and the handmade signs started bobbing up and down again.

  By the standards of the national press, Bush said virtually nothing to those gathered at the airport in Midland, Texas. It was simply another campaign stop, another orchestrated moment; the only difference, as one correspondent wearily put it, was that this particular rally had two high school bands instead of one playing at full throttle. Bush’s speech contained nothing newsworthy about drug policy, or Nicaragua, or the Federal Reserve, or balancing the budget, or social ills, or the homeless. But no one cared. They weren’t there to listen about problems.

  Bush said everything, everything that the people assembled at the airport wanted to hear, so tired had they grown of the litany of how American education was failing, how the Japanese were taking over, how America couldn’t compete anymore, couldn’t feed its own anymore, wasn’t strong anymore, just wasn’t any damn good anymore. In his simple remarks he confirmed for them that America was still great, still number one in the weekly top twenty poll, whatever the threat of the Japanese and the Germans and OPEC. He also confirmed for them that what they believed in, what they cared about, was the very essence of what it meant to be an American. It took almost no time for him to get his astonishingly simple message across.

  “I believe that I am on the side of the American people and the state of Texas in terms of values!”

  The crowd erupted in cheers, and the cheers only intensified as he listed some of those values: prayer in the schools, the right to own a gun, the outrageousness of furloughing dangerous prisoners, particularly dangerous-looking black ones like Willie Horton. He took out the dreaded L word and planted it squarely on the forehead of his opponent, Michael Dukakis.

  “I am not going to be deterred by one or two liberal columnists or the liberal governor of Massachusetts!”

  The word came out with a sneering nastiness, as though he were spitting out a rancid piece of food, and it successfully conveyed the desired effect: being a liberal wasn’t just a political state of mind, but was something threatening, something dangerous.

  “Texas is on the way back!”

  It was an absolutely mystifying statement given the precipitous drop in oil prices at that very moment and news the same week that yet another Texas bank, MCorp, had announced that it could not go on unless it received a billion-dollar bailout from the FDIC. The announcement meant that nine of the state’s ten largest banking organizations now needed an aggregate sum of money from public and private sources well into the tens of billions to stay afloat. The problems of MCorp and the other banks were nothing, of course, compared to the S & L crisis, which according to one estimate was going to take $65 billion to solve. But it didn’t matter.

  People liked hearing that Texas was back, that they were tough and could take it and were up on their feet again. Fact and fiction merged. They liked George Bush in the same way they absolutely worshiped Ronald Reagan, not because of the type of America that Reagan actually created for them but because of the type of America he so vividly imagined. As Tony Chavez pointed out, it was an amazing illusion, as contradictory as Reagan himself becoming the great promoter of the family despite his own life as a divorcé and a father whose children hated him, as contradictory as Bush’s passing himself off as a down-to-earth Texan despite an upbringing in the ultra-rich ozone of Greenwich, Connecticut, followed by sojourns at the equally elite Andover and Yale. There were more cheers, more frantic wavings of tiny flags.

  “Thank you for the magnificent welcome home. I’m glad to be back. God bless you.”

  The two bands once again broke into “Deep in the Heart of Texas.” The five hundred or so people who had come out for the five-minute speech then left to go home, happy and satisfied. In that brief interplay, it was easy to see why the election was over. Dukakis, with his painfully methodical, low-key approach, didn’t have a prayer.

  Bush then left to give a speech at the Petroleum Museum to an audience of independent oilmen. He talked about his time in Midland and his wife Barbara’s “world record as the mother that watched the most Little League games.” He talked about a community pulling together in the fifties when times were not simply tough but “pretty darn tough.” Mostly he talked about “values,” the most important buzz-word to be added to the lexicon of American politics in the 1988 election.

  “My values have not changed a bit since I was your neighbor in the fifties. My values are values like everyone here that I think of: faith, family, and freedom, love of country and hope for the future. Texas values. Some just call it just plain common sense.

  “I am an optimist and I’d much rather go around the United States of America talking about how things are on the move and that we can do better . . . than in telling everybody how sad everything is because my faith in this country has never varied since I learned from many of you what it is to take a risk and build something and to get out there and do something for the community.

  “I’ve stood shoulder to shoulder with many people here today in starting the first YMCA in Midland, Texas, and then let that liberal governor ridicule me about a thousand points of light but it is neighbor helping neighbor, it is community, and Odessa and Midland stand for community and we are right!”

  It was the same thing he had done at the airport. He created an image of a country that was still as good, as fundamentally sound as it had been in the fifties, when Bush and thousands of others had watched the American Dream blossom before their shining, ever-hopeful eyes, days when the United States produced 44 percent of the world’s oil, when the most dominant force affecting price was the Texas Railroad Commission and not OPEC since there was no OPEC, days of heaven that no longer existed.

  Their belief in him seemed ironic, perhaps even crazy. Far from blossoming, the economy of Midland-Odessa had fallen apart during the Reagan-Bush administration, and it was hard to think of any other single area of the country that had suffered as much. The price of oil had plummeted, and there were theories that this had happened because of an orchestrated maneuver by the Reagan administration, in concert with the Saudis, to reduce oil prices as a way of stimu
lating economic growth. If that was true, Bush was part of an administration that, far from protecting the oil industry, had pulled the rug out from under it.

  The estimated drop in spot oil prices in 1986, from about $24 a barrel to $8 a barrel, resulted in a savings to consumers nationwide of about $200 million a day. With a 2.5 percent drop in the consumer price index, everyone around the country had a great deal more money to spend, except in Midland-Odessa and other oil-producing regions, where life under the Reagan-Bush administration became as bleak as it had been during the Depression.

  The statistics were numbing. In 1986 unemployment in Odessa shot up to 20 percent. The number of bankruptcies filed with the federal court in Midland went up by 65 percent. The price of housing in the Midland-Odessa area fell the most of any area in the nation, 11.4 percent. More gripping than the statistics were the images: hundreds of people waiting outside the Permian Bank in Odessa after it had failed to see if they could get their money out; a row of once-proud oil field workers who never in their lives had dreamed of applying for unemployment stretching down the block like a bread line; an FDIC auction featuring the complete inventory of a failed Toyota dealership—14 mobile homes and more than 150 cars and trucks; a full-page newspaper ad by Fannie Mae advertising great deals on sixty-eight houses that were in foreclosure—not the lavish palaces that everyone associated with the Texas oil boom but starter homes bought by people trying to grab a piece of the dream.

  And yet when it came to the election none of the devastation seemed to matter. “The Republicans have done nothing to help the Texas oilman for the last eight years,” said Clayton Williams, a Midland oilman. “But when it comes down to voting for a liberal versus a conservative, most oilmen are conservative.

  “If other oilmen are like me, they’re probably going to bitch and scream and moan. And then go ahead and vote our principles—conservative.”

  Voting on principles was hardly a new phenomenon, but it seemed to go a step further in 1988. In Odessa and Midland, as in other places, liberalism had come to be perceived not as a political belief but as something unpatriotic and anti-American, something that threatened the very soul of the hardworking whites who had built this country and made it great. And Dukakis, by the very way he looked and acted, embodied every bad stereotype of a liberal—brooding, clenched, frowning, swarthy, hairy, a man who came across as one gigantic, furrowed eyebrow.

  As election day neared in Odessa, the antagonism toward Dukakis and all that he represented became more and more venomous. Ever since the college was built for the Pennsylvania Methodists in the 1880s, there had been nothing but distrust for Yankees in Odessa. And Dukakis was as Yankee as they came, from Massachusetts, or Taxachusetts as it was derisively called, with a Harvard background, surrounded by Harvard people who all spoke high-and-mighty Yankee talk and treated simple, earnest people like the citizens of Odessa with as much respect as they did the hind rear of a donkey. The tone of the comments and the campaign literature about him went far beyond simple dislike for a presidential candidate because he was a Democrat. Even the jokes about him seemed bitterly cruel.

  What do Dukakis and panty hose have in common?

  They both irritate Bush.

  What’s twelve inches long and hangs in front of an asshole?

  Dukakis’s necktie.

  During the election season a so-called Michael Dukakis Fact Sheet started making the rounds in Odessa. The pamphlet, drawn up by a group called the League of Prayer in Montgomery, Alabama, and handed out at a local doctor’s office, brutally condemned Dukakis as a pro-choice, pro-homosexual advocate of sodomy who was soft on defense and soft on criminals and who sought “to rid America of its Godly heritage.” The pamphlet described him as a “cardcarrying member of the ACLU,” which it said was the equivalent of being “against everything moral, ethical, righteous, holy, Christian, Godly and patriotic.” Homosexuals, the pamphlet said, were nothing more than a “minuscule band of sexual perverts.”

  In the Permian locker room, players old enough to vote for the first time talked about Dukakis as the “homo” president and depicted a world with him as president in which it would no longer be possible to exercise the inalienable right of taking a forty-four magnum to blow the brains out of a criminal robbing or physically assaulting you.

  The comments about him depicted a man who would not simply take the country in a different direction but would threaten its very sanctity, its very core. They translated into an almost irrational fear—fear that Dukakis would shut down the military, fear that he would take away the right of people to protect themselves against violent intruders, fear that he would ruin the economy, fear that the only people who would benefit from his administration would be the poor, while they, the hardworking guts of the country, got sold down the river.

  “Boy, I think he would be the worst thing that could ever happen to this country,” said city councilman Dub Kennedy, who found Dukakis’s membership in the ACLU abhorrent.

  “I think he’s the biggest liberal I know running for president,” said Ken Scates, who had lived in West Texas for almost forty years and had built up his own oil field service company from scratch. “All I know is what I have read in Reader’s Digest and other things. I think he’s too liberal. He’d shut the military down. Inflation would be bad. The only person that I see voting for him are other liberals and welfare recipients.”

  “First of all I’m a gun collector,” said former city councilman Vern Foreman. “You tell me I can’t have any guns, you’re gonna see a helluva fight. I don’t see how anybody could vote for Dukakis. The son-of-a-bitch is too damn liberal.”

  Certainly it would have been hard for Dukakis ever to play well in this part of the country. West Texas had a history of staunch conservatism, not to mention a virulent dislike of government as practiced by Democrats. In the fifties and sixties the John Birch Society had had a significant membership in Odessa. The last time the county had voted for a Democratic presidential candidate was in 1948, when it went for Harry Truman. If the politics was conservative, so obviously were the attitudes.

  In 1982, the mayor of Odessa proclaimed Decency Awareness Week and asked citizens “to give appropriate recognition to this week by suitable observances and prayer and supplication to Almighty God to deliver our City, State and Nation from the threat of public decadence and crimes of indecency.”

  In the early eighties, a group called Odessans for Decency had been formed. The group avowed a four-point platform—stamping out abortion, pornography, and homosexuality, and establishing prayer in the schools. For a time it was quite popular and quite effective. It engineered a successful campaign to force an adult bookstore out of the downtown. It successfully lobbied the city council to block a cable company from offering a sexually explicit program called Escapade. It also led a spirited campaign to prevent Ozzy Osbourne from playing a concert in Odessa in 1983 because of the British rock star’s outlandish behavior, which had included biting the head off a bat as well as performing songs that allegedly encouraged Satan worship, but a federal judge ruled that Osbourne had a contractual right to play here.

  Joe Seay, one of the founders of Odessans for Decency, said the group then asked its followers, who he said numbered twelve thousand, “to pray that God himself would prevent Ozzy Osbourne from coming to Odessa, Texas.” Osbourne ended up canceling because he had the flu.

  In 1987 Seay stepped down as president of Odessans for Decency to found a group called the Christian Voting Bloc, an organization aiming to promote political candidates with Christian values. During election time he sent out a list of endorsements to a secret mailing list of twelve hundred registered voters. Influential Democrats in town, much to their chagrin, believed the group had significant influence. The platform of the Christian Voting Bloc was much the same as that of Odessans for Decency—fighting pornography and working to curtail any special rights for homosexuals.

  In the latter part of 1988, when a state district judge from Dallas
said he gave a murderer a lighter sentence because the two victims were homosexual, Seay was one of the few to support him publicly.

  “We’d work to keep him in office,” Seay told members of the press. “We need more like him.”

  When George Bush came to Midland-Odessa he didn’t go quite as far, but it was the family and school prayer and allegiance to the flag that he highlighted over and over. As historian Garry Wills pointed out, he seemed as closely linked to Pat Robertson as he did to Ronald Reagan, and it was a strategy that worked brilliantly.

  Dukakis forces in Texas had thought they could win the state on the basis of the economy. They thought that the issues of gun control and the Pledge of Allegiance were emotional fads that would quickly die out. They never thought that Bush’s rhetoric, a kinder, gentler version of the “Morton Downey Show,” would have much lasting effect. They patiently waited for the campaign to get back to the greater good of forging practical solutions to massive problems, but that shift never took place.

  Perhaps just once Dukakis should have left the rarefied atmosphere of Boston and Harvard that seemed to entrap him no matter where he was, hopped in a car by himself, and taken a drive down one of those lonely, flat-as-a-pancake roads to the gleaming lights of a Friday night football game. As in ancient Rome, any road he chose would have gotten him there. He could have pulled down his tie and unbuttoned his collar. He could have gone to the concession stand to eat a frito pie and a chili dog and then wash it all down with one of those dill pickles that came carefully wrapped in silver foil. Instead of keeping track of the score, he could have sat in a corner of the stands to listen to the conversations around him as well as take note of the prayers both before the game and after. He could have seen what people were wearing, observed how they interacted with their children, listened to the songs the bands were playing, watched those balloons float into the air like doves of peace, and let the perfume of the Pepettes and the Golden Girls flow sweetly into his nostrils. He could have counted how many blacks were there, and how many Hispanics.