Texas’s Cities: One Big, Dysfunctional Family
CHRONICLING THE RIVALRIES OF HOUSTON, DALLAS, FORT WORTH, SAN ANTONIO, AND AUSTIN.
My Texas experience is only about a decade and a half long, so a lot of the rivalry stuff between Texas cities was nothing I had experienced, or thought.
However, I have long made note of one rivalry. That being what comes across, at times, as Fort Worth's sort of, well, inferiority complex, caused by Dallas being the big kid on the Metroplex block, with Dallas getting bizarrely demonized by many Fort Worthers.
Three paragraphs from the dysfunctional article, with the first paragraph mentioning the Fort Worth hating Dallas dysfunction, and with the third paragraph including another of the few mentions made of Fort Worth, with that mention being an example of the type thing that riles some Fort Wothers...
Small towns have their vicious football rivalries, but for sheer volume of insults and homerism, the five cities of the Texas Triangle offer the most fertile ground for discussion today. Here it is in a nutshell: Fort Worth hates Dallas. Houston hates Dallas and Austin. San Antonio hates Austin. Austin wishes all the rest of us would just go away, and Dallas pretends that none of the rest of us even exist.
Dallas and Houston are warring fraternal twins. Houston has always resented Dallas for being better at football, hates how global pop culture sees Dallas as the world’s oil capital when it is not, and thinks he is a little materialistic for Houston’s taste. (You know what really galls Houston about Dallas? Creator David Jacobs was inspired by Blood and Money, an epic true-crime tale that took place in Houston.)
With the exceptions of Austin, which Dallas loves to try to impress with a new-found impetus toward coolness, and scrappy little sidekick Fort Worth, the city gaslights every other Texas locale. But especially Houston. “Rivalry?” Dallas asks. “What rivalry? We don’t have a rivalry with Houston. Nobody up here ever even thinks of Houston.”
Fort Worth is the scrappy little sidekick of Dallas? Well, the scrappy part of that line is sort of a compliment, isn't it? I would take it as such if someone called me scrappy. Calling me little, that I would not like so much.
That paragraph where we learned Fort Worth is the scrappy little sidekick of Dallas took me some parsing before I think I figured out what was being said.
If I am right the writer is suggesting that Dallas plays mind games with most other Texas towns by acting as if Dallas does not feel any rivalry with them, with Austin and Fort Worth being exceptions, with, Austin being an exception because, apparently, Dallas hopes to impress Austin that Dallas is also a cool town, and with Fort Worth being an exception due to the town being the scrappy little sidekick of Dallas, like a little buddy.
I may have totally misunderstood that scrappy little sidekick Fort Worth gaslighting paragraph.
Could an article like this Texas Monthly article be in Washington Monthly about the dysfunctional rivalry between Seattle, Tacoma, Bellevue, Spokane, Yakima and Olympia?
Likely not. I don't think one would read a line about Tacoma being the scrappy little sidekick of Seattle. Or Spokane hating Seattle. Or, well, you get the point....
3 comments:
Fort Worth is the bullsh*t capital of the free world.
I think that article's writer had a typo when he wrote "scrappy" little sidekick Fort Worth, when he meant to more accurately write "crappy" little sidekick Fort Worth.
In Seattle, we disrespect Pullman - with good reason.
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