W. B.

The Texas Legislature. It passed a resolution commending the Boston Strangler for his efforts at population control. One of its members, trapped in a barefaced lie, concedes, “You caught me speedin’.” If you start a fight for “reeform,” especially for any bill that would threaten “a healthy bidness climate,” you might wind up in List City.

Think of Texans as proud yet humbled (Texans humbled? Yes, humbled), as conquerors and conquered, as people plunging gustily forward yet remembering where grandparents are buried. But there are Anglo-Saxon Texans, slave-descended Texans, Spanishand Indian-descended Texans. A historian of Texas here tells how they all coalesce into a kind of separate nationhood while being very much a part of the U.S.A.