Never Mind ‘fake News': Texans Need to Quit Losing Their Minds Over Threats That Don't Exist

Let us be grateful for calamities that failed to materialize over the last week or so. No asteroid slammed into the Earth. No plague was unleashed. Freakishly huge insect overlords did not seize control of Beaumont or Big Spring or Wichita Falls. Actually, this could take a while: The list of things that didn't happen and will almost certainly not happen is a long one. Yet Americans (in general) and Texans (in particular) have expended a lot of valuable energy just lately protesting and legislating and generally losing their minds over dystopian fantasies: Shariah law, panic in public toilets, threats to the sacred memory of Sam Houston. Well, we all have our odd phobias. Mine tend to revolve around expensive things that might unexpectedly break, such as auto transmissions or the slab on which our house sits. As a species, we're engineered to worry. But if it makes anybody feel better, I will stake an excellent Pecan Lodge barbecue supper on this assurance: Shariah law will not be declared in Richardson. Never. Not in Richardson, not in Irving, not in Dearborn, Mich. We're not talking "no new taxes" never; we're talking insect-overlord never. Yet hundreds of people turned out at a Richardson mosque Saturday to froth and fulminate over a "takeover" of U.S. law by Shariah, a personal religious code that some Muslims observe. Some of them toted big, tricked-out rifles and combat fatigues with kaffiyeh-style face masks, looking (purposely?) not unlike warriors in an ISIS recruiting poster. If the point was to contrast sane and reasonable with scary and oppressive, they got things backward. Whatever they thought they were protesting, it didn't rise to the intimidating show they themselves put on by brandishing very real firearms against a fantasy, a feverish hallucination. This lurid "Shariah" scenario is the unprovable negative, the overheated misrepresentation and fear of something by people it does not affect and about which they know nothing. It makes as much sense as if I set up camp outside a kosher grocery store and waved a gun around in defense of pork chops. Yes, there is an air of comic gullibility to this — or there would be if not for the guns, which while legal, served no purpose other than to frighten children and stoke their owners' pride in their big manly tools. Likewise, a frantic band of armed defenders raced to a public park in Houston on Saturday to defend a statue of Texas statesman Sam Houston, which faced no threat and was the subject of no controversy. They were inspired by vague internet rumors that self-styled anti-fascists intended to topple the monument "because he owned slaves," a measure by which an awful lot of better-known statues would face similar, and possibly more serious peril. Sam's defenders, some of whom carried Confederate battle flags, apparently included few historical scholars. They were surely oblivious to the fact that Houston fervently opposed secession and was ousted from the governor's office in 1861 when he refused to swear fealty to the Confederacy. If they wanted to defend a Confederate icon, they picked the wrong statue. This stuff isn't "fake news"; it's not news at all. It's nonsense, ginned up by fanatics and eagerly received by people who like to yell and wave guns. How, otherwise, do you explain this stubborn determination to ignore plain facts? Alas, Texas isn't exactly setting a good example for good sense and decency from the top down. At the behest of our governor, legislators are heading toward a special session, having wasted much of the regular session in pointless displays of hysteria over how to prove up the genders of people in need of the use of public toilets. The unkillable zombie "bathroom bill" will rise once again at the behest of actual elected officials determined to believe that transgender Texans pose a moral and public safety threat to the sanctity of the toilet stall. It would be nice if this sort of baseless, factless, wholly invented paranoia indicated that all the real problems have been faced, and that our state doesn't have any real threats to worry about. Maybe, you might suppose, we're all squared away on health care, infrastructure, education, energy policy, child welfare, taxes, transportation and poverty — hence the leisure time to shriek and flail over a bogus problem that threatens nobody at all. Better suppose again. A cynical sort of observer might even think all that shrieking and flailing provided handy cover for failure to cope with those more pressing issues. It is, as we're all so fond of pointing out, a free country. Fret over what you choose.But please, can we at least make it something real? This not-news is wearing us out.  Continue reading...