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Inner Dallas

Frederick TurnerIn my travels I often find myself having the following conversation:NEW ACQUAINTANCE: So, where do you live?ME: Dallas.N. A.: (Pause) What brought you to Dallas?ME: Ummmm...And then I must either make a quip ("Just lucky, I guess") to get me out of the responsibility of asensible answer, or launch into a pretty comprehensive reframing of the whole issue of where onelives.The subtext of my interlocutor's question is quite complicated. In one sense, it is ratherflattering, from the New Acquaintance's point of view: "I'd have thought

you

could have hadyour choice of where you wanted to live"--but it also has a tinge of "Not quite successful enoughto live in New York/San Francisco/London/Santa Fe/Seattle, huh?"--or even "Boy, you must havereally blotted your copybook to be stuck in Dallas--what did you do?"Saddest of all is when the question comes, not from a Parisian or New Yorker or Londoner, butfrom a Dallasite, in which case there's a further subtext: "So, us failures have got to stick together." True, it is only a certain class of alienated Dallasites that will ask the question in thatway. There are far more fiercely loyal partisans of the Big D, among whom, in a way, I countmyself. But this essay is not going to be the standard praise of such things as the superbacoustics of the Myerson Auditorium, the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Theater Center, the fineDallas Museum of Art, the excellent and reasonably priced restaurants, the historic districts, theglorious spring and fall, the dazzling postmodern glass architecture of Fountains Plaza and thedowntown in general.Nor will it even be directly about the vibrant dynamism of Dallas's economy, the practically zerorate of unemployment, the powerhouse new technology of the North Dallas Telecom Corridor,the world-class shopping, the fact that Dallas's average disposable income is the highest in thenation, the city's role as the unsung capital of NAFTA. Nor, again, the world preeminence of DFW airport, the eight major universities within Dallas's orbit, the cowtown charm and culturalbrilliance of its neighbor, Fort Worth, the Nobel Prizewinning faculty of the Southwest Health

Science Center, the mushrooming population, the cultural energy of its many large (and for themost part relatively amicable) ethnic minorities.Quite a few cities (Atlanta, Miami, Denver, Seattle) can make similar Chamber of Commerce orTourist Board boasts. And indeed the established giants--New York, Chicago, Los Angeles--arebeginning to see their lunches being eaten by the new-tech upstarts. They are rightly threatenedby the wave of major corporate relocations to the sunbelt and the former Empty Quarter.But this would only be an argument for Dallas as a place to work, not a place to live. After all,Dallas has no mountains, no ocean, no forests, no river to speak of, very little history (and someof it gruesome), almost no literary publishing industry, and a climate that tops 100 degrees forseveral weeks during the summer; and it is at least a day's car journey to anyplace that wouldcount as a major tourist attraction. Everything that would make Dallas a good place to live hashad to be imported and paid for, or invented

in situ

. And this, in fact, is the beginning of ananswer to my solicitous New Acquaintance.For to our doleful little list of things Dallas doesn't have, one can add a number of moral evilsthat are strangely lacking or scarce in my city. Dallas has very little of the corrosive envy thatpoisons the air of New York (I except a few academics who are trying to escape to a morepessimist environment). If you live in New York and do not leave it, you can have no idea of theamazing liberation and lightness of being you feel when you get out of its culture of envy, thatdark miasma of resentment that creeps across the upper East and West Sides and the Village onan autumn day. Dallas is also remarkably free of the snobbery that paralyses Boston, and theclass hatreds of London. It lacks the totalitarian liberal guilt of politically-correct Berkeley, AnnArbor, New Haven, Madison-Wisconsin, and Hollywood, and the kneejerk partisan paranoia of Washington, D.C.. Above all, Dallas possesses none of the subtle and pervasive sense of culturaldespair that one finds in almost every Northern and Eastern city (a Texan often feels in New York as if he were made of a denser reality than the waterish stuff around him, as if he could put hishand, like Superman, through the walls)--a feeling of despair one even encounters, in a differentform, in the far West. That sense of cultural despair I have privately christened the "Casablancasyndrome"--everything has been going to the dogs since Bogey said goodbye to Ingrid by theairplane, and

real

civilization won't return until we get back Paris, Gauloises, Marxist politicalintegrity, trenchcoats, abstract art, proper coffee, classy novelistic adultery in the afternoon, Jazz,Hemingway, and protest poetry.Underneath this attitude is a deep hatred of business and technology, a convulsive rejection of thefuture, and a perpetual adolescent desire to escape responsibility. Though Dallas does have itsown small share of this, for the most part Dallas is a city of hope--or as David Byrne of theTalking Heads put it in

True Stories

, his remarkable movie about Dallas, Dallas is the city of

dreams. People are inventing and living their own Casablanca here, and don't need to resurrectthe old one.Dallas deeply irks those observers of it that cannot shake off their distaste for capitalist Americaas it flourishes here. They seize on what they can--the alleged suicidal alienation of suburbanDallas life, for instance--and have made Plano, a northern suburb of the city, almost a watchwordfor anomie and cultural vacuum. But such people are generally academics or journalists, whoseown culture often cuts them off from the six great sources of human community in the suburbs--family, religion, sport, school, charitable activities, and local popular discussion groups such ashistorical and philosophical societies, garden clubs and the like, which they tend to considerbeneath their attention. I myself discovered Little League, which combines family with sport,through being dragged into that community by my son. Baptist and Catholic churches are vasthives of social and charitable activity, as are the elaborate paraphernalia of Texas' major religion,football, with its bands, cheerleader fund drives, local rivalries, and so on. Weddings, funerals,and christenings, often avoided by liberal intellectuals, are deep sources of community.But these communities are not physically localized. Traditional city planners, who love the oldidea of the neighborhood, cannot get their heads around the strange geographical superimpositionof virtual neighborhoods that operates here--neighborhoods about 400 square miles in extent,connected closely by car, cellphone, email and local TV, radio, and the press, and denselyoverlapping like a palimpsest. My neighborhoods include several local intellectual and literarysalons, my karate group, the Dallas Institute, the theater world, my wife's musical, culinary, andlinguistic connections, my church, the Jung Society, and sundry artistic and architecturalcommunities. Strangers cannot see these communities going on in the street, and thus there is ahuge discrepancy between the views taken of Dallas as a place to live by dwellers here and byoutside critics of itWhy this should be so is connected to the more general issue that we began with, which is whyone lives anywhere. And we cannot answer this question until we have at least encountered amore fundamental issue still, which is: what makes us happy?What makes us happy and what we believe makes us happy are two different things. There arethings we have, even things a place gives us, that make up the meaningful substance of our lives,and that silently and invisibly make us happy. Silently and invisibly, because for the most part wetake them for granted, transferring their felt benefit to the second category, what we

believe

makes us happy. Human as we are, unless we are very wise indeed, the things we believe makeus happy are the things we want but do not have, the things that we want because other peopleseem to want them in order to be happy, the things already in the possession of other people who