Table of contents for August 2018 in The Texas Observer

Stemming the Tide Sea-level rise cannot be stopped, and our coasts will succumb whether we fight it or not (“Salt Strife,” June issue). The Observer should write an exposé about the $15 billion boondoggle called the “Ike Dike” or “coastal barrier” that's being sold to Houstonians as our savior from hurricanes, flooding and storm surge. Residual storm surges, ebbtide backflows, constant erosion, sedimentation and other environmental impacts will harm Galveston Bay, our Gulf shoreline, and will make the “Ike Dike” less than the “silver bullet” its proponents at Texas A&M, Rice University’s SSPEED Center, the Texas General Land Office and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers say. We need a strategy that includes buyouts of flood-vulnerable property, works with nature and keeps people out of harm's way. Brandt Mannchen HUMBLE…

Texans swept at the Scripps National Spelling Bee in June. Karthik Nemmani, 14; Naysa Modi, 12; and Abhijay Kodali, 11, all from North Texas, beat out 512 other contestants to place first, second and third, respectively. The following words were among those that stumped finalists. Which means “an ancient remedy for colic”? a. bewusstseinslage b. koinonia c. philonium d. condottiere ANSWER: C. An 18th century Persian medicine, philonium contained opium, white pepper, saffron, rosewater and a variety of aromatics.…

THREE YEARS AFTER A TEXAS STATE TROOPER RIPPED her out of her car and slammed her to the ground over a traffic violation, Sandra Bland’s name still evokes images of police brutality. Her name also remains on the lips of bail reform activists; her death in a Waller County jail cell, reportedly by suicide, came after she couldn’t scrounge up the $500 that would have secured her release. Defendants like Bland — stuck in a rural jail because they can’t afford their freedom — are driving the growth of America’s jail population, according to a new report by Right on Crime, the criminal justice offshoot of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a right-wing think tank based in Austin. While the nation’s prison population has dipped in recent years, the number…

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THE RISE OF DONALD J. TRUMP REPEATEDLY CONFOUNDED political scholars, reporters, pundits and campaign operatives alike. Time after time, those who closely follow politics failed to see what was right before their eyes: a guttural cry from the heart of white America. ¶ Election Day, inevitably, has been followed by a ceaseless churn of new books on the greatest electoral upset in American history, as writers and publishers look to cash in, cover their asses, issue a mea culpa or all of the above. But until now, an election that always seemed to border on fiction has hardly gotten the novelist’s touch it deserves. After 18 years struggling for his break as a writer, longtime Dallasite Ben Fountain was sent on a meteoric rise at the age of 48 in…

Ruskin said beautiful artcan only be produced by peoplewho have beautiful thingsabout them. He meant nearby.Glowing fruit stands. Radiantcans. Synonym-lessvegetables. Architect,build this store overand over. Cartoon eyesfill aisles a child’ssight-line. Cerealspace lowershelf-heights, brand animalsbait. Baby gorillas, pandas, talkingextinct birds. Walls paint lakescenes, fields golden, orchardsmultiply. Our streetof seven years’franchised mural: familypharmacy on the other corner, florist,liquor store, as if from overhead,beside, animated, caricatured, survivingour gummy bear drugs and roses. Joshua Gottlieb-Miller is a doctoral candidate in poetry at the University of Houston, where he serves as the digital nonfiction editor for Gulf Coast.…

THE TERM “Consequence Delivery” WHO’S USING IT: U.S. Border Patrol During the peak of this year’s family separation crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border, El Paso Congressman Beto O’Rourke went on MSNBC to discuss what he’d seen at an immigrant detention center in McAllen. “I met with somebody in Customs and Border Protection who has the job description of ‘consequence delivery,’ which sounds like something Orwell would’ve come up with,” O’Rourke told Chris Hayes during the June 16 interview. Since 2011, the U.S. Border Patrol has maintained what the agency calls a “consequence delivery system,” essentially a set of metrics to measure the deterrent effect of arrests, prosecutions and deportations meted out to migrants who enter the United States without authorization. The operative question: Are we hurting them enough to prevent…

TITLE/ORGANIZATION President, John Hagee Ministries; Pastor, Cornerstone Church THE CAUSE Evangelize the planet, or get rich tryin' NOTABLE ACCOMPLISHMENT Gave the closing benediction at the opening of the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem in May ALLIES Donald Trump, the Bush clan, Benjamin Netanyahu MONEY QUOTE "Let it echo down the marble halls of the presidential palace in Iran: Israel lives." ON A SUNDAY MORNING IN late June, John Hagee took the stage in his palatial north San Antonio megachurch, his white hair slicked back and his imposing jowls obscuring the upper third of his shirt collar. A month earlier, he'd been one of two American pastors invited to bless the blood-soaked opening of the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem. Now, for his audience of a few thousand congregants splayed out in decks…

The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them.—MARK TWAIN GIVE DONALD TRUMP THIS: HE’S brought a certain clarity to our present condition. With democratic norms shattered, institutions weakened and the illusion of a shared polity ripped away, we can see our politics, our society, for the bloody scrapping for power that they are. There’s a wildness loose in the country that shows no signs of being tamed. And it’s far more feral and dangerous than incivility. The U.S. government has been taken over by a corrupt authoritarian who likely colluded with a foreign power to steal an election. He has empowered white supremacists, shredded safety nets and environmental protections, played to the…

IN LATE MAY, NEARLY 30 COLLEGE STUDENTS GATHered in Houston for a weeklong summit on how they could be the generation to end abortion in America. One day, after a morning prayer, the students attended a training session held by the Abortion Dialogue Academy, an organization disseminating “persuasive pro-life arguments.” The students learned how to convince their peers that abortion is as “unthinkable of an act as infanticide,” and then went to the University of Houston campus to practice their new skills by trying to “convert” people. The day wrapped up at their hotel with a lecture by John Seago, the legislative director for Texas Right to Life, titled “History of Abortion Law and How to Dismantle Roe.” The students traveled to Houston from across the state to kick off…

EVEN AS UNION MEMBERSHIP FLATLINED NATIONALLY in 2017, something surprising happened in the Lone Star State. Texas had its biggest surge in union membership since 1983, the first year the Bureau of Labor Statistics began collecting state union data. Texas union membership grew by 80,579 people in 2017. Union density, the percentage of union members in the total workforce, grew modestly from 4 to 4.7 percent, the biggest jump since 1993. The apparent boomlet corresponds with economic growth and shifting political affiliations in urban Texas. In progressive cities such as El Paso, elected officials have helped public-sector labor organizers put down roots. And in some conservative, rural parts of the state, private-sector unions have been able to attract members with apprenticeship programs that guarantee higher wages. Over the last year,…

FROM THE START, THE ESSENCE OF DONALD TRUMP’S POLITICAL project has been the dehumanization of others. When he descended the gilded escalator at Trump Tower in June 2015 to kick off his presidential campaign, he famously told a national TV audience that Mexico was “not sending their best.” The people coming across the border were “bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” ¶ Two months later, two brothers in Boston found Guillermo Rodriguez, a 58-year-old Hispanic homeless man and a legal resident of the United States, sleeping outside a subway station. They urinated on his face, and when he woke up, the men took a metal pole and beat Rodriguez around his head and chest. The two men told police that “Donald Trump was right. All these illegals need to…

THE BAYOU CITY LOVES BERNARD “BUN B” FREEMAN SO much that he’s been given the title “Houston’s unofficial mayor.” But the Grammy-nominated renaissance man of Texas rap actually hails from Port Arthur, a struggling refinery town 90 miles east. The surviving half of legendary hip-hop duo UGK, Bun B has become a sort of cultural ambassador for the region. In the past several years, he’s published a coloring book, co-lectured a wildly popular Rice University course (“Religion and Hip-Hop Culture” with religious studies professor Anthony B. Pinn) and documented the rise of Trump as a 2016 election correspondent for Vice News. The Observer spoke with Bun B about his hometown, his music and the meaning of trill. His fifth album, Return of the Trill, is out August 31. "In Port…

In May, I traveled to Lajitas to document the sixth annual Voices From Both Sides festival (also called Fiesta Protesta). The daylong event commemorates the 2002 closure of the border crossing between Lajitas and its Mexican sister city, Paso Lajitas, as well as serving as a kind of binational family reunion. More than 1,000 people cooled off in the Rio Grande, gathered for a picnic lunch and took in music and ballet folklórico performances. See more photos from Eye on Texas at www.texasobserver.org/eyeontexas. CALL FOR ENTRIES: Seeking Texas-based documentary photography. Please send inquiries to eyeontexas@texasobserver.org.…