The Hill Country -- and How Lyndon Johnson Lit Up the Farms

Don’t ask what Jesus would have done about the Texas floods; ask what Lyndon Johnson would have done.

By

David Gottfried

Today, the pious and submissively stricken of Texas bow to the Lord who ripped their lives asunder with epic, biblical floods. Although they are largely Protestant, they still adhere to the tenets of the Roman Church: Don’t blame the government; blame your sinful self.

The Traditional Diet for the Common Folks: Austerity and Agony

Believing that people – including 8-year-old girls who woke up as the water level in their cabins rapidly reached the roof -- must pick themselves up by their own bootstraps, they shun criticism of the allocation of resources in Texas and other states with a confederate, plantation sensibility. They know that men like Enron Billionaires are supposed to be free to hunt and kill a hundred animals a week – and not eat any of them – and that poor folks are supposed to get killed at a young age as their health care is getting butchered. (In the United States, white men in the top stanine – or ninth – of annual income have a life expectancy that is 16 years greater than white men in the lowest stanine of annual income.)

With the election of Donald Trump, the conservative rot in Texas gained zealous advocates in Washington. To the budget barbarians of Washington, it always makes sense to cut a program. Hell, that South African, Elon Musk, the veritable incarnation of plague in Human form, even cut funds for early warning censors for Ebola. (I can hear the know-nothings and MAGA rabble cackle, “Who cares about Ebola. It’s in Africa.” But it can hop a plane from Africa to New York, and it makes sense to station medical experts in third world countries to surveil the contagion.)

To assess how much a society should spend for health and safety, we must assess how rich a society is.

And it made sense to post sirens in the flood prone locales to save lives. I suppose that hidebound human antiques will say that we shouldn’t install sirens because through all of human history there were no such things as sirens to warn people of approaching floods, but through most of human history there were no antibiotics for bacterial pneumonia. Nevertheless, we don’t withhold penicillin from hypoxic pneumonia cases with fevers of 105 by arguing that our ancestors died of pneumonia by the truckload.

Very simply, the safety protocols a nation should institute are a function of not only how horrible the danger is but also the wealth of the nation and the costliness of its other threats.

Given that this nation is so damn fucking wealthy that private citizens, with extra loot, are now booking private trips to the moon, we have the cash to install warning sirens for floods.

Once upon at time, when there were western progressives itching to start a prairie rebellion against Eastern banking interests, when the west was so radical than Kansas farmers had kidnapped judges while they had conducted foreclosure proceedings against farm families, there were Western politicians who did not sound one bit like Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Lyndon Johnson and When the Rockies Roared for Freedom and Equality

Lyndon Johnson spoke like a hick, but his brain was a prodigious political instrument. That man was so brilliant that when he was 3 years of age, his Mother had taught him to memorize poems of more than 20 lines.

And when men like Johnson came along, he realized that “feeble-mindedness” among the poor was not the result of poor people having been cursed with genes making them stupid. Rather, he knew, as did a famous Dr. Goldberg from New York, that vitamin B deficiency disease had reached epidemic proportions throughout the South and Southwest, that this crippled intelligence and that the cause was poverty and a diet bereft of adequate levels of B vitamins.

Lyndon Johnson was well aware of what religious apologists of poverty had to say. And Lyndon Johnson realized that too many preachers spoke as if they were in the pay of Wall Street.

According to Doris Kearns Goodwin, it pained Lyndon that his Mother was embarrassed because her hands betrayed the effects of decades of rural hard work and squalor. She chopped wood to make a fire to cook dinner and build a big pot to do the laundry. In those days, rich ladies persecuted women who did manual labor and no longer had the most limpid, lovely hands.

Lyndon Johnson wanted to get electricity into rural areas and fast so farm ladies could save their hands from ceaseless toil. His efforts were widely decried. The common chorus heard from Congress and State legislatures around the country was emphatic: Poor farmers will never be able to pay their electric bills. Indeed, President Calvin Coolidge, when apprised of the agonies of entrenched rural poverty, disinterestedly snapped, “Farmers were always poor. That’s their lot in life.”

LBJ did not believe in Lots in life. He believed that with his balls and brains he could get anything done. He electrified rural America when he occupied very junior positions, and as President, he gave us Medicare, Medicaid, Model Cities, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

And Lyndon Johnson, with fury and boundless energy, would make the flood sirens squeal louder than Lyndon screaming at Republicans in the United States Senate.

He did mess up on Vietnam big time.

However, some people loved him so much they denied Vietnam. Indeed, Thurgood Marshall, a great black lawyer who argued murder cases in the South in the 30’s and the 40’s, who never benefited from affirmative action, and who was nominated to the Supreme Court by Johnson in 1967, said that people just made up bad stuff about Johnson and Vietnam to hurt one of America’s Greatest Champions of the Dispossessed.

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For a little comic relief, listen to Johnson’s detailed and hectoring instructions on how his pants should be constructed. Don’t miss his insistence that he be given a lot of room for his big nuts: