Survival tips from a red state liberal

I liked this article, but I think I can build on her ideas. Why? Because I'm a Texan and Texas liberals like me have been devising ways to avoid going batshit crazy for a long, long time now. So, here's how my friends and I avoid going crazy in the most famous of Red States.

1) Be batshit crazy to begin with. Okay, this is cheating but absolutely necessary. The whole "Keep Austin Weird" thing is a political movement. When people get in your face about your liberal politics, shrug it off as an eccentricity, like having a fetish for Chuck Taylors or being a Ween fan.

2) Drink. Well, duh. This is the oldest and grandest tradition of Texas liberalism. Wine and hard liquor are out of the question. Bonding with your fellow liberals is easier to do over beers. Also, it's hard to call someone a cheese-eating, wine-sniffing elitist who has a beer in one hand and a tortilla chip loaded with queso in the other. And since everyone is fixing to enjoy the economic prosperity that has characterized the South for so very long, you may need to learn to enjoy cheap beer. There are two favored ways to drink cheaply.

--Mexican beer. There are many okay-priced ones like Corona, but your best bet is Tecate, which can be enjoyed with actual limes and salt but is even better with packets of Twang. If you wish to up your eccentricity quotient, an easy method is to adopt the habit of pouring the Twang directly into your mouth before drinking the beer instead of pouring it into your beer.

--Cheap Texas beers. Texas is world famous for its cheap beers, or at least should be. You have Pabst and Pearl, of course, but the hands down best is Lone Star. Of course, if you're in the Austin area and you have a taste for something that isn't pure piss, Shiner Bock is pretty inexpensive most everywhere you'll go. But that's cheating. If none of these beers is available locally, I'm sorry. Investigate what your local not-bad cheap piss beers are.

3) Give the holy rollers hell. This can be a lot of fun. Throw eggs at anti-abortion protesters. Call up the "crisis pregnancy" clinics, tell them you're a 15 year old crack addict who is pregnant and waste their time trying to talk you out of an abortion. Wear a T-shirt decorated with a "666". There's a good reason that Texas rock and roll types love to decorate any and everything in hellfire--it makes the fundies sweat. Go out on Saturday night and crack jokes about how you're never gonna make it to church in the morning. Make fun of them in music.

4) Start watching Formula 1. And for bonus points, watch MotoGP as well. You don't just vote like the rest of the world does, but you can enjoy some of their favorite sports as well, instead of huddling close to home and watching the vastly inferior NASCAR. A bunch of my friends are huge racing fans, so we get together to watch the races on TIVO many a Sunday. It's a great time to work out the urge to eat stinky cheese, wear classy Ferrari-red clothes, and drink wine. It's like blowing off shitty American football to follow soccer, but more money.

5) Don't relinquish the good symbols. Try as they may, the conservatives of Texas cannot lay claim to the cowboy hat in the name of Bush. This is in no small part because the goofy Texas left has a grand tradition of taking pictures of ourselves partying or doing other fucked up things in cowboy hats. For instance, I have a picture right here of me flashing Dio-style devils horns while wearing my cowboy hat that was taken just last weekend. We also lay claim to equal rights to cowboy boots and pick-up trucks as our right-wing brethern. They can have back pocket-less Rocky Mountains, though. If we can hang onto these things despite the endless attempts by the Karl Roves of the world to lay claim to them for their candidates, then surely Mom and apple pie will be simple to hang onto.