Four months after Uvalde, what do we know about the role of the Texas Department of Public safety in the response? A deep dive into the history of Texas DPS Director Steve McCraw and the role he played (or didn’t) during the state’s deadliest school shooting. Also, Migrants are being released into the streets in El Paso, that’s because detention centers and shelters to support them are full. And energy prices are very high in Europe; we’ll look at energy weaponization. Also, what does it mean to re-wild and why is San Antonio an example of this tactic? These stories and more today on the Texas Standard:
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Texas Standard: March 8, 2022
A Houston native and American basketball icon arrested and detained in Russia. What can the U.S. do to secure her release? We’ll have more on WNBA star Brittney Griner and concerns she’s being held as a political prisoner in Russia as western pressure over Ukraine swells. Also, decades after NASA’s big move to Texas, economist Ray Perryman sizes up the space industry’s multi-billion dollar trajectory. And the Rolling Pines Fire reconsidered: a report on what caused the most recent big fire near Bastrop, and what it could mean long term. And the case for the face of the new right in Texas. Those stories and much more today on the Texas Standard:
Trailer: Back Home To The Armadillo
Join KUTX as we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the historic Armadillo World Headquarters music venue. Starting August 17th, you can hear an hour-long oral history covering the Armadillo’s musical legacy, from blues and the birth of cosmic country to the punk rock explosion. You’ll learn why 50 years later, the Armadillo World Headquarters is still a beacon for Austin’s past, present, and future.
One Texan In The Global Village
There is an unusual map of the world that was once a popular poster. You still see it around in many places because it is a map that makes you see the world in new ways. This map reduces the world’s 7.3 billion people to a village of just 100 people. It keeps all the ratios the same so we can get a look at the world in miniature.
So on this map you will see that there are 60 Asians in the world – that’s counting China, Japan, India and Eastern Russia. More than half of the world lives in Asia.
Europe has 11 people. Africa has a few more: 16. Africa has a lot more room. If you add all of the Americas together, from the North Pole all the way down to Tierra del Fuego in Argentina, you get 14 people.
The United States is only five people. Texas is one whole person in that village. Imagine. Out of the entire population of this vast planet, only one gets the honor, the rare pleasure of being a Texan.
Reminds me of another map observation from Bob Wheeler, author of “Forged of a Hotter Fire.” I like to make sure I mention Wheeler’s book whenever I can because his work floats around the internet with his name divorced from it. He gets no credit.
Here is what Bob Wheeler has to say in his marvelous little Texas-centric book: “Look at Texas for me for just a second. That picture with the Panhandle and the Gulf Coast and the Red River and the Rio Grande is as much a part of you as anything ever will be. As soon as anyone anywhere in the world looks at it they know what it is. It’s Texas. Take any kid off the street in Japan and draw him a picture of Texas in the dirt and he’ll know what it is.”
Wheeler said that he thought “most everyone everywhere would like, just once, to be a real Texan – to ride a horse or drive a pickup,” perhaps they longed to drive off to the freedom of vast blue skies to horizons unknown. Wheeler believed that everyone, deep down, had a longing for something that might be called Texas. Might be so.
W.F Strong is a Fulbright Scholar and professor of Culture and Communication at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. At Public Radio 88 FM in Harlingen, Texas, he’s the resident expert on Texas literature, Texas legends, Blue Bell Ice Cream, Whataburger (with cheese) and mesquite smoked brisket.
Green Room: Smaller, Faster, Lighter, Denser, Cheaper
From overpopulation to global warming, ‘catastrophists’ have ignored a major trend of human history. Austin-based author Robert Bryce
argues that in often unforeseeable ways, technology moves inexorably toward solutions making the world a better place. Don’t worry, be happy? Well, it’s a lot more complicated than that.
V&B: The Great War and Its Legacy, 100 Years Later
In partnership with the Harry Ransom Center, Views and Brews discussed the recent exhibition “The World at War, 1914–1918.” The exhibit marks the centenary of the start of World War I, and seeks to recover the deeply personal experience of the war.
Listen back as Rabbi Neil Blumofe and Ransom Center curators Elizabeth Garver and Jean Cannon join KUT’s Rebecca McInroy to explore the layered causes, complicated effects and penetrating propaganda of a war that forever changed our relationship to grief, industry, faith and one another.