Feature: Is Texas taking over?

LOS ANGELES, Aug. 3 (UPI) -- A new documentary featuring journalist Christopher Hitchens, "Texas: America Supersized," examines the notion that the Lone Star State's culture is transforming cultural values and norms in the rest of the United States.

The one-hour program is part of a series of Texas-oriented programming on Trio in August. The schedule also includes the documentaries "Fat City," "Alamomania," "Texas Teenage Virgins," "Turning Muslim in Texas" and "Business, Texas Style."

The cable network will also program feature films set in Texas -- including "The Alamo," "Blood Simple," "Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders," "Red River" and "Slacker." Music specials including "Asleep at the Wheel: Live at Billy Bob's" and "Willie Nelson & Friends: Outlaws and Angels" are also on the August schedule.

Trio president Laura Zalaznick said the time was right to take a close look at Texas.

"From all-you-can-eat buffets and big hair, to patriotism, big business and religion, things tend to be more extreme in Texas than anywhere else in the country," she said.

In "Texas: America Supersized," Hitchens explores Texas in a series of interviews with notable Texans -- including oilman-investor T. Boone Pickens, journalist Molly Ivins, singer-songwriter-novelist Kinky Friedman, filmmaker Richard Linklater and novelist-screenwriter Larry McMurtry.

The program examines Texas culture, including the stereotypes that many outside the state have come to associate with it -- wealth, power, high school football, cowboy values and the perception that everything in Texas is outsized and Texans like it just fine that way.

In an interview with United Press International, Hitchens said he had visited Texas before working on the documentary, but not for any extended period of time. While he was there working on the film, he learned that Texans don't seem to mind the stereotyping.

"You get to Texas and you find that the stereotypes about it are what the Texans like," he said. "You wouldn't be doing them a favor by knocking (the stereotypes) down."

In the documentary, advertising executive Roy Spence told Hitchens there is something to the suggestion that the rest of the United States and Texas are developing similar cultural and political values.

"Texas is like America on steroids," said Spence.

Ivins said there are three distinct strains of Texas culture -- religiosity, anti-intellectualism and machismo.

"And all three of those are attractive to large groups of voters," she said.

The documentary shows Hitchens gearing up for his assignment by picking out a cowboy hat and a pair of cowboy boots. The British-born journalist is usually seen wearing clothes more suggestive of an Eastern, urban environment, but he told UPI he was not exactly a stranger to the Western look.

"When I was a kid, I had a Davy Crockett hat," he said. "We all had them. If you didn't have a Davy Crockett hat, you missed out."

Texas gets a lot of mileage out of its traditional image as home to cowboys and ranch hands, but "Texas: America Supersized" makes the point that the state's long-running association with real cowboys is fading into history. Hitchens said that image has come to apply more to tourism and marketing, than to the true character of the state.

"They're just stuck with it," he said. "The number of lives that really involve horses and cattle is very small and getting smaller."

Friedman, who recently announced he will run for governor of Texas, offered an elastic definition of what it means to be a cowboy.

"Gandhi was a cowboy," said Friedman. "Jesus was a cowboy. Nelson Mandela was a cowboy. And George Bush is a cowboy."

McMurtry -- best known as the writer of "Terms of Endearment" and the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "Lonesome Dove" -- had a different take on Bush, calling him a Yankee oligarch and an imposter. McMurtry also concluded that the cowboy is facing extinction in Texas.

For all of Texas' well-publicized preference for bigness, the documentary points out that Texans have a fondness for smallness when it comes to government and taxes.

Hitchens said he was surprised to learn that the Alamo is also small -- "dinky," is how he put it -- and the Rio Grande is not so grand.

"In most places it's barely more than a creek," he said.

Still, Hitchens said he had no idea until now how huge the state itself was.

"They have (room for) three or four states there," he said.

With a Texan in the White House, it is easy enough for outsiders to equate Texas politics with American politics. But Hitchens found in researching the documentary that Texas also has a liberal tradition. After all, Texans Lyndon Johnson and Sam Rayburn were key players in the New Deal.

In the end, Hitchens concluded that the United States is not becoming just a large version of Texas.

"I don't think there is any state in the union that's representative in that way," he said. "If there is one that would set the national trend that way it would be California."

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