This is based on a trip I took to Austin, Texas coming up seven years ago.
Come morning in Austin, Texas we plot a day of immersion into local culture for transitioning to the second stage of midlife crisis: ANGER.
Blanton Art Museum warms our blood with grisly Goya etchings of religious military persecution…
…a supreme setup for a stroll in blistering heat to the LBJ Memorial Library where we’re supposed to learn how Johnson anguished over Vietnam with no mention of his Texas cronies profiting on armaments and war support services while millions of lives on both sides were snuffed out and countless more lives destroyed by drug addiction or from losing loved ones and no mention of the so-called domino effect and how Johnson lectured the American public that if we didn’t take a stand in Vietnam the rest of Southeast Asia would fall and Communist combatants would roll up onto the shores of Hawaii.
No mention also of napalm or Rolling Thunder…
…the sustained bombing campaign that cost so many lives and led to America for the first time in history losing a war (albeit one it was never justified to fight).
An exhibition on the assassination of JFK glosses over the horror that allowed Johnson to move into the White House and actually glorifies lies told by the Warren Commission.
But what truly causes the bile in my stomach to revolt is a serial on a TV screen showing something called Times of 1957-1965 that includes an old TV commercial advertising Alka-Seltzer…
…which immediately follows JFK’s delivery of the most inspiring line of his inaugural address (“Ask not what you can do for your country…”), no editing accident you can be certain.
This is not a memorial library but a heinous monument in honor of whitewash and prevarication.
Thus ANGER is realized and it’s not even noon.
To emphasize my advanced age, an old friend from high school turns up and reminds me it’s been 43 years since we last hung out together. At Franklin Barbecue we indulge in brisket, potato salad and coleslaw. And I realize Texas barbecue is just a Jewish deli on steroids (the beans).
A snooze back at my hotel transitions me from ANGER to REPLAY, which translates into proving to ourselves we are good enough, young enough, for entry into the speakeasy that denied us entry the evening before.
We go through the same ritual but this time, having asked our concierge to reserve a table, we transit past the threshold guardian at Midnight Cowboy, slide into a black leather booth and order up Vespers from “master mixologists.”
Turns out we hadn’t missed much.
Because a better time follows at Pete’s Dueling Piano Bar with its free anger therapy: Singing along to songs we actually know from the 1970s.