America Is Becoming Dallas
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Sam Rayburn
18 min read
The Sam Rayburn Tollway is mentioned as the route to Princeton. Rayburn was the longest-serving Speaker of the House in U.S. history and a towering Texas political figure whose legacy shaped the state's development and political character.
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George W. Bush Presidential Center
18 min read
The article includes an extended critique of this presidential library and its presentation of Bush's legacy. The Wikipedia article provides factual context about its construction, exhibits, and the controversies surrounding how presidential libraries frame their subjects.
“Dallas, in its not always very comfortable role as broker of money and fashion between Texas and the world beyond, has always been a changeling, gregarious and outward-bound in one chapter of its life, suspicious and rigid, inward and fearful in the next, tugged on one side by the xenophobic impulses of the state and on the other by the lure of the great beyond.”
-From “The Accommodation,” by Jim Schutze.
Going to church in a mall is a particularly American version of utopia. This is the dream that Prestonwood Baptist Church offers. Under the spacious, suburban skies of Plano, Texas, the Prestonwood campus delivers the architecture, amenities, and abundance of parking lots that you might expect from a trip to Dillard’s and the food court. The complex includes a Sports and Fitness Center, a handsome stadium, and a private school, whose Prestonwood Lions have been five-time state football champs.
The main building, with the sloping green metal roof and cream walls of a modern middle school, is flanked by a cross-topped tower and a 30-foot-high Christmas tree. Inside, its soaring atrium frames more than just a 7,000-seat megachurch with tiered seating. There is also a coffee shop, and a huge buffet restaurant and dining hall, and meeting rooms, and a book store, and a Kidz area, and many very tidy restrooms. There is cool air conditioning and clean carpets. There are friendly greeters and family activities. Here, you can find refuge from Satan’s scorching rays. Here, you can grab a chicken sandwich and a cappuccino and park your kids somewhere and yap and shop and relax. Yes, Jesus is here–right inside those double doors. But this is more than a church. This is a lifestyle. If you find yourself beguiled by the lifestyle, there is no telling where you might end up.
In this sense, Prestonwood is part of a much larger project. It is one pillar of a comprehensive vision of how America should live. There are many such visions–but right now, this one is ascendant. It has momentum. It is seizing territory, charging forward, feasting on the plastic fruit of plastic seeds planted by generations past. It is the idea of infinite American entitlement, blessed by god and unrestrained by man or nature. Everything for us, and hell for our enemies. In practice, this vision
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