Three-Point Shots, Vol. 3, No. 4: March 24, 2025
Measles, squabbling over the “Official Texas Steak,” and “flooding the zone” – they’re all getting worse, and will continue to.
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Monday, March 24, 2025
Quote of the Day: “Life is not fair, but government absolutely must be.”
Ann W. Richards, 45th Governor of Texas
Quote of the Day: “Life is not fair, but government absolutely must be.”
Ann W. Richards, 45th Governor of Texas
1. Measles
You may know that we are in the midst – or, worst case scenario, beginning – of the worst measles outbreak in the good old USA since 2019 and in Texas since the Memory of Man ran not to the contrary.
We have now reached 309 confirmed cases in Texas, which is an important epidemiological milestone known as “over 300 cases.” It is almost certainly an underestimate, since the protocols of testing and tracing are just now being ginned up.
As you might expect, the primary age group vectoring the cases is children ages 5-17, i.e., schoolkids. Once upon a time, the medical community enjoyed broad public support for the idea that children should be vaccinated. In fact, it was (and is) Texas law that children must be vaccinated to attend public schools. Hence, no outbreaks. But now, everyone “does their own research.” Or they claim various “exemptions” that let them feel self-satisfied about being a public health risk. And if you think such behavior is bad for public health, you should see what it does to democracy.
The reason I say you may know is that our state leaders are preoccupied with much more weighty matters during their biennial gathering in Austin. They have been too busy to call for public health measures or even education campaigns to suppress the measles outbreak, not least because they face a Catch-22: if they advocate for immunizations, they run afoul of the cod liver oil and Vitamin A crowd (which happens to include the current Secretary of Health and Human Services); if they advocate for those quack remedies, they risk being proven as, well, quacks.
Consider the major crises facing our state: an underfunded educational system, an unreliable energy grid, and a statewide thirst for water that is quickly approaching the Hatfield vs. McCoys stage. I’m not suggesting that the Lege will do anything substantive about any of these challenges; at least, not until they have solved the naming rights to the New York Strip steak.
2. Dan Patrick’s Crusade to Rename the New York Strip Steak
Dan Patrick is a serious guy, and not in a good way. He has destroyed the institutional traditions of the Texas Senate, turning its 31 members, both Republicans and Democrats, into serfs. He took a questionable $3 million donation in the middle of last summer’s Ken Paxton impeachment, then confirmed everyone’s worst fears by throwing the match to Paxton. He is constantly in a fit of pique at the Texas House of Representatives, irritated that they do not follow his orders like the Senate does.
But Patrick, or Dannie Goeb as his birth certificate says (and aren’t we supposed to go by birth certificates?), is a huckster at heart. His latest crusade is to rename the popular New York Strip steak as the Texas Strip steak, because reasons reasons reasons. At heart, he just doesn’t want any piece of meat named after that hotbed of woke Marxism, New York. In case you did not get the message about his trolling the libs, he posted this on his Twitter feed:
Gulf of America shrimp, get it? That way, he can su*k Trump’s dick and have his steak too.
Not to be outdone when it comes to carnal stupidity, GOP House members devoted time last Monday to grilling tomahawk steaks and proposing that that cut of meat become the official steak of Texas.
House Speaker Dustin Burrows even created his own “Michael Dukakis moment” by posing like a drunken Las Vegas conventioneer with a tomahawk steak:
Molly Ivins used to call Texas politics the “finest form of free entertainment ever invented.” But, under GOP leadership for the last 30 years, the shtick is growing stale.
3. Flooding the Zone
When I talk with my friends, they have two reactions to the current pace of public life. The first is to the dizzying sheer volume and pace of it all. The second is to the injustice and immorality of it.
Like the Big Lebowski, public life these days has gotten complicated for me: “A lot of ins, a lot of outs. Fortunately, I'm adhering to a pretty strict drug regimen to keep my mind limber.”
The volume and pace is deliberate, writes Jennifer Mercieca, a professor of Communication and Journalism at Texas A&M University. “Deliberately overwhelming people with a flood of news content is a propaganda strategy used by authoritarians like Russian President Vladimir Putin to distort reality and prevent people from clearly evaluating their government’s actions.”
“Deliberately overwhelming people with a flood of news content is a propaganda strategy used by authoritarians like Russian President Vladimir Putin to distort reality and prevent people from clearly evaluating their government’s actions.”
Mercieca brings the receipts:
Trump is generating a lot more media content in his second term than he did in his first.
Reagan averaged about 5.8 news conferences per year. Trump averaged 22 per year in his first term, according to data collected by a nonpartisan group at the University of California Santa Barbara called the American Presidency Project. Former President Joe Biden averaged 9.25 per year.
Trump has already had 18 press gaggles or press conferences since taking office in January 2025.
The pace of changes – executive orders, new Cabinet members, outrageous violations of governmental and societal norms – is meant to disorient and paralyze. It aligns with former Trump advisor Steve Bannon’s injunction to “flood the zone with shit” as a way to neutralize negative coverage. But, as Professor Mercieca points out, the strategy has deeper, authoritarian roots.
We owe it to ourselves, our children and our future to push back against the onslaught. I suggest: find friends who share your ideas and values and forge new, deeper relationships with them around the topic of “how do we protect our country from these people?” Maybe start with your fellow Life Its Ownself readers – share your own stories, begin a dialogue, reach out to suggest new topics for discussion. The comments section is always open.
A Sad Note …
I found out this morning that Susana Aleman, the longtime Dean of Students at the U.T. Law School, has passed away. Susana served from 1984 to 2006. She was unfailingly cheerful and pleasant to deal with, creating “positive customer experiences” for law students before the term had been invented. She was the institutional memory of the School of Law for thousands of those students – greeting them when they returned for reunions, remembering their stories together. She will be sorely missed by those students and the School of Law.
Rest in Peace, Susana.
This is a fabulous post capturing the absurdity of Texas priorities in the 21st Century. I encourage you to send it to Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and the like. Bravo.
I thought the Texas Strip Steak was the lunch special at the Yellow Rose Gentlemen's Club.