Positive Liberty

Letting their freak flags fly in the most mainstream of Mainstream Media, Reason’s Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch (which one is Felix and which is Oscar?) grace the Washington Post’s Sunday Outlook section with a paean to Dallas. No, not the next door neighbor of the NFL’s soon-to-be Arlington Cowboys, but the execrable prime time soap opera that premiered 30 years ago and, as Gillespie and Welch would have it, helped the West win the Cold War and, alas, abetted the political ascension of George W. Bush. Every silver lining must have its cloud, I suppose.

Dallas’s contribution to the decline of both communism and presidential “couthness” aside, one point Gillespie and Welch failed to mention was how much the Ewing’s iconic Southfork Ranch was and still is a Potemkin Village. The ‘Mansion’ at Southfork Ranch is in fact a 4800 sq. ft. house with a 960 sq. ft. enclosed garage. Hardly a hovel but frankly smallish by comparison with some nearby Plano, TX neighborhoods and positively snug compared to the actual Dallas’s ostentatious Preston Hollow neighborhood.

Southfork serves today as a conference center and tourist attraction. I admit to not having made the trek, myself; but my wife has been to several events there and, at the risk of putting words in her mouth, described the facility as surprisingly small and unimpressive. Then again, having been chauffeured through a part of rural Russia a few years ago where our driver pulled over to negotiate at length, unsuccessfully as it turned out, with a roadside truck stand selling cabbage, what impresses is very much in the eye of the beholder. Dallas may have been, as Texans are wont to say, all hat and no cattle, but at least it showed the rest of the world what it was like to live in America always having more than enough cabbage.

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