THE WEIRD WORLD OF BAYTOWN, TEXAS

I worked for six years in Baytown, from 1998-2004, as a high school theater teacher, and got to know the place and it's people pretty well. And let me tell you, it's one weird town. For starters, it's in complete denial about what it is: the working class community thirty minutes east of Houston on I-10 is a large town, around 75,000 or so in population, that seems to think it's still a small town. That is, they have real urban issues with which to contend, like poverty, racial divisions, and gang violence, and they do deal with that stuff, but it's as though people there want to pretend they're all on Leave It to Beaver. It's a conservative place politically, which is no surprise given that it fringes on east Texas, but it is surprising given it's working class majority demographic and the huge non-white populations there--there are sizable African-American, Hispanic, and Pakistani communities in Baytown. All of this weirdness takes place under the shadow of Exxon, which essentially built the place decades ago to house their plant workers. If I understand correctly, nothing happens there politically that hasn't been blessed by the multi-national oil giant. Really, the place belongs to Exxon; it's just that nobody wants to admit it.

And people there are happy with the arrangement because it provides them with good, life long union jobs with benefits and retirement--very few places in America have such a good deal as far as jobs go these days. But the proximity of the plants brings problems along with the good jobs.

From the Houston Chronicle:

Delay in oil-spill notification probed

Residents, who were told in a letter from the company delivered to their homes Tuesday morning that the appropriate agencies had been contacted, expressed shock Wednesday that authorities had not been informed initially.

"Oh, my god. I am really scared," said Patricia Robinson, 55, who has lived in Archia Courts for 40 years, and watched Wednesday as Exxon Mobil contractors continued to wash cars and dig up the complex's playground.

The excavation, according to the company, had nothing to do with the spill, but, rather, was to improve the playground, which was missing seats on swingsets and was too close to power lines.

"Exxon must be hiding something," Robinson said. "They are trying to get it cleaned up so fast."

The delay, according to state officials who arrived on scene Wednesday, resulted in little evidence being available to reconstruct what happened. Investigators as of Wednesday afternoon still were having trouble deciding whether to classify it as an air pollution event or an oil spill.

"When we got there today, everything was clean," said Indest. "They had more than 24 hours to do their work. There was nowhere ... to take a sample.

Click here for the rest.

Crap like this happens all the time in Baytown. There was more than one occasion where we had to "shelter in place" for a while at the school where I taught, while the latest emission scare was being sorted out. I haven't seen any studies on the topic, but, from personal experience with the people there, it strikes me that the town has more than its fair share of weird cancers, birth defects, and other strange health maladies--pollution in Baytown, toxins in their environment, have got to be off the scale.

But everyone seems to be cool with the risk. I guess they feel like that's the price they have to pay to live in their fantasy 1950s world with such good jobs.

Of course, reality can never be completely swept under the carpet. I said above that Baytown deals with some heavy urban issues. Gay churches, for instance.

From the BP News, courtesy of my buddy Adam, who still attends the high school where I taught, and who writes the blog Shattered Soapbox:

SBTC removes church over homosexuality controversy

The Southern Baptists of Texas Convention’s executive board has acted unanimously to disaffiliate a church for violating the convention’s constitutional provision concerning churches that “affirm, approve, or endorse homosexual behavior.”

The SBTC credentials committee and two SBTC staff members met Dec. 20 for one hour and 45 minutes with the pastor of Faith Harbour -- previously an SBTC congregation in Baytown -- with a redemptive aim, SBTC minister-church relations director Deron Biles wrote in a summary of the meeting.

Biles recounted that the committee hoped to clarify Faith Harbour’s stance toward a church it is helping sponsor and allowing to meet in its facilities, which bills itself on its website as welcoming and affirming of homosexual, bisexual and trangendered people.

Additionally, the new church, Eklektos, has a female senior pastor. Biles said the committee and Faith Harbour pastor Randy Haney were unable to resolve their differences over Faith Harbour’s involvement with Eklektos.

Click here for the rest.

Heh. It wasn't simply the gayness of this congregation; it was also that they had a female pastor! God, I love Texas. Even though this excommunication is coming down from a state organization, I have no doubt that the overall attitude in Baytown is in wholehearted agreement--Baytown, like everywhere else in the world, has plenty of gay people, but is, I would assert, more homophobic than other towns its size. Did I mention the racism boiling beneath Baytown's 1950s facade? While I met more than a few there who I consider to be wonderful, enlightened, and intelligent people, I have to say that if I lived there, I would be doing everything I could to get out. And if I had children, I wouldn't let them within fifty miles of the place. The prevailing culture there is simply insane, much more fit as a setting for a David Lynch movie than as a place to spend your life. It's really not even worth visiting.

The best thing I've ever done for myself was to quit my job there. Because if you stay there long enough, the insanity creeps into your brain, and you start to see the world through Baytown's weird lenses, which is just no good.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$