In the Pecos River Valley of West Texas, mostly Mexican immigrants pick the famous cantaloupe crops. They also go north to harvest beets and corn and fruit but some of them stay with their families in little towns like Saragosa. I had driven many times past the 100 plus houses and a handful of stores on route 17 because it lay between Pecos and the state park and limestone pool down in Balmorhea. There was always a reason for me to be writing and working in West Texas and even when I ran out of them I spent free time wandering in the desert. There is light and air there that does not exist anywhere else and there are people living there who are independent and strong.

Desert and Mountains

Few ever noticed Saragosa because it was modest houses and trailers and if the road did not bend just north of town the traffic would have been passing at 80 miles per hour while racing down to Interstate 10. The sky was often clear on the edge of Reeves County and the dark Davis Mountains were usually visible across the Chihuahuan Desert. There were only a few hundred people living in Saragosa the night that a super cell storm climbed 61,000 feet into the atmosphere. A single funnel spun down between the mountains and the little town of laborers as about 80 people gathered at Guadalupe Hall for a pre-kindergarten graduation ceremony for Head Start children.

Out of the Still of a Night

In Texas we live with tornadoes almost all year long but they are rare in that part of the state because of the mountains. Reeves County had not suffered a single fatality as a result of a tornado from the time record keeping began in 1916 until the sun dropped below the horizon that day in 1987. Saragosa had no tornado-warning siren but a radio station broadcasted an alert and there was information from the TV stations about 100 miles distant in Midland. The families attending the graduation ceremony were oblivious until one of them stepped outside and saw a cloud with multiple funnels on the edge of town. No one left the hall and they went to corners and turned over benches and hid behind anything that might offer protection.

There was no time and little hope. Twenty-two people died in the building where they were about to begin a celebration of the future for their children. None of the graduates was killed but the twisters claimed eight more residents of Saragosa. A hard life on the edge of the desert had gone beyond grim. Five of the fatalities were under the age of five and the number of dead counted was at 30 before the sun rose and America began hearing the horrible story of the tornado town.

Dust in the Wind

Reporters came from the big cities with their rental cars and neckties and satellite trucks that sent live signals back for broadcast. They were parked along the side of Highway 17 and when their cameras pointed at the town it all looked like a disaster movie was being filmed but it was real and even sadder than it appeared to outsiders. Cameras also recorded the tiny children’s caskets a few days later as they were carried down Cemetery Road to gravelly holes in the desert that had wooden crosses with hand-carved names to mark their eternal spots.

Nothing to Say, Nothing to Do

Healing does not happen fast in the desert but the old man who owned the only general store in town was making his own adobe bricks for rebuilding a few days after the storm. One-by-one he carried them to a stack as the mud dried. The cameras turned quickly away, though, and the unknown town went forgotten as the world cast its eyes back to politics and celebrities and newer disasters. Nobody you know can tell you about Saragosa or where it is or what happened on that night of great statistical improbabilities.

I rode my motorcycle through Saragosa last summer but I did not stop and barely reduced my speed. I tried not to look at the sign pointing down Cemetery Road and had been confronting the memory of the tornado as I came down from Pecos in the painful July heat. There is still no way to talk about what happened there but I think about Saragosa every time a warm day turns suddenly cool and the sky darkens and the wind freshens.

And I’ll wish again that I could forget.

In those days, we went to Mexico every weekend and ate and shopped and walked the streets in Nuevo Laredo and up to the Sierra Madre and the little towns like Bustamente. People played music in the plazas and there was almost always the smell of carne asada in the air as you walked to the Cadillac Bar for a drink. The nights we had on the border are still as vivid as the mornings when it had rained and you could see the mountains across the desert.

I don’t think it is anything like that today but I don’t go down to Mexico any more. A few days ago, while speaking with a friend from there, I’d heard about nine people found hanging from a bridge. There is no reasonable way to talk about such things. The desperation over drugs and money and guns has grown so great that the news often sounds like everyone has surrendered to the circumstances. The war on drugs is over. And drugs won.

The U.S. government says that there is now a “net zero” migration from Mexico to this country but that does not mean our mutual problems are lessened. They are still coming to America and we continue to buy the product that is killing Mexicans by the tens of thousands. You cannot know what that is like until you have seen and heard them cry. I have listened to their pleadings but mostly I remember the immigrants’ tears.

We were down on the Rio Grande where the river makes a slow bend south of Del Rio, Texas. The land the immigrants were about to encounter when they reached the north bank of the big river was marked by an endless horizon of mesquite, prickly ocotillo and cholla, and a ceaseless heat that felt as though it were left over from the earth’s beginnings. First, though, they had to cross the fast water.

Our camera crew was moving slowly into the cane breaks. The sky was rolling up darkness from the east and there was much less light in the tunnels the immigrants had made through the 10 and 15 foot tall stalks. A US Border Patrol officer led us down a path and showed us where the crossers had made little spaces to hide off of the trail. These were littered with abandoned clothes and other belongings that might have not served them on the long walk across deadly open spaces of Texas. I thought it looked like a camp or a fort fashioned by adventurous boys.

Badlands in Front of the Gladlands

Above us, the cane stalks woven together by the wind made a roof against a sky that they would come to know as an enemy in the next days. A few of the lucky ones would be able to jump a freight train if they were successful at sneaking into town and avoiding the security at the rail yards.

“We can’t catch them all,” the border patrol agent said into our television camera. “We only get a tiny percent. And you feel bad about it when you do. But it’s the law and it’s my job. Here, let me show you this.”

The pathway opened up to a muddy embankment that angled sharply to the water. The Rio Grande was moving swiftly and was darkly colored from the soil it carried from the farmland of north central Mexico and the tall canyonlands of Big Bend National Park. They would have to swim with great strength and courage to reach America.

“They’re gathering over there right now.” The agent pointed upstream a few hundred yards and slight motion was visible in the undergrowth on the Mexican side. “I sure as hell wouldn’t want to be crossing that river tonight. Let’s just pull back and wait.”

After making our way slowly behind his pocket flashlight, we were positioned with the agent at a location up the trail near the hollowed out rest spot. We squatted in the darkness for almost an hour until we heard them slipping as they clambered up the muddy embankment. The agent stood.

“They’ll be here in a few minutes.” His voice was dispassionate, clinical. After riding around with him that day, his moral conflict was obvious. He was the son of immigrants from Mexico. “We all came here from somewhere,” he had told us during the taping of an interview. “I’m just not sure how or what we do about this.”

Eleven immigrants approached and the agent turned on his big flashlight as he heard them rustling through the cane.

“Alto. Espere aqui,” he ordered.

His voice was not authoritative but they obeyed and stopped. As he walked past each of them, he tapped them on the shoulder and ordered them to sit on the trail. This was a measure of security he took because budget cuts had put him in the position of working alone in the dark and handling people who might be filled with angry desperation. These 9 men and 2 women were not. They were tired and sad and wet and all they wanted was a job and money to care for their families in Mexico.

“Can you please just let me go,” one of the immigrants said in halting English. “I just can’t go back. Please, sir. I am beg to you.”

His name was Armando. As we waited for the vans to arrive after the agent radioed for assistance, we talked to Armando. He was the only one willing to speak but their stories all had the same texture of pain with minor variations in fact.

“I cannot go home,” he sobbed. The bright camera light turned his tears into shining rivulets. “No work there. My children hungry. My wife sick. I have to come America.”

“Where do you come from?” I asked.

“My home…..you know is Guadalajara? Little place by there. I walk here. Many hundreds miles.”

The agent paced in front of the assembled group and kept his eye wary for anyone who might bolt into the brush.

“You let me go, sir? Please. What it matter? No one knows. What it matter to you? Nothing? But it big important to me. Please. My children.”

I turned to see if there was a reaction on the agent’s face behind the flashlight’s glow. He betrayed nothing. He swung the beam of his light up toward Armando and saw his bare feet, sweat pants, and torn tee shirt, his dripping, stringy hair.

“I can’t,” the agent said in perfect Spanish. “You know that.”

The vans rolled up and the immigrants boarded and were gone within minutes. After being processed through a detention center, they were returned to the international bridge and sent back south. But they were not likely to give up.

“I’m sure I’ll see Armando again,” the Border Patrol officer said. “Or one of our other agents will. And probably the rest of them. Look, like I said, I don’t blame them. I’d take whatever risks are necessary to feed my kids. I guess we’re all just doing what we have to do. I don’t know anything.”

But what else is there to know? Drug cartels are killing innocents and each other. The Mexican government’s military crackdown has not even slowed the trade. Hundreds of people, mostly women, have been “disappeared” from Ciudad Juarez. And now the low-paying jobs of the border manufacturing facilities known as maquiladoras are being moved to China where labor is even cheaper.

A Hard Road to a Better Life

And the only thing separating that great misery from great possibility is a river and a desert. So they take their chances going north. And they swing hammers and build houses and work the farms and the restaurants and clean homes and hotels and care for our children. They also have the same dreams of health and prosperity as Americans. The profit of great industries is carried on their low income backs and is marked in their calloused hands and defined by the ache of their muscles. Our economy and our country might not function as well without their labor. And there are no laws Washington can pass that will free us from our mutual dependence.

Immigration is not a curse. It is our heritage. And when we decided to make America the “shining beacon on a hill,” we ought to have known people were going to be drawn to the light.

But we quickly forget about the miracle of just being alive. We might not even have ever recognized it. But we do know that we want more of life. We even expect it. We’ve come to believe we should all have health and long decades of happiness, money, good weather, wonderful friends, happy, and curious children. And if we are fortunate, and these things come to us, most of us acquire the wisdom to understand the sweet gift we have been given. The odds have once more been defied. And worked in our favor.

But let’s acknowledge that no matter how much we love. How much we care. How hard we try. The world and its workings are beyond our ability to truly control. Or even understand. Life grants us our comfortable delusions. And we cling to them. And we believe them to be real. But often they are not. Love does conquer everything. But sometimes not when we need for that to happen.

Our children, of course, are what give our lives their greatest meanings. But they also spur our greatest fears. We tremble when we release their hands for their first steps. And we shrink with anxiety the moment we walk out the door leaving them at day care. Or with a sitter. The school bus comes one day and they climb up those steps and are gone to the beginning of their own lives. We’ve lost a little more control. Then comes the first sleepover. And a date. Or a school trip. And then they are off to college. This all happens in an instant. And if we are lucky, it all goes well and some day we get another son or daughter by marriage. And even grandchildren.

But a prophet once said that, “Our children are not our children. They are the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself.” Life will make its own choosings. We know the world has chaos and darkness that puts us all at grave risk. But we also know that there is beauty in friendships and landscapes and a night sky and a wildflower and newly fallen snow. A silent moment of personal faith. These are things that bring most of us joy.

Moments in Time

But we do not all see the universe through the same lens. People who look through a different set of eyes cannot see these happy things. They sometimes have a view they don’t like. And will not share. This is not a bright, shining object they are drawn to. It is, instead, a troubled talisman they cannot turn from or deny. The world is too much for them. The paradoxes and mysterious objects and emotions of life frighten them. They don’t understand how anything fits together. Of course, none of us does. But most of us reach acceptance. And then happiness, either in spite of the mystery of everything. Or because of it. But there are those we love who are troubled by what’s coming at them. Or what they think might be missing from the world.

We can usually see this happening. We reach for them. We offer a hand. But they take their solace elsewhere. And they will not let us follow. They cannot explain what it is they know that we do not. They can only try to find a way to lessen their hurt. And that is where our loss begins. It does not mean they can’t feel our love. And appreciate it. They just don’t know what to do with it. And they worry about what we might expect in return. Even though they love us as greatly as we love them.

Loved and Lost

Every life, of course, deserves celebration. Especially of those we love. One man has a son for 21 hours. His best friend has his son for 21 years. Neither is sufficient. It’s just what we are given. There is little to be understood from that beyond the miracle of the first breath. The last breath, I believe, knows its own time. We cannot forestall its moment no matter how hard we try. Nor can we find easy acceptance of that moment.

“Everything is necessary,” Cormac McCarthy wrote. “Every least thing. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall.”

I remember a bright sunny morning on the banks of the Missouri River. Men had gathered with horses to recreate a part of American history. They were to cross the high plains and the Rocky Mountains in the old way. And in their path their horses hooves would trod over the souls of 6 people who had died for every single mile trying to make it west and know a dream of success on the frontier. But the pastor reminded all of us there in the rising sun that we were celebrating the “sheer joy of just living.” And that was regardless of any outcomes of our endeavors. What we might think of as achievement and failure.

So this is what we have. The sheer joy of just living. We might not feel it now. But it is what we are given. A set of years. An accumulation of moments with one another. We honor that time with friends and families. We memorialize it with love. But we cannot ever know how this all came to us. Either by grace. Or chaos. Or that simple statistical improbability of being born and then walking in the world. We have all this for a while. We don’t know how long. But it is a wondrous gift.

And what we love about it all will last forever.

She’s young, full of energy and dreams, and has her eyes on adventurous horizons. But even in the 2012 world where she is coming of age, her culture is laying out frilly dresses, shiny pumps, and lip gloss that have the potential to turn her into little more than a support system for a future husband’s ambitions. A lot more doors are open to young women in the post-feminist era but the expectations of gender don’t simply disappear.

And Mary Pauline Lowry will have none of it.

Lowry is a thirty-something Austin writer whose new novel, “The Earthquake Machine,” explores the power of sexism and gender through a teenager’s decision to shed her history, her sex, her friends, and almost everything she is in order to find a different existence. The architecture of Lowry’s story is subtle with symbols that are cast upon a stark and unforgiving landscape, which she renders as both inspiring and frightening with her near perfect choice of words.

Rhonda, the narrative’s main character, has a troubled epiphany during a river trip down the Rio Grande as it passes through the canyons of Big Bend National Park. Like John Grady Cole and Lacey Rawlins of Cormac McCarthy’s “All the Pretty Horses,” Rhonda has arrived at a decision to escape the emotional detritus of war. Cole and Rawlins went off on a teenaged Mexican adventure in order to abandon the wreckage of fathers permanently harmed by combat in World War Two. They were also rejecting the limited lives proscribed by West Texas. Rhonda, though, is running from a domestic conflict, which is no less of a war, where she suspects her pharmacist father is doping up her mother and manipulating her into suicide, Rhonda will not have the boundaries of her life drawn by the same cultural mores that are destroying her timid mother.

Crossing over is not easy in the Big Bend. The landscape announces a kind of human insignificance and boldly states that no one has meaningful troubles or the time for introspection. To the people who know the border, the Rio Grande that Rhonda is floating with her friends unifies two cultures and you don’t change much regardless of the riverbank on which you choose to stand. Rhonda feels something different, though, and after a sexual near miss with the group’s river guide, she slips into the water and lets it carry her away to Mexico where she has no more goal in mind than to find Jésus, her parents’ gardener who taught her perfect Spanish and became her friend. She cannot get far enough away from the tragedy that unfolded at home in Austin.

Lowry’s skills are manifest from the opening pages when she establishes tension but she becomes masterful beyond her years as a storyteller when Rhonda comes up from the river, naked, wet, hungry, and born again as a boy. Rhonda encounters a peyote-eating shop owner that helps her cut her hair, provides clothes that hide her gender, and guides Rhonda to assume the name Angel. By the time she leaves the little border town of Milagros, Angel has added the Virgin of Guadalupe to her initial quest to find her friend Jésus. Strangers might see her as a boy or a girl or an androgynous creature wandering in the desert, but that doesn’t stop the neophyte Angel from searching for answers to questions she can’t even articulate and knows are emotionally and psychologically too profound to ignore.

A lesser writer might be accused of too many contrivances but Lowry peoples the road in front of Angel with characters that inform the soul of the little girl lost that she is not alone in her struggle. An expatriated American, who is suspected of dealing in “product,” empowers his wife to build and remodel and saw and hammer because these are endeavors that make her happy, and when she is joyous the sex is great and the house is in harmony. A woman with calloused hands can love, too.

She Writes like the Wind

After the couple agrees to give Angel a ride to Jésus’ hometown, a gang of banditos confronts them on the highway. Angel slips into the jungle with them where she discovers they are “banditas,” and the sharp edges of sexuality and gender begin to soften for her. These are women that united to defy expectations and the law. They are raising hell instead of children and, in spite of their rebellious approach to life, find liberty in having refused to cook and clean house for a man. Even in the machismo culture of old Mexico, Angel finds females who’ve ignored all the gender clues laid out before them by centuries of marriage and custom.

When Angel finally reunites with the beloved Jésus, she is disappointed yet again by a man who refuses to teach her, as he had promised, a special skill. Her memory of the river guide won’t leave her alone, either, and Angel seeks a physical release that leads her to the earthquake machine. She shares this double D battery fun with an elderly woman who has been living alone and miserable for decades since her husband died. Genevieve doesn’t play the role of the ancient seer, though, and instead slouches sadly among the folds of her own skin and reminds Angel of what awaits a girl who ties her fate too closely to a man.

When the earth finally moves for Angel, it is both orgasmic and tragic. Lowry refuses to give her protagonist an easy time of things and she loses love almost as quickly as it is discovered but she has learned enough to know that she can take charge. Sex might feel like it is the most important thing in the world to a post-pubescent girl, but as Angel undergoes yet another transformation, she realizes that sex, too, is “its own little death.” Nothing is more transitory than beauty and lust.

Lowry may have been writing The Earthquake Machine for the young adult reader, but she has created a story that belongs on bookshelves next to other fine literature. She’s as accomplished with her sentences and character development as a young Jane Smiley or Anne Tyler and often as disturbing as Jim Harrison. In the hands of a writer like Mary Pauline Lowry, the human condition can be as brightly illuminated through the plight of a post-pubescent teen as it can through the travails of the Joad family scratching its way westward during the Great Depression. The Earthquake Machine moves Lowry into an elite group of young female writers who know that the feminist movement is about more than equal pay for equal work and that a girl has a right to be a grrrlllll, if she chooses.

And, boy, (or maybe girl,) does she know how to tell a story.

There were, of course, problems. Detroit caught fire in July 1967 in race riots and Governor Romney asked for federal troops. Most of the racist white southerners that had come north to work the factories instead of the fields in the south had managed to set themselves up in segregated communities, regardless of their incomes. The high school I attended, Grand Blanc, between Flint and Detroit, was still all white in 1969. Dr. King’s message was rattling around unheard in the tin ears in much of America.

Governor Romney’s son Mitt was at least partially insulated from the times by his family’s wealth. He was raised in Bloomfield Hills, an affluent suburb of Detroit, where his father had become the CEO of American Motors. Mitt was not to be seen in public schools during his high school years. The family sent him across town to Cranbrook, an exclusive boarding school that offered a better education than the public system. One of his classmates was Daniel Ellsberg, a former Marine who stood up to protest the U.S. political mistakes and deceptions in Vietnam by releasing The Pentagon Papers. There was one black student in Romney’s graduating class.

All the Soft Places to Fall

Mitt’s progress from there was predictable. While the sons of southerners were mostly running to the car plants to fill out applications to work on the assembly lines, he was off to Stanford and Harvard and Brigham Young. In California, when students were staging a sit-in at an administration building to resist draft assessment tests, the future head of Bain Capital took part in a counter protest. The Vietnam War he was supporting was a conflict in which he would not be compelled to participate. Mitt got two student deferments and another one for being a “minister” of the Mormon Church while he was a missionary in France. His luck held when he drew the number 300 in the first ever draft lottery.

What, exactly, makes him presidential?

There is something troubling about the collective American consciousness that enables us to elect persons of privilege to a job whose most basic requirement ought to be a first hand understanding of economic struggle. Like the two Republican Bush presidents, Mitt Romney has always had a soft place to fall. In 1975, when he left Harvard, he went straight to Wall Street with a class of business school graduates who became consultants instead of employees. The mortgage his dad told him to deal with first was probably never a big worry and when Mitt landed at Bain Capital in 1977 he was launched on the business career that is somehow supposed to qualify him for the White House. Please explain how being successful at an investment fund trains an individual for dealing with foreign policy, a stubborn congress, and a lagging economy.

We Americans celebrate wealth and business success as if it were a form of religion. Of course, people who work hard and accomplish their goals, financial, material, or even spiritual, ought to be admired because they contribute to the advancement of our culture. But the rich are not necessarily special; they tend to be prepared and lucky. Their money is generally not the consequence of any intellect or insight that can translate to leadership or government. We simply want to believe that is how they earned it.

In Romney’s experience, he has been almost as disconnected from the concerns of the working class as was George W. Bush and his father. W once asked a friend to help him “to understand the poor,” as if the economically disadvantaged had somehow made a decision to not have money. “Why’d they do that?” W seemed to be asking. W’s father loved to tell the tale of leaving Connecticut in an old car with “Bar” and heading out to West Texas to become a wildcatter in the Permian Basin oil patch but he always leaves out the part where his father the senator staked him to a half million dollars to get the oil business rolling. Eventually, H.W. sold the company for millions, set up trust funds for all of his children, and ran for congress.

There isn’t any class warfare in America. We are all participants in the same game and some of us have greater advantages and use them to gain wealth but that doesn’t mean the rich should be president. I’ve often thought the difference between the two political parties was that one was rolling down the highway in a nice new car and ignoring all of those who had fallen into the ditch while the other party was slowing down and pulling over to help get the stranded travelers back on the road. Capitalism is imperfect and x amount of effort does not necessarily produce y amount of results. Some of us end up in the ditch. People fail for many reasons. But almost all of them are trying. Our national discourse is over how we provide assistance.

We’ve had wealthy presidents in the past and some have had greatness. Our greatest president, however, came from a log cabin and understood the common man’s struggle, and it is not about corporate tax cuts. Leadership is a product of intimate understanding, which rarely is a consequence of wealth. But America has only two types of citizens: millionaires and those of us who very shortly expect to be millionaires. The result is we admire money and project onto the wealthy characteristics they often do not possess.

And putting those people into the White House tends to be a grave mistake.

“Just tell me what it does,” he said.

When he won his first statewide office as Texas Agriculture Commissioner, he did it by changing parties and having Karl Rove run his campaign. Perry, in fact, later acknowledged, “Karl did everything.” Unfortunately, more than a decade after he left that office, Texas is still dealing with bad debts from an agriculture loan program backed by Perry.

He was not Lieutenant Governor long enough to make major stumbles because George W. Bush left for the White House and Perry moved into the governor’s mansion. If he’d had even the slightest amount of self-awareness, Rick Perry would have looked around that grand old structure and pinched himself while wondering how in the hell it all happened.

Rick Perry has never had a true sense of who he is until he conceded here in Iowa. What he knows, and what most of America has also learned, is that he may be the least intelligent governor in the country. Just like he had never paid attention to those bills he was asked to sponsor as a legislator back in the 80s, Rick Perry ignored issues relevant to winning the presidency. He was always too busy helping his lobbyist friends and corporations seeking taxpayer handouts to bother learning the number of Supreme Court justices or even their names.

He was a gaffe machine in cowboy boots powered by oil money and rich Texans who drooled over the idea that Perry would open Washington’s doors to all of their big dollar dreams. And Perry, on paper, which is where he should have stayed, was the best candidate for the GOP. He had been a governor of Texas for more than a decade and had the political positions that evangelicals and the Tea Party lusted over. Perry would have done better in this campaign if he had never spoken a word and simply walked around and waved his arm at the crowds.

But then he went and talked.

Sort of. His “oops” moment will be taught in political science books for generations to come. And young collegians will wonder how a man so stupid could ever think that he might become president. Hell, even Ronald Reagan learned his lines. But Perry couldn’t be bothered. He’d never had to debate much to get where he was and it’s clear he didn’t read or think on complex issues. He just decided to run for the office and raise money.

He might say he is “reassessing” but he is done. The worst governor in the history of Texas may have set a new standard for the worst presidential candidate. Money and profile and reputation are not sufficient in the race to the White House. Perry has embarrassed himself and his state and is likely oblivious to the scope of his failure. A friend and long time associate of Perry’s said the governor had always been very good at just trying things to see how they unrolled. If he failed, he simply shrugged and moved on. He has failed and failed miserably and a simple shrug will hardly do for a response. How does he explain the $17 million plus that he wasted, including about $4 million on TV ads in Iowa? One analysis indicates he spent $500 per vote. He has done worse than Texas Governor John Connally did here in 1980 and worse the Texas U.S. Senator Phil Gramm in ’96. Rick Santorum did better with $500,000.

His endorsement may end up being sought by Romney or Gingrich or Santorum because Texas will be essential to any Republican presidential plans for Washington. But who wants the dumb guy’s support? Rick Perry can reassess all he wants, but his campaign, which was mangled as poorly as his syntax, is finished.

And if he doesn’t know that, he is even stupider than he appeared during the debates.

Polls show Romney poised as the likely winner or second place finisher in a fight with Ron Paul and Rick Santorum. Even Dr. Paul has suggested in interviews that he doesn’t go to bed at night with visions of himself in the White House. His race continues to be more of a movement than a candidacy and he lives under a ceiling of support that rarely rises.

Romney, though, has money and the moderate politics to give the president a tough fight in the fall. But he doesn’t give his own party those sweaty palms of excitement. And everyone in the GOP wants to see if there is a viable candidate that can become the party’s dreamboat, which is the only democratic service likely to be provided by Iowa.

The third place finisher here will get more media narrative and attention than has ever happened to an also-ran. This will be Rick Santorum, Rick Perry, or Newt Gingrich, (unless the Santorum surge has gone so far the polls haven’t measured it accurately and he wins.) The former speaker seems the least likely to take that third slot. Every other ad on television here in Iowa is an attack on Gingrich and his poll numbers have fallen precipitously.

Santorum’s, however, have been rising, and he could finish anywhere from third to first. Unfortunately, this rise in popularity is connected to the fact that he has practically lived in Iowa for the past year and has had the profile of an Iowa gubernatorial candidate. Even with money, he cannot sustain that level of exposure beyond Iowa to New Hampshire, South Carolina, Florida and on to Super Tuesday in March.

The case is harder to make for Texas Governor Rick Perry. He has begun to turn around his campaign’s blunders and has been on an almost endless bus tour of this state but his numbers appear unlikely to reach above the mid-teens. If, however, that leaves him in third place, Perry will get a new narrative as the Non-Romney. A reconsideration of that nature means he gets examined not so much as gaffe machine but as a long-term governor of a very large state whose politics please both the Christian evangelicals and the Tea Party.

But the Iowans who were supposed to reconsider Perry have been looking hard at Santorum. Even though the former Pennsylvania US Senator lost his reelection campaign by a margin of 18 percent, his support has been on the rise here. A surge in the turnout of evangelical voters, which was once supposed to help Perry, now more likely means Santorum will become the Non-Romney. Perry has been directly attacking Santorum because his campaign team is aware of the threat the Pennyslvanian poses for the Texas governor’s chances of a rebound. But there is no data to show the shots have harmed Santorum.

In none of these candidates, however, is there the kind of voter enthusiasm that is tapped when a future president shares a vision of the country’s future, except for Ron Paul. When the Texan contrarian walks into a room in Iowa, his supporters are loud and animated. Romney, Perry, Santorum, and Gingrich get a kind of polite applause as if the crowd were trying to make a final decision on whether to buy a Mac or a PC. They seem to want to get the process concluded and see how their machine functions. But that doesn’t mean Congressman Paul will be able to outlast Mitt Romney over the long run to the convention.

The winner will be the Non-Romney.

And if that candidate can generate money and enthusiasm in the coming primary and caucus states, Mitt Romney will have a very miserable 2012.

What’s the matter with Iowa?

His latest bit of oblivion occurred when he was asked yesterday about a landmark Supreme Court case called Lawrence v. Texas. During the early 70s, while the rest of America was worrying about the Vietnam War, the Arab oil embargo, and violence in the streets, free love and cheap marijuana, down here in Texas our state government was fretting over consenting adults of the same sex making love. The state passed a law making it illegal. A quarter of a century later, Harris County sheriff’s deputies in Houston were looking for a gunman and broke into the apartment of two men engaged in sex. They were arrested under the Texas law. Eventually, the men decided to fight to protect their privacy and the Texas Homosexual Conduct Law was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court during Rick Perry’s third year as governor.

The late Tyron Garner and John Lawrence, Jr, who stood up to the Texas law that intruded into their private lives

But yesterday in Iowa, the man who has fought so hard to protect marriage as an institution reserved for the union of males and females, admitted to the Austin American Statesman’s Ken Herman that he didn’t know a damned thing about the Texas law. Perry’s flat-out stupidity on this issue must be difficult for even his most ardent supporters to process. When the Texas GOP nominated him for governor in 2010, the party’s platform had a plank that called for making it a felony for same sex couples to be married and any public servant who performed such a service to be prosecuted as a felon. The measure did not become law but Perry’s going to be back in Texas shortly after his further national embarrassment and he’s likely to be bored and vengeful.

The rank hypocrisy of Perry on the matter of the law and government and same sex partners is a bit astonishing. He has built his political career on the notion that the government’s rights and responsibilities stop at an individual’s doorstep, or, at least that is his rhetoric. Unfortunately, there are voters in Texas and Iowa that appear foolish enough to think he actually practices the principles he espouses. The government only stops at your doorstep in Perry’s world if it is trying to enforce a law that he and radical conservatives don’t like. Perry’s commitment to making “government as inconsequential in your life as possible” is abundant garbage when he wants you to act more fundamentally conservative. In those cases, it’s okay for the law to break into your home and tell you that you are having illegal sex or that your daughter must take an HPV shot developed by one of his major campaign donors and promoted by one of his oldest friends and lobbyists.

A walkin' contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction

Perry has no shame about any of this because he does not have the intellect to even begin to understand what’s wrong with his contradicting ideas. The same principle of political stupidity applies regarding his notion of a part time congress. The Texas governor wants to reduce government spending and stop making life so easy and pleasant for members of congress and make them more accountable. Government spending is okay, however, in fact, even kind of sweet, when it comes time for him to double dip on the taxpayers of Texas. Even though he is still on the state payroll for $150,000 as governor, Perry has filed for and receives a Texas government pension that amounts to $92,000. When congress gets pensions and benefits, Perry calls it excessive spending but in his case he and his staff have referred to it as smart “estate planning.”

In his polemic book that was ghostwritten under his name, Perry yaks and yabbers about activist and interventionist judges subjugating the will of the states and how frivolous lawsuits are destroying America’s economy. He refers to the Supreme Court justices as “oligarchs in robes,” which, apparently, is a lesser being than an oligarch in cowboy boots and hat. Perry thinks federal courts ought to stay out of state business.

Except when he needs them to step in to save his presidential campaign.

He filed a lawsuit asking a federal court to overturn the Virginia ballot access requirement that a candidate collect 10,000 signatures before they be placed on the presidential nominating ballot. Perry wanted one of those awful activist judges to tell the state of Virginia its rules are stupid and illegal. He has also promulgated the idea that when people file what Perry views are “frivolous” lawsuits and they lose their case, they ought to be responsible for all legal costs. It is doubtful that when he was told by a federal court that Virginia’s regulations were the state’s prerogative and were just fine the way they were implemented and his case was lost that he was willing to write a check to pay Virginia’s state lawyers for their time and the court’s costs.

His lawsuit wasn’t frivolous. But yours will be. Rick Perry has worked very hard to close the courthouse doors to citizens who have been harmed by corporate incompetence. Caps on settlements make it almost impossible to cover the legal costs simply to get a case to the point of being placed on a docket. These changes in the law are helping to lure big businesses to Texas. Of course, the multi-million dollar taxpayer checks Perry is giving corporations that promise jobs, which often never materialize, also helps lure industry south of the Red River.

Rick Perry is not a conservative. He is a man of little intelligence who has used charm and looks to build a political career. And his success is a crime against democracy.

He talks about budget management and fiscal austerity and then puts the state in a position of spending like a fool on his security. While he decries the Congressional revolving door of lobbyists as “legal corruption,” some of the richest people in Austin tend to be his friends who worked for Perry and then went out into the lobby. There are, according to research conducted by the Huffingtonpost, 40 lobbyists who have worked for Perry and are now making money by carrying messages to him from corporations and conservative causes.

Maybe it’s not legal corruption in Texas. We tend to just think of it as bidness. But Perry is trying to be one of the serious candidates on the grandest of global stages and he thinks no one is noticing his hypocrisies.

Bus Boy in Iowa

The latest absurdity is the money being wasted on his security. The Texas Tribune has reported it’s about $400,000 per month, which is likely to total around $4 million by the time Perry plops back down in his $10,000 per month taxpayer-funded mansion in the hills west of Austin. Perry, like George W. Bush before him, sees a relationship between his self-importance and the number of armed men around him whispering into their coat sleeves.

How many are traveling with the Texas governor is hard to discern. News media outlets have been trying under open records laws to get copies of vouchers but can only acquire general spending information. Details won’t be available until after the presidential campaign has ended but figures reported by the Texas Tribune indicate an absurd level of spending by taxpayers on a candidate who claimed to raise $17 million for his campaign. Between September 5 and 28 of this year, lawmen shadowing Perry spent more than $50,000 on food, $161,000 plus for airfare, and $112,111.00 for lodging. In one instance, they spent $4400 to eat at a restaurant near the Ronald Reagan Library during the debate and another $6400 for plane tickets to San Diego.

Even if there were 44 of them traveling with Perry, $4400 for one meal seems absurd when spending taxpayer money.

And nobody laughs when Perry says he’ll control spending when he gets to Washington. Maybe because it’s not funny. It’s a bit frightening that he is pulling close to ten percent in recent Iowa polls. In the last budget Perry passed before he went north of the Red River to chase his fantasy, he cut the heart out of virtually every government program. Teachers got fired by the tens of thousands, class sizes went above state legal levels, in home care for the disabled was dangerously cut, money for state parks, already in serious decay, was reduced, and hundreds of thousands of children and indigent adults were booted off of basic state health care. (The Texas Tribune’s web page, which carries the latest Perry story, includes a banner ad from the state’s Parks and Wildlife Department asking the public for funding help. The budget has been cut almost every year the legislature has met under Perry’s leadership and the parks system has gone hat in hand to the public.)

But there is money available for corporate giveaways like the Texas Enterprise Fund and the Emerging Technology Fund. Perry has now doled out hundreds of millions to companies that are run by friends of his who make donations to his campaigns or to large corporations that promise to come to Texas and create jobs but the work never materializes in the numbers described.

If god really told Perry to run for president, as he claims, then god has bad judgment. Or a twisted sense of humor. Rick Perry is a certifiably ignorant religious zealot who thinks the world is 10,000 years old and global warming is a hoax and evolution is a theory that ought to be subjugated in textbooks to creationism. The fact that he is given any type of consideration by Republican voters is a condemnation of their party and the American electoral process.

And Perry owes Texans millions for the money he has wasted on traveling security.