I don’t know how sensitive you are to the media, it’s bias, and propagandist manipulation, for me it is something that I have been sensitive to and studied since my youth.
If you are tuned into it you may have noticed that Texas is starting to get the treatment that all these PC (non PC?) things started getting 40 and 45 years ago.
The casual, isolating, mildly degrading/insulting, negative associations, comments about Texas are cropping up throughout media and popular culture, and in news.
They are just sprinklings now, just starting to form drops here and there, but it is definitively happening, Texas is on the way to being portrayed as a pariah, they can’t totally do Texas like they did the South, but it is something that you are old enough to witness this time.
It is similar to Clarence Thomas, they can’t destroy Texas, but they can take some of the sheen off of it and make it harder to casually use it as a counterpoint to California and New York governance, without getting soiled with some of the baggage that the media is striving to attach to it.
They want to contaminate it for mention in polite company.
The casual, isolating, mildly degrading/insulting, negative associations, comments about Texas are cropping up throughout media and popular culture, and in news.
Yes, I've seen it too, but I don't think it's all that new. As a native Californian, I can tell you that there's long been a perception out there that Texas is a somewhat backward, overly conservative, flag waving, hickish place, filled with narrow minded Christians and empty headed yahoos. Not all Californians think of Texas that way, but enough do, that the viewpoint is noticeable.
My own views of Texas only improved because I was regularly in conversation with like-minded patriots and conservatives out here. In time, I came to see that all of those 'negatives' that liberal Californians looked down upon, were actually superior virtues, and that they set Texans far above the degraded and decrepit culture out west.
Maybe it's just me, and maybe it's because I'm just a bit biased toward my adopted state, but I see the cultural stock value of Texas rising in the minds of Americans.
It's an odd thing, but after living in California for half a century, I never experienced any home sickness for the place when we relocated to Texas. On the other hand, I had to make a trip out of state in our first year here, and I was absolutely sick with longing for Texas while I was gone.
Like I said, I might just be a tad biased :-)