Kinky for Governor - Why the Hell Not?

You can take the girl out of Texas, at least temporarily, but you can't ever take the Texas out of the girl. I know that it's currently not at all cool to be a Texan, mostly because of the example that Texans who have made it to Washington have shown the rest of the country. Folks seem to think that George Dubya Bush, Tom DeLay, and Dick Army, to name an infamous few, are representative of all Texans. They are, certainly, the upholders of one brand of Texas politics and culture, but by no means is theirs the only brand.

Kinky Friedman (who was named Richard by his fairly normal parents, the children of Polish and Russian immigrants), however, represents the Texas I have always known and loved. Kinky is more or less my age, a Texas Hill Country boy, a UT graduate who went to Borneo with the Peace Corps after graduation. He's had the same unfocused wandering sort of life that I and most of my friends have had, except that he got famous. During the seventies and eighties he performed with a group called Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys, whose songs were as eclectic as their name. When drugs and exhaustion drove him from the music world, he settled in to write a series of mystery novels set in New York City and featuring a guy named Kinky Friedman. I've read all but the last two of these books, I must confess; as I must also admit to having some of Kinky's earliest albums among the LPs I can't turn loose of. Even though I no longer have a turntable to play them on.

Now this guy is running for the position of governor of the Lone Star State, a position, as I'm sure you will recall, formerly occupied by our current President. It's currently occupied by a man Molly Ivins calls Governor Goodhair, but whose name is actually Rick Perry. In the beginning I kind of thought this campaign was a joke, but it's now evident that it's not. For the whole enchilada on Kinky, I recommend this article from The New Yorker: Lone Star: Kinky Friedman on the Campaign Trail, by Dan Halpern. Halpern spent two weeks with the Friedman campaign (slogan: Kinky Friedman for Governor. Why the Hell Not?) last summer and produced a delightfully readable article. Of Kinky as a candidate he says:

He is surely the only candidate for governor to have written extensively
about his past cocaine use, or to have flown in Led Zeppelin's private plane, or to have performed at the Grand Ole Opry. He is also currently the only candidate in the 2006 Texas gubernatorial campaign to operate outside the party system, without party money. Kinky, as everyone calls him, is running as an independent candidate.

He has a website that is worth following as the campaign heats up next year. Visit it if only to see what's in the shop. You could be first on your block to have a bumper sticker that says: My Governor is A Jewish Cowboy. Or a t-shirt bearing Kinky's favorite signoff: "May the God of your choice bless you." I fully intend to buy a singing Kinky action figure before it becomes a high-priced collectible, and I deeply regret no longer being a Texas citizen and thus able to vote to vote for a man who is not owned by any corporations, whose platform is Education (No Teacher Left Behind), Healthcare, and Renewable Energy. Maybe he can kick up enough interest among Texas voters so that the seventy percent who didn't vote last time actually git in their pickups and head for the polling place.

posted at 8:43:00 PM by marigolds2

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