This week Caribou Barbie resigned her governorship for the good of Alaska. Who would ever have thought she had such a realistic picture of her own ability? Maureen Dowd wrote a couple of clever columns about it. They weren't as funny as Sarah Palin, but they were funny.

Molly Ivins (Saint Molly if there are any saints at all, which I doubt) could have surpassed the original. It takes a hard-drinking, Texas female of the liberal persuasion to really skew a po-faced fish-eating far right Alaskan bimbo.

Sister-in-law Jimmi used to send me Molly's books whenever they came out. (Note to young readers: examine in-laws with a gimlet eye before marriage. Good in-laws are a delightful serendipitous acquisition that one increasingly values. At the very least, you're stuck with bad ones every Christmas. One of my mother's sister-in-laws used to give her back, very nicely wrapped, the gift my mother had given her the Christmas before. The woman didn't believe in recycling; she was very cheap.)

Occasionally, something comes up in the news and I remember Molly. I would have enjoyed her take on the Jackson Circus this week. I don't believe he was a child abuser. There was no credible evidence, no evidence at all, that he was. There was also no evidence that he was a saint.

Occasionally, I harangue sisters-in-law Jimmi and Nancy about their place of residence: Houston, I say, is a town that smells like a wet dog. You'll probably die of some toxic waste induced cancer. It's a place where families, whole families, mother, father, little babies and all, live out of shopping carts and sleep under the freeway bridges. It's got more murders in a week than most European countries have in a year... At least the Mafia imposes a certain restraint on Galveston. Houston is flat, ugly and has hurricanes and floods. Texas is a place to leave.

Then I remember Molly. Texas has a fairly substantial minority of Liberal Texans. How big I don't know; at least big enough that 'Texas Liberals' is not an oxymoron. They win very few state elections because the Republican dominated state legislature used redistricting to minimize such an electoral outcome. (Austin's district looks like a windy snake, taking in most of the HIll Country's liberal population.) But Texas Liberals, like Molly, my sisters-in-law, my sister in Houston, my friend Lynn in Austin, get on with bidness - a good Texas word. They work for losing candidates - and they know they're going to lose - they hold candle-lit vigils and marches and protests and don't expect it to change anything.

When I lived in Houston, I remember taking an exit off the freeway into downtown Houston. Along the access road, you had the houses of poor people, probably people of colour. The houses qualified to be described as shacks, Small, needing a paint job, broken steps. But they had little front porches. On the front porches, you saw tomato plants, red peppers, geraniums, spider plants, growing in large tin cans, the Crisco three pound size. Nothing would grow in the baked earth in front of the little houses. But the people living there made do and created something of beauty. It wasn't a place to live, but the contrasts would make good photographs or paintings. The poor of Texas, white, black and brown, have distinctive, impressive musical traditions that are part of Texas. Tex-Mex food is infinitely superior to Cal-Mex and better, I think, than New Mexico’s variety of Mexican food. Texas, both the good and the bad, is Texas and different from the rest.

The Coastal Indians of Texas practiced something called a 'second harvest'. They went through their feces and picked out the undigested plant material and ate it again. In  North Texas, dipping into the Hill Country, the Comanches were on the tail end of the Plains Indian complex. They loved the horses and raiding but never took to the Sun Dance. (Thus some of the arguments about their classification.)

The Sun Dance involved four (sometimes eight) days of singing, dancing, fasting, and, in some cases, self torture. The Comanches went once, got bored and went home. They are sometimes called the Agnostics of the Plains.

Now I prefer my own Native American ancestral complex: the Cherokee, part of the Five Civilized Tribes in the south eastern United States. They had Spider Woman and horticulture and developed an alphabet for the Cherokee language after seeing the European one. They adapted, by damn, and did well - until Andy Jackson and the Trail of Tears.  Like the Cherokee, I'm a pragmatist. Observing what happened to the Cherokee, I left Texas.

My friends and relations (and Molly) seem to me to be taking an equally satisfying model of Indigenous People's behavior. They go through the shit and take what's of value and they greet the words of the Good and Great with a belly laugh and skepticism. At least Texas politics offers considerable material for black humour and inspires a mountain-sized lump of skepticism. Probably a good way to approach what appears to be a depressing future.