Mariella Gattini

In the series God Save Texas written and directed by Richard Linklater, Sam Houston State, the university I went to full-time for four years, is one hundred percent reduced to the backyard of a prison system, whose only major achievement has been recently winning a football championship. His view, other than perpetuating the stereotypes Texans are constantly labeled with, does not help in the clarification of things, it only adds to the problem. He sounds like a dazed and confused ex-footballer with the megaphone in his hands and with no clue in how to actually use it.

I’m not here to defend the prison system, and it’s not my intention to get into that can of worms, one that Abbot, Patrick, and Paxton—that now I realize sound more like a law firm from hell—have been playing like a fiddle.

What I would like to convey here is what Linklater missed and failed to show in this extraordinary opportunity he created for himself.

I went to Sam Houston State University between 2000 and 2004, as a full-time student. I had just arrived to the country, my daughter was becoming a teenager, and my husband was the only one in the family with a work permit after being hired by a big company in its worldwide division. Since I couldn’t work and I was not religious, so no way was I going to join a church, I decided that the best thing for me was to join a university. There, I expected to find reasonable and more enlightened individuals, who could help me in the understanding of an unexplored state, a part of the U.S. I was unaware of at the time. I had already been to Florida and New York, and this seemed to be a great opportunity to understand this country from another perspective.

What I found at Sam Houston State in its administrators, faculty, and classmates, was a group of individuals open to helping each other, whether in clerical matters on the side of the administration, or in the relentless pursuit of knowledge in students and professors. With the exception of the few nazis I encountered, who got a piece of my mind, the majority of people around were busy and concentred on getting the best from their time in the mix.

We didn’t talk about the prison next door, but not because we weren’t aware of it, or because we tried to live our lives as it didn’t exist, but because the environment within the perimeters of the university was conducive to the understanding of things, especially in the psychology and philosophy departments where I spent most of my time. We particularly talked about punishment and how useless it was when it came to rehabilitating someone going through a period of incarceration. I had classmates who worked next door, and when I asked them how dangerous their job was, they told me that the most prevalent sentiment inside was not violence but sadness and hopelessness.

I had classmates and professors who came from all around the country and around the world, including Japan. I didn’t live on campus and my classmates where younger than I was, so I went to class and then went home to a neighboring town where I lived in a beautiful house inserted in a great neighborhood. Nevertheless, when I was in class, I had the opportunity of working one-on-one with my classmates focusing on the lab task at hand whether it was in biology, genetics, geology, or research methods, so for us it was not important how old or what gender we all were, not even our origin, what mattered was to solve the puzzle we were faced with until we successfully achieved the end result, together. We not only learned tons about the subject matter, we learned a big deal about each other. I felt appreciated and respected by everyone, and in exchange I grew fond of all of them, among them a British classmate, a few years younger, whom I worked with in geology, a class lectured by a professor who was also British.

Texas looks red to pollsters and pundits, due to the intense and institutionalized republican gerrymandering, for that reason, the red spirit is constantly trying to step on the rights of the blue spirit, but the state is actually of a dark purple and not red (maybe because of all the bruising). The major problem Texas has right now, it’s its health care system, that has been notoriously ill against patients, particularly against women, all made even worse by the above-mentioned “law firm from hell”.

Finally, what I got from Linklater were his laments about his past, growing up in poverty, and how far he has come, far away from Huntsville, together with a recompilation of the films he’s made throughout the years. It’s obvious that this is more about him than it is about Texas, because he fails to acknowledge all the hard work and value that a university like Sam Houston State has achieved and the professors who have given their lives for it. One of my political science professors literally dropped dead after a heart attack at the main mall in the middle of campus. Another professor, who had come from New York in the 70’s to teach and who descended from Austrian immigrants escaping the horrors of WWII, lived with an ulcer until his last days on earth. Their lives mattered, not only because they mattered to me, they mattered because they strived for excellence every step of the way, and everyone on campus could take advantage of their perspectives and grow as a consequence.

Richard Linklater has the right to talk all he wants about the prison system in Texas, what he does not have the right to do is to make a mockery and then trash a school that in the late 1800 was created to form teachers and later evolved into becoming the university that it is today, with a woman as president. The fact that he failed to get a true education from it is not the university’s fault, nor it is its administrators’, faculty’s, or students’ who have succeeded and thrived, and because of that they are well-prepared to face the vicissitudes in their lives.

I’ve studied different things at different educational institutions in different countries, and I had already been faced with great teachers and professors who helped me to have a well-round perspective of how things work in reality before I arrived in Texas as an adult.

What I learned at Sam Houston State was the ability Americans have to focus on a task and succeed together in unison, despite the differences and the pettiness in everyone’s life. And we have the others, who go through life dazed and confused, unaware and unappreciative of the big gifts given to them since birth, and as a result, they only manage to add to the noise. A noise that is neither conducive to knowledge, nor to enlightenment.