Understanding the Riots Part 4 : Seeing Ourselves : TEXAS : People talk about when L.A. was the place to be.

Texas knows about stigma.

It knows the misery of being looked at with pity and perhaps with a bit of glee when things went terribly wrong these last 10 years, when the oil bust turned the place into one long unemployment line. The bad times ruined lives and put people on the streets and made Texas a doormat.

Dallas knows about stigma. For 29 years, it has been known as the place where that crazy Lee Harvey Oswald shot the President, right there on Dealey Plaza. Tourists still show up every day and click off their Kodaks to get a shot of Mom and Sis where the bullets found their mark. The sixth floor of the Texas Schoolbook Depository has been turned into a museum so visitors can look out the window where Oswald pulled the trigger.

Mostly, Dallas gritted its teeth for all those years, trying to put on a good public face, trying to show that the city could rebound from such a tragedy. Yet for such a long time, the city was still referred to as “Dallas, the site of the Kennedy assassination.”

Now Los Angeles has its own stigma. And the people here in Texas can understand it because they have lived it.

“I think the net effect will be worse than the Kennedy assassination was on Dallas,” said Jim Jenkins, a lawyer who lives 30 miles south of Dallas in the small town of Waxahachie, Tex. “I don’t think people will want to move there. I don’t think they’ll want to go there, for conventions or anything.”

The view from Texas seems to be that the riots in Los Angeles were not out of character with what was already happening, that L.A. was sinking under the weight of its own problems and that sooner or later the joint had to blow.

People here talk longingly about the times when L.A. was the place to be, when going to the City of Angels was about as much fun as anyone deserved to have. It was Hollywood. The City of the Stars. The place where no one thought it out of the ordinary to be driving around Pacific Palisades and see Walter Matthau out walking the dog. L.A. was the place that started every trend ever invented, while the rest of the country looked on in envy.

But the reports about Los Angeles reaching Texas have not been exactly uplifting these past few years.

The image is of drive-by shootings and smog and crack and highways that grind to a halt for no apparent reason. It is of dirty beaches and houses that cost so much it makes the head spin. People here just shake their heads at the thought of paying $300,000 for a house and not getting a genuine mansion in the deal. And even if you own a home, there is no guarantee it will survive the next big earthquake or fire in the hills.

“I don’t think of L.A. as a vacation spot,” said Sharon Winter, a Houston travel agent. “People think of L.A. more as just a big city with not a whole lot to do for vacation.”

Perhaps it is the reason that, according to recent statistics, only 4.7% of the Texans who take vacations do so in California. There is no further breakdown for Los Angeles, but it is telling that more Texans vacation in Oklahoma than in the sunny climate of the Golden State.

And now this.

At the Quality Feed Store in Houston the other day, Chris Bules was standing behind the counter while a man was paying for a rabbit hutch. Bules said the looting was wrong, but the protest was correct, the only way to get any kind of change in this country.

And then he began talking about how California isn’t the kind of place where it’s easy to start a business any more, about how he’d be living in a one-bedroom apartment with no car in L.A. because things cost so much.

“It’s been losing its luster for a long time,” he said. “The riots just helped speed it up.”