SMALL FAVORS
Ivins, Molly
SMALL FAVORS Molly Ivins Dallas Does It Again The Big D, that darlin' Dallas, has been in the headlines again, once more drawing national attention with its fatal tendency to flash ass. The...
...Jack Hampton started out as an assistant district attorney under Henry Wade...
...I've got a teen-age son...
...In a city where the leading citizens are Bunker Hunt, H. Ross Perot, Mary Kay Ash of cosmetics fame, and the head of the world's largest Baptist church, satire doesn't come easy...
...Even in Dallas, these sentiments drew attention...
...They had driven a good twenty miles from a suburb to Dallas's gay neighborhood to "pester the homosexuals," as one of them put it at the trial...
...For many years, the city was proud of its zealous law'n'order prosecutor, Henry Wade, a man who could get Dallas juries to sentence people to 5,000 years in prison...
...If these boys had picked up two prostitutes and taken them to the woods and killed them, I consider that a similar case...
...Or, more precisely, there are Dallasites who also cringe, but only because they know another round of bad publicity is coming...
...What Dallas hates more than anything else is bad publicity—the kind of bad publicity it got twenty-five years ago when John F. Kennedy was murdered there...
...Not one...
...Anything that touches off another round of "Dallas, City of Hate," "Dallas Is Weird," "Dallas Is Full of Right-Wing Loons" drives the town nuts...
...I don't much care for queers cruising the streets picking up teen-age boys...
...It has always been run by a business-knows-best philosophy...
...The gay victims of Richard Bednarski were not cruising the streets picking up teen-age boys: A band of teen-age boys led by Bednarski was out cruising the streets for "queers" to bash...
...In the first place, Hampton got his facts all wrong...
...These two guys that got killed wouldn't have been killed if they hadn't been cruising the streets picking up teen-age boys," Hampton explained...
...But it seems likely that the only reason its reputation is worse than that of, say, Lubbock, is because of the assassination...
...Dallas is a city that honors the man who can buy a piece of art more than the artist who creates one"—(A.C...
...Bednarski brought a gun with him, talked another boy into joining him in a plan to beat and rob the two victims, went to a park with them, and ordered them to take off their clothes...
...Greene...
...At Christmastime in 1985, for example, a Dallas man put a life-size replica of Santa Claus in a real Sherman tank on the corner of Beverly and Lakeside, overlooking the Dallas Country Club...
...It's not that Dallas gets bum-rapped, exactly...
...People with wit like to make up aphorisms about Dallas...
...Every subsequent bit of right-wing lunacy coming from the city has the effect of a blow on a bruise...
...A city that can't tell the difference between change and progress"— (Anon...
...Dallas Molly Ivins, a columnist for the Dallas Times Herald, appears in this space every month...
...after all, the place is more than passing strange...
...The trouble is, most Dallasites see nothing peculiar about Bunker Hunt, so it is left to a non-Dallas sensibility to cringe when someone like Judge Hampton speaks out...
...is a town that would have rooted for Goliath to beat David...
...The Honorable Judge Jack Hampton touched off the fire this time by giving a light sentence to an eighteen-year-old double-murderer on grounds that his two victims were, after all, only "queers...
...All of this reminds Country-Western fans of the old lounge-lizards' song, "I Am Going Back to Dallas to See If There Could Be Anything Worse Than Losing You...
...It was among their favorite pastimes when they "got bored...
...He seems to have heard not a word of the trial over which he presided...
...Afterward, Bednarski bragged about the killings...
...I say "even in Dallas" because Dallas is just so—how to explain it...
...When they refused, Bednarski shot both unarmed men three times...
...None of these facts was in dispute at the trial...
...It's also the canned-spinach capital of America...
...One of them took five days to die...
...The place they ought to put the Tomb of the Unknown Shopper"—(Marilyn Schwartz...
...So much of what is truly strange about Dallas never gets noticed at all...
...Judge Hampton further observed, "I put prostitutes and gays at about the same level...
...And I'd be hard put to give somebody life for killing a prostitute...
...But in the last seven years of his reign, Wade, who could get a death sentence any time he asked for one, never sought a death sentence in any of the fifty-six capital-murder cases in which the victim was black...
...For a long time now, Texas liberals have been trying to figure out whether Dallas really is any worse than lots of other places or whether, as Dallasites strongly believe, it is treated unfairly...
Vol. 53 • February 1989 • No. 2
