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Larry McMurtry was missing the good ol’ days. In the introduction to his 1968 book of essays, In a Narrow Grave, he lamented our state’s fraying image in the global imagination. The Kennedy assassination and Johnson administration had tarnished our reputation. “We aren’t thought of as quaintly vulgar anymore,” McMurtry wrote. “Some may find us dangerously vulgar,” he added, before twisting the knife, “but the majority just find us boring.”McMurtry needn’t have worried. If Texas was regarded as a tedious topic in the late sixties, it wouldn’t stay so for long. The next decade’s energy crisis was very good for domestic oil’s bottom line, and as we got richer, we got shinier. By the end of the seventies, Texans had so captured the country’s imagination…

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