The Anti-Cambridge

Everyone knows I dislike TX. I work to conceal my origins, to the point that some of my friends have no idea what state I'm from. I do enjoy being mysterious. Sometimes people think I'm from New York. This always makes me happy, and I like to pretend I am, because it was my first home here. It gave me my first impressions of America, from pizza to Halloween to the beach on Fire Island (Fire Island = awesome).

Some of you try to tell me that Texas is great and wonderful.  Most of you were talking about Houston and Austin. I'd respectfully like to point out, my town is nowhere near Houston and not very awesome. In fact, Plano, with its churches and giant strip malls, is as sterile and bland as you can imagine. This is all subjective, you say, so here are some external facts:

From the National Journal:

The biggest city here now is Plano, with 241,000 people, a former farming community that became a corporate headquarters and edge city with DART light-rail service, site of mega-mansion subdivisions, the state's ninth-largest city and the new face of successful Texas. Plano is 10% Asian, many of Chinese ancestry, and they slightly outnumber Latinos: a new face of Texas.
...

Politically, Collin County is very Republican, indeed more Republican than Dallas County ever was: it cast more votes in 2004 than all but five other Texas counties, and gave 71% of them to George W. Bush.

So there it is, staunch Republican stronghold full of big corporations and ugly shopping malls and cookie-cutter franchises upon franchises. In 2004, there wasn't even a Democratic challenger to the House representative, because everyone is too smugly satisfied with their paycheck and their mutual funds and their big screen TV to want change.  If Cambridge is one of the most liberal cities in America, then Plano is the anti-Cambridge.

I know, I'm a hater. But I'll admit that the roads are good.