Requiem for a Neighborhood

DALLAS, Texas — Dallas just ain’t a city for protestors.

There are virtually no sidewalks on which to stand and scream, too many people who wouldn't stop their SUVs even to read the signs, and a population demographic that, on the whole, just doesn’t give a damn.

The famous Cindy Sheehan—who holds George W. Bush personally responsible for the death of her soldier son—learned this the hard way when she came to town earlier this summer to stir up her usual ruckus outside the former president’s new Dallas home. As Bush’s house sits at the end of a cul-de-sac, Sheehan couldn’t get closer than the top of the street, and the neighborhood’s expansive green lawns and wide driveways absorbed her group’s attempts at charismatic exhortation.

And all of this after a failed effort to stage a dramatic march from the nearest intersection a couple of blocks away, in which Sheehan and her fellow protestors, wandering down a major city thoroughfare without sidewalks and braving a stream of impatient vehicles unused to delays, might have been recent graduates of the Outward Bound program in a city where presentation and composure are everything.

But as fruitless and annoying as Sheehan’s protest may have been, there was something about it—as much as it pains me to say this—worthy of attention. This something, of course, was the neighborhood’s reaction to the influx of angry, haggard faces gathered at the mouth of Daria Place.

Preston Hollow—the former president’s new haunt, and the neighborhood I grew up in—is the sort of Norman Rockwell-ish enclave that tries to embody the most idealized notion of American family values: The houses are large and traditional, the lawns green and resplendent, and the children blonde and bike-prone. It likes to propagate its image as the most down-to-earth of Dallas’s affluent neighborhoods (especially in comparison to the adjacent “Park Cities,” where social intrigue is king). But don’t be fooled. Many of Dallas’s richest and biggest-name residents live in Preston Hollow’s enormous estates; the entire city knows it, and to perpetuate the residents’ collective identity as anything else but what they are—a smattering of Texas’s political and social elite—is to succumb to their power.

In that sense, if not a direct personification, George Bush is a sort of avatar for the neighborhood—defined by a bottomless fortune but smitten by the idea of middle America, eternally elite but a self-identified rebellion against the establishment, a possessor of the best social pedigree but a proponent of an even larger cowboy veneer.

Sheehan’s protest was an attack on that avatar. And to some residents of Preston Hollow, it was also an attack on the mythology they allowed themselves to believe for so long, which held not only that Bush was a good president—despite the media’s inaccurate and disrespectful portrayal of his administration—but also that they, the residents of Preston Hollow, were, like Bush, the kind of people who deserved to occupy positions of authority.

Sheehan and her protestors, no matter how disorganized and obnoxious they may have been, nevertheless served as a reminder that for those Dallasites who still dreamed of leading organizations simply because of family connections or social standing: The party is over.". In a sense, by picketing George Bush, Cindy Sheehan (albeit inadvertently) picketed them all, everyone who felt entitled to success because of an alleged ability to occupy both an elite world and still live among the masses, to reap the benefits of wealth but to understand the plight of the poor.

While one little, isolated neighborhood protest is surely not a terminal deterrent for the attitude that has characterized places like Preston Hollow and men like Bush for so long, it was at least an eye-opener. This façade, powerful as it is, will no longer deceive the rest of the nation.


James K. McAuley ’12, a Crimson editorial writer, lives in Currier House.