Unwelcome News On a Friday

 

Susan Bankston, a.k.a. Juanita Jean

Juanita Jean, a.k.a. Susan DuQuesnay Bankston, owner of "Juanita Jean's -- The World’s Most Dangerous Beauty Salon, Inc.," a mandatory blog stop every day for those of us who appreciate smart-alecks and their snark and especially for us displaced Texans who have known other Tough Mamas of the Plains and appreciated their no-sacred-cows shit detectors. "Juanita Jean's" dishes the buffalo dust of Texas politics, especially the piles left by both the corrupt and the inept in the Texas Republican Party. Susan Bankston has been a regular contributor to the famous Texas Observer and to other leftwing rags, but "Juanita Jean's" was special in its own way, described by Robert LeLeux at the Observer as "sort of like what King of the Hill would have been, if it had been written by Molly Ivins." "Firebrand" often shows up in the same descriptive sentence with Bankston's name.

Bankston lives in Richmond, Texas, in Fort Bend County, southwest of Houston, a little beyond Sugarland, made famous in Steven Spielberg's prison-escape movie, The Sugarland Express (1974). Fort Bend is one of the reddest counties in Texas, and nurtured "the hammer" in the U.S. Congress, one Tom DeLay who was rising to power in the early 1980s at the same time that Susan Bankston and her husband were relocating to Fort Bend from Houston. DeLay belongs to history now. He was part of the whole '80s surge of Ronald Reagan Republicanism, the conservative tide that eventually produced Newt Gingrich and his Contract on America.

Bankston made Tom Delay her pet project: She told LeLeux,

“When my family first moved to [the Fort Bend town of] Richmond from Houston in 1983, it was like paradise. The schools were racially diverse. There were no fast-food restaurants. You could see the stars at night. But then, you did have to put up with Tom DeLay .... He had no table manners. He picked his nose in public. He stayed drunk all the time. Of course, there are those who would argue he was a much more likable person then.” 

Bankston nicknamed him "Hot Tub Tom" for his rumored behavior at al fresco get-togethers. She nicknamed him in the Fort Bend Star, and the name stuck. Won't go into the whole Tom DeLay history, and how it ended, ignobly, except to say that Susan Bankston's project of exposing him helped.

She announced yesterday that she's closing "Juanita Jean's" for good. She'd actually mainly disappeared as a frontline contributor to it much earlier. She had gone through the trauma of losing her lifelong partner and husband, whom she called "Bubba" on the blog. "I was 25 years old when I married him and 50 years later, I lost him." Bankston had in the meantime turned "Juanita Jean's" over to three new dominant writers/voices, none of them as talented as Bankston. The loss of Bankston as a regular contributor was bad enough, but the loss of the whole blog is just tragic. Bankston has been publishing it for some 14 years.

Bankston's parting advice for progressives: Pay attention to Gen Z.

I could be wrong. I have been wrong before and it didn’t kill me, so here goes. I think we need to be listening to young people. I think we shouldn’t even give a big bear’s butt about who is the new leader of the DNC because screw ‘em, they are not viable any longer. They spent 1.5 Billion dollars and lost. They lost to Trump twice. I guess they’re waiting for three’s the charm but, frankly, I don’t have that kind of time.

I’m making an effort to pay attention to young people about politics. For example, I listen to David Pakman https://davidpakman.com/ because he’s young, progressive, and while he takes his reporting very seriously, he doesn’t take himself too seriously. I also subscribed to You Tube to hear what the young progressives are thinking.