Politics & Power Quote by Pete Hamill

Texas as a “another country” isn’t geography; it’s branding dressed up as reportage. Pete Hamill, the New York journalist who knew how cities manufacture myth, clocks the state’s self-conception as a kind of national cosplay: a place that doesn’t just have things, it has them “bigger.” The list is the point. By stacking “skies” next to “murders,” “diamonds” next to “disasters,” Hamill turns the Texas boast into an inventory of excess that can’t decide whether it’s bragging or warning. That ambivalence is the engine of the line.

The syntax mimics the breathless pace of tall tale tradition, but Hamill keeps puncturing the romance. “Politicians” and “football players” sit in the same grammatical seat, hinting that spectacle and governance are part of the same entertainment economy. “Women” are included not as individuals but as another category of largeness, a subtle jab at how regional mythology consumes people as symbols. The “growing feeling” framing matters, too: he’s describing a contagious narrative, not an objective fact, the way reputations spread through media repetition until they feel like destiny.

Contextually, Hamill is writing in an era when Texas was becoming a national fixation: oil money, Sun Belt swagger, the rise of modern conservative power, and a pop-cultural pipeline from Dallas to Friday Night Lights. Calling it “another country” flatters Texas independence while revealing the cost of believing your own hype: when everything must be outsized, even catastrophe becomes a point of pride.