GOOD, BAD AND UGLY : Peace vigil near Bush ranch puts Texas stereotypes on national display

In portraying Texans, visiting journalists have embraced a host of well-worn images of typical residents of the Lone Star state, ranging from self-reliant and generous farmer-ranchers to loutish, swaggering bullies with guns in pickups. Last week at the media circus surrounding Cindy Sheehan’s antiwar encampment outside Crawford, both images were in plain view.

First Larry Mattlage, a bearded homeowner, showed up inside his property line near the protesters’ site and fired several blasts from his shotgun into the air. Mattlage told reporters he was tired of the commotion caused by the protest and wanted Sheehan and crew to go home. Asked why he fired the shots, he told bystanders he was "practicing for dove season." He didn’t say whether that was a reference to the international symbol for peace.

A few days later, 46-year-old Larry Northern drove his pickup across a makeshift memorial of wooden crosses bearing the names of American soldiers killed in Iraq, smashing some of them and incurring a flat tire in the process. Police arrested Northern and charged him with criminal mischief.

Meanwhile, other residents of the area thronged a county commissioners meeting to complain about hazards caused by the growing protest. Some demanded that authorities do something to restrict and perhaps remove Sheehan and her group from the area.

Offering the opposite response to the protest was Fred Mattlage, a Waco small businessman and distant cousin of shotgun-toting Larry. He gave the protesters access to an acre of land a mile closer to the Bush ranch. The protesters had been restricted to a narrow road shoulder and ditch. Mattlage’s property is so close to the Bush ranch that CNN camera crews scouting it out reported seeing the president biking in the distance.

"I wanted to provide this property as a place where they could peacefully assemble," he said. "This was an act of compassion to a mother who has lost her son." The organizers of the vigil promptly took him up on the offer and began to relocate Camp Casey, named for Sheehan’s son, who was 24 when he was slain in a Baghdad ambush last year. At week’s end Sheehan returned to California after her mother suffered a stroke, but other parents of soldiers who died in the war carry on the vigil.

Now that the gathering of antiwar protesters will be just a stone’s throw from the president’s ranch, perhaps he and Laura should engage in another act of traditional Texas hospitality by dropping in unannounced on their new, though temporary, neighbors with a housewarming gift and a desire to make their acquaintance.

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/editorial/3318102