Houston Awash in Turd Juice

This will not come as news to anyone who has ever lived in Houston, but a new study shows the city’s bayous are brimming with fecal bacteria. Apparently, someone has finally decided that something should be done about this.

Mary Ellen Whitworth, executive president of the Bayou Preservation Association, is one of many prominent Houstonians lamenting the fact that the “Bayou City” has literally let its namesake waterways go to shit.

“We don’t want to be known for that,” Whitworth told the Houston Chronicle.

While cleaning up Buffalo Bayou would be a wonderful thing, I find it amusing that the impetus for Houston to improve livability often stems from a desire to avoid embarrassment on the national stage. Beneath all the Lone Star braggadocio and Sun Belt business boosterism lies a humidity-soaked hotbed of latent civic insecurity. No other major American city is so easily wounded by what the neighbors think.

If you tell someone from Philadelphia their city sucks, they’ll tell you to go fuck yourself. If you tell someone from Houston their city sucks, an ad hoc cadre of community pillars will join together and develop a marketing campaign to instill hometown pride.