Lubbock, Texas, is only a lunatic asylum and social leper colony rather than a state, but it has easily the worst drivers I have encountered anywhere in the world. They are not particularly inept, but they are wildly, deliberately, rude, aggressive, and obstructive. Lubbockites love to pretend other cars are in their way. They tailgate, they swerve at other vehicles, they assault other drivers because traffic has slowed or they don’t like stopping for signals, and they will accelerate to 100MPH to run up on another car’s bumper so they can pretend it has cut them off. Conversely, they make a point of obstructing traffic any time they can, apparently as a way of challenging each other. They sit though green lights, take two lanes, and drive half the speed limit. Instead of turning onto an empty street or into a gap in traffic, they will wait until another vehicle comes along, smirk at the driver, and quite deliberately pull out in front of it.

I don’t think there are more than 20 people in the whole city who know how a four way stop is supposed to work.

On weekends, MOST drivers seem to be drunk after about 6PM, and a good many before that. “America’s second most conservative city” is basically a pathological sub-culture and failed social experiment. Each and every yokel and neurotic tea partier here pretends to be some sort of aristocrat and goes around in a perpetual state of rage that lesser mortals fail to recognize this and properly defer to them. The roads, where the deranged citizens feel immune and invincible, are the number one venue for expressing this.

It’s a big part of the reason I decided to get the hell out, a big part. It is especially bad during the Christmas season, when the hypocrisy of materialism and mayhem in celebration of their savior’s birthday is irresistible to many of the demented drunken Baptist locals. In the Bible, Jesus went after evil hypocrites with a whip. If He came back to Lubbock, He would take their cars keys away.