The Power and the Money

Covid-19 and American oil production, in gory institutional detail

Oil prices are crashing due to Covid-19. So what happens to American output?

Market reactions first, then political ones.

Well, first the oldest building in Dallas, circa 2019:

Yes, my shoes are bright blue.

Now market reactions to the Covid oil price crash.

Market

The “shut-in prices” is the minimum wellhead price operators need to continue producing from a production well. It’s equal to the amount needed to cover ongoing O&M, including where-necessary pumping and artificial lift, as well as water, gas and steam flooding and other secondary recovery costs.

The first wells to shut down are “stripper wells” nearing the end of their useful life. In the U.S. there are about 400,000 of these wells producing about 720,000 barrels per day. (I said they were small.) They usually rely on pumps to get the stuff out of the ground, meaning those famous mechanical donkeys you can still see in parts of California.

Next to go are wells that depend on secondary recovery. For example, in the Golden State companies inject about 400 million barrels of steam every year to get 161 million barrels of oil. (Governor Newsom has banned new wells using this technique.) These wells are high cost, but when shut down they tend to fill up fast with water. Companies that shut them down risk losing the remaining shut-in oil forever. In addition, companies that shut down wells risk losing their land leases. As a result, these wells don’t close immediately once they start losing money.

After that some wells will start to decline quickly in the absence of new drilling. Tight oil wells in North Dakota decline 65% in the first year and 77% over the first two years. That’s the next to go. In their early phase, however, tight oil wells can be easily shut-in and restarted. So tight oil production will decline in two waves, first by natural decline as new drilling collapses and then again as companies shut wells down. Since you can restart unconventional wells in about a week companies won’t be as reticent to stop production … if not for the fact that most of them are highly indebted and desperate for any sort of cash flow to satisfy demanding creditors.

This chart for tight oil plays in the Eagle Ford region of Texas gives you some idea of just how fast this decline can happen. Without new drilling, production would decline by about 700,000 bpd within a year from this play alone:

But production will decline faster than that, because unconventional wells can be shut-in fairly easily during their first year. 

In other words, the current oil price crash will cause U.S. production to drop, and drop fast. That is, it will if it is sustained. That’s not a given: countries have already begun to reopen their economies. Oil demand will recover as a result, possibly to prices that might keep tight oil production alive and stop the shuttering of stripper wells.

Political

Of course, state governments can act via a process called “proration,” whereby they can order well-by-well output cuts. Back in the 1930s, Congress passed the Connally Act, which made it illegal to ship oil across state lines in violation of state output quotas. It also created the Interstate Oil Compact Commission (here is the law), which brought representatives together from oil-producing states to hammer out overall quotas, America’s own little mini-OPEC before OPEC. (For whatever reason, Illinois and California never passed proration laws, although the California government sanctioned a quasi-private commission that functioned outside the law.)

The IOCC still exists, but its powers have withered. It no longer makes decisions by majority vote. And it now includes 31 states, five Canadian provinces, two Canadian territories, plus Egypt (W?) and the other Georgia (WT??) and the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela (WTF???). Plus, while Arkansas, Colorado, Michigan, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas all passed proration laws, only Oklahoma and Texas still exercise the muscles. (The Rail Road Commission of Texas and the Oklahoma Corporation Commission still publish quotas, set above most wells’ maximum production.) Executive agencies function like muscles: use ‘em or lose ‘em. Those states would need to design regulations from scratch to impose quotas, and they would certainly be challenged in court.

Now, Texas is big enough on its own to mandate a production cut. And the Texan authorities are talking about it! But it’s all talk. And there’s no sign of the Trump administration trying to resuscitate the Depression-era laws that let it coordinate oil production cuts, or even coordinating talks among the IOCC states. But production is falling fast, so Trump could claim that he jawboned producers into it.

Hell, he could do that even if production wasn’t falling fast. That’s his M.O.

Conclusion

Which means that the ultimate question is whether OPEC wants to be fooled. If Saudi Arabia thinks that letting Mexico de facto defect while pretending to cooperate will not hurt their cartel agreement, then they’ll accept the bullshit. If they don’t, then they’ll reject the Trump-AMLO bamboozle.  

Keystone and U.S. oil markets

One new thing in oil markets is the persistant breach between the price of West Texas Intermediate (WTI) and Brent, ranging between $8 and $27. At the same time, the differential between Louisiana Light Sweet and Brent has remained under $3.

Why is that? Well, the answer is that American production has boomed in places like North Dakota. The price of WTI is actually set in Oklahoma (just to confuse you) and it is hard to get oil in large quantity from Oklahoma to the coast for export. Louisiana crude, on the other hand, is right there on the coast. As a result, the shale oil boom in the Dakotas (and to a lesser extent booming oil sand production from Alberta) causes crude to pile up in the Midwest, depressing prices relative to the coasts.

So who benefits? If the lower prices of Midwestern crude are passed on to Midwestern consumers, then they should oppose the Keystone pipeline. After all, Keystone will only make it easier to export oil to the coasts, where prices are higher. On the other hand, if the benefits of cheaper crude are not passed on, then consumers in the Midwest have few direct self-interested reasons to oppose it, at least in the short run. (They may, of course, have other valid reasons not to like the pipeline.)

Severin Borenstein of the Haas School of Business and Ryan Kellogg of the University of Michigan decided to take a look at this question. What did they find? Simply put: Midwestern refineries are running at capacity and can’t satisfy Midwestern demand. As a result, gasoline needs to be imported from the East Coast ... where crude is more expensive. Wholesale refined product prices, therefore, are not any cheaper in the Midwest.

There are three implications to this. The first is that in the short run, building Keystone will not drive up the prices faced by Midwestern consumers.

The second is that Midwestern refineries are significantly more profitable than refineries on the coasts.

The third is that if Keystone is not built, then refining capacity in the Midwest will rise, and eventually the Midwest will in fact enjoy cheaper gasoline than the rest of the country.

There are second-order implications about the desirability of whether U.S. oil exports should be allowed at all, but those will only be relevant when the U.S. achieves net crude oil balance. That is still some ways away, although it is now possible to imagine it happening with two decades ... perhaps much less.

Fear of a black Canada

 Trinidad almost became an American territory in 1931. It didn’t because the British government was perfectly willing to default on its debts to the U.S. government. The Hoover Administration, sensibly, didn’t push the issue.

The Bahamas, it turns out, almost became a Canadian province in 1911. The colonial assembly in Nassau, backed by prominent Canadian investors in the islands, pushed hard to join. The population of the islands was only 56,000, but there was plenty of money to be made investing in infrastructure: the first telephones were only installed in 1906, and electricity arrived in the archipelago in 1909. The Royal Bank of Canada set up shop in 1908.

Canada’s share of Bahamian imports, however, remained small: $28,392 in 1911, compared to $1.3 million in American imports to the archipelago. Moreover, the fiscal cost of taking over the islands would have been minimal: the federal government spent only 6.1% of GDP in 1911, and transfers to provincial governments amounted to only 0.4% of GDP. (Federal infrastructure spending in the Bahamas would have contributed to economic growth in the islands and likely been a wash for the treasury. It also would have been negligible on the scale of the Confederation.)

So why didn’t it happen? Simply put, Canadian racism ... triggered by a wave of American political refugees. Prime Minister Wilfred Laurier (a Liberal) seemed open to the idea of letting the Bahamas join until, in 1911, a strange wave of racial fear arose from Manitoba. A group of about 1,000 wealthy black Americans from Oklahoma — fleeing the 1907 passage of Jim Crow laws after statehood — arrived at the Emerson border crossing. The result was panic on the prairies.

I’ll turn the floor over to William Thoburn, a Conservative MP from Ontario: “As long as we give the free homesteads in Canada’s northwest, they will come by the tens of thousands. I would like to ask the government if they think it is in the interests of Canada that we should have Negro colonization in the Canadian northwest. Would it not be preferable to preserve for Canada the land they propose to give to Negroes?”

The hysteria soon spread to Alberta. A group of prominent Albertans wrote to the federal interior minister, Frank Oliver, with a series of complaints straight out of an American inner suburb, circa 1970. First, they worried that “Negro immigration” would create white flight and drive down property values. (The idea of rural white flight on the Albertan prairies boggles the mind.) They then went on to worry about their women. “We do not wish that the fair fame of Western Canada should be sullied with the shadow of Lynch Law but we have no guarantee that our women will be safer in their scattered homesteads than other white women in other countries with a Negro population.” To his credit, Premier Arthur Sifton refused to block black immigration.

The panic was especially crazy because Canadian law required immigrants to have on them at least $50 per man, woman, and child. In 2010 dollars, that’s $1,185 — but that figure doesn’t take into account the fact that people were poorer a century ago. When adjusted for increases in average wages, each immigrant was required to have the 2010 equivalent of $7,425. In other words, these were not the huddled masses; these were well-heeled political refugees fleeing the sudden imposition of racial tyranny in their home state.

From the Toronto Mail and Empire of April 27, 1911: “If Negroes and white people cannot live in accord in the South, they cannot live in accord in the north. Our western population is being largely settled by white people from the United States. If we freely admit black people from that country, we should have race troubles that are a blot on the civilization of our neighbours ... The Negro question is of the United States’ own making and Canada cannot allow any part of her territory to be used as a relief colony on that account.”

The Canadian government ordered their agent in Kansas City “to refuse certificates or any encouragement to migration of this class” and “take immediate measures to check this class of immigrants.” It then limited black immigrants to Emerson and North Portal, where it subjected them to degrading medical examinations. It went so far as to hire a black doctor from Chicago to travel to Oklahoma and give lectures about how terrible the Canadian climate was for black people. Finally, in August 1911, with a federal election coming up fast, came this order-in-Council, pursuant to the Immigration Act of 1910, which allowed the government to ban “immigrants belonging to any race deemed unsuited to the climate or requirements of Canada”:

In this atmosphere — with the Liberals under fire for their support of the Reciprocity Treaty with the United States — it should come as no surprise that Prime Minister Wilfred Laurier (a Liberal) would decide against expanding Confederation to the Bahamas on grounds of, in his own words, incompatible “ethnical origin.” Laurier was willing to take West Indian islands as purely colonial concerns, with no representation in Ottawa and no right of immigration, but that wasn’t acceptable to West Indian elites which already enjoyed a modicum of self-government. The Bahamas, for example, possessed a parliament elected by a property-restricted suffrage. (The restrictions meant that white people held 26 out of the 29 parliamentary seats, even though they made up only a quarter of the population.)

When Laurier lost the September 1911 election to Robert Borden, the Bahamians tried once again. The big issue in the election was a proposed tariff-reducing Reciprocity Treaty with the United States. The Conservative Party opposed the agreement, and it used imperial rhetoric as part of its appeal. With pro-Empire Borden as Prime Minister, the (unelected) Governor of the Bahamas, William Grey-Wilson, travelled to Toronto. Among other things, he gave a speech before the Empire Club. In it, Grey-Wilson extolled the wonders of trade and tourism — which were, in fact, the biggest gain from Confederation. The Bahamas would win a secure market for its tropical products, and Canadian companies would gain control of that trade. (They would also cement their domination of Bahamian finance and services.) Grey-Wilson, of course, felt the need to assure Canadians that the absorption of the Bahamas would not lead to black members of parliament sitting in Ottawa:

Now, the constitution of the Bahamas, like the other three B’s of that portion of the Empire, is on a suffrage that is almost equivalent to yours in Canada. I have examined them. Separately and I think they are very much the same. That is to say, any member of a community who is in possession of a house of the value of $10 a year is entitled to vote. That, of course, is practically manhood suffrage. That vote is common to the blacks and to the whites. The inhabitants of the Bahamas are one quarter white and three quarters black.

The result of our elections has been for many years past — and I would remind you that the Bahamas have a constitution almost as old as Newfoundland — that the black man almost invariably elects a white man to represent him. And why is that, gentlemen? You here are conversant with the horrors of the situation in the Southern States of America. In the Bahamas we have no such position. (Applause.) I say that a white woman in the Bahamas, in the most isolated position, is as secure today as if she were in this room now. (Applause.) I defy anyone to say that about the Southern States of America.

Now, gentlemen, why is that? It is not because we have treated the black man as the equal of the white; no. He admits himself — the most intelligent of them with whom I have spoken — he admits himself that he is the white man’s inferior. He admits that he is of a child race, undeveloped; but it is because, being a child race, we have extended to him, as we have to all the other races of the Empire, that universal unswerving British justice.

Unfortunately, Governor Grey’s arguments failed to assuage Prime Minister Borden. In a meeting between Grey and Borden on October 18th, 1911, the Prime Minister rejected the possibility of taking the Bahamas into the Canadian confederation. His reasoning was that the events of the past year had proved that Canadian public opinion would not countenance the admission of a majority-black province, no matter how small or how far away. (The refusal of Toronto hotels to give rooms to black Bahamian visitors only reinforced his point.) The Colonial Office concurred. Worried by the hysteria engendered by the emigrants from Oklahoma, the C.O. reported the following about the possibility of a Bahamian province: “No doubt for the moment the Dominion government would safeguard their interests, but there are signs of the rise of a colour question in Canada and in any case it cannot be long before U.S. opinion gives the tone to Canada in regard the Negro.”

Ultimately, all that came out of the talks was a reciprocity treaty with several West Indian jurisdictions. Reciprocity entailed a 20% tariff cut; it was far from the free trade entailed in political union. It barely dented American domination of Bahamian commerce. And so, much as racism derailed an 1867 attempt by the United States to annex the Dominican Republic, racism derailed what should have been a simple, easy, and mutually-beneficial extension of the Canadian confederation into the Caribbean. Canada eventually absorbed poorer, less strategic, and more troubled Newfoundland, but those islanders had pale skins.

As for the Bahamas, it became part of the United States ... okay, not officially, but watch this space.

Cowboys and Italians

 I was in Oklahoma to visit the headquarters of Laredo Petroleum, one of the leaders in the development of domestic shale gas and oil. I was also here to visit some of their field operations. I’ll have more to say about that later.

 
The reason why I’m going to wait is that along the way, I discovered something I did not know: southeastern Oklahoma was once a center of Italian settlement. Now, mass immigration this was not. In 1910, the census recorded 2,564 Italians in Oklahoma, with a further 1,303 native-born Italians. That’s a tiny part of a state of 1.6 million. Even in Coal, Latimer, and Pittsburg counties, Italians made up only 3% of the population in 1910. But they left a mark.

 
Why did they come? Well, the aforementioned names of the counties where they settled gives a clue. The first coal mines in Oklahoma opened in McAlester in 1872. In 1875, the mining companies built a labor camp in nearby Krebs. The companies recruited Italian workers in a deliberate attempt to prevent unionization — American coal miners had already become radicalized. In the words of a 1956 article: “Mine operators found the English, Irish, Scotch, and Welsh stock produced the best miners but also produced the chief trouble makers during periods of strikes in the 1880s and 1890s.”

It isn’t entirely clear why the mining companies had to worry. The mines were located deep in the Choctaw Nation. Before statehood, non-Choctaw residents of the area had to pay a residence fee of 25¢ per month (about $77.20 per year in today’s money). The mining companies deducted the fee directly from workers’ pay packets, and arranged with the Choctaws to make it impossible to pay any other way. Upshot: striking workers faced deportation.

Anyway, Italians they recruited, and Italians they came. The first “Columbus Society” in Oklahoma started in 1881.* Unlike most Italian immigrants to the United States, the Oklahoman Italians came from the north: three-quarters of them arrived from Piedmont, with the remainder from Abruzzo and Molise.** The coal mines, then as now, provided grueling employment for $545 per year ... a less-than-royal $12,700 in inflation-adjusted dollars.***  (Then again, the median household income in the tri-county area is only $17,500 today.) Mining conditions, of course, were much worse than the salaries would indicate. Things improved a little with statehood in 1907, when the new constitution provided for workers’ compensation, an eight-hour day, free public schools, and a ban on child labor in the mines.

Nowadays Krebs is dotted with Italian restaurants. But they don’t really serve Italian food, and I’m speaking as somebody who grew up in the land of the calzone and baked ziti. Consider the founding of the oldest of Krebs’ eateries: the famous Pete’s. Pete Pritchard — so named because none of the local kids could pronounce “Piegare” — who moved to the U.S. at the age of 8, in 1903. He attended school only sporadically, since his father had him work in the mines when they needed money, in contravention of the new state constitution. Pritchard broke his leg in 1923, while working in the mines. His wife and he had a small flock of chickens. They couldn’t sell them for any reasonable amount, and they couldn’t keep ‘em, so they served ‘em up to their friends ... and Pete’s was born.

The place became famous during Prohibition for serving home-brewed Choc beer; Pete himself got busted. Choc beer got its start with the European influx, which cheerily ignored the dry laws passed by the Choctaw Nation. An 1894 report written by an irritated Bureau of Indian Affairs official noted: “The sale of Choctaw beer, a drink compounded of barley, hops,tobacco, fishberries, and a small amount of alcohol, is manufactured without stint in many portions of this agency, especially in the mining communities. Many miners insist it is essential to their health, owing to the bad water usually found in mining camps, and they aver they use it rather as a tonic or medicine than as a beverage, and this idea, that it is a proper tonic, is fostered and encouraged by some physicians. But it is somewhat remarkable as a fact in the scientific world that the water is always bad in the immediate mining centers, but good in the adjacent neighborhoods.”

Eventually, coal mining declined. Many of the Italians left. The rest didn’t fully assimilate until World War 2: when the U.S. went to war, the first reaction of the local police was to raid Italian families and seize their weapons. Some people remained working in a giant socialist enterprise. By 2000, the population was down by a third from 1920. (A new hydrocarbon boom has begun, but more on that later.)

We didn’t eat at Pete’s. We ate at Isle of Capri. The restaurants are all basically converted houses, with big and scattered dining rooms bolted on as the customer base grew. It feels a bit like you’re snacking in somebody’s living room. So does the resolute unprofessionalism of the waiters, who were clearly family members, and strange way you pay, by wandering up to the front and asking for the bill, instead of having it brought to your table. (Sure, you pay on the way out at lots of places around the United States, like that diner out in Maspeth. I just don’t remember having to go to the counter to get your bill.) You can get lamb fries (don’t ask, you don’t want to know), ravioli, spaghetti, something called manicotti (I’m still not sure what it was) and sausage sandwiches the size of your head. Given how the restaurants in the area started (Pete was not unrepresentative) it shouldn’t be that surprising that the food bears little resemblance to the American cuisine you’ll find in other heavily-Italian parts of North America, let alone a real genuine Italian restaurant.

 

I ate a lot. Compare the fellow above with same fellow a few hours earlier, as pictured at the beginning of this post. As Italian food, it was awful. As food, it was awesome. If you’re in the area, I highly recommend it.

Heartland baseball

 First, I would like to thank Randy McDonald for the shout-out!

As many of you know, I am a huge baseball fan. Among the baseball-playing parts of the world, you can learn much about a place by attending a game. Consider how much the bleacher creatures say about New York. Or what the fans at el Clásico del Beis told you about Mexico. Not to mention what you can learn about the Bolivarian Republic if you try. In fact, the only better ways to learn about modern Venezuela involve serious risk of physical harm. Well, more serious risk of physical harm.

 
In short, when Randy and Jerry, two of the principals of Laredo Petroleum, invited me to a minor league game in a stadium right outside the business district, only a serious health crisis could get me to say no.

I was the only guy in a suit in the ballpark. I may have been the only guy wearing a suit in downtown Tulsa. The Sloppy Revolution has taken full hold there, with one female-footwear-related exception that I’ll get to below. 

Tulsa’s minor league stadium is brand-spanking-new and very very nice. There’s a great view of downtown’s towers over the first-base line. It has a modern jumbotron, good sightlines, and fences far enough out to make batazos the rare thing that they ought to be. What it doesn’t have is a winning home team. The Drillers are at the bottom of Texas League AA-ball. I have to admit that we left after the ninth when it was still 1-1, only to miss a top-of-the-tenth four-run massacre at the hands of the San Antonio Missions.

 
The first thing I noticed was that everyone stands up during the national anthem. Now, let me be clear. Most people stand at most MLB games, and those of you who know me will not be surprised to learn that I’m one of the people on my feet with the hand over the heart. (Those of you who have “enjoyed” my company at a game already know this.) That said, I’m pretty sure that far from everyone stands up at Fenway or China Basin or Chávez Ravine or Joe Robbie or the Bronx. Everyone stands up in Oneok Field.

(That is pronounced “Wun-oak,” not “Oh-nay-oak.” I had to be corrected.) 

The second thing I noticed were the sponsors, or at least their publicity campaigns. I simply did not know how to react when a fellow in a hot dog costume started chasing two guys dressed as burritos around the near outfield. That was followed by somebody throwing ice cream containers into the crowd followed by another outfield race, this time made up of costumed little kids.  All emceed by a wannabe Fred Durst.

 
Which brings us to the third thing that I wasn’t used to seeing at a ball game: an emcee! He was a chubby fellow with a little beard that I used to identify with Limp Bizkit. (In fact, I briefly grew one for about a month in late 2000.) He also wore a cape, which I did not understand.

The emcee announced a contest around the seventh inning. I wasn’t paying attention to what he said ... so I was bit surprised to watch two young women start crawling into the outfield from the third baseline wearing what looked like wolf masks. Er? What part of popular culture did I miss? That was followed right quick by another pair of teenage girls competing with each other in a dance contest, to the sounds Lady Gaga. The emcee egged them on to be more, well, “provocative.” They resisted his enticements. The winner, in fact, finally revolted against the emcee entirely and launched into the sprinkler, an utterly non-provocative dance move which, if you’re not familiar with it, unsurprisingly looks like the dancer is trying to imitate a sprinkler. 

Finally, I did not expect to see so many three and four-inch high-heeled shoes worn by the game’s female attendees. I hadn’t seen so many stilettos since my last visit to Caracas. The footwear really stood out as unexpected at a game, especially given the general level of sartorial sloppiness, including among the wearers of the heels. Once clued-in, however, I began to note that far more women wore heels in Tulsa than in the Northeast or South Florida, at least in upscale strip malls around Utica Avenue and slightly-less-upscale coffee shops in Midtown. It almost seemed that if you were female and not obese, you strapped on heels, regardless of whatever else you chose to wear. 

Anyway, it was a fun game, with good conversation, great views and not-entirely-terrible ball play; the only downside was that we couldn’t smoke a couple cigars at the stadium. (But that is true everywhere these days.) It certainly told me something about Oklahoma. Thing is, I’m not smart enough to understand what. And so, I ask you.

Into Oklahoma

 I am fairly confident that Charlie Stross hasn’t been to Oklahoma. (How did he erase that post I made about meeting him in Boston? Magic?) I actually don’t think that Oklahoma represents the future any more than Japan does … but I think he’d find it rather more interesting. It is more interesting! 

 
I am of the generation where the name Oklahoma brings to mind a devasting terrorist attack, the ending of a forgettable Tom Cruise movie, and a very boring musical that I suffered through with the family of a rich girlfriend back in the early 1990s. Plus the Senatorial tag team of Inhofe and Coburn. Mr Inhofe is ... uh. Mr Coburn is much better. I have friends and colleagues who share many of his political beliefs (well, except for the Rachel Carson weirdness, and the high-school-lesbianism-plague thing) and with whom I get along perfectly well. In fact, all accounts indicate that the President of the United States and the junior Senator from Oklahoma get along great at a personal level. In another age, they’d be Johnson and Dirksen redux.

We do not live in that age. The reason, of course, lies in the parliamentary nature of our national parties, particularly the GOP. That said, Oklahoma politics are rather different from what you find in the two states with which I am intimately familiar, Massachusetts and New York. In 2007, for example, the great state of Oklahoma passed an anti-immigration bill that went after businesses that employed undocumented immigrants. Many anti-immigration liberals approve of such laws (or say they do), but the Oklahoma law also banned anyone from providing shelter or transportation in addition to employment and required the police to check the immigration status of any arrestees. (A court recently threw out many of the employer sanctions.) It didn’t quite go quite as far as the current Arizona law, which mandates that the police stop anyone whom they suspect might be in the country illegally or allow citizens to sue the authorities for non-enforcement, but it was certainly a bit more radical than anything you would expect from a Northeastern legislature.  

Oklahoma does have a Democratic governor, Brad Henry, who just vetoed a bill that purported to exempt Oklahomans from gun registration rules and background checks. He also vetoed a bill that would require all women desiring abortions to receive transvaginal sonograms (even after rapes) and force the doctor to describe the image to them. The legislature overrode Governor Henry, and now Oklahoman doctors cannot be sued for concealing birth defects from pregnant mothers. A bill to exempt the state from the Affordable Care Act just passed the lower chamber 71-27, and some lawmakers have begun to discuss creating a state militia separate from the National Guard.

I wasn’t thinking about politics on the flight into Tulsa, but one of the fellows in the row in front of me on the short hop from Dallas turned out to be born-and-raised in southern California. The flight crew of the airplane was based in Los Angeles, so he struck up a conversation with the very nice blonde lady in charge of our cabin. He said to her that he’d never go back and loved Texas. She asked why, and he said, “It’s a red state. Our legislature is part time. They all go home to real jobs.” The flight attendant nodded sagely and turned the conversation to the weather.

Downtown Tulsa is an only-in-America sort of dead. It isn’t a run-down dead, like Buffalo or most Southern small towns. And it certainly isn’t an abandoned dead, like Detroit. It’s just ... empty. The impression is of an old downtown now preserved under glass. Perhaps “undead” is the right word? The people are there, you just can’t see them. A disproportionate number of the few people you see appear to be unemployed long-haired (male) musicians toting guitars and Army-surplus clothes from before 1981. Most of the rest appear to be down on their luck or stealing a smoke. The storefronts are well-maintained, but manage to look vacant even when they’re not. 

The fact is, of course, that downtown Tulsa is not dead in terms of office space. The energy companies that operate here want to be near their in-state bankers and someplace they can convince their out-of-state bankers to spend some time. They also want to be near their competitors and the petroleum club and nice hotels. (Which is why Holiday Inn was just renovated and the Hotel Ambassador a few blocks south of downtown proper is such a success.)

 
Now, to be fair, Tulsa is not downtown. Just a few miles away is a highly manicured upscale collection of shopping malls. It could be one of the nicer parts of California. Drivers are nicer than in California, save for a disconcerting tendency to pull right into the parking spot next to people who are pulling out, and the people at the post office know each other by name. The schoolyards are full of laughing pale-skinned children. A disproportionate number of billboards advertise gun shows and tattoo parlors.

 
Okay, it isn’t as exotic as Dar-es-Salaam, but I liked it.