When Elon Musk wielded a gleaming new chainsaw at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in February, he was creating a symbolic image of his Trumpian efforts to slash government spending and excise the Deep State.
“RRRRRRRRR! The chainsaw for bureaucracy!” Musk proclaimed from the stage.
We now have unstaged images of recovery workers in Texas with well-used chainsaws cutting away actual debris in an effort to find bodies left by a monstrous flash flood on the Fourth of July.
The death toll is in part due to government underfunding and the insufficiency of a Shallow State that failed to provide adequate warnings both before and during the disaster, killing at least 36 children.
With the presumed death toll approaching 120 and with more than 170 people still missing, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott was asked during a press conference if there was going to be an investigation into who might be to blame. Abbott replied that “blame” is “the word choice of losers.”
“Every football team makes mistakes,” Abbott continued. “The losing teams are the ones that try to point out who’s to blame. The championship teams are the ones that say, ‘Don’t worry about it, man, we got this. We’re going to make sure that we go score again, that we’re going to win this game.’ ”
Abbott’s own word choice is all the more unfortunate when you go back nearly four decades to a flash flood tragedy on the same stretch of the Guadalupe River in Kerr County that should have prompted measures to at least mitigate the present one. The 10 dead back in 1987 included two best friends who had been named high school players of particular promise by Texas Football magazine.
John Bankston, 17, and Mike Lane, 18, were making an emergency exit from the Pot O Gold Christian Camp along with 41 others in a bus and a van on July 17, 1987 when the suddenly rising river struck.
Rather than use critical moments to save themselves, Bankston and Lane helped others from the bus, and several reached a pecan grove. Bankston turned to a 17-year-old who had a broken ankle in a cast and asked to remain anonymous.
“He said, ‘You can’t walk or swim, get on my back,” the young man told the Daily Beast. “That’s the type of person he was. Here to help anybody.”
Bankston was a weightlifter as well as a football player and he managed to get the young man from the back of the bus to a tree. But they both ended up being swept away by water that the young man estimates was moving at 50 miles per hour.
Bankston was never seen again. The 17-year-old who had been on his back was washed a harrowing mile downriver and somehow survived.
Lane was less fortunate, but his body was recovered. His family wanted hold a joint funeral for him and his best friend, but Bankston’s body had still not been found a week later. The two families went ahead with a memorial at Berean Baptist Church in Mesquite. More than 700 mourners attended, the 17-year-old survivor among them. Two coffins sat side by side, one with Lane, the other empty amid photographs and football uniforms and letterman’s jackets and Bibles.
Lane was buried next to the empty coffin. The plot reserved for Bankston was marked with a headstone inscribed with a football helmet and a set of weights. It will have to serve as a cenotaph until he is found and that date is recorded in the granite. It presently reads:
BANKSTON
JOHN CLINTON
BORN
JANUARY 24, 1970
LOST IN GUADALUPE RIVER
JULY 17, 1987
DATE FOUND ____ __ ____
Bankston was posthumously awarded the Young American Medal for Bravery by President George H.W. Bush. His family—who the Daily Beast could not reach for comment this week—filed suit against Pot O Gold.
“We had to do something to make people realize how dangerous that river can be,” the father, John Bankston, Sr., told the press after a settlement was reached in 1989. “If it happened once it can happen again.”
But even though the current governor Abbott, says “every square inch” of Texas “cares about football,” the legacy of the missing hero star player failed to propel local, state and federal officials beyond just talking about safety measures as one decade of inaction followed another and then another.
In 2016, Kerr County Commissioner Tom Moser began pushing for an early warning system along what had become known as Flash Flood Alley. He was previously an egniener with NASA, where technology had achieved the seemingly impossible if the funding and will are there.
“When the president said put a man on the moon, you know, we didn’t know what we didn’t know,” he said. “We thought we could do it, but we really didn’t know how to do it. But we figured it out. And I think with that same kind of attitude and drive and commitment and desire to do it, something could be greatly improved, not only for Kerr County, but for the whole nation.”
As The Texas Tribune reports, the county at one time applied for a $731,413 FEMA grant for a high-water early warning system including sirens; but the request was denied. The cost of the system could have been covered by $10.2 million the county received in 2021 from the American Rescue Plan Act, or ARPA, but the money instead went toward improved communications for first responders. Moser’s efforts had gone nowhere when he stepped down in 2021.
“We kept putting it in the budget to do our part, but it never came about,” he told the Daily Beast. “We never got that ever got the funding that we needed to do it.”
On July 4, the survivor whom Bankston had carried to safety years before got a text from a childhood friend.
“He said, ‘Hey, you know, they’re showing footage of your flood accident,’” the survivor told the Daily Beast. “I’m like, ‘Really?’ I’m like, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘Cause they’re having another flood down there.’”
He began watching news footage that looked too much like his own experience in 1987.
“It’s terrible,” he said. “Just seeing that again, that’s just terrible.”
After four decades of inaction by a Shallow State that is as liable to government insufficiency as the supposed Deep State is to government inefficiency, a flash flood had struck another camp on the Guadalupe River. And the death toll for Camp Mystic would be much higher, with many younger victims, including twin sisters who were just eight.
In response to the horror, the Shallow State suddenly deepened to what government should be, whether conservative or liberal. The White House offered Texas and Kerr County whatever assistance it needed. Federal first responders joined recovery crews in searching the flood debris, vowing not to stop until they recovered all of the most recent dead. That does not include the still-missing football player whose father said he just hoped it would never happen again.
But the spirit of Bankston and Lane was alive in rescuers such as U.S. Coast Guard Petty Officer Scott Ruskan, a 26-year-old aviation survival technician 3rd class stationed in Corpus Christi, who is credited with saving 165 people.
His deployment to the flood zone by the Trump Administration was preceded by a question: “Do you have a chainsaw?”
On Friday, Ruskan wore a Coast Guard jumpsuit to pose for a photo with President Trump, who flew in with First Lady Melania Trump.
“I’ve never seen anything like this, a little narrow river that becomes a monster,” Trump said afterwards during a roundtable meeting with a host of federal, state and local officials who were suddenly willing to take immediate action.
But soon enough, the Shallow State is sure to sink back to what it has been for decades.
