Congratulations, Houston! You've just been named "The Fattest City in America" by Men's Fitness magazine for the second year in a row. To respond to the salvo, Mayor Brown recently launched a campaign to inspire Houstonians to slim down, by starting with his own waistline. If you can't rule by policy, why not govern by example?

The taxes are so low here that the city government needs a public referendum to do anything beyond barely keeping the surface streets functional. Behind the scenes, it's businesspeople, both informally and through the Greater Houston Partnership, who push civic projects and sweetheart deals along, from downtown revitalization to building new stadiums. In Houston, the business agenda is the civic agenda.

"The shadow government decided where the football stadium is going to be, how much public money was going to be put into it, and where the money would come from," explains Tarlov. Ken Lay led the approval process of the new baseball stadium, which now bears the name of his disgraced company.

The sign that says Enron Field, which the now-bankrupt company pledged to pay $100 million for, is the most vivid symbol that Enron's shame is also a big black eye for Houston. But neither Enron Field nor the Compaq Center -- Compaq cut 8,500 jobs last spring and may still be absorbed by Hewlett-Packard -- has soured local politicians on the naming game. Right now, the City Council is considering selling off different rooms of the new convention center for corporate branding.

Houston has struggled since the catastrophic oil bust of the '80s to change its wildcatting ways. And like an investor who learned her lesson the hard way when her 401K turned out to be composed 80 percent of Enron stock, Houston has shed its overdependence on the energy industry, with some success. The city now boasts that while 82 percent of all economic activity in the early '80s was energy-related, now it's about 49 percent. That still means it's a town whose fortunes are tied to the price of oil, just less so.

But even with big local employers Compaq and Continental on the ropes, Enron evaporating and the price of oil down from $30 a barrel in early 2000 to $18 a barrel today, the city has lost only 5,700 seasonably adjusted jobs, according to the University of Houston's Institute for Regional Forecasting. That means while the country has shed about 1 percent of its job base in the recession, even with Enron's fall, Houston has lost only a quarter percent of its base. Houston may be down, but it is still ahead of the rest of the country.

But the collapse of Enron means something more here than the loss of jobs or money or even face. Lay was the archetypal Good Houston Businessman: a young man from somewhere else who comes to town, makes a lot of money and showers it back on the community, while building his good name. He was widely thought to be a promising candidate for mayor when Brown's term expires on term limits next year, prompting comparisons to Houston's great-granddaddy of civic business leaders, Jesse "Mr. Houston" Jones.

And before its collapse, Enron represented Houston's best idea of itself -- an innovative, technocratic, deregulation innovator that might be a bit on the arrogant and greedy side but was also philanthropic and civic-minded, a company transforming itself out of the oil and gas business into a new economy conglomerate that even sold broadband services. Enron was the New Houston.

Not even the city's official civic pride cheerleaders can entirely brush off Enron. Lynn Nutt, chair of Houston Proud, confides: "The self-esteem here in Houston is very depleted."

But in a city that's always trying to prove itself, there's no time for navel-gazing about whether Enron's collapse means that there's something inherent in Houston's culture that breeds such colossal screwups. The Houston way isn't to wallow and whine. It's to declare -- all together now! -- your pride in your city, while leaving the congressional investigators, the FBI and the courts to sort out that Enron mess. In bike-riding, eco-friendly, granola-eating Portland, Ore., they may be singing the "Enron Blues," but here in Houston, headquarters for the largest bankruptcy in history, they're still Houston Proud!

Just in time for all the Enron fuss, there's a new Houston Proud "Rally Song" by local songwriter Phil Blackman: "Houston is the Place to Be." It's a twangy Texas two-step blues number with a country twist.

"I've been up, I've been down,
Searchin' for a place to be
I've been around, the world you see
But Houston is the place for me."

Ah, the good-natured earnestness, the protesting-too-much! It's enough to make the heart skip a beat for Houston, or maybe just make you want to skip town.

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