It's a quarter century since Dallas hit our TV screens. In 1978, Variety magazine, the self-styled "premier source of entertainment news", concluded the show was "a limited series with a limited future". As no series can claim to be infinite or eternal, Variety's professionally woolly verdict was literally true. In every normal sense, of course, it was thoroughly wrong.
Larry Hagman, as J.R. Ewing, a villain in cowboy boots, suit and stetson, made Dallas a worldwide hit. It topped international ratings for several seasons. Shot on 35-millimetre film like a Hollywood movie, it was the glossiest, most luxurious soap opera seen. Later copycats - Dynasty, Falcon's Crest - and indeed the spin-off, Knots Landing - probably out-glossed it but Dallas set the standard.
Big and brash, the show was practically a cartoon. Nonetheless, it had the appeal of a car crash - you couldn't look but you couldn't look away. It had a saint too: Bobby Ewing, J.R.'s younger brother. Its leading women - Sue Ellen, Pam and Lucy - wore big-hair, big make-up and even bigger shoulder-pads. It all made for one big, unhappy, rich family living under one roof, Southfork.
It was bizarre, really. They all ate breakfast on Southfork's pool-side patio. J.R. double-crossed almost every man in the oil business and seduced almost every woman in the series. Southforkers married, divorced and re-married in the driveway.
Larry Hagman, a Texan, had only one quibble: the characters weren't corrupt and power-crazy enough. He wasn't fully joking.
Before Dallas the soap opera, Dallas the place was best known as the ultra-conservative city where US president, John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. Its professional gridiron football team, the Dallas Cowboys, also had a certain notoriety and a risible television series was made about its cheerleaders. Fundamentally however, Dallas meant oil, cattle and insurance.
Texas, more than eight times the size of Ireland, is the biggest state in continental US. Only far-away and scantily-populated Alaska is bigger. Of the major US states, Texas is the most different from Europe. It's also one of the few American states to have been an independent nation before joining the union.
It has a lengthy border with Mexico, which once controlled the territory, speaks a different language and has a different civilization. Not surprisingly, Texas is obsessed with its own identity. It sees itself as a super US, different from even most of its fellow states, albeit less so than from Europe. It is, most presciently at present, the heartland of George Bush's United States.
It's considered sniffy, perhaps rightly so, to refer to Bush's political and business cabals as gangs of cowboys. But he was reared in Texas and became its governor. His father worked in the Texan oil industry and it is oil, above all, that made Texas prosperous in the 20th century. In 1900, Dallas had a population of just over 42,000; today it's almost four million.
With the world watching, Bush machine-gunned us with cowboy clichés: "the folks who did this"; "old poster out west"; "smoke 'im out"; "wanted: dead or alive" and so forth. The America he represents, according to leading US political commentator, Todd Gitlin, is the Sunbelt minus California: the old Confederacy plus the mountain states and the prairie. It has roughly half the population of the US.
The American north-east - New York, Boston, Philadelphia - is, adds Gitlin, where effete Europe begins for the "cowboy elite". Though these cities are American, they are certainly not Dallas. It is Texas and its satellites that are most gung-ho to attack Iraq. It is Texas and its satellites that continue to imagine themselves as ruggedly self-sufficient.
The Texan hue to current US power makes Tony Blair's grovelling all the more absurd. He is, after all, a Labour (ok, "New Labour") prime minister of an old, urbanised country in Europe's Wetbelt. Yet, he joins the cowboy gang and talks tough.
It's all quite surreal - as though Hugh Grant had strapped-on a six-shooter and wandered into a western.
Anyway, back to Dallas, the soap opera. Looks like Larry Hagman was right when he claimed that it was, if anything, understated. Its melodramatic villain and saint, its brashness and its glossiness certainly made it loud and cartoonish. But little, it seems, did we know: the real oil addicts were far more power-crazy than smiling, scheming, lecherous J.R. Ewing ever was.
Mind you, when Dallas débuted, there was still a Soviet Union and a Cold War. Indeed, throughout its run, the Cold War persisted. The clarion irony is that competition - the lifeblood of the market system - existed then between ideologies.
However, now that market forces have won, we are saddled with a monopoly, the thing that market forces allegedly fight against.
That monopoly is not only about ideology but about power. Whether people like it or not, George Bush and his Texan cabals have the power - because of US military strength - to do more or less as they please. They have realised the dream of J.R. Ewing. What's saddening is to see so many people trying to find a context to make the Bush project acceptable to themselves.
Anti-Saddam Hussein arguments are justified. But nudging people from anti-Saddam to pro-war is not. Already, most people seem sick of the propaganda and manipulations. A dominant desire appears to be "to keep the head down" and hope it won't be too bad. It's like living as a deep background extra in Dallas.
Still, you've got to hope. In becoming the most popular television programme in the world, the "limited series with a limited future" did rather better than forecast. The seemingly unlimited power with an unlimited future might surprise us all too.