HOUSTON — A PSYCHIATRIST I knew many years ago suggested to me that a person’s irrational behavior in the present was probably not so irrational (to the person) in the past. As time has gone on, this insight has proved pretty useful, helping me develop empathy not just for bad boyfriends and crazy bosses, but for understanding my home state of Texas, which, let’s face it, has been known to excel at throw-up-your-hands behavior.

The recent crisis known as Jade Helm 15 serves as a pretty good example. On the surface, this just looks like another case of a few Texas knuckleheads making the rest of us look bad. To recap: A few months ago, the federal government announced that it would be holding military training exercises in seven states in the Southwest, including Texas. They would, literally, bring in heavy artillery like aircraft — along with Navy SEALs, Army Green Berets and other Special Operations forces.

Maybe the military should have been a little bit more careful with the rollout of the exercise, which began on Wednesday. The plan was to divide the designated lands into primarily “permissive” and “hostile” territories, with Texas falling into the latter category. The operation’s logo — two arrows crossed over a sword, a wooden clog planted bizarrely in the center — looked like something designed for a creepy “Game of Thrones” knockoff in which Amsterdam meets the Apaches.

But to some people around here, the government’s plan to train service members to work in “complex environments” looked like something else: a plot to take over the state. “This is in preparation for the financial collapse and maybe even Obama not leaving office,” the Texas-based conspiracy theorist and radio talk show host Alex Jones declared. That was followed by about one zillion Internet cranks predicting the declaration of martial law — you probably got word about the shuttered Walmarts being converted to makeshift detention centers. Gov. Greg Abbott’s attempt to calm the populace by ordering the state guard to keep an eye on the feds came next, an action that did nothing to confirm the pre-election rumor that he was much smarter than his predecessor, Rick Perry.