Page Two: Music of the Spheres

As I cautioned they might in last week's column on the Waller Creek project, in fact, my moorings had evidently slipped, and I was off as to what is happening. The planning is evidently in a much earlier stage than I implied, and all kinds of input is still being sought and accepted.

Sorry – but though I apologize for its excesses and inaccuracies, I don't really apologize for the column. Too often, due to the involved community not speaking out soon enough, music and other cultural activities have been underserved. If nothing else, I hope the consideration of how the Waller Creek changes are going to affect the live music clubs has been moved from the back to the front burner.

I was severely chided by one anonymous posted comment for not acknowledging all the work the city and concerned citizens have done to support live music. Occasionally polemics in service to a cause make sense. In this column, I try to offer shades of gray more than black and white. In dealing with abstract issues, this approach is the most reasonable – but sometimes, trying to encourage some specific response, more fully filling out the picture doesn't really change the point, and then that point can easily become like a tree lost for the forest.

All that said, I do feel bad that I didn't acknowledge the city's cooperation with the live music scene, as well as the many individuals and nonprofit organizations dedicated to supporting music and musicians. Often that is a tedious rather than glamorous task, and the number of people willingly giving of their own time, energy, and money is amazing. I was particularly scolded for not mentioning the city's Live Music Task Force, and in that, I'm guilty as charged. That group has the most painstaking and least appreciated task of collecting information and advising the city on how it interacts with and legislates the live music scene. More often than not, the job involves dealing with specific details and minutiae that can't be fun.

When it comes to the many music-related nonprofits, this city should be both extremely proud and even more supportive. I would start to name them, but I would leave out more than I include just because there are so many. As an example, I'll just note that Austin boasts both the SIMS Foundation (providing mental-health services for musicians) and the Health Alliance for Austin Musicians when most communities have nothing even close to either of those.

This column was going to be about what I consider the cancerous level of vicious discourse that has become all too common in Austin politics. Reading just the posts in our forums, I wonder why anyone would be a civil servant; those posting seem to feel that there is no accusation too extreme nor description too vile to use against their opponents. The recent elections once again saw things ratcheted up to an unhealthy level.

Certainly some will accuse the Chronicle of supporting and encouraging this trend, to the point where my bemoaning it is pure hypocrisy. The criticism here is not for partisan politics, nor regarding particular positions on issues. This paper believes in fairness and advocacy, in that order. Which, again, isn't to say our support for a position or a candidate, while explicit, may not be excessive. What I'm complaining about is the constant increasingly nasty personal attacks wherein any vague rumor or accusation is offered as though it is proven fact.

It is no secret that I was a strong supporter of City Manager Toby Futrell. Obviously, any city manager is going to have serious critics, and in a community like Austin, their numbers will be legion. There are common and accurate criticisms of Futrell; I just think she was surprisingly effective and most often got into trouble when she led with her heart. But even if you don't like a thing Futrell did and considered her awful for the city, there is a level of abuse that should be unacceptable. There are any number of civil servants who work hard for local, state, or national government because they believe in service. The city manager's job is difficult and stressful. Although the salary figure gets treated with shock and awe, the city manager is essentially CEO of a billion-dollar corporation. Compared to the private sector, public servants are seriously underpaid – even more so given that in the last decade we watched chief executives at money-losing companies receive millions in bonuses. It is easier to damn public officials than to praise them. But treating them all as manipulative, soulless zombies is to really undervalue them. Most people cheerfully ignore that, driven by a sense of community obligation, many of these officials are working for much less in pay and benefits then they would receive in the private sector.

Lest all hell rain down on me, I'm not saying there are no bad or corrupt public servants, nor am I saying that any level of criticism is unacceptable. I believe in criticizing the government as an obligation for citizens and not an indulgence. Nor am I claiming such criticisms are too harsh or unwarranted. It is that way-too-easy slipping over from policy and ideological attacks to extremely vicious personal assaults that is of concern.

Now I'm well aware that there are many readers who think I not only harbor but write such attacks with regularity. By no means am I claiming purity, but the ambition of this column, if not its achievement, is to focus on issues, ideology, policy, and practice. Not only do I not believe that Republicans have horns and eat their young, but I am friendly with many of them. My biggest complaint about Republicans currently is that they supported the Bush administration's every inane move and didn't try harder to hold it to stricter Republican principles.

Even when people's politics seem incomprehensibly dumb, I rarely believe they are bad people intentionally doing bad things. I realize that this is not a popular position. Suggesting that Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld are misguided and wrong rather than evil is not a popular thought in many corners.

Admittedly, this administration makes such distinctions difficult. In its first years, they did everything in the name of security without making this country any more secure. Now they are ready to do everything in the name of energy that will probably make little difference there. Supposedly the left was wrong on invading Iraq, but their position has been validated. The left complained about huge tax cuts for the richest Americans with relatively small cuts for most. We were assured that these cuts would be terrific for the economy. It's hard to be spoken to as though one is a young child as right-wing pundits argue that we need to leave those tax cuts in place "for the economy" when the economy has tanked and the dollar has reached historic lows. When those enormous tax cuts for the very rich were approved, all kinds of commentators pointed out that the average tax cut was going to be $1,000, as though they really didn't understand what "average" means.

I truly want to know where real Republicans were when this administration was busy moving from a point of budgetary reasonableness to almost unimaginable deficits. According to right-wing ideology, we shouldn't spend tens of millions on social services and the social safety net, but it's just all right to spend hundreds of millions on Iraq. By keeping much of this money out of the official budget, they further disguise the federal government's distress and incomprehensible economics.

This also raises another of the issues I find so perplexing. Almost every conservative pundit, it seems, is not just against additional taxes but would like the current rates cut – not just for the working class but especially for the richest Americans, some of whom are not exactly the kind of entrepreneurs who made and help keep this country great but instead are into the second or third generation of just clipping fiduciary coupons.

I really don't understand how some of the richest Americans resent and lobby against paying any taxes at all. But the anti-tax feeling seems universal. Unfortunately, almost everyone agrees that the nation should be spending more money – they just don't agree on what. There is the country's aging transportation infrastructure, the failed Mississippi River levees, alternative energy, among many other needs. These are truly vast projects that will require unimaginable amounts of money, all needing to be added to the budget.

Most people seem to believe that to pay for all this, the government should cut taxes and cut all the "pork barrel" spending and budgetary fat. This combination doesn't make any financial sense, and even in the unlikely case that substantial inroads were made in the latter, it would prove far less than needed. When we invaded Iraq, according to many polls, as much as 75% to 80% of the country initially approved. The invasion was a disastrous mistake. But as we face budgetary shortfalls in every direction, people should not be so quick to dismiss themselves from having helped create these problems.

Ironically, when the Bush administration first came into office, many of my friends who had money in socially responsible investments found their value diminished. This was because along with the reality of the Bush administration not supporting alternative-energy research, there was the expectation that the situation wouldn't change. All the verbiage to the contrary, it really hasn't.

Americans have come to declare it an inalienable right to locate their politics in the misty space between reality and perception. There is what they want, as well as what they demand, completely disconnected from the realities involved in achieving those goals.

Now they wish for the country to become "energy-independent" as the politicians promise them exactly that situation. Dependence on foreign sources for energy can be diminished, but there is very little chance of the country really becoming energy-independent. It's like the same talking heads and politicians who insist that illegal immigration is a huge problem and must be resolved, while standing firm against any hint of amnesty – the only solution with some hope of resolution.

It was barely a couple of years ago that energy conservationists were scoffed at for asking Congress to pay more attention to the problem. Just a few years ago that, while mounting platitudes about alternatives, our president loosened the miles-per-gallon restrictions on automobiles while pursuing the ethanol grail. It should also be noted that whereas illegal immigration was recently regarded by many Americans as the country's No. 1 problem, in the face of the weakened economy, the falling dollar, and the energy crisis, now real problems rather than fanciful ones top the list.

Okay, most of the above was an aside, and then an aside to an aside. While bemoaning the lack of civility and appreciation, last week's column participated in those very activities. Not to any extreme, but in a thoughtless manner, which may be more inexcusable.