The Permanent Warning

Right when it looks like mischief is dead and nobody really ever thinks about anything except money, hope arrives. Early this summer, an envelope arrived containing an odd-sized magazine cobbled together on a photocopier. This is Austin Class War! the cover announces, but what really grabs the eye is the doctored cover photo featuring the late University of Texas Board of Regents Chairman Frank C. Erwin, the man who led UT through a massive building boom in the Sixties and did much to establish its corporate character. Through the magic of an exacto knife, Erwin is wearing a silk dress. The lead story, headlined "The Sheila Erwin Story," recites Erwin's sins -- his attempts to crush student activism, muzzle faculty members, and so on -- including his famous maxim, "I don't fund anything I don't control." Then it heads into a scurrilous segue on Erwin's private life and alleged sexual escapades that only an anonymous paper with no bylines such as Class War could get away with.

The piece closes with a list of demands, my favorite being "the leveling of Memorial Stadium to make way for a replanted oak orchard." (In 1969, Erwin ordered in police when students climbed 40 old trees near Waller Creek, trying to prevent their destruction.)

Granted, under the cloak of anonymity the paper's authors paint a possibly libelous portrait of UT's former regent chair, (even if passed off as satirical fiction), but what's refreshing about this desktop semizdat is that someone cares enough about the past to mention it at all. I have no idea if the stories about Erwin's private life are true, but the rest of the Class War article is solid history, and it is still with us today. Next time you walk into the Texas Union, try imagining a spacious gathering place, instead of the obstructed warren that is actually there. It was turned into a labyrinth after demonstrations against the Vietnam War in Erwin's era showed that an open space could be controlled by a spontaneous assembly of students; ditto the retaining walls on Guadalupe and concrete planters in the free speech area.

The past, as Jake Gittes was fond of saying in Chinatown, never goes away. Especially the recent past, which acts on the present with particular force. The recent past is a terrible problem for the news media, because so many difficult and unpalatable facts exist in the record in plenty of detail, even if the possibility of stony-faced men in party dresses is ignored for reasons of taste. In a country where calling someone "history" means cursing them with total irrelevance, it is not surprising that the news media work overtime fostering the illusion of a dynamic society creating itself anew each and every day, shedding the past like old diapers.

Which is not to say the past is never mentioned; almost every day brings another reminder of former President George Bush's "no new taxes" pledge, deployed to highlight the folly of Bob Dole's central campaign promise. But meanwhile, the idea that defense spending is sacrosanct is never questioned, and rarely mentioned at all, though it consumes almost one-third of the money raised by taxes, and much of that amounts to a generous corporate subsidy. Nor are the huge reductions in corporate income tax in the Eighties mentioned. It would be easy to go on and on. The point is, we are given a radically circumscribed version of the recent past, often truncated to the extent that it is unrecognizable. Context is the poor country cousin in the world of news reporting, hustled out the door when it can't be ignored.

A recent series of stories in the Austin American Statesman on Capital Metro shows how missing history warps understanding. Last Sunday's installment, "Cap Metro paid temp agencies thousands without bids," was typical. The reporter, Laylan Copelin, deserves high marks for thoroughness and clarity. He's a reliable digger of facts. The upshot of this story, and the series in general, is that Capital Metro suffers from lousy management, in this case paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for temporary employees, and not very good ones, outside normal bidding channels. While the headline and the lead paragraphs reflect the narrowness of the fault-finding approach to which most reporters are wedded, the imbalance is corrected when the story jumps to an inside page: "Cap Metro alters way it hired temporary workers," reads the jump headline. Turns out that the transit agency has taken steps to correct things, and the story ends on a much more positive note than it begins.

On August 6, however, after the Statesman series was already underway, a PBS documentary threw the issue into vivid relief, exposing a cruel irony. "Taken For A Ride" detailed General Motors' successful assault on light rail in the Forties and Fifties, when the auto giant bought its way into trolley car companies and trashed them. Most astonishing, though, was the story of how GM promoted and invested in buses as an alternative to trolleys, knowing that the smelly, lumbering buses would prove such a pain in the neck that the whole notion of mass transit would drop in public esteem. They knew the poorly maintained behemoths would sour people on public transportation and shove them towards car ownership. The strategy paid off in spades.

With that in mind, a paradigm shift is in order. Perhaps a more fruitful line of questioning might ask not why Capital Metro is a sort of lousy bus line, but why it is taking so long to convert from an inferior mode of public transportation to one with a proven record of success. Finding fault with them for badly managing a form of transport that was originally promoted because it was unmanageable may be valid, so long as reporters and editors don't mind playing the part of history's pawn. Ask someone over 60 what cities used to be like before escalating car and bus traffic choked the social space; you might conclude that even imperfectly managed light rail would be vastly preferable to the current situation.

Fault-finding agendas can act like a tourniquet on imaginative thinking; a vision of the past can inspire only if it is acknowledged. Context matters.

Kudos

Fairness compels a mention of the other major story on Sunday's front page, "Neglect unpunished" by Denise Gamino, about the failure of the state nursing home board to correct horrendous situations all over the state. In terms of structure and motive, it is exactly like any other piece of newspaper investigation, laying out the abuse of the public trust, the conflicts of interest, and the feeble excuses made by officials. The difference is one of quality. Gamino has covered the mental health and nursing home industries for over a decade, and her work is always sharp and immaculately detailed. She breathes authority over the subject, and the restraint in her tone gives weight to her outrage. Gamino is the Statesman's best reporter, and she would be a credit to any newspaper in the country. It's a miracle she hasn't been hired away, but lucky for us.