Ironically, I suppose, this last roundup appears on the same day that the City Council will sink a time capsule in the courtyard of the new City Hall. A time capsule that will include, with thanks to my friend Jackie Goodman, a squib of my prose.
In case any of you live forever, I won’t spoil the surprise, but what I wrote begins, “In 2005 Austin finally grew into her big-city clothes.” It goes on in this vein, citing cases where the agonies and ecstasies and tumults of the past years and decades have resolved themselves into something approaching a picture of a mature city – a place where we can possess urban vitality, and embrace natural beauty, and engage in the work of community, and still be Austin.
I stopped writing my previous column in this paper – the neighborhood saga “Corner to Corner” – because I felt it was no longer needed. Obviously, there are still more stories to tell, but the role of neighbors and neighborhoods in Austin public life had been well established and institutionalized and so remains today, and thus is now a different story than the one I had embarked on chronicling. I feel much the same way now about saying goodbye to this column, and hasta luego (not really “goodbye”) to this paper after 14 years of writing and editing.
During that whole time, I have endeavored to whisper in your ear a great secret: Austin is not a provincial town. It is just as big and important a city as most others, and in fact may be more important than many larger cities, for we here have a wide range of urban energies distilled to their essences. It is not a perfect place, but nowhere is, and we wouldn’t love it so much if it were. The imperfect is our paradise.
But That’s Another Story
The well-read among you – like my friend, colleague, boss, confessor, and successor Michael King – may recognize not one but two references to the canon of modern poetry in that last paragraph. I’ve been flattered before by comparisons of my writing to “poetry,” but I suppose it’s also an apt description of my project, if not my success in attaining it. Our public life is complex because it is open, porous, democratic; Austin is a city without many truisms and an aversion to hierarchy. The details of public policy and politics matter because there really is no other picture than the Big Picture in this town. It’s not hard to walk in out of nowhere and become a major character in the saga and introduce issues that yesterday didn’t exist and today shape the future.
So “covering” city politics here requires a certain poetic touch, a seeking after essences and Big Pictures and narratives that tell the story behind the story, and that’s what I’ve tried to do here. It’s not really “investigative reporting” or “commentary” or “news analysis” as those terms are normally used in the trade. It’s just storytelling, within the reasonably strict parameters of the journalistic form. A past editor told me that I was a writer and not a journalist. I think this is what she meant.
But I digress a bit; why is now a good time for me to take my leave? I mean, leaving aside the obvious stuff – 14 years is a long time, I have other worlds to conquer, et cetera. The me-centered stuff. Do I really think, as I told my readers a century hence, that Austin has finally arrived at some sort of stopping point? Well, yes.
Obviously, the saga continues. But from here on out it is a different story, not one of becoming a city but of surviving as one. The Austin I came to in the Eighties is gone, although its essence, again, is fondly remembered and thus still present. It is, indeed, because we are a big city that these individual visions of “Austin” can be accommodated and live side-by-side and interact. Had we not gone through this protracted adolescence, we would be a monoculture and thus not, in human terms, sustainable.
Vision Future
But we have of course also seen the advent of big-city “problems” that we can now safely say are permanent, part of the furniture, not going away. We will always have growth and traffic and congestion. We will always have to worry about jobs and affordability and equity. We will always need to think of how to do more – whether with more or with less, but still do more – in the way of public services. These are inherent parts of big-city life. The fantasies on both sides of the political spectrum that these problems can be erased – in other words, that the clock can be turned back – have, I think, lost their luster.
Moving forward, this change makes a big difference. We’ll see it, I hope, in the new City Council that emerges in the new City Hall, in the new Downtown that grows from the seeds now being planted there, in the politics arising from the consensus that Austin is not only Weird but is supposed to be even Weirder and that making it that way requires work and not magic. And so on. We have arrived at a point in the story of Austin where the future, at least to my eyes and ears, has more resonance than the past.
Which makes this a good time to pass the baton. Sure, it’s important to have some experience and institutional memory, but right now, I think, it’s even more important to have a fresh perspective. I too have become part of the furniture, which is not a bad place to be for me, but which I suspect will only make me less able to occupy this role as a chronicler of change. I look forward to reading how Michael King and Lee Nichols and the rest of my Chronicle family – including voices not yet heard – see what I see, for they will surely see things I do not see.
And someday, yes, I too may just have to write a letter to “Postmarks” complaining about how the Chronicle just doesn’t get it. We wouldn’t have it any other way.
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This article appears in January 14 • 2005.