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.
This article appears in September 13 • 1996 and September 13 • 1996 (Cover).