The Texas Observer

If you are trying to look busy in the office today, the Higher Education Coordinating Board’s Committee on Academic Excellence and Research is scheduled to hear a pitch from the Institute for Creation Research at its monthly board meeting. The ICR wants to be able to grant graduate degrees in Texas. To check out the board meeting currently underway click here.

The ICR certainly is cutting edge. According to the institute, based in Dallas, “flexible blood vessels” discovered in dinosaur bones proves that dinos have only been around for centuries instead of millenia. Also, in the ICR’s December issue of Acts & Facts, the ICR’s director of research, Dr. Vardiman, discusses his scientific project called RATE (that’s radioisotopes and the age of earth for the uninitiated). His findings have led to the major conclusion that the Earth is thousands — not billions of years old. Dr. Vardiman admits he’s still struggling with some pesky scientific questions, however, such as how Noah and his family could have survived the massive dose of radiation unleashed from “accelerated decay” of organic matter during the Genesis Flood.

The atmosphere was just right for a visit by The Texas Observer to Dallas this week.

The streets were dotted with signs about the Trinity River Project. Commercials were on air saying things like “Vote Yes on Proposition One. Keep their toll road out of our park!” I swear some of the signs said, “Vote No! Pave the Trinity!” (but that doesn’t quite sound right), and at least one local weekly, the Dallas Observer (no relation), was recommending that voters “Vote Yes”, loudly, on its cover. Politics and policy were in the air.

As staffers, board members, writers, and fans of the Observer and Jimmie Dale Gilmore came together at the Lakewood Theater just northeast of Downtown, there was plenty of reminiscing about Dallas of the past and discussion of Dallas of the present and future. Gilmore kicked it off with a great version of his classic song “Dallas.” Gilmore described the song as a love-hate serenade to the city that over time has become more love than hate.

Wade Goodwyn, whose sonorous voice many will recognize from his day job as a reporter with NPR read a piece by his father, Larry Goodwyn, a former Observer editor and noted scholar of the populist movement. The piece from 1958, titled “Dallas: the personal and impersonal,” detailed the civic boosterism of a racially segregated town in love with efficiency and the notion of progress, up to a point. Dallas Morning News Columnist Macarena Hernandez read from Dagoberto Gilb’s masterful introduction to Hecho en Tejas, reminding the audience of the demographic shift underway. Former state Rep. Jesse Oliver had the crowd laughing with a deadpan reading of “The great Dallas weed trial,” by Bob Cochran and Molly Ivins. The story detailed the struggle of one Dallasite who wanted to grow his backyard so it resembled a prairie of old and the overzealous city inspector who couldn’t tolerate it. Executive Editor Jake Bernstein read Allen Pusey’s recent story on the knavish local Congressman Pete Sessions and Lou Dubose finished the readings off with Molly Ivins’ lament for the death of the Dallas Times Herald. Attendees were also treated to a showing of Paul Stekler’s “The Texas Observer at 50.” And in the end, Gilmore closed the show with a raucous rendition of “The Deep Ellum Blues.”

While driving around Dallas after the show, I couldn’t stop repeating an Ivins quote Dubose had recalled — one that I have heard before, but never really appreciated until now: Dallas is the kind of town “that would have rooted for Goliath to beat David.”

You see, Dallas has this reputation as a mean place — a place where Republicans rule. As the 2006 election showed, that’s not the case anymore. A Democratic precinct chair who is also one of Dallas’ many lawyers and a friend of mine advised me recently that more lawyers are voting in Democratic primaries in Dallas now, because the once all-GOP Dallas judiciary (district court judges and the like) has turned Democratic. This, according to Martin Frost, is part of a recent Democratic sweep in Big D:

In 2004, Bush-Cheney only won Dallas County 51 percent to 49 percent. Democrats that year won the sheriff’s office and several countywide judgeships. This year (2006), the Democratic Party swept all 42 contested judicial positions (elected county-wide) and all five contested county offices including county judge (the presiding officer of the county commissioner’s court), district attorney, county clerk and county treasurer.

Molly’s comment may still hold water in a lot of ways, but politically, this place is changing, and that’s big news for Texas and the state’s teetering, all-GOP political structure.