ustxtxb_obs_1982_02_12_50_00024-00000_000.pdf

.\\,11 and Associates 502 W. 15th Street Austin, Texas 78701 REALTOR Representing all types of properties in Austin and Central Texas Interesting & unusual property a specialty. 477-3651 the legendary RAW DEAL Steaks, Chops, Chicken open lunch and evenings 6th & Sabine, Austin No Reservations COPYING SERVICE Copying Binding Printing Color Copying Graphics Word Processing Austin Lubbock Son Marcos “Daddy’s Girl is splendid memorable, precise, true.” Donald Barthelme DADDY’S GIRL by Beverly Lowry WATSON & COMPANY BOOKS OPEN TUES-SAT 10-6. SUN 10-4 Postmaster: If undeliverable, send Form 3579 to The Texas Observer, 600 W. 7th, Austin, Texas 78701 but an older, wiser, better educated, more worldly, more skillful Larry McMurtry graduated from these firstrate accounts of the remnants of the frontier spirit to a great novel on the same themes. He’s as capable as anyone of doing for the Texas frontier tradition what Faulkner did for the South. I SPEND AS MUCH TIME AS THE NEXT liberated Texan telling Yankees that such and such a view about Texas is totally wrong, but, in the end, it is not wrong that others and we ourselves should expect certain things of Texas just because they’re Texans. No one is just a person and Texans especially. That doesn’t mean we have to be anything anyone wants us to be: it means that we reject all of the counterfeit myths which have been forced upon us and which we have forced upon ourselves; but, on the other hand, it also means that if the shoe fits our history and the spirit of our history, then we had better figure out how to get our foot into it. Living up to the right idea of being a Texan is perhaps more of an issue for Texans living north of the Red River, but the fight to determine what the right idea is which is a never-ending struggle is one which deserves the utmost dedication from anyone who calls himself a Texan, and especially from those who haven’t left. As McMurtry rightfully notes, of late Texans have cooperated quite gleefully in a good many schemes to push off ungenuine, superficial Texas myths on an unsuspecting world solely for the sake of some of that worthless green stuff. In light of the current epidemic of Texas fever, it seems particularly urgent that Texans ask them question at hand. In districts where the rotgut reactionary congressmen cannot be defeated, Clements can be concentrated on. Defeat them with what? That is the question for the next two years. The national Democrats are leaderless. Pussilanimity is the order of the day. Demoralized, the Democrats have not yet regrouped. But there is a great need among the people for a new progressive leader now. If he or she does not appear, we will turn to Edward Kennedy again because that will be the only alternative sufficient to the emergency. selves what it is they are supposed to be and what it is that those who want to be like Texans are supposed to imitate. If we spent a little more time reading some of our better writers and a lot more time asking ourselves who we are, we would still wear boots and Stetsons and drink Lone Star, but maybe we’d think twice about letting John Travolta cross the state line, or about putting out $12.95 for a string of five hundred one-liners pretending to be a novel by Dan Jenkins, or about accepting the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders as models of Texas womanhood, to choose a few convenient examples. We wouldn’t abandon the symbols of the frontier tradition, but we would demand a deeper, more reflective rendition of those symbols than the czars of Madison Avenue are willing to give us. MY IRISH FRIEND who gave me a way to raise some of these questions has since left Annapolis to go back to New Mexico. After stumbling around through a bit of everything for his first forty years, he says he’s going to spend the rest of his life trying to save the West. “That’s an honorable thing to do, isn’t it?” he asked the last time I saw him. “It sure as hell is,” I said, “but leave me a little to save when I get there.” He should be writing this, I suppose; but I’m sitting in Annapolis, Maryland, reading Frederick Law Olmstead’s 1857 A Journey Through Texas, which for some reason, I know not why, was sent to me by a Santa Fe bookstore and I’m thinking a lot about how I want to be in Texas when I die, and how I’ll die if I’m not there soon. This Reagan presidency is the end of the era that began with the New Deal. After this, we begin a new era. What will it be? That is the question of the 1980’s. We cannot turn to the past, and we can not turn now to the gears-stripped Dem ocratic Party for answers. A party that abandons proportional representation in its convention process is not the place to debate and decide fundamental things, other than as a political vehicle at elec tion time. Fundamental things, we must figure out by ourselves, in our own minds and movements, and bring, then, to the political process, the new answers. R.D. FINISH LINE x Restaurant and Bar Tasteful Dinners Relaxed Happy Hours 208 W. 4th Street One Block West of Congress 480-0061 Dugger on Reagan . . . from page 4