ustxtxb_obs_1987_10_23_50_00007-00000_000.pdf

prosecution, which is an informal way of giving probation, and the students were required to do a certain amount of community service work. Oden says the four shanty-smashers will be working with an Austin group called the World Affairs Council, perhaps on a project concerned with poverty in the Third World or the plight of blacks in South Africa. Oden readily admits that the student anti-apartheid demonstrators “certainly received much harsher treatment” by the court system for the “same grade of offense” as the students who destroyed the shanty. “There is a discrepancy there,” he says. But to Oden the quiet handling of the case of the four students is the reasonable approach. He believes Judge Taylor’s jail sentences “bore almost no relation” to the seriousnessness of the offense and was rendered out of frustration and irritation. It is, of course, hard to imagine Judge Taylor sentencing the four rowdy students to jail time, though their behavior was neither non-violent nor of noble intention. The difference is that the 16 students who sat down in the president’s office were challenging established authority. The four young students who wrecked the shanty were attacking a troublesome symbol they seemed to be saying “South Africa has nothing to do with us.” In all the concern over proper justice for the demonstrators it should not be lost that this is essentially what the University is saying, by refusing to end its business ties to apartheid. The University and many of its privileged students and Judge Taylor, as well would perhaps be happier to think South Africa is part of someone else’s world. Now it’s part of theirs. L.D., D.D. OBSERVATIONS Who Will Replace Bill Clements? FISSURES HAVE OPENED UP within both political parties in Texas, fissures special to constellations of personalities. The Republican governor has three more years to go, but he is a profound embarrassment to everyone. Hard-line antitaxers are humiliated by his indefensible violation of promises indefensibly made; and who with sincerity can defend his conduct in the Ponygate scandal, what he did and how he lied about it? When he left the Mansion after his 1982 defeat the Republican State Executive Committee promptly cleared away many of his people, so one may deduce that even at that time there were at least two ways of looking at him within the Republican camp. Leading Republicans in Dallas have begun to say publicly that he is an albatross. Does this startling fact signify that he may come under pressure from within his own party to step down? If not, we are in for three years on a ship of state in whose captain the crew and the travelers have lost faith. The fissures in the Democratic Party are opening up between and among supporters of different progressive prospects for high offices in 1990. This is happening because of an abundance of talent preparing to compete for the few top offices that come open then. Jim Mattox and Ann Richards appear to be committed to run for governor; if both do, the choosingup will divide progressive from progressive, even within families. John Bryant, Lloyd Doggett, and Craig Washington probably will all be candidates for the one job of attorney general in 1990. Imagine the fratricidal effects of such a situation! Some damage may be avoided among the Democrats by prudential restraint on the grounds that anything can happen in the two full years before the 1989-90 campaign season and that therefore the wisest posture is wait and see. But if it’s too early for the Democrats, it’s too late for the Republicans. Clements is in, and the only thing that can save the Republicans three years of agony and humiliation is for Clements to get out. Paul Burka, Author of .. . Paul Burka, a senior editor of Texas Monthly, has written a one-page column in that magazine’s October issue, an article entitled “Famine, Pestilence, Destruction, and Death.” This is an arrogant and low-minded piece of work. There is no way to just let it pass. As Burka presents things in Texas politics, the Democrats were sitting pretty as long as they had “the candidates, Lt. Gov. Bill Hobby and San Antonio Mayor Henry Cisneros,” but with their withdrawals from the 1990 race for governor, “the Democrats are left with the Texas version of the Seven Dwarfs: the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.” These, Burka informs the readers of his magazine, are Jim Mattox, Jim Hightower, Garry Mauro, and Ann Richards. He then proceeds to instruct everyone how each of them should be regarded. Listen to what, and all of what, he says about them. Mattox “might well be in jail today but for a vote of twelve of his peers.” “All come from the liberal wing of the party, which hasn’t produced a winner for governor or U.S. senator since 1964. All carry other baggage. Richards is a recovered alcoholic. Mauro has been under fire for his financial wheeling and dealing. At a time when family issues play a major role in politics, Mattox, Hightower, and Richards Even though Comptroller Bob Bullock, who has declared for lieutenant governor in 1990, was not one of the Monthly’s horsemen, he was too tempting a target for the senior editor, in his assassinative mode, to leave alone, so Burka just threw this in about Bullock in passing: he “isn’t identified with the liberals, but he too is a recovered alcoholic.” Texas Monthly’s “Ten Best, Ten Worst” judgments on the legislature have degenerated recently into a vicious game of smear-the-liberals, but Burka has done some interesting workups of political analysis. He can say, in defense of “Famine, Pestilence, Destruction, and Death,” that every word is true, which, as far as I know, it is. The issue, however, is not truth but probity. Burka here has engaged in political hatchetwork as brutal as any of the recent displays of the specialty in the national political life. Richards and Bullock are slashed down in one ruthless characterization. Pointing at Hightower, Mattox, and Richards, Burka takes upon himself the nuances of the phrase “conspicuously single.” Mauro is reduced to the charges made against him. And by writing, accurately, that Mattox “might well be in jail today but for a vote of twelve of his peers,” Burka uses the English language to tell us that Mattox is guilty because he was found innocent. Paul Burka has burned this page of work onto the story of his own life. He has much of good credit to his name, but henceforth he will always also be the author of “Famine, Pestilence, Destruction, and Death” in the October 1987 issue of Texas Monthly. THE TEXAS OBSERVER 7