ustxtxb_obs_1991_12_13_50_00002-00000_000.pdf

A JOURNAL OF FREE VOICES We will serve no group or party but will hew hard to the truth as we find it and the right as we see it. We are dedicated to the whole truth, to human values above all interests, to the rights of human-kind as the foundation of democracy: we will take orders from none but our own conscience, and never will we overlook or misrepresent the truth to serve the interests of the powerfid or cater to the ignoble in the human spirit. Writers are responsible for their own work, but not for anything they have not themselves written, and in publishing them we do not necessarily imply that we agree with them because this is a journal of free voices. SINCE 1954 Publisher and Acting Editor: Ronnie Dugger Associate Editor: James Cullen Managing Editor: Brett Campbell Copy Editors: Roxanne Bogucka, Amy Root Mexico City Correspondent: Barbara Belejack Editorial Intern: Roddy de la Garza Contributing Writers: Bill Adler, Betty Brink, Warren Burnett, Jo Clifton, Terry FitzPatrick, Gregg Franzwa, James Harrington, Bill Helmer, Ellen Hosmer, Steven Kellman, Michael King, Mary Lenz, Tom McClellan, Bryce Milligan, Greg Moses, Debbie Nathan, Gary Pomerantz, Lawrence Walsh. Editorial Advisory Board: David Anderson, Austin; Frances Barton, Austin; Elroy Bode, Kerrville; Chandler Davidson, Houston; Dave Denison, Cambridge, Mass; Bob Eckhardt, Washington, D.C.; Sissy Farenthold, Houston; Ruperto Garcia, Austin; John Kenneth Galbraith, Cambridge, Mass.; Lawrence Goodwyn, Durham, N.C.; George Hendrick, Urbana, Ill.; Molly Ivins, Austin; Larry L. King, Washington, D.C.; Maury Maverick, Jr., San Antonio; Willie Morris, Oxford, Miss.; Kaye Northcott, Austin; James Presley, Texarkana; Susan Schwartz, Galveston; Fred Schmidt, Fredericksburg. Contributing Photographers: Bill Albrecht, Vic Hinterlang, Alan Pogue. Contributing Artists: Eric Avery, Tom Ballenger, Richard Bartholomew, Jeff Danziger, Beth Epstein, Dan Hubig, Pat Johnson, Kevin Kreneck, Michael Krone, Carlos Lowry, Ben Sargent, Dan Thibodeau, Gail Woods, Man Wuerker. Managing Publisher: Cliff Olofson Subscription Manager: Stefan Wanstrom Executive Assistant: Gail Woods Special Projects Director: Bill Simmons Development Consultant: Frances Barton SUBSCRIPTIONS: One yearS27. two years $48. three years $69. Full-time students $15 per year. Back issues $3 prepaid. Airmail. foreign, group, and bulk rates on Road.,Ann Arbor, MI 48106. Any current subscriber who finds the price a burden should say so at renewal time: no one need forgo reading the Observer simply because of the cost. biweekly except for a three-week interval between issues in January and July \(25 Texas. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to THE TEXAS OBSERVER, 307 West 7th Street. Austin, Texas 78701. A Member of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies A.411T THANKS TO THE swift and generous replies of more than five hundred read ers, the Observer’s 1991 fundraising campaign has passed the half-way mark toward the $48,000 minimum goal. As of this writing, the exact total of contributions and pledges is $30,141. Josh Hayes and Alice Lockhart wrote us last month, “It has always been a risky business to be a gadfly, but society must have you and people like you, buzzing around telling us it ain’t necessarily so. So my wife and I are enclosing a check.” Hayes told us to use part of their gift to renew a subscription for another subscriber who could not renew for herself because she is on Social Security. David Braybrooke sent $250 “in.memory of Edmund Pincoffs’ love for liberty and democracy, from a friend whom he led to subscribe to The Texas Observer.” Dr. Pincoffs, a gentle, strong minded philosopher, a professor at UT, who was a friend of mine, too, is much missed. Each year some of our contributors write to us in the vein of the note from Jack Commings of Vidor last year: “Solicitations for funds at Xmas is truly foolhardy so is publishing a liberal paper in Texas. I can’t afford this come to think of it I can’t afford not to do it.” We know from the notes, too, that some of the contributors are really stretching themselves; it’s hurting. Yet without these responses of support when we have had to send out the call, the Observer could not continue publication; we would have gone under some years back. Just as important to us, for our morale, is the deep communication we receive from these outpourings of contributions from the subscribers that the Observer is highly valued and that we must continue and expand it. I have been with the Observer, dear fellow members of the Observer community, for 37 years, since October 1954. Across the past 20 years, in addition to doing everything on the business side that we had the resources for and. thought made sense to do, we have been looking at. first one, then another larger plan for making a better go of the Ob s erver. Scores of us have talked and planned together to find away to assure that the Observer will last and grow and still be here a hundred years from now when we’re all dead. We are entering, I believe, an historic period for the progressive movement in Texas. Now is the time for our readers and supporters near, far, and wide to send us all your ideas, suggestions, and criti cisms past, present, and future. And please be patient, hold on, and keep on keeping the faith. I must strike a different note, concerning the resignation of the editor, David Armstrong, late in November. Dave and I have worked hard and long together on disagreements concerning issues in journalism without making any net progress on these disagreements. I shall not go into these matters here; in their nature they are and shOuld be in-house. Suffice it, please, to say that both Dave and I have given our fullest attention to these disagreements for many months and have not been able to come together on them. I thank Dave for the good work which he has done for the Observer and for the energy and sincerity of his devotion to the magazine’s progress and expansion. I wish him success in his future career. We are fortunate to have Associate Editor Jim Cullen and Managing Editor Brett Campbell for editorial continuity. I will be acting editor for a while. The Duke Watch Last month, when David Duke was running for governor of Louisiana, Abe Rosenthal, formerly the boss and now a columnist at The New York Times, spoke truth to bigotry more clearly than anyone else in the country. If Duke won, Rosenthal said, Louisiana would have elected “the first Nazi governor” in U.S. history. Furthermore, Rosenthal wrote somberly, each citizen of Louisiana would be personally responsible for his or her role and vote in the outcome. Everyone should know what Duke is, whatever he says he is, from what he had undoubtedly done and undoubtedly said, much of it very recently. No one is entitled to the excuse, “We didn’t know.” Now we in Texas are facing the same challenge and the same inevadable personal responsibility. If Duke runs for the Republican nomination for president in Texas on March 10th, as he now seems most likely to do, we cannot let what he claims to be advo-‘ eating pass as if he is not what he is. Neither can citizens in positions of some leadership let his coded practice of racism pass without identifying and condemning that as what it is. How will Texas Republicans live up to this severe and ethically grievous test? We don’t know yet. We’ll have to mount a Duke Watch, to see. I hope our readers will help us to main OBSERVATIONS The Publisher’s Report 2 DECEMBER 13, 1991