I wonder what would have happened if the event had been publicized well. Hardly any of the small circle of politically active liberals in the town I live in (only 50 miles from Austin) had heard Dowd was coming. I, however, know a UT journalism alum who told me. She also told me to go early because the LBJ Auditorium would fill up fast.
Two things about the lecture pushed me to get over the last barrier to blogging (should I spend my time writing for a non-peer-reviewed medium?). First, I felt that I am no longer the same as the more urban Maureen Dowd attenders. I am no longer accustomed to fraternizing with ordinary people who care passionately about analysis of current events. Most of the people I deal with every day don’t know who Tom DeLay or Bob Woodward are. People in my town and students on my campus rarely pose questions of speakers, let alone asking eloquently phrased questions that challenge a featured dignitary. Even when Robert Kennedy spoke for a group of our town’s business people, not a particularly environmentalist group, people applauded politely before the mayor tried to smooth things over by praising the great contribution of the steel company and the power plant to our local economy. For some reason, he left out the chicken processing plant that was involved in a dispute with the county over the horrible smell it emits when “rendering” unusable parts. This audience, however, asked Dowd hard questions about journalists and journalism.
This brings me to the second thing that pushed me to sit down and register with blogger.com: although Molly Ivins and other audience members challenged Dowd to comment on the role uncritical journalists have played in taking the country into some of our present debacles, everyone shared fundamental assumptions and values that I can no longer take for granted. Believe me, I wish that I could explain journalists’ continuing value as Dowd did Wednesday: as long as some people have power, journalists will be necessary to keep an eye on them so that they don’t give in to the temptation to abuse it.
I wanted to step up to the microphone and ask her if she could get closer to the bottom of the question she had been asked to speak about, “Are journalists necessary?” I didn’t ask because I was enjoying listening to the exchange of ideas that only those who share Dowd’s values can have. I was hoping that these people’s ideas could inspire me to new strategies for communicating with the majority of the people whom I live among.
How does one explain the value of a journalist to someone who doesn’t believe that the actions of the powerful affect her in any way? Of what value are journalists to those who would just as soon not be bothered by arcane questions of political philosophy, like defining the citizen’s role in representative democracy? What should we say to those who think journalists would have served the nation better by using their resources to help a few people flee the floods in Louisiana and Mississippi than they did by exposing inefficiency and neglect on the part of government officials to a global audience? What do we say to those who find any criticism of elected leaders unpatriotic?
My feelings of isolation in a crowd of people who are like me and share my values and frustration at the questions Dowd left unanswered (because people like us don’t have to be convinced of the value of the system the founders of the American republic put in place to safeguard democracy) led me to the conclusion that we need to include experiences of those who share these values but do not live in the rarified world intellectuals and political activists (liberal or conservative) prefer to inhabit.
I have grown tired of justifying my values to those who don’t share them. I, too, would prefer to discuss the content of current events rather than whether it’s worth expending the energy to learn about policy initiatives or candidates’ platforms. I would rather talk to the people who attend Maureen Dowd lectures, but they are not here. And they don’t have any idea how to engage the people who are. I wonder how political operatives from Washington can help us reinvigorate progressive ideas in our kind of towns when the only town they ever see is populated by the sort of people who read the newspaper and understand why Bill Maher is funny.
After almost four years in this small town in Texas, I still can’t believe I live somewhere with a phone book this small and nowhere to buy the Sunday New York Times. I’m still surprised that people like this place as enthusiastically as they do when my friends around the country wonder how I can stand to live here. I have concluded that we, the people who attend Maureen Dowd lectures, need to stop trying to deny that most of the country isn’t like my town. We need to figure out how to engage in discussion that will bridge the gap between average, small-town folks and those of us who value ideas and thoughtful political participation. I hope that my stories and analysis of my experience living somewhere in the vast U.S. territory that is not a university town or a political center will provoke thought among those who still live where I used to. Maybe all of us will be changed a little bit, for the better, by finding new terms for the conversation.
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