You Call This Democracy?

As I mentioned at the beginning of the week, this weeks challenge from the Unpaid Punditry Corps was -

Do you think that your local community (your town, city, county) is appropriately informed about politics and government, or is not?

I've been thinking about this one all week and getting opinions from local friends and from friends who moved to San Antonio from out of state. The brief answer is "no, they are not well informed" and that lack leads to a lack in democratic debate - but that short version begs for some explanations.

Here goes.

It's polling day today in the local city and Mayoral races. Pair the news that early balloting is up 50% on the 2001 elections with the depressing fact that the turnout is expected to only be about 16% and you get the picture.

In the main, I would say local media coverage has been singularly uninformative about the various platforms and issues, especially the TV station news. Other than the fact that one mayoral candidate likes to change places with his twin brother at official functions and another is upset about potholes in the roads, the TV told San Antonians nothing about where each candidate stands on the issues.

The local newspaper, the Express-News is better but not up to the standards I have come to expect while living in the UK. The city of Glasgow has almost exactly the population of San Antonio yet the Glasgow Herald has a staff of reporters who go all over the nation and the world and editorial opinionators regarded as leaders of their field. Edinburgh has a third of the poulation base, but it's Scotsman newspaper is internationally remowned. In the main, the Express-News relies on AP, Reuters and other agencies to write their main stories (even when that story is the FBI arresting councilmen for corruption), syndicated columnists for it's opinion pieces and local reporters end up covering flower shows, car accidents and the like. Giving the paper it's due, it did manage to produce an informative special on Texas state legislation recently, but there isn't enough day-to-day follow up for non-specialists to actually become familiar with the various issues.

The best coverage by far has come from local bloggers, like the San Antonio Election 2005 blog, The Jeffersonian and Band B blog - but as always the number of people reading blogs is limited.

Why haven't I blogged the local elections? I don't get a vote - I am a danged furryner. When it comes to US national politics, it affects the whole world so even though I don't get a vote I think I get a say. That's why.

Then again, the TV News and the Express-News paper don't do all that better on national or world items. None of the investigative stuff, or relating it to local issues I would expect in the UK. Maybe that's their fault - or maybe it's because they know their market and their market don't want to know whats going on unless it involves how many dogs are killed by the city pound every year, Paula Abdul or Michael Jackson.

Truthfully, the cult of glorious ignorance here in Southwest Texas stuns me. It stuns locals who managed to get a mind well enough prepared with facts to have a basis to work with too. The stereotypical figures of Homer and Bart, or of Hank Hill and his beer-buddies, are not seen as satyrical anti-heroes by many here but as role models to aspire to. It is particularly bad amongst men, many of whom regard education as somehow unmanly. You can't be a man unless you remain ignorant of all the world's knowledge that doesn't involve cars, football, basketball and the proper use of a barbeque. It's the eventual end result of the Republican monopoly. They have been telling everyone that the "danged liberal intellectuals" will steal their manhood for so long now that the myth has become an extreme in the other direction.

Then there's the schools, also known as day-care. The standards of education in Texas are poor by the standards of Georgia. Just ask my teen daughter who has experienced both in the last 12 months. The teachers mostly agree that standards have been dumbed down to the max, but daen't stick their heads up to say so. Texas is not a "right to work" state.

You know, there is something wrong with standards when my daughters school can proudly tout the fact that 930 out of 2,700 pupils got straight "A" grades in every assignment and test for English in the last 12 months. Have school supervisors never heard of the Bell curve? If over a third never failed to get less than 90%, then it's the grading that is wrong, not the students who are doing well. Meanwhile, senior students are scrawling swastikas on canvasses, work by their fellow students, that the school exhibited and not one word in the local media - the school is keeping it quiet for fear of bad publicity.

Yes, there is something rotten in the state of Texas, and it isn't just De Lay, although he may be it's pinnacle of acheivement to date. Texas is the extreme of the US in this regard, but Americans abroad invariably notice the differences in other countries. Here's a snippet from a piece in the UK's Guardian newspaper by veteran American reporter Simon Schama. I urge everyone to read the whole thing, it's delightfully wicked and barbed.

Then followed questions from the press; the only feature of which that might have been recognisable to American reporters would have been the well-practised habit of leaders to disarm questioners by remembering their first names. In the White House press room (a calculatedly dismal prefab in the grounds) it might have the effect of defanging the journalists with mock camaraderie; but not in Wimbledon at nine in the morning. Even in the dress code of the press conference - jackets and ties for both party leaders (who'd suited up from the calculated, open-necked, informality of the walkabouts) there was the unspoken recognition of the ritualised, gladiatorial nature of the exchange. "Right, James (or Brendan or Andrew)." "Yes, well, going on about the danger of letting the Tories in if you vote Lib-Dem, isn't that the wife-beater sneering, 'You'll stay, you've got nowhere else to go'?" To this kind of question it's safe to say, the famous Dubya lightness would not have responded well. Instead: the tell-tale dilation of nostrils; the giveaway smirk behind which plans for No Future Admission would already be being finalised. Instead, both Brown and Blair, laughed and, mirabile dictu, it was not at all the laugh of someone about to be sick.
The ability to take this kind of take-no-prisoners irreverence on the chin; indeed, to expect it, is breathtaking to visiting reporters from the US, where oppositional politics (such as it is) is mired in a tarpool of tepid glutinous reverence, where Democratic fury has been frightened into milquetoast bleating by pre-emptive Republican accusations of "divisiveness". If John Humphrys is thinking of a late career move across the pond he should forget it.

Well, yeah.