If you haven’t already, take a minute to read what Jim Schutze has written on Unfair Park. I tried to respond to it in that forum. I couldn’t. Their login process for comments stymied me. I tried to log in with my Facebook account and instead was logged in with my Village Voice account, which has a goofy username attached to it. When I tried to change my username, it told me that “Tim Rogers” was already taken. By then, the comment I’d written had disappeared into the ether. I hope our registration process isn’t similarly frustrating people. If it is, please send word to [email protected]. I’d like to know.
Back on task: if I understand Schutze, he’s saying that D Magazine and the Morning News are working together to support the Nasher. A sample:
The Nasher is a holy temple of the Art Mob, by which I mean the rich patrons whose devotion to high culture in Dallas is the ultimate aspirational consumerism. They parade around and around the Nasher wailing like a vast chorus of keening castrati, with the entire editorial staffs of D and the News clumping along behind like hired mourner hags.
Some nice imagery in there, I must admit. But then Schutze goes on to point out that DMN business columnist Mitch Schnurman recently broke step with his paper and wrote that the Nasher needs to get practical about finding a solution. Which led to:
Now, anybody with half an I.Q. worth of story sense would have spotted Schnurman’s piece as highly anomalous and therefore worthy of note, given the degree to which it cuts against orthodoxy at the News. I would have the thought the Rogerses [Ed: he dragged my wife into it, too, because one time, long ago, her firm did some piece work for the Nasher.] might have noticed it. But nary a word did appear about it on Frontburner, not a jot nor a tittle. That’s what I mean by synchronicity. It’s scary the degree to which the Dallas establishment and their media horns stick together on something like this.
I don’t understand. By not commenting on Schnurman’s story, I’ve shown my allegiance to the Nasher and my alignment with the Morning News? If Schutze’s theory is right, wouldn’t I attack Schnurman? I’ve read Schutze’s post twice. Really, I can’t follow his logic. The reason I haven’t written anything about Schnurman’s column is that we’re on deadline for our January issue, and I must attend to the thing that pays my mortgage. Until further notice, that’s print, not pixels.
Finally, Schutze wraps up his post by thusly describing the groundswell of support for the Nasher:
[R]ight now I look at D; I look at the News; I see all these call to action letters and this flocking behavior. Flocking, flocking, flocking, ever closer, more and more of them. I feel like Tippi Hedren in The Birds. Please, make it stop, Hitch.
What he calls flocking I’d call the coalescing of consensus. The role of dissenter is an important one. I’m glad Jim Schutze is playing it. I just wish he’d quit flubbing his lines.
