EDITOR’S PAGE

WHEN HAVE WE ever had a summer in Dallas like the one that’s now dropping the last of its petals, soon to join the faded roses of other years? It isn’t just the Republican Convention that makes 1984 memorable- it’s those two horsemen of the apocalypse, Michael Jackson and the Grand Prix, that will mark this summer as the year the Dallas mystique took a turn toward the bizarre.

It had to happen. Ronald Reagan couldn’t contain us forever. Couldn’t contain us, in fact, for the whole of this summer. Alien energies had to burst forth, and when they did-in the extreme intensities of noise and heat at Fair Park’s Grand Prix-they showed us a generation yearning for the release of Armageddon, those frightening days that films such as Poltergeist and Ghostbusters tell us will pit good against evil with the most fantastic special effects of all time.

The same phenomenon was evident at Texas Stadium the nights that Michael Jackson and his brothers, surrounded by a storm of lights, lasers, smoke and thunder, brought to another generation the primeval exaltation of the life force. What else could he have been selling? Even when his hips swiveled, we knew it wasn’t sex. The voice was too high, the single white glove and bunched socks too eccentric, the footwork too reminiscent of the innocence of Fred Astaire (with none of the insinuations of Gene Kelly) for that.

The tip-off came in the very beginning, when those huge anthropomorphic globs waddled onto the stage to signal that something very important was about to happen. Indeed it was. Only moments later, Michael himself pulled Excalibur from the stone of time and helped us believe for a while in our eventual triumph over politicians, promoters and other apostles of folly.

It was devastatingly effective. It was also brilliant hype that used outrageous demands to get attention. While we thought they were turning us off, in truth, they were drawing us in. Who could have refused a chance to be indulged in utter forgetfulness? That’s what the Jacksons offered.

No wonder Dallas responded as it did. We have a lot of internal tensions to deal with at the moment. It’s as if Dallas is two cities, with half our people in Bible study groups and the other half courting indictment-and some doing both. No doubt each culture is in desperate reaction to the other.

Dallas is a city where public goodness can be very important. A financial journalist who was considering a move to Dallas from New York was concerned that he would have to become more of a churchgoer than had been his habit if he wanted to get along with the business community that would be his primary source of information. Although I told him that wouldn’t be necessary, he had heard correctly about the significance of prayer to local business people. I added, however, that if he or his wife ever wanted to run for political office around here, membership in a church or synagogue would be mandatory.

But this is also a city in which another writer had great difficulty in finding an apartment for his family while he did research for six weeks in Dallas. “We don’t take kids,” he was told again and again. “This isn’t a family town,” one building manager advised. “Go to Fort Worth for that.”

Dallas not a family town? That seems impossible to those of us who grew up here and thought the landscape would never be large enough to accommodate our views. We would always be oppressed, we feared, by the old verities.

And they do persist-sometimes in exaggerated form. Take, for example, the big controversy stirred up by the Trail Dust Restaurant, which wanted to install a dance floor in its Mesquite location. Nearly 15 ministers and 100 of their church members jammed the chambers of the Mesquite City Council to protest. A seminary student warned that dancing would increase drinking and that carnage on the highways would result.

But Mesquite Mayor Brunhilde Nystrom led the City Council to endorse the dance floor. She explained her position this way: “There is a silent majority in our community that supports growth.” God and mammon. The same old struggle. Only in Dallas, both have a way of winning.

But not always. At about the same time that the Mesquite City Council was debating the dance floor issue, two sisters were arrested for meeting in a local club to plot the murder of their husbands. Score one for decadence. And remember that Mesquite is not the only part of Dallas that’s riddled with violent contrasts. While there’s no use trying to prescribe any one true way for a big city, it would help if some of our opposites could be reconciled to each other.

Not that we’ve settled on what Dallas’ statement to the world will be; there’s great confusion on this question. We stopped being Southern at the end of World War II. What did the pathos of the foiled Confederacy have to do with Dallas? Nothing. Besides, Dallas hates losers. But if we weren’t Southern, what were we? A reproduction of the East Coast? An extension of the West? No, not that. We wanted to be anything but a replica of Los Angeles. We longed, infect, for the sophistication of New York.

You can see it in our architecture. Bill Pereira, who designed the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Music Center, once lamented that he couldn’t get any work in Dallas. All the big assignments go to Easterners, he complained, and he was right. The only buildings that I know of in downtown Dallas by California architects are Southland Center and the Hyatt Regency, both designed by Welton Becket. Perhaps the answer lies with our own local architects. Given the chance, the best of them might be able to articulate for us in the language of design who we are.

Former Mayor Erik Jonsson said, “It’s the optimists who build things. The pessimists become critics.” Dallas is nothing if not a city of builders, a city of optimists. In the next stage of its maturation, Dallas will need to accommodate itself to its critics and learn the lessons of pessimism, whose purpose is the prevention of hubris. Properly contained and moderated by hope, a dash of pessimism counsels us to run scared, to take nothing for granted. I think that Michael Jackson would understand this position perfectly.