Guest Viewpoint
Evan Carton, Director
University of Texas Humanities Institute

Reading and Civic Participation

Since this is the political season of an election year, it is also a time for ritual lament about Americans'—and especially young people's—lack of civic participation. So I was pleased when my daughter, a college sophomore eligible to vote in her first presidential election, resolved recently to buck peer apathy and take an interest in politics.

She watched the first night of the Democratic Convention with my wife and me, intent on grasping the central issues, and their foundations in policy, history, and economics, beneath the speeches' spin. Expert "analysts," such as Chris Matthews and Jeff Greenfield, assisted my daughter in her efforts. Their commentary informed her that what she really should be thinking about was whether a foreign-born woman who told a reporter to "shove it" was too crude to be First Lady; whether a photograph of John Kerry in a goofy-looking protective suit during a campaign visit to the Kennedy Space Center could be used to Republican advantage, as was the 1988 image of Michael Dukakis riding in a tank; and whether a phrase in a decade-old article by the wife of Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack (who was not chosen as the vice presidential nominee, but might have been) would hurt the Democrats with minority voters.

Henry David Thoreau once wrote that he went to the woods "to live deliberately." Deliberation, though, should not be a personal retreat. In fact, the qualities that the word connotes—thoughtfulness, purposefulness, consultation, unhaste—define a meaningful public sphere; without them, civic participation is either empty reflex or war by other means. Sadly, the public sphere that our political pundits and media talking heads model on television—the place "where more Americans get their news than any other," as one of the network slogans has it—is aggressively anti-deliberative. Almost any private Walden is a more satisfying and more humane place to be.

It doesn't have to be that way, to borrow a tag line from John Edwards, and it isn't in Austin. Austin reads, and reading for pleasure—according to a widely cited recent report by the National Endowment for the Arts, based on U. S. Bureau of the Census data—is the common denominator among people of all age groups who remain actively engaged in the civic life of their community and country.

To enhance civic dialogue through public humanities programs, to help create lively and rewarding opportunities for Central Texans to live deliberately together, is the job of the University of Texas Humanities Institute, a co-sponsor of the annual Mayor's Book Club or Austin Reads campaign that begins this month. Along with Mayor Will Wynn and the Austin Public Library, we invite metro Austinites from every neighborhood and from teens on up to read this year's selected book, Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses, and then come participate in one (or all!) of the 12 free public discussions that will be held in branch libraries throughout the city between August 18 and September 29.

All the Pretty Horses, the story of a dispossessed sixteen-year-old Texan who rides into Mexico in 1949 to recover the experience of the West that he loves and that the United States has lost, will not tell you how to vote this year. But its issues—border crossing, language and cultural barriers, human relations to the environment, compassion, violence, the individual's responsibility to others, young people's visions of the past and the future—are more relevant to this or any election than most of what will be said before November by those who will. These are the sorts of issues that citizens explore face to face in a vibrant public sphere, learning far more about themselves and their neighbors in the process than they do in the latest Gallup poll. In the library discussions, too, the expert leaders—each representing a different area of specialization and a different take on the book—will listen more than they talk. And when they talk, people like Center for Mexican American Studies director Jose Limon, former regional director of the US Peace Corps Leslie Jarmon, labor historian Neil Foley, and Texas Monthly writer and past president of the Texas Institute of Letters Don Graham will have something thoughtful to say. Read the book and come talk back to them.

Evan Carton is director of the University of Texas Humanities Institute. Schedules of the free public discussions of All the Pretty Horses are posted on the Austin Public Library and the UT Humanities Institute web sites.