Stack widow

[LDE]

Mrs. Stack was the beneficiary of a benefit concert last night. She gave a reasonably classy statement to the press, but it also contained a fair amount of self pity. We're supposed to feel bad that her daughter's birth certificate perished in the fire. The local media have spun this as "Austin's music community came together to support the widow." But in fact it was a group of largely classical players in North Austin. I'm a card-carrying member of the Austin music community, as in singer-songwriters and rock musicians centered on South Austin, and the clique that usually turns out for benefit events had nothing to do with this one.

She wants sympathy because she "lost her home." Didn't Stack pay for this himself, and hadn't she only lived there a few months? While I do feel sorry for her, my sympathy is tempered by the knowledge that, if she loved him so much, she's probably a fellow traveler of his right-wing terrorist sympathies. The "Austin music community" is thoroughly sick of the Baptist right-wing contingent in the affluent suburban area north of Anderson Lane, which backs efforts to use zoning, tax policy, ever-tighter noise ordinances, anti-smoking campaigns, and even lack of litter collection to harass the music district while law enforcement blithely ignores the city's five, count 'em, five red-light districts. It sounds nice, I suppose, to clueless t.v. consumers to spin the event as "Austin's music community came together to support Stack's grieving widow" but, believe me, it's not a cause any of us wish to be associated with in the press.

[Gregg]

We're supposed to feel bad that her daughter's birth certificate perished in the fire.

So running for president is out.....

[The Observer]

The "Austin music community" is thoroughly sick of the Baptist right-wing contingent in the affluent suburban area north of Anderson Lane, which backs efforts to use zoning, tax policy, ever-tighter noise ordinances, anti-smoking campaigns, and even lack of litter collection to harass the music district while law enforcement blithely ignores the city's five, count 'em, five red-light districts.

What does that have to do with Mrs. Stack?

While I do feel sorry for her, my sympathy is tempered by the knowledge that, if she loved him so much, she's probably a fellow traveler of his right-wing terrorist sympathies.

And again, maybe not. From what we have heard from other family members and friends, Stack didn't voice his political opinions and didn't communicate about his battles with the government. It is quite possible that Mrs. Stack knew little or nothing about what Stack really thought. More than likely she was having to deal with his anger and hostility towards her on a daily basis.

[LDE]

I don't know about Mrs. Stack's views. Their neighborhood was a highly affluent area whose politics is hard right, and many of the musicians for the benefit came from area churches. It's as if, in Southern California, people from a community theater in Newport Beach got together with actors from a Passion Play at the Crystal Cathedral and the local news reported it as "Hollywood's actors came together for a benefit." Not that the local news here was spinning. They're simply not competent to report anything but house fires, car crashes, street crime, and the weather.

[Demosthenes]

The local media have spun this as "Austin's music community came together to support the widow." But in fact it was a group of largely classical players in North Austin. I'm a card-carrying member of the Austin music community, as in singer-songwriters and rock musicians centered on South Austin, and the clique that usually turns out for benefit events had nothing to do with this one.

Considering that Mrs. Stack is a classical musician, a professional pianist, and a piano teacher, I think it's nice that the classical music community is helping her out. Heck, even the choir from Vernon Hunter's church participated in the fundraiser.

Perhaps there's more to the Austin music community than rock music and your particular clique?

[Judge Roy Bean]

I don't know about Mrs. Stack's views. Their neighborhood was a highly affluent area whose politics is hard right, ...

"Highly affluent?" For Austin, not hardly.

[iplawyer]

"Highly affluent?" For Austin, not hardly.

The judge is right on here. I'd call that area very middle class. The most affluent people in Austin live in either Tarrytown or close-in Westlake.

[Demosthenes]

According to Trulia, Stack's neighborhood is in the next to the lowest category for Austin home values (the middle green color on the map key.)

http://www.trulia.com/home_prices/Texas ... -heat_map/

[LDE]

Okay, I'll admit I misjudged the nature of the benefit. I assumed Mrs. Stack's church was a fundamentalist megachurch based on where the house was. In fact, it's a mainline Methodist church in the heart of hippie-faggot-socialist-race-traitor South Austin, and co-parishioners of the dead IRS employee cooperated in the benefit. It's really nice to see professed Christians behaving like Christians for a change. Rather than stirring up Tea Party hysteria based on Stack's supposed heroism, perhaps this incident will in a tiny way help to diminish the religious-political hatred that plagues central Texas. (In another heartening development, two creationist crazies who pushed for writing young-earth principles into the state's science textbooks along with other revisionism such as saying nice things about Joe McCarthy were defeated in the GOP primary. Not only is it remarkable that they lost; it's unusual for such positions to face a primary challenge at all.)

BTW, I'm also well acquainted with the Austin classical-music community, which overlaps more than you'd think with the singer-songwriter establishment. I've been the personal assistant for a composer for eight years; I'm the webmaster for an organization whose director just landed a job in New York as one of several conductors-in-residence at Carnegie Hall and Avery Fisher Hall; and I've sold several articles reviewing local classical events. But I was unfamiliar with the Bachus Conservatory, which Mrs. Stack is affiliated with in some way. I'm glad to know about them, because we're trying to recruit singers for an upcoming performance and they might be a resource.

I stand by my characterization of Scofield Farms as one of Austin's affluent neighborhoods. No, it's not up there with Tarrytown (which is newly gentrified; many long-term residents are far from wealthy) but I'm not considering West Lake Hills (often misidentified as Westlake, which is actually a Fort Worth suburb) or the western Travis County locations that show up in red on that map as part of Austin. I'm talking about neighborhoods inside the city limits, just as you wouldn't call Arlington, VA an affluent neighborhood of Washington. The coworker in the next office, who owns a modest house not so far away in Wells Branch, reacted to the incident thus: "He can afford a house in Scofield Farms and he's complaining!" I imagine most regulars at Quatloos make at least five times what I do (about $62K, which I think is a little above the national median) and the idea that a quarter-million-dollar house could be anything more than a hovel probably sounds ludicrous if you're based in the Northeast or California, but in a city where the biggest employers are the government and the state university that's a lot of house. (Of course, hundreds of thousands of Austinites live in apartments—which means paper-thin walls, gang members for neighbors, and no maintenance—and there are folks like me who rent trailers well outside of town just so we can have some spending money rather than seeing it all go to the landlord.)

That real-estate map contains some distortions, apparently because it rates neighborhoods by average listing value. The big red blob to the east of Austin is the airport. I can't imagine what sort of listings they have, unless the hotel at the airport contains some luxury condos. Other than the airport itself, it's an ultra-seedy area of strip joints and crummy apartments, and even the apartments (I think) are outside the boundaries of the red area. Maybe they count commercial sites or whole apartment buildings as listings in the $millions? Another big red area includes Camp Mabry, the National Guard base, though properties adjacent to it would be among the city's nicer areas. I'm also surprised to see Windsor Park marked red. I lived close enough to Windsor Park to walk through it on the way to the local supermarket (I was temporarily without a vehicle, which is a hellish situation in Austin) and it was then a Latino area of modest houses that abutted three of the most dangerous gang-prostitution-crack ghettos in town. Perhaps the redevelopment of the former airport next door has raised property values, but the reluctance of white Anglos to buy any property east of IH-35 (the segregation line from the Jim Crow days) persists.

[LDE]

One interesting thing about the Stack incident is that the history of how independent-contractor programmers got screwed under the tax code shows clearly how the government in Washington is just a puppet of big business. The tax provision that originally embittered Stack by wrecking his chances of making a living was enacted because IBM demanded a tax break and independent programmers were made to cough up the difference so that IBM's handout would be tax-neutral.

Yet Stack and his Tea Party allies vent their ire on the IRS. Big biz has successfully convinced them to talk to the hand (the federal government) and revere the "invisible hand" which really has us all by the throat. The sham democracy in Washington makes a good target for populist rage while the heartless greedheads who dictate the narrow terms of acceptable debate go about their treasonable sellout of the Republic unscathed.

[iplawyer]

Tarrytown and the surrounding area is not "newly gentrified" as you put it. That part of Austin has always been the most affluent part of Austin - and an area where the newly rich move in, tear down, and build mansions. Scofield Farms is a suburb neighborhood of Austin inhabited by middle class folks that teach, work at the state, IBM, etc. It is not affluent. While there are some affluent areas in NW Austin like the Great Hills area - that is certainly not considered one of them. And I highly doubt there are many quarter of a million dollar homes there anymore. Finally, I don't know why you'd leave out the West Lake Hills area. While its own incorporated city, it is completely surrounded by close-in Austin.

Years ago when I first moved to Austin I lived in south Austin - Buda to be exact. There is an "attitude" in south Austin. Its hard to describe - but they resent the Austin folks north of the river. I really don't know why. But it is certainly evident in LDE's comments here. Those folks that live in West Lake Hills or Tarrytown feel no differently about the folks living in Scofield Farms (middle class NW Austin) or Circle C (middle class SW Austin).

[iplawyer]

One interesting thing about the Stack incident is that the history of how independent-contractor programmers got screwed under the tax code shows clearly how the government in Washington is just a puppet of big business. The tax provision that originally embittered Stack by wrecking his chances of making a living was enacted because IBM demanded a tax break and independent programmers were made to cough up the difference so that IBM's handout would be tax-neutral.

And I think this scenario is wrong. Wasn't the legislation the result of a Microsoft consultant complaining that she should really be paid as an employee?

[LDE]

The issue here was neither cheating people out of benefits nor cheating the government out of taxes. The issue instead was one group seeking an unlevel playing field. No hearings were held. Section 1706 was a last-minute addition to the 1986 act. The Joint Committee on Taxation staff projected the section as producing $60 million over five years because of assumed reduction in tax cheating by programmers who were independent contractors. And $60 million of tax savings was what IBM wanted but could not get except for an offsetting increase in someone else’s taxes.

Moynihan was eager to cater to IBM, a powerful economic force in his state, unlike the independent contractor programmers onto whom the tax burden was shifted.

The reaction from major companies was swift and sure. Dozens of them — from IBM to Nissan, from Clorox to Wachovia Bank, from AT&T to TRW — simply decided that any temporary programming work would be done only through those job shops that used the employment model. For people like Midge Johnson, who had set up an independent contractor job shop in Lanham, Md., the bill destroyed her business.

“Why does Congress say that I can’t go out and pursue the American dream and give my kids and grandkids things I couldn’t have?” she asked me in 1998. (See How a Tax Law Helps Insure a Scarcity of Programmers, New York Times, April 27, 1988.)

Those programmers who wanted to hire out on contract were devastated. Jim Carlin, a partner at the accounting firm Holthouse Carlin & Van Trigt LLP, the largest in Southern California, said the IRS was determined when it audited one job shop with 50 employees a few years after section 1706 was enacted and signed by President Reagan. The audit took more than eight months to resolve and was a costly drain on the client, although Carlin prevailed. Had the firm lost the audit, it might have been forced to go out of business, he said.

http://www.blognewsweb.com/2010/03/04/d ... on-hunter/

Your assertion that Tarrytown has "always" been the most affluent part of town is contradicted in the very same sentence by the reference to teardowns. That there are small houses available to be torn down and replaced with big ones shows that the area wasn't always uniformly wealthy. I once (ca. 1998) had a chance to rent a one-bedroom apartment in the middle of Tarrytown for $500/month. (I didn't take it.) Around the same time, I knew a guy whose family sold a Tarrytown cottage near the lake for $90K; it became a teardown. And just 3 years ago I was doing Web development for a Native American sculptor who rented a 2-bedroom near 12th and Exposition. She survived on grants and occasional art sales and was far from wealthy. My understanding is that it was once a black neighborhood till Jim Crow imposed segregation and moved them all east of IH-35.

Looking at Demo's map, I see houses in Scofield Farms are listing around $200K on the average, so I was a little over when I said "quarter million." Somewhere I read that Stack's house was valued at $233K so that's what I went by. "Middle class" looks different to an "IP lawyer" than it does to someone like me who works for wages, augmented by a small music and media business. Now, in my home state of Massachusetts, Scofield Farms would be a lower-middle-class area, like Medford. But, again, it's above average for Austin. I disagree that state workers, who average about $50K/year, can comfortably afford a $200K house. Same with teachers. My point is that the ethos of areas like Scofield Farms is much like Stack's: anti-government, pro-Ayn Rand, full of contempt for hippies, artists, lefties, minorities, labor, and any religion other than extreme fundamentalist Christianity, as exemplified by the area's many megachurches.

Why does South Austin resent North Austin? (It's not everything north of the river, which includes Central Austin, i.e. between the river and Anderson Lane. It's North Austin proper on up into the Williamson County Reich.) South Austin was mostly built before 1985. The people who live there have been in Austin a long time. When I arrived in Texas in 1989, Austin was shockingly poor by the standards of this New Englander. The oil shock had devastated Texas, and Austin had never had much economic value; it was the seat of government and the state university. High-tech with its legions of Ayn Rand believers hadn't taken over yet. Austin was just about the only place in the state (other than Houston's mostly gay Montrose area) where it was okay to be an artist or an atheist, where interracial couples and gays could go about their business without being beaten up by cowboy street thugs, where rock and blues music (rather than country) was tolerated, where Stevie Ray could learn his licks and Linklater could film Slacker. The population was around 375,000. Now it's about a million, and most of the newcomers have settled in North Austin. Rather than continuing the city's exemplary land-use patterns, the rapacious developers who took over city government turned the northern outskirts of the city into a mini-Houston: giant freeways, big box retail, megachurches, no civic anything. And for the new residents, it isn't enough that they get to live in their own right-wing, lily-white, homophobic, Bible-based, SUV-ridden, art-free, gun-friendly paradise. They want what remains of the earlier Austin, the dirty hippie tattooed faggot multicultural zone, eradicated.

Note that this isn't about politics per se. The old-fashioned redneck Texan may use the N word but he'll be seen the same night drinking and playing cards with those same black folks he casually slurs in conversation. There used to be a spirit of live and let live. Now it's drive the enemies of God out of town. Personally, I took the hint and moved back out to the country. I used to really like Austin but I despise what it has become, and so do lots of people who see themselves as making a last stand in South Austin against the Houstonization of a once enjoyable and tolerant city. (About 3 years ago, a city-sponsored study found that 60,000 musicians had left town over the prior few years.) Stevie Ray wouldn't even be able to rent an apartment in Austin nowadays because he'd fail the credit check. I've got less than seven years before I can retire on a full pension and I'm counting the days. Once I have that guaranteed income I intend to figure out what the opposite of Texas is, and move there.

[iplawyer]

LDE,
Whew - I guess I fall into the exempt area - as I live South of Anderson Lane. While my handle is now "iplawyer" - I still live in the same house I lived in before I went to law school.

And while Austin may have changed over the years - it is still a cool city to live in. Gook luck in your search for an area that is like Austin used to be. Let us all know what you find.

Montreal, Vancouver, and Toronto are nice tidy cities - and all a hell of lot more expensive than Austin. So is Ventura and Santa Barbara. You'll also find the taxes in any of those areas to be oppressive relative to Texas.

I think that South Austin has just as developed areas as Scofield Farms such as Shady Hollow and Circle C. That is why I don't understand the attitude. And I still contend that all of those are middle class areas.

[LDE]

After a house concert two weeks ago I helped to move a set of chairs out to far SW Austin, an area near Escarpment, off Back Bay, which I didn't even know existed. Based on the folks I met in that neighborhood I suspect it's where people who used to live in South Austin proper relocate when they've come into some wealth. It's actually a lot nicer than most of North Austin but probably a lot more culturally hospitable.

Joe Stack was no aberration. He was just self-destructive enough to put his hatred into action. Texas is the fault line between moderate-liberal America and right-wing extremism. The hatreds are so much more intense here than in, say, Mississippi because there are large enough numbers of liberals, artists, gays, etc. for the fundies to feel threatened.

Let me tell you about an incident from around 2002. I was then living in a rural compound where two of my housemates were both on disability, one hurt badly enough from construction work that he could barely walk. I was trying to buy a Mac-compatible printer and they had just bought a Windows-compatible scanner at the Best Buy near MoPac and Great Hills Trail. Even though I worked about two miles from there, as a long-haired male who (then) couldn't afford to dress well, I tried to stay away from that part of town (about 1.5 miles from the Stack home, which is why I bring it up) because I knew I wouldn't be welcome. However, my housemates had first been sold a printer that wouldn't work with their computer; then they went back and were sold a different one, which also didn't work, but were told it would function if they bought an adapter. They had already made two round trips, over 120 miles, to this Best Buy and didn't want to do it again so they convinced me to go there and purchase the adapter while I shopped for a printer.

At the Best Buy some smirking 20-something twerp told me that, even though they had arranged with my housemates over the phone as to which part to get, now they couldn't help them unless they brought in their computer for another 60+ miles of driving. (Remember, one of these guys was bedridden with a severe back injury.) When I asked for help with a Mac issue the arrogant little jerk refused to serve me and told me to go read the box. He implied that they didn't have much use for Mac owners.

I usually keep the lid on my natural New England sarcasm and play nicey-nicey as the locals demand but in this case I admit I lost my temper and yelled at the clerk, who was being insufferably rude, but with the usual Southern halfwitted smile. I only spoke for about 20 seconds, but loud enough for the rest of the customers to hear. I neither used profanity nor made any threats, but I said something to the effect that I had never seen such terrible customer service, that somebody so ignorant of computers had a lot of nerve condescending to a customer twice his age, and that if they didn't change their attitude they could expect to go out of business quickly. Then I left.

I grabbed a quick bite and went to the nearby Circuit City to try my luck there. On my way in I was met by an Austin police officer. Best Buy had called the cops on me and told them I had "made a terroristic threat." I was interrogated for 20 minutes till I convinced the cop there was nothing to the complaint. I called the store back and complained to the manager, but of course the staff all denied that the incident had ever taken place.

I haven't set foot in a Best Buy since, and I've avoided that part of town as much as possible.

Austin seems reasonably livable if you can afford to own. I can't, and apartment life is the absolute pits.

When I grew up in the Boston area, economically the times were hard. Then around 1980 it became trendy and rich yuppies moved in and bought up everything so that ordinary working people couldn't survive there anymore. In 1989 I was in a doctoral program, working 25 hours a week on top of school, and with a young wife who had little education and stayed home with our young son. Over about 18 months our rent tripled, then the landlord kicked us out of our place in Medford to give it to his son, and I literally couldn't find any place to live on what I could make. So we packed up and followed my parents back to Texas, my mom's original home state.

In 1989 so many people were leaving Texas that U-Haul was paying drivers to bring empty trucks back to the state. When we arrived, times were brutally hard. It was normal to live without a telephone and not unusual to lack indoor plumbing. I knew people who rented storage units to live in since they had electrical outlets. But there was a feeling of commonality, that we were all in this together. Despite the massive out-migration, thousands had arrived from Northern climes such as Wisconsin and Illinois and the locals had no problem with the Yankees moving in.

Now the city's prosperous and they don't need us around anymore, so we have the choice of conforming to their post-Confederate worldview or going back where we came from. Those same housemates I mentioned are planning to leave for Santa Fe in the near future. Either that town or Portland, OR, seems to be the next destination for those of us who are no longer tolerated in Texas. I'm thinking more like Prague or Berlin, though.

Some in the press have wondered about the supposed tone deafness of big finance, big pharma, and the likes of Anthem. Don't they know their unbridled greed will lead to a backlash? I think the very rich realize the ship is going down and they're stuffing their pockets for the last few years they'll get to do so before departing for London or Shanghai. The mountain of debt necessary to keep the recession from a full-blown depression can't be sustained, commercial real estate is about to collapse, China won't buy our bonds forever. The culture is brain dead, celebutainment run amok; educational standards are falling, the armed forces can't even stand up to cave-dwelling jihadists with homemade weapons, and the government is broken. The U.S.A. is probably going Argentina, or more accurately Venezuela. Within a decade or so when working people realize things won't ever get back to where they were, there will be a revolt that installs a socialist quasi-dictatorship. However necessary that corrective might be, it won't be much fun and I'd rather be in some civilized part of the world than a dried up, no-longer-dynamic, husk of a former empire.

[iplawyer]

Wow - just wow. Every state in the union has extremists like Joe Stack - it is not limited to NW Austin. Every country does as well. And every Best Buy in every state has employees like you encountered. My husband has long hair and we have managed to do pretty well anywhere in Austin despite that and his super-ultra liberal beliefs.

I pretty much thought the South-North Austin attitude had to do with red necks in South Austin not liking the professionals that live in North Austin. Your attitude is something way outside of that paradigm. I sounds like you are more upset about your situation in life than the changes in Austin. I could not possibly imagine spending 7 miserable years to get a retirement - possibly just to be just as miserable and unhappy. Why not try for some kind of change now that will make your life better?

I have to say that Santa Fe and Portland are both a lot more expensive than Austin is. I can't imagine if your friends are having a hard time here that they will do well in either of those places. But good luck to them. We rejected Santa Fe as a retirement locations as being too elitist - and it is way more so than Austin - there is no comparison. There are areas around Santa Fe that might be less expensive - but we did not find any. Maybe your friends could try Espanola.

I was here in 1989, and the situation was not as dire as you make it sound. And Austin has not changed in character that much since then. It has grown and is more expensive. A lot of places have grown and become more expensive in the last 20 years.

I hope you are happy outside of the US in Prague or Berlin. I'm sure that you will not encounter any extremist or any young 'uns being uppity in either place! I'm not so sure that either of those places will be better if your prediction comes true. But really - good luck. I hope that you can find happiness in your life at some point.

[LDE]

It sounds like you are more upset about your situation in life than the changes in Austin. I could not possibly imagine spending 7 miserable years to get a retirement - possibly just to be just as miserable and unhappy. Why not try for some kind of change now that will make your life better?

I'm happy with my life in most respects. I have a smart, talented, healthy son who's in a great long-term relationship. I'm in excellent health and almost totally debt free and I eat a nice dinner every night. Because I live deep in the country I am totally left alone to make art and music. I take from Austin what it has to offer in terms of support from my fellow musicians. All of us stay in our various hippie ghettos and shut out the negative trends that have caused the city to deteriorate culturally even as it has improved economically.

Every recession I've lived through prior to this one was devastating. This time I have a recession-proof job and few worries. Meanwhile I'm recording myself and other people as I try to build up my new record label. If something I've written or produced should hit I'll quit my day job as soon as I see that six-figure check, but all of the fields in which I have proven top-level talent—music, academia, journalism—have become essentially non-paying careers, so I'll stick with my secure post, thank you.

I have to say that Santa Fe and Portland are both a lot more expensive than Austin is. I can't imagine if your friends are having a hard time here that they will do well in either of those places.

They found they could sell their six-acre spread 25 miles from Austin and buy an equivalent property 7 miles from Santa Fe for half the price.

We rejected Santa Fe as a retirement locations as being too elitist.

Hey, I'm from the Boston area. Snobbery doesn't bother me. Snobbery on the part of cowboys who think their city is more beautiful than Paris and more cultured than New York because they've never been past Oklahoma bothers me. You don't hear the same arrogance from people in Dallas, Houston, or San Antonio, but there's little that distinguishes those cities from Austin nowadays. (Except for the music scene, which amounts to lots of talented players making no money because there isn't any audience. And a city government that considers them a bigger threat than prostitutes.)

[LDE]

Accompanying these bleak assessments ... is a majority belief that America is
now in decline (58% compared to 32% who think the U.S. is on the rise) and a narrow
majority who now believes, after the end of the so-called “American Century” and
victory in the Cold War, that the world is looking elsewhere in terms of future success or direction.

http://www.xavier.edu/politics/american-dream-study.cfm

[Mr. Mephistopheles]

Americans have thought America has been in decline since a group of natives first saw weird ships come over the horizon.

Not to nitpick, but for the Native Americans that did signal the end of life as they knew it.

The past has come and gone and as my dad noted, "the good old days were old and not all that good." Too many fools dwell in the past and wish for some magical time that never really existed.

Also, would you punk kids stay the hell off my lawn!!


As for living costs, try SoCal, yet because it is my home it is where I choose to live and probably retire. I do not give two hoots in Hell what anyone else thinks of SoCal, I know it is right for me.

As for Austin, or SoCal, or Boston, or wherever - there will always be good parts and bad parts, and real whitebread parts, and multi-cultural spots, slum areas, and snob areas. You just have to live in the area that makes you happy. (bolding added)

Yes, few of us today know the real hardships experienced by our not too distant ancestors. I too live where I do because this is where I want to live. Jobs are perpetually scarce, cultural amenities are greatly lacking, it's a great distance to reach those cultural amenities (for example it's >200 miles for palatable sushi or decent performing arts), but it's home.

On the other hand, it is a very inexpensive place to live, it's very peaceful, we have no neighbors, we live in the middle of nature, it's "home", and if any punk kids are on my lawn they are a full 1/4 mile past the big yellow No Trespassing sign.