Wet Moon Over Texas

Here in downtown Houston tonight, the air is humid and everything's closed. Houston is not what you'd call a late-night city. It ain't New York, where I've been spending much time lately.

But this is a place that evokes memories -- of a long ago media tour when I was a Rolling Stone reporter, the place my older sister and her family lived for a while, the city that welcomed refugees post-Katrina from New Orleans, which is just down the road.

It's also across the Gulf of Mexico from those Florida islands that shaped so many of my fantasies and fueled so much of (as-yet) unpublished fiction -- Sanibel and Captiva.

People not from around here like to diss Houston. I don't know, it probably wouldn't make my top fifty cities in the U.S., but then again, I've known some nice guys who came from here, and it was the corporate setting for the hero in that great movie, Local Hero, about the oil industry exec who also was a star-gazer, and who in the end spared a scenic Scottish coastal village the ruin of becoming a new petrochemical port -- even after all the residents decided they wanted to be pillaged by the rich Americans.

Every city has its virtues.

I'm perfectly happy to be in Houston tonight, breathe its humid air, gaze at our common moon floating high above the mighty Gulf, and wondering about the forces that send us here and there, stirring old memories, establishing new ones.

Journalists have a saying: "Dead men can't sue." What that means, of course, is that you can write with impunity about a dead person, since (s)he has no standing in court that would allow you to be sued for slander, defamation, slander.

The problem is, who wants to slander a dead person?

Not me, for one. After all, I am the superstitious type. The dead may well have other ways of getting back at a mere journalist with a nasty-spirited pen. Better to let the dead rest in peace and aim your arrows at those living whose actions hurt others in unconscionable ways.

Journalism, to me and many, is all about social justice, righting wrongs, making power accountable, giving voice to the voiceless. These are lofty goals, but we are imperfect vehicles for pursuing them.

Because all we are is people, as likely to err as any other person. The arrogance of some journalists puzzles me.

But it exists, and maybe that's one of the reasons why their chosen outlets stand threatened with bankruptcy tonight.
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