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My blue heaven: outsiders have always bashed Austin for its liberal politics, but my beloved city takes pride in being different from the rest of the state. Smarter too. And more arrogant.

Article Excerpt
Reading a newspaper account of former Austin mayor Bruce Todd's near-fatal bicycle crash reminded me why I wanted to come here in the first place. Austin is different from the rest of Texas. You may have noticed this in the November election, when 253 of the state's 254 counties approved Proposition 2, a constitutional amendment that outlawed what was already illegal: gay marriage. The lone holdout was Travis County, whose county seat is Austin. The city doesn't merely tolerate but actually treasures the offbeat, the adventurous, the fractured, and the weird. In other words, it's the sort of place where a 55-year-old former mayor would think that a neat thing to do the Sunday after Thanksgiving was take a marathon bike ride in the country. Ironically, Todd's life was saved because he wore a helmet, a cause he had championed as mayor despite the libertarian streak that runs through the city's residents.

Outsiders hate Austin, of course, and with good reason. We're smarter and more talented than they are, not to mention more arrogant. For most of the state's history, Austin has been the center of creative, cultural, intellectual, and political life. Folks love referring to us as the People's Republic of Austin, suggesting that we are the true totalitarians in this state. Bashing Austin is great sport at the Legislature as well. In 2001, perhaps in an effort to prove that small minds are capable of big blunders, Austin's beloved Barton Springs was moved into the district of San Antonio senator Jeff Wentworth. "Sometimes I feel like we're Romans surrounded by Goths beating on the gates," Larry Wright, one of dozens of talented writers who make their home in...

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