Month: April 2003

THE WEATHERS REPORT

Post author By Ed Weathers
Post date April 26, 2003

THE EMPTY BOX

(Let me start with my own disclaimer: The following views are mine and mine alone, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Memphis Flyer or anyone else associated with The Memphis Flyer: E.W.)

Religion is the root of much evil.

It has to be said.

Here is what I believe: There is no god, there is no messiah, there are no prophets plugged in to some divine will. There are no saints or holy men. If there is a heaven or a hell or any other kind of afterlife, we can’t know anything about it while we’re in this life, so it’s useless to speculate and foolish to believe. Faith is an empty box. To believe in Christ is to believe in a rabbit’s foot. To believe in the Buddha is to believe that pro wrestling is real. To believe in Mohammed is to believe that the groundhog can predict spring. To believe that the Ten Commandments came from some god on a mountaintop is to believe that television psychics can talk to your dead grandmother. Allah, Jehovah and the Trinity are elves and Tinkerbells. They are no more than desperate hope given a name and anthropomorphic shape by the imaginations of frightened men.

It has to be said.

Religion is superstition. It is mankind crossing its fingers. Its sole functions are 1) to comfort and console those who cannot bear the suffering and death that are ultimately the lot of every human being, and 2) to offer meaning in a world where meaning can never be established. Religion, in other words, is a fortress of lies built to keep out the terrors of existence and nonexistence. For those in power, it is useful in still another way: Since time immemorial, the powerful have used religion to distract the oppressed, to encourage them to focus on the next world so that they will acquiesce to the injustices of this world. If you would have your slaves remain docile, teach them hymns.

This is not saying anything new, but it has to be said again.

On balance, religion has made the world a worse place. It has generated magnificent art and wonderful music and spectacular architecture, and millions of people have, over the centuries, done good and beautiful things in its name, but on balance it has not been good for the world. Those millions of good people would have done just as much good without it. Mother Teresa would have been saintly without the New Testament. Martin Luther King would have been a paragon of eloquent courage without having been baptized. Gandhi would have overturned an empire leaning only on his walking stick. Virtue would exist without Christianity or Judaism or Islam or Hinduism, which, in their vanity and vaporishness, are no different from the Roman’s belief in household gods or the Druid’s belief in tree spirits. A magic act is a magic act, whatever robes we clothe it in. But because of religions like these, the world has experienced centuries and centuries of backwardness and unnecessary suffering. Throats have been slit in their name, hearts exploded, the best minds distracted or destroyed, sweet people tortured, millions of children sent horribly to oblivion.

It has to be said.

Today is a good day to say it. Perhaps the worst of religion’s dangerous superstitions is the notion of the “holy” place. The idea that this patch of earth or that building or that city or nation is somehow sanctified by some god has left us with the bombs and guns and bodies of Kashmir and Belfast, of Baghdad and Jerusalem. “Next year in Jerusalem.” Oh, the lives such words have cost! Why not “Next year in Memphis” or “Next year in Singapore” or “Next year on the banks of the Platte”? What is land but land? What is a building but a building?

Today is a good day to say it because we have a praying president convinced that he is plugged in to the will of God, and his conviction is leading the United States to holy war, first in Iraq and later . . . wherever his prayers might take us. The Muslim world is right: George W. Bush is on a Crusade. He believes that God is on his side, just as Osama bin Laden believes that God is on his side, and the PLO thinks God is on their side, and the Irish Republican Army is certain God is on their side. The list of those who have made war in the name of their god is too long even to start here.

Today is a good day to say it because Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is convinced, as he said last week, that the United States is a country with God’s special blessing, and Attorney General John Ashcroft thinks his views on abortion and the Bill of Rights come straight from the mind of his right-wing Christian god.

Our leaders say they want to make the world safe for secular democracy. I wish they meant it. But I’m afraid that what they really mean is that they want to make a world receptive to their Western god.

There are wars enough when what is “holy” is not part of the picture. Communism and fascism and capitalism would have had their wars even with all gods standing on the sidelines. There are land wars and economic wars and grudge wars and wars for no reason that anyone can understand at all. But religious wars are the most tragic, because they are built so deeply on a deluded sense of righteousness. Have nonbelievers started wars? Of course. They have started wars for land or politics or pure villainy. But I don’t know of a single nonbeliever who has killed simply to make others stop believing. (Stalin, you would say? No, he killed for power.) On the other hand, the world has thousands, millions, who will kill, and have killed, in order to make someone else believe as they believe.

You won’t read this in The New York Times, but it has to be said: Religion does more harm than good. I wish George W. Bush and his handlers would stop talking to, or about, their god. I wish the Near and Middle East would suddenly be flooded by a sea of atheism. I wish Northern Ireland would overnight experience mass religious amnesia. How much more at peace the world would be.

A man truly awake does not need religion. He doesn’t need gods. He doesn’t need miracles. He doesn’t need holy lands here below or celestial heavens up above. For him, life in this universe is itself holy, as is every patch of ground and every path he walks. Life itself is enough of a miracle. To believe in a god who made this life is to believe in a miracle even greater than this miracle. Who needs more than one unfathomable miracle? Existence is a fluke, a freak, a wonder, a dream, a bizarre uncanny thing. Our own consciousness of this existence is so incredible a phenomenon that I don’t understand why anyone feels the need to believe in anything else more “spiritual.” It’s all spiritual. It’s all true magic. Why add imagined magic to explain the magic that is right before us?

Religion is dangerous. It needs to be said, and no one is saying it, except on the nonbelievers’ web sites and in their magazines, where they speak only to each other. Our politicians won’t say it. Our commentators won’t say it. The power of self-censorship in this God-fearing country is too strong, freedom of speech be damned. I can say it here only because this audience is so small, and I have little to risk. (Will fifty of you read this? Will 500? I have no business you can boycott. I have no office you can vote me out of. All I can lose is my job.)

Nearly all my friends are believers. Nearly all of those I love are believers. Most of them are generous and kind, and their religion gives them hope and comfort and pleasant society. Last night, I went to a Passover seder at the home of Jewish friends. They are wonderful people. It was a lovely evening. My own widowed mother has been sustained since my father’s death by the amazing kindness of the women in her church. Yes, I have seen many good works born in synagogues and church pews. But the nonbelievers I know are just as kind, just as loving, just as hopeful, and they have given just as much comfort to those in need.

And I too hope. I hope, for example, that I will see my dead father and my dead friends in some next life, and that we will all be free from worry and pain forever. But it’s just hope, and it’s awake and open-eyed. It’s not faith, which is sleepy and blind. I don’t depend on my hope, and I wouldn’t base my living actions on it. It’s a hope that does not grow out of dogma, and I would never try to impose my hope on someone else. Pure hope never yet has led to war. The same cannot be said of dogma. If I were to found a religion, I would call it “The Church of the Hopeful Few.” Hope would be its only doctrine, and I think it would be a peaceful church.

I know it does little good to tell believers that they should stop believing. I don’t really care if they believe, as long as they remain in their closets when they pray, and leave their gods there when they emerge. Their self-delusion saddens me a bit, but it is usually harmless. When it does harm is when it drives them against the self-delusion of those who believe otherwise. Then is the time of enmity and war.

If our leaders must believe, then, let them believe. But let them remember that the White House is not a cathedral, and that the capitol building is a place of men, not gods.

News The Fly-By

DR. FRIST’S BEDSIDE MANNER

Post author By Chris Davis
Post date April 26, 2003

According to the AP, Americans for Insurance Reform, a coalition of groups opposed to U.S. senator/doctor/insurance man/kitty-killer Bill Frist’s push to put a cap on medical malpractice claims, has begun a multistate advertising campaign. In one of the group’s 30-second TV spots, a devastated couple tells how their 2-year-old son died of dehydration because he was not given a simple IV after being taken to a hospital. Frist, who has been hanging out in Beijing, told reporters he has not seen the ads, but that “we absolutely must … eliminate the frivolous lawsuits affecting in a negative way access to quality care for the American people.” DUH! You can always have another kid, for gosh sakes.

Book Features Books

City Reporters

Post author By Leonard Gill
Post date April 25, 2003

Maybe you knew or maybe you’ve heard tell of the Lauderdales, one of Memphis’ oldest, finest families. Or maybe you didn’t or maybe you haven’t, and if so either way the story goes this way:

First, a fortune was built on jute factories in Indonesia, millinery mills in Nova Scotia, and linotype foundries in Itta Bena, in addition to a fleet of steamships and dirigibles to go with a chain of short-lived sno-cone parlors. Then what? Times changed or maybe the times simply lost interest. The Lauderdales fell on hard times. Very hard. Mama and Papa Lauderdale took off with the jewelry, the silver, and the car for somewhere (parts unknown? the great hereafter?). Uncle Lance got struck by lightning. And poor little unrich Vance, age 27, got stuck with an empty mansion and a pile of unpaid bills.

Then, times changed again. It was back in 1991, when the newspaper you’re now reading was brand-new and it stepped in with an offer Vance couldn’t refuse: The Lord and readership willing, the paper would pay him — but for what? A weekly thousand words or so on the odd questions curious Flyer readers had about their old hometown. (Or was it curious questions from odd readers?) You know, the “lost” Memphis that Memphians grew up with, the city’s hidden history readers once knew or heard tell of: the beaten signs and boarded storefronts they’d passed a million times and couldn’t make heads or tails of. Faded postcards and vintage photos they’d fished out of a drawer. An out-of-the-way municipal marker here, a mysterious gravesite there. Former nightspots; shuttered hamburger joints. Weird monuments; weirder stories. People, places, things. Stuff. And in the case of a lot of it, the exact whereabouts: unknown. The explanation: inexplicable. Found: the original WHBQties. Lost: the Tropical Freeze drive-in at Poplar and White Station.

Well, that Ask Vance column (one part native intelligence, one part hard research, one part harder legwork, two parts pure invention or beside-the-point but hilarious preamble to some honest answers) proved very successful. So successful, in fact, that The Memphis Flyer‘s sister publication, Memphis magazine, in 1995 made Vance a counteroffer he couldn’t refuse: that publication’s back pages (plus pay).

Then, times changed — again. Now Vance is in that magazine’s front pages. And now he’s booked, under cover, in Ask Vance: The Best Questions and Answers from Memphis Magazine’s History and Trivia Expert (for $19.95), a compilation of columns brought to you by Bluff City Books, a publishing startup from Contemporary Media Inc., parent company of The Memphis Flyer and Memphis magazine. The excellent editing credit for the book goes to Memphis and Flyer senior editor Michael Finger, who knows Vance like the back of his hand. (Or did he once give Vance the back of his hand? Nobody knows.) The handsome layout credit goes to Memphis magazine art director Murry Keith. But one unanswered item you’ll search in vain to find. I quote:

Dear Vance: A ‘Qtie I think who went on to be crowned Mrs. America I believe had a date in junior high with a friend of mine I’m pretty sure once. This was in 1960-something. Who is she and where is he? Am I odd, curious, both? You should know. — L.G., Memphis.

Vance Lauderdale will be signing Ask Vance at Burke’s Book Store (1719 Poplar Avenue) on Thursday, April 24th, from 5 to 7 p.m. Call the store at 278-7484 to reserve copies. You can also order Ask Vance from the Memphis magazine circulation department at 901-575-9470.

More publishing news just in and also on the homefront: This month, Sanctuary Publishing in England has brought out Waking Up in Memphis: Discovering the Heartland of Blues and Rock ‘N’ Roll ($18.95) by Andria Lisle (Local Beat columnist in the newspaper you’re now reading) and co-author Mike Evans on what made and makes Memphis music great. Lisle’s legwork and love are written all over it — whether it’s an evening out at Wild Bill’s (where she figures she’s put in a good 1,000 hours), rubbing shoulders with the late Othar Turner at his annual goat barbecue in north Mississippi, sampling the menu at the Big S Grill with R&B legend Rosco Gordon, getting saved under the direction of Rev. Al Green at the Full Gospel Tabernacle, hanging out with “East Memphis’s Persian Princess” and classical guitarist Lily Afshar, or paying tribute to Jim Dickinson, who’s paved the way for sons Luther and Cody and the new Memphis sound.

“During the decade and a half I’ve lived [in Memphis],” Lisle writes near the close of her and Evans’ book, “the city has taken on a mythic quality, and in more recent years I have seen reality and fiction combine into a new fabric as strong as the old tapestries of Sun and Stax.”

Andria Lisle, participant observer to much of this city’s music scene, has woven a fabric of her own.

Opinion

Anatomy of a Lie

Post author By John Branston
Post date April 25, 2003

Plagiarism at the Tri-State Defender was much more extensive and, at times, malicious than we reported last week, according to additional research and interviews with former staff members. And the former managing editor, Virginia Porter, said it was carried out by the African-American newspaper’s current owner, Tom Picou, using the aliases Larry Reeves and Reginold Bundy.

Picou, who lives in Chicago, is the nephew of the late John Sengstacke, founder of the Tri-State Defender and the Chicago Defender and other newspapers that serve the black community. Picou is the CEO of Real Times, which bought the Tri-State Defender and three other newspapers in Detroit, Chicago, and Pittsburgh earlier this year for a reported $11 million.

Picou told the Flyer last week that Larry Reeves was an unpaid freelance writer whom he never met in person although Reeves authored 142 articles in the Tri-State Defender. Picou said he believes Reeves was an elderly white man who has since moved to Arkansas. He declined to speak to the Flyer this week. Asked if he is Reginold Bundy and Larry Reeves, he said, “Absolutely not. I’m finished with this issue and that’s the end of it,” before hanging up the phone.

Like “Larry Reeves,” “Reginold Bundy” was a prolific plagiarist, changing datelines and place-names to relocate stories to Memphis or other cities in the Mid-South. By doing a computer search, the Flyer was able to conclusively establish that several stories were stolen. We offered to show the evidence to Tri-State Defender publisher/editor Marzie Thomas at her office. She declined three times.

· In 1995, Bundy stole parts of a story about crimes of passion in Miami from Miami New Times and transposed it to Memphis, changing real Hispanic people to fictional African Americans and editorializing about violence in the black community.

· In 1995, he stole parts of a story, “Open Hearts,” about an autistic child, from the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel.

· In 2001, he stole parts of “Who’s Sorry Now?,” about the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s mistress, from The Village Voice.

But “Reginold Bundy” was a much more creative and complex persona than “Larry Reeves.” Reeves was a space-filler, “author” of long, front-page stories that were lifted nearly verbatim from other weekly newspapers far enough away that the actual reporters probably would not notice the theft. Bundy had an agenda. In 54 stories found in our computer search, he often editorialized about actual politicians and events in Memphis or West Tennessee and apparently constructed passages of dialogue to embellish his creative efforts.

For example, in 1995 Bundy stole part of a feature story about donating cheap cameras to the homeless in Miami from Miami New Times. But he transposed the story to Memphis, inventing tourists and locals who crassly shot pictures of a homeless man in Court Square “who goes by the name Tattoo George.”

“Tattoo George” speaks to “Reginold Bundy” in a pathetic parody of black dialect, saying, “It’s like dey got nothin’ else to shoot. So day shoot us.”

In a 1996 story, Bundy writes about the burning of four black churches in rural West Tennessee: “In fact, in many rural counties in Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, the TSD learned, the state of social conditions haven’t really changed over the past 40 years despite changing laws and national mandates. To target Black churches in the wake of exceeding racial intolerance is no more of a novelty than the alleged continued lynchings in the Mississippi Delta region.”

Sources include “the FBI’s Hate Division,” “documents released in 1968 by the Congress of Racial Equality,” and “an official who preferred not to be identified.”

A 1,415-word 1995 Bundy story attacking state Sen. John Ford includes no sources other than “a close friend” and “one unidentified man in a local restaurant.”

Porter, 62, told the Flyer she was managing editor at the Tri-State Defender from 1995 until 2002, when she was laid off. She now lives in Kankakee, Illinois. She formerly worked as a copy editor for The Sacramento Bee and other newspapers.

She said “I would stake my life on it” that Picou is Reeves and Bundy. She said anyone who questioned procedures at the Tri-State Defender “was abruptly let go.”

“He [Picou] was the big boss,” she said. “Why fight with him over his product?”

She said the make-up work for the Tri-State Defender’s front page, page three, and jump page (where front-page stories are continued) was done in Chicago and sent to Memphis.

“I used to tell him [Picou] all the time, ‘One day you’re going to get the Tri-State Defender sued because I know this stuff is either made up or ridiculous,'” she said.

The Chicago Reader, a weekly newspaper that has written about Picou, describes him as going to work for the Chicago Defender as a teenager and rising from baseball writer to editor to president of Sengstacke Enterprises before leaving the company in 1984 “because he couldn’t put up with the boss.”

Marzie Thomas has been advertising director of the Tri-State Defender since 1991 and was named editor/publisher this year. In a Commercial Appeal profile in February, Thomas, 50, says, “Our mission has always been to tell the truth. We have no other purpose but to make sure the truth gets out.”

In an editorial last week, Thomas wrote that “a free-lance reporter may well have plagiarized stories” and that the Defender “was not the culprit, but rather the victim.”

News News Feature

HOW IT LOOKS

Post author By Ed Weathers
Post date April 25, 2003

News The Fly-By

City Reporter

Post author By Flyer Staff
Post date April 25, 2003

Murky Waters

Local group monitors pollution in Wolf River Harbor.

By Bianca Phillips

Industries have been discharging polluted storm-water run-off into the Wolf River Harbor without following certain permit guidelines, while others are dumping with no apparent permits on file, according to a report released Tuesday by the Water Sentinels.

A new program of the Sierra Club’s Chickasaw Group, the Water Sentinels are trained volunteers who collect water samples and check for pollutants. Based on recent tests, the group reports that out of 20 facilities that discharge storm-water run-off into the harbor, only three have permits on file and have shown evidence that they have been sampling their storm-water discharge properly.

Water Sentinels project director James Baker said the attendant at the Environmental Assistance Center could not find permits on file for eight of the facilities. Those include Bunge Corporation Grain Elevator, Buzzard Used Auto Parts, Cargill Grain Elevator, Classic American Hardwood, Dunlap St. Used Auto Parts, Levee Auto Parts & Salvage, Yarbrough Cable, and Ponderosa Tennessee (which the report notes may be out of business).

The remaining nine companies appear to have permits but have not reported evidence that they have been sampling according to the requirements of the Tennessee Multi-Sector General Permit for Storm Water Discharge, which requires that a lab test be done once a year and a visual test every quarter.

“You know the old saying, ‘April showers bring May flowers.’ Well, they can also bring pollution washing off a site into the Wolf River Harbor. Rain is good, but what it can wash off some of these places can be pretty yucky,” said Baker.

Polluted storm-water run-off is caused by rain washing chemicals off the pavement of these facilities as well as running through dumpsters and other outdoor sites that hold chemically infected waste.

The Chickasaw Group also collected run-off samples from Levee Auto Parts and Metal Management and found that the pollution exceeded the legal permit limits by an average of 24 times. Among the pollutants found in these samples were aluminum, copper, iron, lead, zinc, organic materials, and suspended solids.

“No Fishing” signs are currently posted in the Wolf River Harbor due to the high levels of pollutants in the water, but the Chickasaw Group worries that the Riverfront Development Corporation (RDC) will install a land bridge and transform parts of the harbor into a recreation lake. This project is included in the RDC’s master plan.

Unpatriotic?

Lawyers challenge terrorist laws.

By Janel Davis

Attorney Jeffrey Jones was in court Friday defending a federal court magistrate’s ruling allowing bail for his client charged with immigration evasion.

Jones’ client, Yousef Maslef Abas Saleh, and Muthanna Ahmed Ali Muthanna are Yemeni citizens accused of conspiring with two female United States citizens to evade immigration laws. Saleh and Muthanna allegedly married the women for the sole purpose of remaining in the U.S. and conspired to present false statements on residency applications.

Saleh and Muthanna were originally being held without bond. Jones challenged the ruling with Judge Diane Vescovo and won a stay of bond. Saleh was released on bond on condition that he maintain employment and remain in West Tennessee. That ruling was challenged by federal prosecutor Fred Godwin, filling in for prosecutor Linda Harris, who asked for the bond to be revoked, citing Saleh’s remaining family ties to Yemen and the potential for him to flee.

“Mr. Saleh posted bond and has continued to work in the area,” said Jones. “This case should be treated as any other case in the same situation.” Before the hearing, Jones also referenced Patriot Act laws passed since September 11th, which allow for foreigners to be held in custody, many times without bond, on suspicion of terrorist activity. “My client has done nothing wrong and has not been involved in any terrorist acts and is not a threat,” Jones told the Flyer.

Allegations stem from Saleh’s original entrance into this country with a six-month B2, or non-business, visitor pass from the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), which has been taken over by the Office of Homeland Security. He was granted a six-month extension on the pass but was not allowed to work under conditions of a visitor status. During that time, Saleh married and divorced one U.S. citizen and then married his current 19-year-old wife.

An INS agent testified that Saleh had completed applications for two Social Security numbers and used different arrangements of his name on immigration documents and health forms.

Muthanna, represented by Stephen Monroe Temple, remains in federal custody. Saleh and Muthanna face arraignment on Wednesday.

Riverfront Review

Outside consultants give thumbs-up to master plan.

By Mary Cashiola

The Riverfront Development Corporation (RDC) brought in a national team last month just to make sure they were “on the right track.”

A six-member team of developers, consultants, and an architect from the Washington, D.C.-based Urban Land Institute were brought in to assess the RDC’s master plan as well as how it should be implemented.

“We have our master plan and we have an idea of how we wanted to move forward,” said RDC communications director Dorchelle Spence, “but we needed a third party that wasn’t married to any one plan to study it.”

The study cost the RDC $110,000. The team spent a week in town, interviewing 75 people, including Mayor Willie Herenton, Jack Belz, and representatives from the Memphis Regional Chamber and the Memphis Convention and Visitors Bureau. Prior to the team’s arrival here, the RDC sent them a 200-plus page packet, including the RDC’s master plan for the riverfront, demographics, and maps.

“When they first saw the plan, their initial thought was, Why are you building more land downtown?” said Spence. “But once they got to Memphis and they saw how it was laid out, they thought it was a great idea.”

The proposed land bridge in the plan would be entirely for residential and cultural use. “Part of our plan is developer-dependent,” said Spence. “A big question for us is: Can we expect people to come in and develop this land?”

According to Spence, the team’s initial findings were positive and the RDC expects a written report in June.

TennCare Bites Down

Children’s dental clinic can’t accept new patients.

By Janel Davis

Time and luck have finally run out for the Children’s Dental Clinic, which was forced to cease seeing new patients April 15th.

The clinic at 4691 Knight Arnold remains open with a limited staff during business hours for follow-up work on current patients. TennCare officials have refused to alter their certification process and accept the clinic, claiming there are already enough dentists in the area.

The clinic staff, which specialized in treating children on TennCare, hopes that the ban on credentialing dentists in Tennessee’s urban areas will be lifted with the start of TennCare’s new budget year on July 1st. “We’re not giving up. We are still open to maintain a presence in the community,” said lead dentist Dr. Freida Grimes-Moore.

The clinic has never received TennCare patient reimbursements and was being bankrolled by the clinic’s owner, Bill Mueller.

Another children’s clinic, also owned by Mueller and his Colorado-based Forba LLC group, came under fire last week following the December death of a 4-year-old patient in Phoenix, Arizona. The boy’s death was found to be caused by an overdose of lidocaine. The dentist denied any wrongdoing and has been allowed to continue practicing pending a formal hearing. The four dentists in that office were licensed general dentists but none received additional certification in pediatric dentistry.

All of the five dentists in the Knight Arnold office are licensed general dentists. “None of the dentists there are licensed pediatric dentists, but all of them have additional training working with children,” said Dan DeRose of Forba. “Most children are treated by general dentists and not pediatric dentists.”

Theme Song

Memphis’ budget comes with a slogan.

By Mary Cashiola

What do high school proms, chain restaurants, and Memphis’ annual budget have in common? The answer, for the last couple of years at least, is a theme.

As Mayor Willie Herenton presented the city’s operating and capital improvement budgets for the 2004 fiscal year to the city council last week, those in the audience were given buttons bearing a rearranged skyline and the somewhat cryptic words “Memphis: The Choice is Clear.”

Very nice, but what does the slogan mean?

“In the last number of years, we’ve attempted to have a theme behind the budget,” city finance director Joseph Lee explained. “We tried to tie in the budget with the city’s vision, which is to be recognized globally as the city of choice in which to live, learn, work, and recreate.”

In his presentation, Herenton focused on Memphis’ achievements in the last year, including the two Tyson fights, the downtown school opening, the FedEx Technology Institute, and the zoo’s new pandas.

“We think it’s important to tie the budget into what we’re doing as a city,” said Lee. “It makes it more of a document that shows us where we are … as opposed to being just a big book of numbers.” Last year, the budget’s theme was “Choose Memphis.” The year before that it was “Memphis Measures Up.” The budget team chooses the theme each year.

“We’re just trying to get the city excited,” said Lee. “Yes, it’s a down economy, but we’re still doing lots of things. We’ve taken some hits but not to the extent of some other cities. We think we’re still moving forward.”

We Recommend We Recommend

The End

Post author By Chris Davis
Post date April 25, 2003

Weapons of mass destruction,” grumbles Wesley Creel, administrator of programs at the Pink Palace Museum. He is setting up the television for a screening of I Am Become Death: They Made the Bomb, a French documentary about the Manhattan Project and its role in ushering in the atomic age. Without provocation, Creel begins a monologue about the invention of the crossbow and how it led the pope to declare that such a terrible WMD would surely bring about the end of everything that ever happened. “Any idiot could learn to use a crossbow in three hours,” Creel continues, explaining that the first armor-piercing weapon, the English longbow, could take years to master. “There’s the Gatling gun, machine guns,” Creel says, as his list of doomsday devices goes on and on. It would appear from his comments that to Creel doom is in the eye of the beholder.

“People don’t understand chemical weapons, and they don’t understand biological weapons, but they understand hot lead ripping the flesh,” Creel says, suggesting that we most fear the things we least understand. A mushroom cloud explodes on the television screen.

Arthur MacCaig’s film I Am Become Death begins with theoretical physicist and father of the H-bomb Edward Teller discussing his pacifism and his desire to not become involved in warfare or politics. But Teller, along with a number of other top scientists, including Albert Einstein, was summoned to a meeting with President Roosevelt in which Roosevelt spilled the beans about a secret German plan to build an atomic bomb. At that point, pacifism didn’t matter. Politics didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was getting the bomb before the Nazis did. And while some of the original Manhattan Project scientists, especially Bob Wilson, have expressed a certain amount of guilt about the 200,000 dead in Nagasaki and better than half that number dead in Hiroshima, not one regretted his role in the project. It was something that, at the time, had to be done to stop the original Axis of Evil. Still, it doesn’t make the images of flesh-free skeletons lining the streets of Japan any less upsetting.

“I never lost one night of sleep over this,” says the man who dropped the bomb, Brigadier General Paul Tibbets Jr., in one of the documentary’s more disturbing moments. Tibbets talks about looking down and seeing the ground bubbling like molten tar where he had dropped the bomb. No matter what the alternatives were, it’s more than a little stunning that such a terrible image wouldn’t give a man pause, that the ghosts of half a million dead Japanese men, women, and children would not occasionally haunt the dreams of the man responsible for their sudden dispatch.

I Am Become Death also considers the role of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the wafer-thin American scientist who headed the Manhattan Project and who is largely credited for its success. Oppenheimer was a Communist, and the U.S. military knew this. They also knew he was the best man for the job, and they were not about to let politics stand between them and the development of the bomb. It stands in sharp contrast to the paranoia that reigns in post-9/11 America. After all, can anyone imagine an Islamic fundamentalist being tapped to lead a top-secret U.S. military project today? Probably not. Of course, it was politics that ultimately brought Oppenheimer down, after he voiced his disapproval of the H-bomb, which was 500 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. He called it an agent of genocide, noting that there were no targets large enough for its awesome power. But this was in the 1950s, and Senator Joe McCarthy was poised to aim his anti-Communist fury at Oppenheimer and by doing so turn a national hero into a despicable, America-hating villain.

Between its focus on using fear to create peace, the development of WMDs, and the politics of paranoia, there are any number of points in I Am Become Death that reflect contemporary concerns. And while the organizers of this event, the U of M’s library system and the Pink Palace Museum, hope to stimulate discussion, their goals seem curiously unrelated to the film’s content. U of M physics professor Don Franceschetti, who has been working in an advisory role on the “Research Revolution: Science and the Shaping of Modern Life” film series, of which I Am Become Death is a part, hopes the discussion will be of a more ecological nature. Franceschetti notes that many species are endangered because of the burning of fossil fuels. He hopes the film may get people considering the positive uses of nuclear energy, which, barring accidents, is cleaner than some alternatives. Of course, if life on planet Earth is what you hope to discuss, a film called I Am Become Death, which never once considers the use of nuclear power outside the context of its military applications, might not be the best springboard.

At one point in the film, Oppenheimer expresses his greatest fear: Once the race to create the better doomsday device was begun, it could not be stopped. As U.S. troops scour the Iraqi desert looking for chemical and biological weapons and diplomats prepare to discuss North Korea’s nuclear capabilities, it’s obvious that Oppenheimer was terrifyingly correct.

A screening of I Am Become Death and a public forum will be held at the Pink Palace Museum on Saturday, April 26th, from 2 to 4 p.m.

Art Art Feature

Free Art Tomorrow

Post author By Bianca Phillips
Post date April 25, 2003

When you step into the old Tennessee Brewery on Tennessee Street downtown, you can’t help but feel a bit inebriated. Only these days, it’s not the beer that’s intoxicating but the empty, grand old building’s architectural drama.

Look up and you see the wrought-iron railings of the open, winding staircases that frame each floor. The windows were strategically placed so that natural light floods in, throwing ornate shadows from the decorative latticework of the railings. It was once the site of a bustling beer industry, and hundreds of feet traversed that very floor each day. The worn concrete, scattered with flakes of rust, seems to welcome new feet after years of abandonment.

The 113-year-old Tennessee Brewery, which was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1980, has seen good times and bad. In 1900, the brewery was owned by John Schorr and was said to be the largest in the South, pumping out up to 250,000 barrels of Goldcrest beer a day. In 1999, it was at the center of an environmental court case that could have resulted in its demolition had current owner Kevin Norman not stepped in. He purchased the crumbling landmark after the previous owners refused to make necessary repairs to prevent its destruction. Norman funded the process of getting the building back up to code requirements.

Now, the old building sits vacant, looming over the Mississippi River like a giant ghost, but Norman and a local group of artists appropriately called ArtBrew have banded together with a plan for the brewery. They want to turn it into an affordable living/work space for artists, complete with performance and exhibition space, “arts-friendly” commercial and retail space, and arts education and outreach programs for the community.

“Artists are really priced out of the downtown market, and that’s a shame. We’re hoping to remedy that situation,” says ArtBrew member Michael Eck. “The price of rent will probably be comparable to getting a studio loft in Midtown. There are a couple of artists’ cooperatives in Midtown in such raw spaces, and they’re just making do with what they have. This would put a solid roof over their heads and offer them a permanent home to begin to develop and grow.”

ArtBrew has commissioned the Minneapolis-based Artspace Projects, Inc. to take a look at the building and determine the idea’s feasibility. Artspace is a nonprofit organization with a successful track record for helping groups like ArtBrew obtain funding for these kinds of historic renovations. They function essentially as a real-estate developer, pulling funding from historic tax credits, affordable-housing tax credits, charitable foundations, and corporate donations as well as traditional bank financing.

After the funding has been pulled together, Artspace either co-owns the building with a local partner like ArtBrew or steps down entirely, depending on what the artist collective has in mind. Artspace often retains a general-manager status for several years to ensure the project is fulfilling its mission as an artist community.

Since most of the rooms of the brewery are large and built in such a way that it would be difficult to divide them into apartments, ArtBrew has selected the Float Factory, an old warehouse located at the corner of Virginia Street and South Main, to be the main live/work space for the artist collective. The brewery would actually only house four to six apartment spaces reserved for international and out-of-state artists to serve as their artist-in-residence home. A couple of those spaces may also be reserved for accomplished local artists who would be hand-picked to stay in the brewery for six months to a year.

The remainder of the brewery’s rooms would be converted into a number of arts-related spaces: a dance studio, a cinema, various studio spaces, gallery and exhibition space, nonprofit and for-profit commercial and retail office space, a media cooperative, a publishing cooperative, an iron-forging shop, arts classrooms and workshop space, and possibly even a microbrewery to revive the building’s heritage.

When Artspace visits, they’ll be performing a marketing survey to determine if there is a real need for such a space for artists in the downtown area. If they decide there is and determine the Tennessee Brewery and Float Factory are practical spaces for such projects, they’ll try to obtain the funds. The average Artspace project takes about three years from the research phase to completion of construction.

“There’s so much inspiration with the river flowing by and the great buildings downtown,” says Eck. “All these people are moving downtown for the excitement of living downtown, but it’s not very exciting here if there aren’t creative people living and creating.”

An open-to-the-public community meeting with Artspace representatives will be held inside the Tennessee Brewery (477 Tennessee St.) at 7 p.m. on Thursday, April 24th.