I have no idea of what this really is, but anything that bills itself as a Back Flash Male Review at Flashback s in Raleigh has got to be interesting. And there you have it. As always, I really don t care what you do this week, because I don t even know you, and unless you can get Bill Clinton to come to my house to sign his new book, I m sure I don t want to meet you. Besides, it s time for me to go study Dubya s hair some more. Maybe it s just oily.
—T.S.
Plante: How It Looks
BUM RAP
Everywhere you look these days there is 8th District U.S. representative John Tanner of Union City involuntarily playing straight man for Michael Moore.
He’s in the promos for Fahrenheit 9/11 on all the TV channels, getting his hand pumped in front of the U.S. Capitol as Moore ropes Tanner in for one of the filmmaker’s patented ambush interviews. In the film itself (which is doing blockbuster business in virtually every kind of venue), Tanner is Exhibit Number One among various congressional foils as Moore sallies forth, a compliant U.S. Marine in tow, to do some mock recruiting for the war in Iraq.
The idea Ñ or, more accurately, the dramatic frame Ñ is: These congressional hypocrites have voted for the war but aren’t willing, as Moore straight-facedly implores them, to send their own kith and kin to fight in that Middle Eastern cauldron.
Never mind that Tanner explains to Moore that his children are grown adults with families.
Never mind that he doesn’t challenge anything the filmmaker says, even attempting to express sympathy for Moore’s antiestablishment views. He’s still presented as a fall guy, a stand-in for President Bush’s war policies. Why?
Tanner, though a Democrat from a rural West Tennessee district that historically has included portions of Memphis and Shelby County, has the blue-suited clean-cut look one might otherwise see in many a suburban Republican member of Congress. And he has a broad Southern accent. That makes him a perfect foil for Moore, a tubby Michigander who’s gotten rich from his barn-burning books and films but still affects the look of a rumpled day laborer. A “tribune of the people,” you see.
One of the other congressmen set up by Moore has complained that he told Moore he had a nephew who was headed for military service in Afghanistan and that he’d be glad to help with the “recruiting” effort but that these parts of the conversation were trimmed from the film. (A transcript available last week on Moore’s own Web site seems to bear out the congressman, Representative Mark Kennedy, R-Minn.)
Tanner was placed in an even more misleading context. True, he voted for the October 2002 Use of Force resolution that would ultimately, for better or for worse, give President Bush the go-ahead to commence hostilities against Saddam Hussein. For the record, so did Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry; Senator John Edwards and Representative Dick Gephardt, Kerry’s two most likely choices for a running mate; and 9th District U.S. representative Harold Ford, among others.
But here’s a scene you won’t find in Moore’s movie. Let us fade to election night in November 2002. The scene is the downtown Hilton in Nashville, where various Tennessee Democrats, including Tanner, have been following the televised returns showing a surprise Republican sweep in congressional elections. Quoting from my report in the following week’s Flyer, we see a troubled Tanner, “who nursed a libation in his hotel room … and professed outrage at Bush and the GOP as the bad news from national contests streamed across the bottom of his TV screen.”
“`Those people ought to be arrested and tried for fraudulence!’ Tanner said. `They took our minds off what was important, the economy, and sold us a bill of goods about Iraq. The idea, trying to convince us that a two-bit tinhorn dictator with 20 million starving people was a threat like Adolf Hitler! They don’t have any weapons to bother us with! The whole thing was an election fraud. Nothing but!'”
How’s that for buyer’s remorse? And how’s that for a far-sighted presentation of the same point of view that film-splicer Moore labors so hard and cleverly to assemble in Fahrenheit 9/11?
Though a Navy veteran, Tanner is no war hawk. Au contraire. And though I was impressed by the forthrightness of his election-night remarks, I almost came to feel guilty in reproducing them, since a right-wing Nashville blogger exploited them for a whole week thereafter to accuse Tanner, a certified “Blue Dog” conservative, of being a lefty know-nothing.
But that was no more unfair or ludicrous than the way Tanner just got treated by that celluloid blogger of the left, Michael Moore. Not that Tanner will be impacted much among his home folks. His official Republican opponent this year, one James L. Hart, is an avowed racist who has begun to be repudiated by official spokespersons for the party.
Hart got the GOP nomination by default, since it’s hard to dig up credible opposition to Tanner in the 8th District, whose voters know him to be a levelheaded, fair-minded centrist. Michael Moore has no idea who he is.
POLITICS AND A PUBLIC PENSION FUND
For 24 years in county politics, including eight years as mayor, Jim Rout was an open book, as politicians go. Reporters calling him could often get him on the first or second ring, as I did this week. He would answer almost any question, personal or political. He’s been out of office for almost two years but finds himself involved in a federal investigation of the county pension fund and a personal $25,000 investment he made.
Why now? Did the times change or did Rout change? Probably both. The Watergate effect met the wealth effect, and Rout may have a Martha Stewart problem.
The Watergate effect, as explained a few years ago by former federal prosecutor Mike Cody, was an offshoot of the Richard Nixon presidency. “Under-the-table practices of long-standing became the focus of investigation and criminal enforcement. The public and juries began holding politicians and public officials to a higher standard. Things were perceived as illegal that before had just been winked at.”
In the Eighties and Nineties, the Watergate effect produced a string of federal prosecutions of public officials in Tennessee, including then-congressman Harold Ford Sr. These days the feds’ high-profile targets are corporate executives like Martha Stewart and, in Memphis, former and possibly current county government officials.
The wealth effect was a product of the soaring stock market before the tech bubble burst in 2000. County government officials including Rout and his top assistant Tom Jones were intimately involved in several big-money deals including FedExForum, AutoZone Park, the aborted Grammy museum, and the Memphis Cook Convention Center. Many of the executives, consultants, underwriters, and attorneys involved in these projects make over $1 million a year and get lucrative stock options. Public officials make $100,000 to $150,000 a year Ñ a good salary by most standards, but not in this league. Many times Jones and Rout and their city counterparts would work long hours, shoulder-to-shoulder with the corporate crowd. Public participation was vital to the deals. The salary gap had to sting.
The fact that Rout invested $25,000 in a startup company shows he was not immune to the wealth effect. For that money in 1999, he could have bought stock in FedEx or AutoZone (and doubled or tripled his money today), but, like many investors, he was dazzled by the long chance. He was, at the least, unwise to get his investment back before the company went bankrupt. Like Martha Stewart, he should have taken the loss. Making matters worse, the company was in the portfolio of Delta Capital Management, one of 12 managers hired by Rout and others to invest the $786 million county pension fund. Rout was interviewed by federal investigators in March. On July 7th, David Pontius, the county employee who administers the pension fund, will meet with a federal grand jury. He said he expects to be asked about Rout and Delta Capital.
Rout has pushed the ethical envelope before. In his last year as mayor, he traveled to Australia with his wife Sandi, insisting the trip was strictly business. He once suggested his wife’s travel expenses were legitimate public costs because she was the “first lady.” He later reimbursed the county for some of her expenses by drawing from his campaign fund.
No local politician can avoid ties to local businessmen, but Rout’s are closer and more personal than most. He owes his last two private-sector jobs to political benefactors. He is currently president of Jack Morris Auto Glass. Morris was a major fund raiser for Rout as well as current Shelby County Mayor A C Wharton. Before he became mayor in 1994, Rout was president of Behavioral Health Group. His benefactor was Dr. William H. Rachels, a wheeler-dealer in health-care companies, Memphis politics, and real estate. Rachels, finance chairman for Winfield Dunn’s successful Tennessee gubernatorial race in 1970, was chairman of Health Industries of America when it spun off Behavioral Health Group in 1988. Rachels hired Rout to run it.
From 1988 until 1992, 39 percent of Behavioral Health Group was owned by Stephens Holding Company, a Little Rock-based financial conglomerate. A subsidiary, Stephens Capital Management, was hired by Shelby County to help manage the pension fund. Rout, a county commissioner at the time, was a member of the investment committee which made the recommendation. Some county employees and local stockbrokers publicly questioned the appearance of favoritism and the high-risk stocks that were Stephens’ specialty, but their objections were overcome.
When he became mayor, Rout sold Behavioral Health Group to Stephen Winters, owner of Medshares, a home-health-care company across the street on Union Avenue Extended. By then Rout was the sole stockholder. He wouldn’t disclose terms of the sale.
All of this was reported by the local press, but the issues never got traction. Then.
Tonight s Amuse Bouche Dinner at Melange features a 26-item tasting of goodies with wine to go along with everything.
The Circus Bears are at the Blue Monkey Midtown.
AN OPEN LETTER TO MICHAEL MOORE
Dear Mr. Moore:
I know you have used this approach a time or two in the past when communicating with prominent public figures — and with not-so-prominent Americans like myself who are on your e-mail list — so I hope you won’t mind being on the receiving end, just this once. I’ve got a favor to ask.
Let me start by pointing out how we two have something in common. Long ago, back in the 1970s, you were the founding publisher of an alternative weekly newspaper in your hometown of Flint, Michigan. A little bit more recently (in 1989), I founded an alternative weekly in Memphis, Tennessee. I believe your paper went bust, but you seem to have done alright for yourself, all the same. Our paper, The Memphis Flyer, is fifteen years old now, so I’ve done okay, too. We’ve both been blessed.
Like tens of thousands of other Americans, I saw Fahrenheit 9/11 this past weekend. It was some kind of event, let me tell you. I myself saw the film smack dab in the middle of “red” America, deep in the heart of Texas, in a matinee at a packed mall theatre in suburban San Antonio. The place was packed to the rafters, and when we left the 4:10 screening, the line waiting for the next one stretched out the door into the parking lot.
I left the mall emotionally drained, yes, but also relieved that, finally, someone (you) had produced a cogent negative statement on the war writ large enough to get everyone’s attention. No, your powerful piece of docu-drama won’t quite drown out the bombastic misrepresentations of truth that intellectual thugs like Limbaugh and Hannity present as “fact” on a daily basis. But F9/11 will at least draw attention to the fundamental obscenity behind the war in Iraq, in ways that even the most myopic American “patriot” might understand.
Most important of all — and I think this was your intent — the film will resonate mightily, I expect, with its true heroes, the mostly ordinary folks paying the highest price for Bush’s Folly: the troops called upon to fight the feckless war that has resulted from what former Reagan Secretary of the Navy James Webb recently called “the greatest American foreign-policy blunder of modern times.”
I especially enjoyed your skewering of the mainstream media, clearly the Bush Administration’s partner in crime, and, as an alternative-weekly publisher, found myself wishing that you’d done more to hammer that point home. Indeed, I left the theatre thinking how Dan Rather and Wolf Blitzer need to be flown off to The Hague in handcuffs right alongside Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld. And I was particularly struck by your almost elegaic three-minute treatment of the actual 9/11 NYC event itself early on in the film. Bravo! What a marvelous tribute to your cinematic skills, something that often gets lost in the shuffle these days, now that you’re almost more popular than Jesus, as John Lennon might say. You’re not just a dude with a camera.
But as often has been the case with your films, you’re once again a little heavy-handed in F9/11. I was somewhat surprised that you were not as visually absent from the film as some of the preliminary reviewers had suggested you were. And yet again, I find myself from time to time irritated by your in-your-face approach to “interviewing” sometimes hostile and/or but sometimes innocent subjects. There’s just a little too much Geraldo Rivera about all that for my taste.
Moreover, your “ambush interview” technique doesn’t always do justice to your (our) cause. Take this example from F9/11. After going into how the legislators who voted to “bring it on” (war) in Iraq do not themselves have any of their own children fighting in it, you charge up Capitol Hill armed with enlistment forms, a sympathetic Marine, and, of course, your cameras. Among the first congressmen you encounter — and the one you choose to zoom in on — is Representative John Tanner, a Tennessee congressman whose district is just up the road here from Memphis. Taken completely off guard, Mr. Tanner hems and haws, says nothing very sensible, and shuffles off awkwardly.
The insinuation is clear; Tanner is “one of them”: legislators who support the Iraq war without making their children available to fight in it. Pity you didn’t do a little more homework before running this clip, though. John Tanner, a Democrat, has been anything but a devout supporter of the current administration. Just consider what he had to say about the Bushies, as quoted in the pages of our newspaper back in 2002, in the aftermath of the Republican mid-term election landslide:
“Those people ought to be arrested and tried for fraudulence,” said Tanner. “They took our minds off what was important, the economy, and sold us a bill of goods about Iraq. The idea, trying to convince us that a two-bit tinhorn dictator with 20 million starving people was a threat like Adolf Hitler! They don’t have any weapons to bother us with! The whole thing was an election fraud. Nothing but!”
Sounds like an ally to me, not an enemy. Maybe you owe Congressman Tanner a note of apology for using him to make your point. It’s a good point, to be sure, but a little bit like attacking Iraq to punish Al Qaeda, isn’t it? (Since Congress is not in session, here’s Representative Tanner’s home office address: PO Box 629, Union City, TN 38281. Or you can just call him directly at 731-885-7070.)
But this isn’t the favor I mentioned I wanted to ask. Or at least not the only one.
No, this may sound a little weird, and more than a little presumptuous, but I want you to pull out one particular film clip from Fahrenheit 9/11.
The one I have in mind comes towards the end of the movie, sandwiched among four or five in rapid succession, if memory serves me correctly. It’s more than a little grainy, but it shows President Bush at the podium of what appears to be a fundraiser, decked out in white dinner-jacket. The camera catches his opening remarks: “This is an impressive crowd of the haves and have mores,” he says. “Some people call you the elite, I call you my base.” The crowd roars with delight.
The message the viewer is expected to take from this clip and its neighbors is clear: George W. Bush panders to the rich. Not a novel or particularly difficult-to-prove premise, to be sure, but that’s obviously the message. Those nasty selfish Republicans are indeed the Bush “base.”
But surely you know where this particular clip came from. Surely, as a former newspaper dude yourself, you have fact-checkers. Surely you know as much about the circumstances of this particular film clip as my friend here in Memphis, Steve Denegri.
Actually, Steve’s a new friend, not an old one. He’s my friend because he kept me from making a complete fool of myself in print, writing about your movie. Let me explain.
You see, our weekly paper has a daily website, where on Saturday I posted an early version of a Fahrenheit 9/11 review I had written immediately after seeing the film. In that review, I wrote specifically about this clip, speaking about how powerfully it described the venality of the current administration, even suggesting that John Kerry use it in his own campaign. The “haves/have-mores” image, I suggested, was among the most powerful in the whole movie.
Fortunately for me, Steve Denegri saw my on-line review within an hour of its posting, and informed ignorant me of where exactly “President” Bush made this “haves/have mores” speech. “I watched this speech take place live as carried by the Fox News Channel on October 19, 2000, just a few weeks before the presidential election,” Steve told me via e-mail, “and there was a speaker that preceeded George W. Bush that evening: Al Gore. And among those in the crowd roaring with glee was Hillary Rodham Clinton.”
Steve went on to explain: “You see, both Bush and Gore were invited to speak at this fundraiser, one which put no money in either party’s pocket. That event was the 55th annual Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner, which that year raised $1.6 million, thanks to the appearances of then-candidates Bush and Gore. The Al Smith dinner has the very noble cause of health care at New York Catholic hospitals as its key fundraising theme, not the political agenda of an elite crowd of Bush supporters. Money raised that evening went toward care for the elderly, AIDS victims, unborn children, and unwed teenage mothers.”
Boy, did I ever feel stupid. You see, Michael, that remark came from what was basically a roast. It was made in self-deprecating jest. And George W. Bush wasn’t even President when he made it!
You can actually still find the full video on the Web (there’s a nice print summary of the event at http://cny.org/archive/ld/ld102600.htm). Right after Governor Bush talks about his “base,” he goes on to poke fun at someone else on dais alongside him: conservative critic William F. Buckley, Jr. “We have a lot in common,” smiles the Republican presidential candidate, gesturing at Buckley. “Bill wrote a book at Yale; I read one. He started the Conservative Party: I started a few parties myself.”
Thanks to Steve Denegri’s eagle eye, I was able to pull that draft review offline before it hit the actual newspaper. Don’t worry; I’ve still been able to use a lot of the same lines, in this letter to you, even. But since you probably don’t read The Memphis Flyer either on the web or in print, I thought I should call your attention to this gaffe directly.
Maybe this was just an honest mistake. If that’s the case, you probably owe George W. Bush an apology for taking his remarks in that “haves/have-mores” clip completely out of context. I know, I know: the idea of admitting a mistake to this guy who’s made more mistakes than any of us can count — and admitted nary a one — sort of sticks in your craw, doesn’t it? But fair is fair, don’t you think?
One way or the other, that clip needs to go from the movie. God knows, the crackpots on the right slam us every day on the basis of things we anti-war types haven’t even done, let alone done wrong. Let’s not give the suckers any free ammunition, ok? As it is, the presence of this particular clip in Fahrenheit 9/11 makes it the Mother of All Cheap Shots. It needs to go. Now.
And it’s not like the film will suffer by its removal. The dozens of other Bush clips you feature (by the way, is the President eligible to win a Best Actor award for his role in F9/11?) restate the obvious, in powerful terms: this man is simply not up to the job of being President of the United States. Whether it’s his goofy “now watch this drive…” line uttered after speaking resolutely about terrorism, or landing his jet on that aircraft carrier with the “Mission Accomplished” banner, or staring off into space, yes, for those remarkable seven minutes in that Florida classroom on the morning of September 11th, 2001, the clips you select for our re-viewing pleasure leave movie-goers convinced not only of the error of his ways, but in total bewilderment at how this second-rate buffoon ever got elected (sorry, selected) to be President of the United States. Good job.
But get rid of the “haves/have-mores” clip. Yes, as a filmmaker, you’re entitled to take a little artistic license in the making of your point. But when taking that license shoots loose and fast with the truth, aren’t you doing your own cause and mine a complete disservice?
All the best,
K.N.
GO ASK ALICE
Hey fashion-mavens, forget the ominous Owrwellian overtones. The negative utopia of Wonderland is all the rage this season!
“I don’t understand you,” said Alice, “It’s dreadfully confusing!”
“The effect of living backwards,” the Queen said kindly: “it always makes one a little giddy at firstÉFor instance, now,” [The White Queen] went on, “there’s the King’s Messenger. He’s in prison now, being punished: and the trial doesn’t even begin till next Wednesday: and of course the crime comes last of all.”
“Suppose he never commits the crime?” said Alice.
“That would be all the better, wouldn’t it?” the Queen said.
–Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass
***
In an exclusive interview with FOX News’ Brit Hume, Charles Duelfer— whose ISG is leading the hunt for weapons of mass destruction — said terrorists in Iraq are “trying to tap into the Iraqi WMD intellectual capital.”
“When we have investigated certain labs and contacted certain former experts in the WMD program, we have found that they are being recruited by anti-coalition groups,” Duelfer told FOX News. “They are being paid by anti-coalition groups. We’re seeing interest in developing chemical munitions.”
The same process seems to be happening in Afghanistan, he said.
–Fox News website, Thursday June 24, 2004
***
It’s time to take a good long stare into vanity’s crooked glass where nature is perfectly reflected but in reverse. The situation in Iraq grows curiouser and curiousier according to Fox, the most biased news source in the history of American media, and therefore completely trustworthy. Fox reports that Al Qaeda, which had no significant influence in Iraq prior to the U. S. invasion, has emerged from its natural home deep within the Fertile Crescent and is actively working to jumpstart Iraq’s long-defunct WMD program.
Why yes, and thanks for asking: that would be the same long-defunct WMD program/imminent threat the American-lead “coalition” was so recently deployed to crush. It’s really quite astonishing how this ultimate solution to a nonexistent problem has now caused the nonexistent problem to become a truly-existent problem, which in turn begs for yet another heavy dose of the final solution. It makes one giddy at first to even consider such historic non-events, and the grave threats they now represent.
Oh what I’d give for a sinister disembodied grin right about now.
America was confronted with a startling truth on September 11: As long as terrorism exists, nobody in the world is safe. This has resulted in an all-out campaign on behalf of the United States to make the world a more dangerous place and thereby make doubly, even triply certain that no harm will ever come to America or any of her former allies. (See above) That’s why stepped up attacks against American forces in Iraq are proof incontrovertible that we’re winning this glorious war. That’s why Al Qaeda’s recent attempts to construct WMD in Iraq are a positive indicator that Democracy is alive and well, and flourishing in the hearts and minds of Arabs throughout the Middle East.
On a related note, it’s turned out to be extremely fortuitous that the U.S. Military (busy smashing up a decidedly unflattering portrait of President Bush’s father, also named President Bush), managed to leave some of Iraq’s less-happening nuclear facilities unguarded, further insuring that no nasty-bomb will ever be used against the Enemies of the Enemies of Freedom. Had the facilities been guarded from the very beginning of the occupation there can be no doubt radioactive material would have fallen into the wrong hands by now.
“With all the gala new school openings, lavish proms, and proper commencement exercises, life in Iraq is really quite gay,” says Tweedledee, a fictional member of the Iraqi Governing Council who was unavailable for comment. “And to think,” he adds, voice and index finger raised defiantly, “it’s all happening in Afghanistan too!”
A MULTICOLORED FOURTH
We’ve all made (and ignored) New Year’s resolutions. But how about trying a Fourth of July resolution? And I don’t mean hot-dog eating contests, a who-can-jump-the-firecracker competition, or anything connected to parades, watermelon, or lemonade. Find something that reminds you of why you like being an American (or living in America), and tell as many people about this charm as you can. Between hot dogs, of course.
My resolution? I’m going to count the number of people, places, and things that are NOT American that make me love sports so much more than I would otherwise. After all, it’s the wide WORLD of sports that inspires us, no?
Modibo Diarra. This native of Mali, West Africa, arrived in Memphis the same year John Calipari did. (He stole no headlines, did he?) After starting 24 games as a freshman, Diarra spent most of his remaining three seasons on the bench. But if you happened to see his last home game at The Pyramid last March, you saw love. Rare has the parting ovation for a Tiger player been louder than the one Diarra received. And NEVER has a player visibly returned the same affection the way Diarra did. He leaves the University of Memphis with a degree, and thousands upon thousands of new friends.
Albert Pujols. Baseball remains the Great American Pastime (sit down, football fans), but the sport has never had the kind of Latin flavor it enjoys here at the dawn of the 21st century. Having arrived in St. Louis from the Dominican Republic (via Kansas City, via Memphis!), Pujols is reminding Cardinal Nation of greatness. The kind of greatness measured in Musial terms.
The Tour de France. Come July, I tend to mix the red, white, and blue of Old Glory with the same colors on the French flag. Whether it’s Lance Armstrong’s continued ride to immortality or the pastoral settings the race brings into our living rooms, this is an event that somehow remains underrated in a world drowning with sports news and numbers. In my book, aside from climbing Everest (without oxygen), this is the greatest test of human athleticism in the world.
Anna Kournikova. Greatest Russian import since Smirnoff.
Pau Gasol, Dirk Nowitzki, Peja Stojakovic, Tony Parker, Yao Ming. Finally, an NBA champion has some credibility when they call themselves “world champions.” If the singular beauty of a jump shot is part of what saves this ailing game, we’ll have Europe to thank.
David Beckham. Oh, for crying out loud, if I’m going to include Anna . . . .
The Championships at Wimbledon. Among my favorite childhood sports memories is watching Borg and McEnroe at my grandmother’s in Cleveland, Tennessee. These two actually made me put my baseball mitt down for a few hours.
Ernie Els. No, he doesn’t have eight major titles, but he does have as many U.S. Open championships (2) as Tiger, and this native of South Africa seems to have his career on the upswing, unlike certain Nike pitchmen. On top of all that, he plays with a smile. Always easy to cheer for a guy named Ernie.
Stubby Clapp. A product of Windsor, Ontario, becomes the face most readily attached to AutoZone Park. Whoda thunk it?
Athens. No, not the home of the Dawgs. Considering the international climate, and the proximity of this summer’s Olympic Games to the Middle East, we better all be rooting for the birthplace of the Olympics. A lot more at stake here than a few more cracks in the Parthenon.
So Taguchi. You’re darn right. He’s in over his head when with the major-league Cardinals (and has seemed so at the plate sometimes here in Memphis). But as for comportment, approach, and professionalism, this Japanese veteran has been worth his seven-figure contract. And mark my words: if the Cardinals are contending this September, you’ll see Taguchi as a regular late-inning defensive replacement. The guy can play the outfield with the best of them.
Memphis social worker Kerry Fulmer (right) listens to the voice of Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry during a conference call at an open house for local Kerry supporters Sunday. The event, which took place at the East Memphis home of Millie Katzen, was one of several presided over lately by Fulmer, who is the Massachusetts senatorÕs first cousin, once removed, and heads up volunteer efforts for him in Shelby County.