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Public Relations

The war on terror in the Middle East is a public relations nightmare for the United States and a bonanza for the terrorists.

We’re trying to sell freedom, but we promoted freedom far more successfully for decades with Coca-Cola, Levi’s, and rock-and-roll. We are losing the public relations battle because we are failing to grasp its complexity. We’ve ignored the key PR questions — “Who is our audience?” and “How can we best influence them?”

The relationship between terrorism and media coverage is incestuous. The French government understood the complexity of this relationship in the late 1980s when Paris was repeatedly rocked by terrorist attacks. European officials did not begin a “war on terror” but conducted a series of still- ongoing special operations at home and abroad to attack terrorist groups at their core.

The European strategy stems from an understanding that, historically, all terrorist groups eventually weaken or self-destruct. This has been the case with groups from the Symbionese Liberation Army to the IRA. As these groups evolve and begin to conduct their violent business, they lose support from the public and are forced to turn inward, especially when they are tracked with competent intelligence. In hiding, they lose touch with the mainstream political movements that spawned them and are forced to focus on survival rather than growth. This growing isolation eventually leads to the decline of the group.

After September 11th, most of the world was on America’s side. Even many of those who sympathized with the ideas of Arab extremists were repulsed by the attacks. It was a golden opportunity to weaken the terrorist network worldwide. The day after the attacks, France’s largest newspaper, the left-leaning Le Monde, ran a headline that read, “We Are All Americans.” The paper would not think of running such a headline today.

What happened?

We are trying to wage a traditional war on a nontraditional — and PR-savvy — fringe element. In the Middle East, such radical groups have thrived under authoritarian regimes like those of Saudi Arabia and Egypt. They radicalize in the face of ineffective governmental response to social and political problems (e.g., health care, poverty, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict).

The U.S. must stop supporting these governments, first because it damages our credibility and goes against our basic principles, but more important, because it is simply not necessary to our survival. The Cold War is over. Countries such as Turkey are proving that Islamic nations can create their own brand of freedom without American intervention. Other authoritarian regimes, such as Iran, will eventually self-destruct with the right economic and ideological pressures, much as the U.S.S.R. did.

We won the Cold War with a combination of ideology, well-marketed cultural and consumer products, undercover operations, and, most important, the internal failure of a system that could not meet the demands of its citizens. Fostering some form of democracy in Middle-Eastern countries would undoubtedly be good, but using force to do so represents a lack of understanding of the complexities involved.

We are losing the public opinion war in the Middle East. We have elevated the status of al-Qaeda far more than the group could have done on its own. Our American marketing savvy seems to have fallen by the wayside in favor of reactionary violence. Getting mad or trying to get even won’t solve the problem. America needs to get smart.

Tatine Darker is a graduate student in political science at the University of Memphis.

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Cover Feature News

All Over

ELECTION COVERAGE

Bush Back(s) In By Jackson Baker

The Eternal Return By Chris Davis

The Local Angle by John Branston

Seating New School Board By Janel Davis

Bush Back(s) In

GOP gains at the legislative level and school-board surprises highlight other results.

Election Day 2004 was a day of mixed messages and, intermittent rains notwithstanding, brisk turnouts at the polls. Almost 375,000 votes were cast in Shelby County, along with 2 million statewide. Both were records, added on to what had already been precedent-shattering totals for early voting.

Though the Big Issue on everybody’s mind — that of the presidency — remained unsettled until mid-morning Wednesday, when Democrat John Kerry made a surprise concession to President Bush, shake-ups in other races were signaled early on. These were local, where two school-board incumbents suffered reverses, and statewide, where the Republicans added significant legislative gains to Bush’s electoral-vote victory in Tennessee.

Local Democratic activist Cheri DelBrocco reported a wait of an hour and a half on Tuesday morning at Temple Israel on East Massey. And her own expectations were stood on their head. Seniors in line, supposedly responsive to traditional Democratic positions, were indicating their intention to vote for Bush, while youngish mothers with children — the conservative-minded “soccer moms” of yore — were talking up Kerry.

As local Kerry campaign director David Cocke boasted to the faithful from a stage at Beale Street’s Plush Club Tuesday night, Shelby County would go for Kerry by some 52,000 votes — 2,000 more than separated Al Gore from Bush in 2000. But that was countered by local Republican chairman Kemp Conrad, who presided over a crowded election-watch party at GOP headquarters on Ridgeway.

Conrad, who had set as a goal the cutting in half of Gore’s countywide majority, nevertheless professed himself “thrilled” by the election results. “We had an increase of 10 percent in Shelby County overall, and of that new 10 percent, Republicans got 75 percent,” Conrad maintained. He further noted that his party had captured a majority in the state Senate and that Shelby County had provided more votes than any other Tennessee locality for Bush, who won the state, Conrad calculated, with “a 13 percent majority.”

Though they were moot as far as influencing any local outcomes, both Conrad and Cocke, as well as state representative Kathryn Bowers, the Shelby County Democratic chairperson, were nigh on to apoplectic about what each of them saw as the other party’s machinations and about apparent screw-ups in communications between the Election Commission downtown and various local precincts.

For Cocke, the issue was the issuance of provisional ballots to voters whose credentials could not be verified at local polling places. By his estimation, these were mainly Democratic and numbered “in the thousands.” Worse, though, was what we called the “confusion” resulting from the communications breakdown. “You have to blame the commission,” he said. “There was gross incompetence. It doesn’t matter what party was responsible.” (Democrats have a 3-2 majority on the panel.)

A corollary to Cocke’s concern was one advanced by Probate Court clerk Chris Thomas, a Republican, who claimed that at one precinct at least 75 voters who should have been classified as provisional were allowed to vote by machine. He, too, blamed a communications breakdown between the commission and outlying precincts.

Even as the polls were opening Tuesday morning, Bowers and Conrad were in a verbal tangle over what the Democratic chairman charged were efforts by Republican poll-watchers to intimidate and disqualify obvious Democratic voters — African Americans in the main. Conrad said the charge was “an attempt to play the race card — right out of the Kerry/Edwards playbook” and unjustified by any Republican conduct “past or present.”

The local controversies reflected some accruing to the Big Issue nationally — that of who gets to be president for the next four years. All hinged on Ohio, whose vote count had been delayed, contingent on what at first was predicted to be a weeklong counting of provisional ballots in that state. Right up to the point of Kerry’s Wednesday-morning concession, Bush maintained a numerically slight lead in that all-important Midwestern state, which even before Tuesday’s voting had been generally classified as one of three decisive “battleground states” — the others being Florida, which went for Bush, and Pennsylvania, which went for Kerry.

In the final mathematics, the winner of Ohio’s 20 electoral votes was destined to be elected president. That was the bottom line, and that was the line reluctantly crossed by Kerry — reportedly at the behest of his wife Teresa.

Though there were several well-watched races on the local ballot, most eyes at the two party election-watch parties — the Republicans at their Ridgeway headquarters, the Democrats at the Plush Club — were fixed on the several big TV screens that sporadically presented the presidential results in key states.

Burned in 2000 by what turned out to be premature calls of Florida for both Gore and Bush, the networks were reticent about stating their conclusions. Notable in this regard were CBS News and the Fox News Channel, criticized by Republican and Democratic partisans, respectively, for their alleged biases.

Though he had been billed as one of the star attractions at the Plush Club festivities Tuesday night, 9th District U.S. representative Harold Ford Jr. had decamped earlier in the day for Boston, where, as a national co-chair of Senator Kerry’s effort, he intended to share a stage with the Democratic nominee in Copley Square.

Given the incompleteness of the outcome, the Democrats’ celebration never occurred, however, nor did the Republicans indulge in one at their national headquarters in suburban Virginia. Local Republicans did whoop it up on Ridgeway, however, claiming victory as soon as the Fox network got over its unaccustomed bashfulness and put Ohio in the Bush column just before midnight, Memphis time.

Though local office-holders were numerous on Ridgeway, Memphis lawyer David Kustoff, Bush’s state campaign chairman, joined other GOP bigwigs in Nashville to monitor statewide and national results.

And though Representative Ford was not to be seen at the Plush Club, other members of the Ford clan were. There was, for example, Uncle John Ford, the controversial District 29 state senator, who took the occasion to proclaim to another attendee, “You’re looking at the next mayor” — a boast which underlined the curious absence from political events, this week or at any time in this campaign year, of Memphis mayor Willie Herenton.

And Isaac Ford, a sometime candidate for various offices and the congressman’s brother, was going about at the Plush, impeccably suited and chanting, somewhat inscrutably, “Hip-hop politics! This is hip-hop politics!”

Whatever it meant, it was a counterpart of sorts to “flip-flop” — the pejorative used by Bush and other Republicans against Kerry that figured large in this year’s presidential campaign. For a while, it seemed that term “flip-flop” might come to describe the outcome of the presidential race. But that was before Kerry resolved on his concession statement Wednesday — an act that no one could call ambivalent.

Meanwhile, these were the winners and losers in local and statewide voting:

Legislative Races: Potentially dramatic change was in the offing for the next session of Tennessee’s General Assembly, as two Middle Tennessee Democratic state senators — Jo Ann Graves (Clarksville) of District 18 and Larry Trail (Murfreesboro) of District 16 — fell to Republican challengers Diane Black and Jim Tracy, respectively. As Memphis lawyer John Ryder, the GOP’s immediate past national committeeman from Tennessee pointed out, “That gives Tennessee its first elected state Senate majority in history.”

A survivor, though, was the Senate’s presiding officer, Lt. Governor John Wilder of Somerville, who turned aside a challenge from Republican Ron Stallings. And the speaker of the state House of Representatives, Jimmy Naifeh of Covington, won an easier-than-expected victory over Dr. Jesse Cannon, his GOP opponent.

Although Republicans had a net gain of one seat in the House, the Democrats — and presumably Naifeh — will maintain their power, with a seven-vote majority. What happens in the Senate, where nominal Democrat Wilder has in recent years functioned as a de facto nonpartisan leader, is still uncertain. The Senate speaker has had the declared support of three GOP senators, including Shelby County’s Curtis Person, but Ryder predicts that there will be a “grassroots” demand from Republicans that the GOP get to name one of its own as speaker.

All the incumbents in Shelby County and its environs held on to their seats. That included Democrat Mike Kernell in state House District 93, who won over Republican John Pellicciotti with somewhat greater ease than he had in 2002, when the two first tangled.

At a Republican rally in Shelby County on Monday night, Pellicciotti had been fatalistic. “I’d like to flatter myself that what I do or what Mike does in our campaigns will make the marginal difference that elects one of us or the other,” said the young businessman. “But the fact is, I think these local races, where they’re close, will be driven by the Bush/Kerry race. Whoever does the best job of getting their voters out for president will determine the outcome in District 93, too, I think.”

Though, as previously indicated, spokesmen for the two parties differed as to which party actually improved its lot in Shelby County, Pellicciotti’s stoic forecast might have been on target.

Another Democratic House member, Beverly Marrero, turned back Republican Jim Jamieson’s third try for the District 89 seat, and Democrat Henri Brooks easily beat Republican D. Jack Smith, a former Democratic legislator, in District 92. Ditto with Barbara Cooper over George Edwards in District 86.

Two local Republicans, House GOP leader Tre Hargett and newcomer Brian Kelsey won easy victories over Democrats Susan Slyfield and Julian Prewitt in Districts 97 and 83, respectively. Republican state senator Mark Norris and Democratic senator Steve Cohen easily disposed of their opponents. Cohen eclipsed both Republican Johnny Hatcher and Mary Taylor Shelby, a perennial running as an independent. Norris won two-to-one over Democrat Pete Parker.

School-Board Races: Two upsets and one narrow escape dominated results in the five contested elections for the Memphis board.

In the closest race, incumbent Wanda Halbert of Position One, At-Large, profited from the halving of the “anti” vote between her two major opponents, second-place finished Kenneth Whalum Jr. and Robert Spence. But her board colleagues Willie Brooks in District 1 and Hubon “Dutch” Sandridge in District 7 were not so lucky, polling well behind newcomers Stephanie Gatewood and Tomeka Hart, respectively.

Gatewood won outright. Sandridge will get to fight another day, however, since Hart failed to get an absolute majority; the balance of the vote went to third-place finisher Terry Becton.

Patrice Robinson defeated Juanita Clark Stevenson and Annabel Hernandez-Rodriguez Turner in District 3. And Dr. Jeff Warren defeated Rev. Herman Powell in a battle of newcomers for the right to succeed the retiring Lora Jobe in District 5.

Congressional and Legislative Races: All members of the Tennessee congressional delegation won handily or without opposition — including: 7th District Republican congressman Marsha Blackburn, who was unopposed; 8th District Democratic congressman John Tanner, who buried unregenerate racist James L. Hart, running with the GOP label but repudiated by every Republican in sight; and 9th District congressman Ford, who racked up a better than 4-to-1 majority against Republican Ruben M. Fort.

Oh, and there was an unknown — because they are so far uncounted — number of votes for gay activist Jim Maynard, the write-in candidate who was spurred to oppose Ford because of the congressman’s support of a federal marriage amendment that would exclude gay matrimony.

In a post-election press release, Maynard said he was considering a formal run against Ford “in the next primary” — which, given that the congressman will almost certainly next be seeking the U.S. Senate seat which current incumbent Bill Frist has said he will vacate in 2006, would escalate Maynard’s goal as well.

Though Maynard’s effort this year — not even noted by most media outlets — never amounted to more than a blip on anybody’s radar screen, he made some effort in his press release to put his own circumstances in a larger context. Referring to Tuesday’s overall national outcome as a “sad election,” Maynard went on to sum up thusly: “George Bush lost every debate to John Kerry. The exit polls showed that the majority of voters opposed Bush’s handling of the economy and the War in Iraq. So why did he win such a large popular vote (51 percent)? The polls show that the most important issue to voters were “moral” issues (i.e. abortion and gay marriage.)

“The Republican Party, under the direction of Karl Rove, strategically planned to use the issue of gay marriage to motivate the Christian Right and to divide the base of the Democratic Party. They succeeded. As I predicted, the issue of gay marriage and gay rights may have played a larger role in this election than the economy or the Iraq War. The political Right uses cultural issues like abortion and gay rights to win the support of people who do not benefit much if at all from Republican economic policies.

” Like the rest of the world, I am baffled by the choice the American people have made today.”

One wonders how “baffled” Maynard could actually be, having just pinpointed one of the clear reasons for the seismic, and potentially permanent, shift to Republican control in national and statewide — and, perhaps even in the long run, local — politics.

Not long before his death last month, religious right activist Ed McAteer, who had no trouble acknowledging he wouldn’t know a Laffer Curve (or any other economic precept) from a laugh track, said his own de facto support for Republican causes and candidates owed almost wholly to social and moral issues. Otherwise, he could be a Democrat. Even Moral Majority mogul Jerry Falwell, on a visit to Memphis some years back, had said much the same thing.

It isn’t a matter of better or worse. It’s just reality — which one postmodern school of philosophy defines simply as “that which is the case.”

With Bush backing in again and the GOP stealthily gaining elsewhere, Republicanism is increasingly the case.


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The Eternal Return

By CHRIS DAVIS

In the streets, on the airwaves, and up and down in the polls.

It was one of those goddamn Holden Caulfield moments. Some local coup de rouge had slapped a “John Kerry: the Terrorist Choice” bumper sticker on the big Kerry/Edwards sign right in front of the offices of the Shelby County Democratic Party. A handful of moist Kerry supporters stood in front of the vandalized billboard soliciting honks from Dem-friendly motorists speeding down Poplar Avenue. Watching the dynamic donkeys cheer in front of that sign was like watching some poor schmuck make his way through a crowd wearing a grin on his face and a “kick me” sign on his back. The sky was the color of wet asphalt and the rain was unrelenting. I wanted to tear the offending sticker down, but how could I? Where there’s one bumper sticker, there are hundreds, at least. They were destined to return.

Half an hour earlier, Rush Limbaugh, the right’s pill-popping superpundit, had been blathering away on the radio about Osama’s most recent video. According to Rush, bin Laden’s message was full of “talking points from Michael Moore’s damnable cinematic opus Fahrenheit 9/11.” He said the al- Qaeda leader made veiled references to Dick Cheney’s former company Halliburton and its special no-bid U.S. government contracts, proving once and for all time that one out of one terrorist masterminds recommend the Democratic ticket. It was almost like bin Laden had access to John Kerry’s secret diaries. It was almost like bin Laden and Kerry were two sides of the same waffle. Rush stopped short of saying exactly that, but it was a fine and cutting point from the man whose abbreviated career as a racist sportscaster and subsequent drug bust have made him a little less likely to go out on a limb. And like the sign said, “John Kerry: the Terrorist Choice.”

“Mega dittos, Rush,” said a long-time listener and first-time caller from one of the battleground states. He had phoned in to say that he was working hard to see President Bush reelected. Rush told him, “You’re doing the Lord’s work.”

Early on, it became clear — at least if you used Limbaugh’s logic — that Shelby County was siding with al-Qaeda and other enemies of the Lord. In spite of the nasty weather, Kerry supporters were waving signs all over town. There were Bush supporters too, but they looked lonelier and somehow wetter. Still, there were no lines outside the polls at Humes Middle School or at the fire station on Thomas near Chelsea. Most of the Democratic campaign workers in these heavily black polling districts blamed it on the rain. Some blamed early voting. Everybody said things would pick up as the day wore on. They repeated this as the day wore on.

By mid-afternoon, Tucker Carlson, Crossfire‘s boyish Republican shill, looked like he’d lost his best friend. The exit polls spelled bad news for the president, and Tucker seemed ready to concede defeat. The liberal blogosphere was rippling with cautious optimism. BuzzFlash.com, a popular clearinghouse for left-leaning literature posts, included an editorial by Memphis author Jeff Crook:

“The hills have suffered four years of drought and fire. But when it finally rains, you get landslides.

“This morning, I arrived at the polls at 7:30 a.m. It was raining, but there was already a line out the door, people standing under umbrellas, more people walking toward the school, cars parked (and stuck) in the mud along Holmes Road, and a wrecker backing up to pull someone out. I couldn’t find a place to park.

“It was a beautiful thing, seeing all those people standing there in the rain waiting to vote. It was a beautiful thing, seeing all those kids staring at us in wonder, the lesson from yesterday’s mock election reinforced by seeing their parents and neighbors standing in line to participate in the real thing. And everyone in line was watching the kids too. I don’t know what they were thinking, but I was thinking, That’s who I was voting for. I was voting for them. I was voting for their future.”

The illusion of a high voter turnout taken in conjunction with Kerry’s momentum in the polls looked like good news for Democrats. But Sean Hannity had taken the hand-off from Rush and he’s on the air repeating everything the fat man has already said about Kerry and bin Laden sitting in a tree K-I-S-S-I-N-G. It wouldn’t be long before Memphis’ own Mike Fleming will be offering likeminded opinions live from his lofty perch at Owen Brennan’s.

An ad ran on WREC-AM 600 talk radio that marveled at how America hasn’t been attacked since 9/11. It praised the American military for taking out Saddam and preventing him from giving aid and comfort to all those terrorists. It went on to say that the American military has something in common with the fine billiard tables offered by a certain East Memphis retailer: They are, without a doubt, the best in the world. It was one of many administration-friendly advertorials placed by local businesses.

On CBS, Dan Rather announced that “Bush is sweeping through the Midwest like a combine.” The returns were starting to come in, and Kerry’s vaunted momentum was taking him nowhere fast. The networks and the blogosphere scored a virtual tie in announcing that the younger generation, presumed to be fired up and leaning heavily toward Kerry, didn’t show up at the polls. Twelve hours later both worlds report that young people did turn out in record numbers, but so did their folks.

As late as 6 p.m., Fox was still touting the phony Drudge story about voting machines in Philadelphia that were loaded up with votes before the polls even opened. By noon, Philly’s election officials had confirmed that the phantom numbers were from an odometer that records every vote ever cast on the machine in every election and had no bearing on the election at hand. The blogosphere broke out in goosebumps as news got out about a slew of G.O.P. lawsuits shutting down polling locations in Ohio.

At 10:40 p.m. EST, Josh Marshall of TalkingPointsMemo.com wrote, “Why no more network coverage of the flurry of lawsuits across Ohio? This is what the election is coming down to. And it’s not being reported.” About an hour later, Ohio — the state promised to Bush by Walden O’Dell, the CEO behind Diebold’s controversial black-box voting systems — finally becomes the focus of TV news coverage.

As Ohio went into overtime, the talking heads got busy constructing a narrative that explains Bush’s apparent trend-defying victory. Their conclusion: America voted its values. “It turned out to be all about guns, God, and gays,” one pundit said in passing. Frequent allusions were made to Karl Rove’s ace in the hole, an alleged four million Evangelical Christians who didn’t vote in the 2000 election. Given the president’s three-million vote lead in the popular vote, that story seemed to make sense but only on a superficial level.

Guns, God, and gays were all in play when Kerry was hailed as the overall victor in the presidential debates. Kerry’s message of sending aid to the middle class picked up steam, as job forecasts remained bleak and consumer confidence continued to drop through the floor. And then the bombshell dropped when it was announced that 377 tons of high-powered explosives were missing in Iraq and had likely fallen into enemy hands. For two full days the president and his staff were caught flatfooted. All the momentum was shifting in Kerry’s direction, and even polls that oversampled Republicans reflected the shift. Pollmeister John Zogby went so far as to call the election for Kerry on an episode of The Daily Show, which could have sent the wrong message to the show’s famously young, liberal, and — according to Bill O’Reilly — stoned audience: Stay home and smoke it, kiddos, everything’s gonna be copacetic.

Then bin Laden reared his ugly head. And, according to Rush and Hannity and all those guys at Fox, bin Laden’s been drinking a little too much of that liberal Kool-Aid. There’s a flurry of news stories about possible terrorist attacks aimed at disrupting the elections. The word on the street was “orange.” Evidence of organized attempts by the GOP to suppress the vote in places like Ohio, Nevada, and Florida went largely unreported while the media turned its collective attention to Osama’s personal endorsement of John Kerry: the Terrorist Choice.

Early Wednesday morning, even as CNN.com was proclaiming, “Bush Camp Certain of a Win,” the proprietor of the DailyKos.com, a massive liberal blog, was bitchslapping his readers for bitchslapping each other.

“What I found in my reading [posts and e-mails] was a plethora of bashing Christians, bashing Kerry, bashing gays, bashing Edwards, bashing Kos, bashing America, and bashing each other as well as a lot of people saying they’re abandoning the Democrats, abandoning politics, abandoning the country,” Kos wrote. “This descent into despair and irrationality and surrender puts icing on the Republican victory cake.” His overall message was simple: Shut up and organize.

It’s becoming relatively clear that early reports of a record voter turnout were greatly exaggerated in terms of the percentage of eligible voters who actually took the time to vote. Since the Democrats outstripped their opponents in registering new voters, it can be assumed that the majority of no-shows were registered by Dems who failed to get their newbies to the polls.

Morning in America turned to mourning in Democratic circles when news came that John Kerry had conceded the election to President Bush. The incumbent won his second term and his first legitimate victory. So what? America is still deeply and bitterly divided, and as long as half of America represents “the Terrorist’s Choice” and the other half is doing “the Lord’s work,” that’s not going to change.


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The Local Angle by John Branston

Voters jam the phones, read the fine print.

by John Branston

So many willing voters, so many ways to win them.

More than 374,000 people in Shelby County voted Tuesday; 220,000 of them voted in a city-school board race. The fall-off factor itself fell off.

The residency referendum won, the payroll tax lost. Voters apparently are not so intimidated by fine print after all and can distinguish one proposal from another.

The only Ford family candidate was barely visible. So was Mayor Herenton who, according to an aide, spent election night at home. So were those patented and widely distributed endorsement ballots that supposedly swung huge numbers of voters in other elections.

Shelby County Democratic Party headquarters was dark before the 10 o’clock news. That their candidate, John Kerry, handily won Shelby County with almost 58 percent of the vote suggested how little it mattered in the scheme of things.

Electorally, Tennessee looks more and more like Mississippi, based on the 57 percent to 43 percent Bush margin. Without someone like Ross Perot in the race to take votes away from the Republicans, as he did in 1996, Democrats can kiss Tennessee good-bye.

At the Shelby County Election Commission, the day started like a barnburner. All 20 phones were tied up, as were 80 more at another site in East Memphis, with calls from precincts about provisional voters. Election Commission veteran O.C. Pleasant sensed trouble. The provisional ballots would not be counted until the day after the election. “The outcome could be in the balance in close races,” said Pleasant.

Poll workers like Darrell Mack, in charge of provisional ballots at Precinct 20-01 in Midtown, were unable to get through on the phones 20 minutes after the polls opened. Fortunately, he said, “People have been very nice. Nobody got aggravated.” By that afternoon, the Election Commission had commandeered another 40 phones downtown, and the problem was resolved. And by evening, as the votes came in, there were only a handful of reporters and campaign strategists watching the returns as they were posted on the big screen in the jury room.

One of them was Jerry Hall, a political consultant to school-board candidate Wanda Halbert. Along with Jay Bailey and Ron Redwing, Hall formed a black coalition with wide experience in city and county government to back Halbert and another school-board winner, Stephanie Gatewood.

“We’re not rich people,” Hall said, taking dead aim at the supporters of Halbert opponent Robert Spence.

Some called the alliance of the Hyde Foundation, Plough Foundation, M-Pact, and white supporters of Spence and school-board candidates Tomeka Hart, Patrice Robinson, Willie Brooks, and Jeff Warren “the green team.”

That nonpartisan alliance, however, did not manage to elect Spence, the former city attorney, but it did put another school-board incument, Hubon Sandridge, in jeopardy. Sandridge faces a runoff with Hart, who missed an outright victory by three percentage points. The green team will be back.

Another power-broker with a mixed record was the Memphis Education Association, which endorsed Sandridge, Brooks, Robinson, and Halbert. The old politics of the MEA union and the new politics of the green team will go head-to-head in the December 7th runoff between Sandridge (a minister) and Hart (a lawyer with a firm known for taking on unions).

If provisional voters — a polite term for people who go to the wrong polling place and take their chances by casting a paper ballot — did not become the story of the day, some 166,000 early voters, by some accounts, did live up to their, uh, advances.

“Statistically speaking, early voting has already decided these elections,” said City Council veteran Tom Marshall. “The old-school campaign strategy was to get your folks out on Election Day. That is going to hurt some folks this time.”

That reasoning holds if the early-vote demographic fairly reflects the Election Day demographic. While no candidate or referendum on the local ballot won the early vote and lost the overall vote or vice-versa, the total varied by at least a few percentage points in several cases. Spence, for instance, outpolled runner-up Kenneth Whalum Jr. in the early vote but not in the final vote and finished third. In other words, it still ain’t over ’til it’s over.

Marshall’s colleague Myron Lowery saw a couple of other omens. He noted that Memphis voters overwhelmingly approved a referendum requiring city employees to live in Memphis and even more overwhelmingly rejected a payroll tax on city residents and outsiders who work in Memphis.

Lowery took that as an indication that voters have a longer attention span and more critical judgment than some people think they do. He has a vested interest as both a councilman and a candidate for the proposed charter commission, tentatively scheduled to be voted up or down on December 7th.

“I think the charter commission is good,” he said. “I don’t think the city should appeal. I think they should look at it as a wonderful opportunity.”

The payroll tax was tarred with a charge of vagueness and a “just vote no” campaign led by the Memphis Regional Chamber of Commerce. At several inner-city precincts, young black men and women carried signs and posters opposing the proposed tax. Pressed to explain her position, a worker at the Dave Wells Community Center simply produced a green handbill urging a “no” vote and featuring a picture of a white man identified as Chuck Strong, “a small-business owner in the city of Memphis for 23 years.”

The vagueness charge could return next month to haunt the charter commission, an equally open-ended proposition whose core constituency might be described as Grumpy Old White Men.

In the last analysis — aren’t you glad to hear those words? — Memphis looks ever more like an island, just like every other Southern and Midwestern city with a large black population. The presidential vote in Shelby County (of which Memphis is 75 percent) was a near mirror image of Tennessee’s statewide support for Bush.

The Chamber of Commerce looks like a player, but it will have to make peace with Janet Hooks and her friends on the City Council. Hall and Redwing and Bailey and consultants who play it as it lays are another force to be reckoned with. So are black moderates like Harold Ford Jr., who tone it down to the point of blandness. And I don’t know this, but I would bet a nickel that Willie Herenton voted for Bush.


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Seating New School Board

Makeup and mindset change with election.

by Janel Davis

By the end of election night, with all precincts reporting, all but one of the Memphis City School Board races had been determined, giving voters a glimpse of that body’s new composition for the upcoming session.

Change is brewing as one incumbent was unseated, another faced a runoff election, and one left her seat for a newcomer. When the board convenes next year, its membership will still reflect the school district’s composition, which is majority African-American. But it will also have several new faces and personalities.

As expected, newcomer and physician Dr. Jeffery Warren beat Herman Powell for the District 5 seat vacated by former commissioner Lora Jobe. With Jobe’s endorsement, it was an easy victory for Warren. In previous interviews, Jobe said her nine years on the board were enough.

With her departure goes the leading advocate to abolish corporal punishment in the schools. While the issue is not over — a vote is expected by the newly seated board — Jobe was its strongest challenger. Warren, also opposed to corporal punishment but with no previous board experience, will be hard-pressed to produce the same amount of influence.

Warren’s addition to the board adds another male member to the body, making up for incumbent Willie Brooks, who lost his District 1 seat to Stephanie Gatewood. Brooks and Gatewood had been challengers for the same position just one year ago, after the death of commissioner Lee Brown. Brooks won that special election and served just 11 months.

“I said to myself if I could lose the first election by only 118 votes after having raised only $300, then there was no telling how well I could do this time,” said Gatewood from her Marshall Avenue headquarters on election night.

“This time I only raised about $2,500 and won. I didn’t have any big endorsements and no money to speak of, but look at what hard work and grass roots can do,” she said. “Who knows? Maybe I can be president of the United States next.”

Brooks had been endorsed by The Commercial Appeal for his quiet leadership but had been criticized by other candidates and voters for that same demeanor. In a city used to a boisterous and outspoken members, Brooks’ character at times seemed out of place. At his North Memphis headquarters, the atmosphere on election night was vintage Brooks: quiet and calm.

“I won’t make any comment about what was different in this election than in the last one, but from the beginning it has been about working with the students and building relationships,” said Brooks, speaking barely above the noise of supporters standing outside. “I value my time on the board and the work that I was able to do with Superintendent Carol Johnson.”

With Gatewood in office, voters can certainly expect more volume. With a high-pitched voice and outgoing personality, she brings her volunteerism and community involvement to the board, tenets of a platform appealing to 59 percent of voters in her district. Still buoyed by the win Tuesday night, Gatewood was quick to highlight the work ahead.

“We have a lot of work to do in my district,” she said. “My district is so large and diverse. We’ve got some schools with zero percent parental involvement and then we’ve got some with 100 percent parental involvement. We’ve got to find a way to bring the level of involvement and everything else up to equal levels.”

Gatewood, a single mother of two, brought parental involvement for single mothers to the race, which was also a large part of the campaign in the District 3 election. In that race, incumbent and current board president Patrice Robinson beat single parent Juanita Stevenson for another term. Although she lost by more than 20 percent, Stevenson’s “Fresh Start” campaign raised voters’ awareness to the need for checks and balances with the board budget and spending. Robinson had been criticized when she suggested using school board funds for expensive meeting chairs.

A strong showing by challengers with no previous board experience sent the message to incumbents that no seat was safe. The closest race of the night was the At-Large Position 1 race, in which incumbent Wanda Halbert narrowly beat two challengers. But Halbert downplayed the close vote.

“We had a lot of name recognition and some strong political and financial backing involved in the campaign, also a lot of negative messages that got out there that may have made some decisions,” she said. “I just think the numbers are attributed to the dynamics of who was in the race more so than anything anti-incumbent.”

Halbert’s challengers, Pastor Kenneth Whalum and attorney Robert Spence, had certain advantages, such as their own name recognition and Halbert’s reputation for a disrespectful attitude toward fellow board members, district employees, and former superintendent Johnnie Watson.

After finishing second in the race for which there are no run-offs, Whalum’s kept open his options for a future race and expressed concern that Halbert will remain on the board. Calling himself the race’s “800-pound gorilla,” Whalum came within 2 percentage points of an upset, employing mostly church and community volunteers to make up for few endorsements and limited finances.

“From this I hope [Halbert] will say to herself, ‘Two-thirds of the voters voted against me and perhaps I need to assess the way I handle myself,'” he said. “I’m hoping the new board will be more civil, but that remains to be seen because Wanda is still there, and Wanda and [fellow commissioner] Sara Lewis have always been the most boisterous and most out of line with school board policy. We’ll probably see more of the same, and that’s too bad.”

Before the new board can be seated, District 7 must hold a runoff, since no candidate received at least 50 percent of the votes. District 7 incumbent Hubon Sandridge faces an uphill battle from challenger Tomeka Hart, who finished the general election 16 points ahead. Reeling from the positive results, Hart stood outside her headquarters with a smile of triumph. “The voters showed tonight that it was time for a change,” she said.

Sandridge has already promised a victory in the runoff election, saying his 17 years of school-board service will guarantee the win. Early in the campaign, he dismissed the challenges of Hart and other opponents, saying he found their aspirations admirable but their efforts insignificant.

While Hart’s initial victory was helped by support from the New Path young professionals group, Sandridge’s own actions may have been more beneficial. Years of discontent and public outbursts on the school board have painted Sandridge as stagnant in the district’s attempt to move forward in both achievement levels and public perception.

When asked about his campaign platform and efforts, Sandridge told the Flyer, “You can write what you want, but my 17-year record speaks for itself and the voters in my district know my record.” According to the election-night results, the voters in that district may know his record all too well.

Memphis City School Board Winners

At-Large, Position 1

Wanda Halbert – incumbent

District 1

Stephanie Gatewood

District 3

Patrice Robinson – incumbent

District 5

Dr. Jeffery Warren

District 7 —

Runoff Election to be held December 7th

Tomeka Hart

Hubon Sandridge – incumbent

Categories
News The Fly-By

GEST APPEARANCE

David Gest, the producer mostly famous for his rather embarrassing marriage to Liza Minnelli, has become a naturalized Memphian. To celebrate, he’ll host a little coming-out party at the Cannon Center on December 6th. Though tickets may be purchased for as little as $45, the good seats range in price from $1,000 to $25,000. Potential advertisers can buy the center spread in his commemorative program for a mere $35,000. Considering that party guests include Topol, the Doobie Brothers, Patricia Neal, a host of other bands you probably thought had broken up, and a slew of golden-age celebrities you thought were dead, it’s really quite a bargain.

In related news, Charles Nelson Reilly has canceled his scheduled appearance with Opera Memphis due to illness. And no, I’m not making that up either.

Chris Davis

(Note: A previously posted item about a blogger’s taking exception to a News Channel 3 weather alert mentioned a response to that by Darrell Phillips, a newsman for WMC-TV, Action News 5. Some readers may have gained the impression that Phillips was an employee of WREG-TV. We regret the confusion.)

Plante: How It Looks

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

This Is the Life

Biopics are awful. Let’s just get that out of the way, shall we? No film genre is so historically stodgy, so dull, so consistently conventional. No matter the subject, they all have the exact same story arc — rise, fall, redemption. Rinse and repeat. And the bad news about Taylor Hackford’s Ray is that it could be the archetypal example of this sorry genre.

Ray Charles is an irresistible subject for this kind of treatment. As a beloved and recently deceased cultural hero who triumphed over addiction, racism, and disability, it’s a role waiting for an Oscar moment, and you’d better believe Jamie Foxx is already clearing mantel space.

From the stiff chronology to the slideshow segues to the hackneyed flashbacks to a truly awful final stretch that goes from a too-snappy Freudian deus ex machina to a classroom-doc wrap-up, Hackford and co-writer James L. White do everything in their power to trip this film up. And yet Ray succeeds in spite of it all.

A lot of this success has to do with acting. Given the blindness, the sunglasses, and the identifiable mannerisms, Charles might be easy to mimic, but give Foxx credit for nailing the role. Following excellent performances in Any Given Sunday, Ali (a far more failed biopic but supplying perhaps Foxx’s best performance as Ali’s cornerman), and Collateral, Foxx’s Ray completes his transition to A-list status.

But it’s the “Hey, it’s that guy!” factor in the supporting cast that’s really special. Ray may boast more immensely likable but underrecognized actors in good roles than any movie this year: Kerry Washington plays Charles’ gospel-singer wife Della Bea. Best known for her supporting role in Save the Last Dance but best seen in her lead role in Jim McKay’s great indie Our Song, Washington might have the most glowing face of any young actress in movies today. Energetic Regina King (who hasn’t had a role this juicy since playing Mrs. Show Me the Money in Jerry Maguire) is a joy as Margie Hendricks, the lead Raelette who has Ray’s illegitimate child and whose torturous relationship with the star feeds scorching duets such as “Hit the Road Jack” and “(Night Time Is) The Right Time.” David Krumholtz, the Sizzlin’-lovin’ eldest son in Slums of Beverly Hills, gets to grow up as savvy, constantly bemused agent Milt Shaw. Ike Turner lookalike Thomas Jefferson Byrd (brilliant in Spike Lee’s Get on the Bus and Bamboozled) pops up as a bandmate who helps Charles get hooked on heroin. Best of all are Richard Schiff (intensely mopey Toby on The West Wing) and Curtis Armstrong (“Booger” from Revenge of the Nerds and the “Sometimes, Joel, you just have to say ‘What the fuck'” guy from Risky Business) as the patron saints of record geeks, Atlantic Records’ Jerry Wexler and Ahmet Ertegun, respectively.

That brings us to the other thing that Ray gets right: the music. That Ray Charles isn’t a cultural figure on par with Elvis, Dylan, and the Beatles can only be explained through racism, a case this movie doesn’t make. But the genius of “The Genius” is something it nails. Recording-session scenes — such as the one where Charles begins to break away from his influences (particularly Nat King Cole) by playing with Ertegun’s “Mess Around” or the excitement you see on the faces of the Raelettes as they’re coached to greatness –are thrilling even if they’re mostly too brief. An obviously embellished if not outright fictional scene where “What’d I Say” is written on the spot to fill time at the end of a concert is electric. The song surely wasn’t conceived this way, but the experience of the scene is true to the sense of spontaneity you get whenever the song is played.

If Ray misses anything it’s in not underscoring enough the historic transition Charles presided over merging gospel and R&B into soul. You get the reaction of his audience to the new sound, but without the on-screen presence of the gospel standards that Charles rewrote, the audience doesn’t hear it. But what the audience does hear is still plenty. Ray is a music movie in which the music — and the film’s attitude toward it –makes up for the deficiencies in moviemaking.

— Chris Herrington

In Birth, the latest film directed by Sexy Beast helmer Jonathan Glazer, an extraordinary premise is set forth against a realistic backdrop and acted out by realistic people. Anna, an ordinary woman (played by the unordinary Nicole Kidman), has just announced her engagement to Joseph (Danny Huston — director John’s son). It’s been 10 years since her beloved Sean died suddenly while jogging in the park, and now Anna is ready to move on. Or is she? As if on cue to spoil her potential happiness, a young boy who shares Anna’s departed husband’s name wanders into the home of Anna’s affluent mother and makes a startling announcement: He is Sean. The Sean.

At first, the boy is doubted, of course, but then he starts to demonstrate that he knows things. Things that only the departed Sean could have known. He recognizes furniture. He remembers that he and Anna got married 30 times in 30 churches. He remembers places where he and Anna “did it.” Surely this is a joke, right? Well, it’s not very funny. “Does Mr. Reincarnation want some cake?” asks Anna’s mother (played by wry and wonderful Lauren Bacall). He does.

There is an immensely rewarding pace in Birth that makes itself evident just when Anna starts wondering if there might be something to the young boy’s claim. Instead of sinking into a race-against-time format or conjuring up some urgency that requires car chases, death wishes, or, heaven forbid, special effects, Birth allows events to unfold in a deliberate but unforced near-crawl. Every day — be it an exceedingly important one or one like any other — still has 24 hours in it, and Birth treats time with the utmost regard. Sean, while claiming to be a reincarnated dead husband, still has to go to school. People have to go to work.

Everything about the way Birth unfolds seems exactly how real people might behave in these circumstances. They are skeptical to the point that we too would be skeptical, angered at the point when we ourselves would be angry. Its characters are bestowed with a respectability in that regard. Even as Anna becomes more and more obsessed with the boy’s claims, her surrounding family gets more and more worried about the potential harm of the situation. A lesser film might have them plot against the boy or send Anna to therapy or Do Something Drastic. Instead, they just worry aloud — as I think most people would do.

When the ever-patient Joseph erupts against the boy in the middle of a private concert (for sitting behind him and kicking his chair, as young boys do), his attack is not merely a dramatic, cinematic outburst; it is a fit of rage. These emotions are those of a confused, angry person instead of a Hollywood construct of the jealous boyfriend. His actions, like those of each of Birth‘s characters, are unpredictable and palpable. When Anna allows young Sean to take off his clothes and join her in her bath, one gasps, not because it’s sensationalistic or even sexual (it’s not), but because it is so honest and true to what Anna must be feeling.

Cameron Bright plays the boy, Sean. He is deadpan almost throughout yet has the presence of a little adult. There is a staidness and a posture that makes it very easy to believe that there is a husband — a man — somewhere inside the boy. He makes it easy to believe that Anna is confused. So are we. Is this a hoax? Is this boy the real thing or a gifted liar?

A pall hangs over the wealthy condominium where most of Birth takes place. Everything’s just a bit dimmer than it should be. The atmosphere is thick. You can almost smell it. There is, likewise, a musicality to the film that helps articulate its themes of birth, life, and death within that pall. The film’s beautiful scoring is filled with near-sacramental themes that evoke baptism, childhood, marriage, funeral. In one scene, Anna and Joseph have gone to the orchestra, and for almost a full minute, the camera indulges in a close-up of Anna’s face as a tempestuous movement is played that is reflected clearly in Anna’s eyes. This moment is like the rest of the film, edging us slightly to a place we may not want to go, to a mystery we may not want to solve but feel we must

Categories
News The Fly-By

Critical Care

Janet Chapman has been in the hospital with her mother before. Sitting at her bedside in a Baptist-Memphis emergency evaluation room, Chapman waited again for her mother’s test results and word from her doctor. But before the physician appeared, Chapman was visited by one of the hospital’s emergency room volunteers as part of the Experience Critical program.

The program, which employs volunteers as additional ER support staff and patient liaisons, has been so successful that Baptist Hospital has packaged the program for nationwide marketing.

“The Experience Critical Volunteer Corps grew out of a program in New York,” said Baptist chief nursing officer and vice president Beverly Jordan. “We took the program and put a different spin on it. What we do want is satisfied patients who feel confident and comfortable, and we want the experience of our volunteers to be happy.”

The program was instituted a year ago as the final part of a three-phase plan dealing with emergency room patients in the tri-state area. Patient research in this region, as well as nationwide, revealed the public’s misunderstanding and discomfort with hospital emergency rooms. Parts one and two of the plan educated residents and patients on the purpose of ERs. Phase two also educated the ER staff on easing patient and family anxiety.

“With the Experience Critical piece, our plan was also to expose 18- to 25-year-olds to health-care in hopes that they may see this as a potential career. The response has been tremendous,” said Jordan.

The volunteer corps of the program is geared toward students enrolled or interested in some type of medical curriculum, who are able to keep pace with the busy ER environment. Each branch of the Baptist Hospital system has its own set of volunteers who work and manage their own shift schedules throughout the day. Volunteers participate in three separate training sessions before beginning their first shifts.

The 40 Baptist-Memphis volunteers, like 19-year-old Devin Little, are introduced to the emergency room by head nurse Trais Hutcherson. Little, a general-nursing student, said her fascination with hospitals was fostered by her mother — a nurse at Methodist Hospital — and television’s hospital drama, ER.

“I don’t really know what to expect, but I know I’ll be helping people,” said Little prior to her first shift. She signed on to work from 3 to 10 p.m. each Thursday.

While some of the volunteers may be medical students or have prior hospital experience, they are not allowed to treat to patients. “We allow the volunteers to do customer-service activities and see to patients’ well-being: providing water, ice, and blankets, running items to the lab, assisting with patient transport, and communicating basic messages to patients’ families in the waiting room,” said nurse manager Brenda Ford.

In return for their services, volunteers receive internship or community service credits from their respective colleges. For some volunteers, serving others is enough.

Alongside the twentysomethings, Karen Woosley stands out. Woosley is one of Baptist-Collierville’s 12 volunteers. At 39, Woosley is in her fourth career. A former international business employee in St. Joseph Hospital’s insurance department, Woosley never forgot her love for medical centers. Between that career and her current enrollment at Baptist’s nursing school, Woosley took a 10-year hiatus to raise two children and teach preschool.

“This is a perfect experience for me,” she said. “I try to treat the patients the way I would want to be treated if I were in their situation, and the patients are so receptive to that.”

At the Collierville hospital, the pace is slower and more to the liking of volunteers like Woosley. The ER consists of only a few examination rooms compared to the bustle in Baptist’s East Memphis location. To make her shift run smoother, Woosley has typed index cards to keep track of each patient. The cards document patient requests, whether they may receive fluids, and whether or not the volunteer may enter the room.

“Each Saturday, when I get ready to come here, my kids say, ‘Mommy’s going to the hospital to be a doctor,'” said Woosley. “I have to tell them that I’m not a nurse just yet, but working with these patients has let me know that my heart is in the right place.”

E-mail: jdavis@memphisflyer.com

Categories
News The Fly-By

Covering the Kettles

Holiday shoppers will no longer be able to unload their change and a little holiday cheer in front of Target stores. After many years of allowing Salvation Army Santas to collect donations in red kettles at store entrances, the retail chain is enacting a “no solicitation” policy for all of its stores, including the three Target locations in Memphis and the nearby location in Horn Lake, Mississippi.

Target Corporation’s decision began making news across the country a few weeks ago, although the company notified the Salvation Army of its decision in January. Requests from other organizations for similar fund-raising campaigns led to the policy, according to the company. “If we continue to allow the Salvation Army to solicit, then it opens the door to other groups that wish to solicit our guests,” said a written statement from the company’s headquarters in Minneapolis.

The local red kettle donation campaign of the Memphis Salvation Army is handled by area commander Lt. Col. Danny Morrow, who has overseen kettle drives throughout the country for 40 years.

“The Target decision decreases our ability to serve people year-round,” he said. “From the beginning, we understood that we were guests. We knew that it was their store, and we were always aware of that, but this is tough for us.” According to Morrow, Target store collections account for 30 percent of the total red kettle drive, which raises about $200,000 annually in the Memphis area.

“I don’t really know what to say about it. All I can do is encourage local Target management to contact the national office to get the kettles back,” Morrow said.

Nationally, collections in front of Target stores have raised about $9 million for the charity, surpassed only by the $14 million raised in front of Wal-Mart stores. Collections at Kmart rank third with $7 million. Local Wal-Mart stores will allow kettle collections to continue outside its locations, but Super Kmart locations, which are the only type of Kmart stores in the Memphis area, will not. The Memphis Salvation Army has obtained permission from Big Lot stores to hold kettle drives this year. The closeout chain has four locations in the city but draws fewer customers than the Target stores.

Local Target store managers would not comment on the decision, referring all inquiries to the company’s headquarters. Morrow said all negotiations with area stores are handled on the corporate level.

In addition to the Target locations, Memphis’ Salvation Army holds kettle drives at approximately 40 locations throughout the city beginning the weekend before Thanksgiving and extending through Christmas Eve. In addition to retail locations, kettle volunteers position themselves at grocery stores and mall entrances.

“We heard about the decision here [in Memphis] in the late summer,” said Morrow. “Not only does it hurt our collections, but the few people we hired to ring the bells to help them make at least some money are out of a job.” The remaining locations will be manned in four-hour shifts by volunteers or the few paid employees that the organization is able to hire.

To supplement the lost collections, the Salvation Army will focus efforts on existing fund-raisers, including mail solicitations and Internet donations. Although Target has banned sidewalk solicitations, the company will continue its ongoing commitment to communities, donating more than $2 million each week to organizations like the Salvation Army.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

EDITORIAL

With George W. Bush achieving the popular-vote majority that eluded him in 2000, the tumultuous election of 2004 is now in the record books. And while most of the television networks, as we go to press, have not declared the president’s electoral-college victory official, it’s all over but the shouting.

But there should not be too much shouting about a Bush electoral mandate. Not now, not in a country as bitterly divided as ours is at this critical juncture. Election 2004 confirmed all of our worse suspicions, namely, that the polarization that began during the Clinton era has continued. The divisions worsened after Bush/Gore 2000, hardened with the invasion of Iraq, and are now etched in concrete. As NBC’s Chris Matthews observed in the wee hours Wednesday morning: “This was not an election about issues, but one about the kind of country we want to be.”

Much to the pundits’ almost universal surprise, the exit polls demonstrated that the single issue voters most cared about in 2004 was not the war in Iraq, not the state of the economy, not even the specter of “terrorism,” but something they labeled “moral values.” In a nutshell: President Bush swept to victory on the strength of the perception that he was somehow more ethical, and more true to himself, than Senator Kerry. To 51 percent of the voters, the better “man” won.

However correct or absurd that notion may be, it is a stark political reality. Indeed, the hard mathematics that have ensured Bush’s reelection may be the only reality this country can currently agree upon. Otherwise, we Americans dwell in two parallel universes.

Nor do these universes correspond neatly to the now-ubiquitous red-state/blue-state geography favored by the TV pundits. Here in Tennessee, for example, all four major newspapers in Nashville and Memphis (including this one) endorsed Senator Kerry, and while the president carried the state by 15 percentage points, Senator Kerry carried Tennessee’s two most populous counties by 14 points.

The divisions in this country are not as simple as the colors on a map might suggest; we are divided by communities, not states. And unless we’re prepared to indulge in our own version of ethnic cleansing, oversimplifying these divisions, as the national media is wont to do, does no one any good.

In his second term, President Bush must now do the right thing. With his campaigning days officially behind him, he needs to send Karl Rove into graceful retirement and turn his attention to the one problem that dwarfs even the Iraq quagmire in significance. This time around, Bush must become the once-promised “uniter not a divider.” A continuation of the winner-take-all approach so evident in his first administration will make losers of us all.

Senator Kerry, on the other hand, should not be consigned to the dustbin of history. He ran a superb campaign — he will go down in history, for example, as the first candidate to win the presidential debates and yet lose the election — and can legitimately lay claim to the position as spokesperson for the 49 percent of Americans whose views will continue to need representation. Tom Daschle’s defeat in South Dakota creates a natural opportunity for that “leader of the opposition” role to become official. We strongly suggest that the Democrats place John Kerry in the position of Senate minority leader.

But the loser in this race can only do so much. The burden is upon the president to reach across the partisan divide, to work with Senator Kerry and other Democrats to begin the healing process so essential for our future. Should he choose to do otherwise, George W. Bush runs the risk of presiding over “evening in America” and leaving as his legacy a truly dysfunctional nation.

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

Want a Revolution?

“It’s almost a revolution, what’s going on in New Orleans’ kitchens today,” says Chef Joseph Carey, founder and chief instructor at the Memphis Culinary Academy, whose new book, Creole Nouvelle, explores the latest trends in New Orleans’ oldest cuisine.

Carey was born and raised in New Orleans. He became a combat photographer and journalist while serving in Vietnam. When his hitch was up, he moved to San Francisco, where he lived for 16 years, opening a series of restaurants, including a Creole place in Oakland.

“I left New Orleans and only went back after many years away, so I saw it with brand-new eyes,” he says. “I saw it as a person from the outside.”

What Carey saw in New Orleans was a brilliant cuisine stunted by an excess of tradition and menus that were increasingly submissive to the tourist dollar. But in the San Francisco Bay area, that crazy quilt of colors, cultures, and lifestyles that clash and coalesce in unexpected ways, Carey wasn’t oppressed by tradition or hemmed in by tourists with expectations.

“I found this place called the Housewife’s Market in downtown Oakland,” Carey says. “It was like a European marketplace. There were butcher stalls with meat. There were stalls with fresh produce, good cheeses, fresh seafood from Louisiana, crabs, and shrimp. There was even a guy who made his own sausage: andouille and boudin blanc. Before I found this place, I didn’t know there had been a huge migration of blacks from New Orleans to Oakland. But there was, and since I was running a Creole restaurant, this was absolutely wonderful for me.

“So I was able to get all of these great ingredients. Then I started changing some things. I started learning more Asian techniques,” he says. “I started taking jambalaya, which is traditionally a baked rice dish, and preparing it as a stir fry. I kept trying more and more things, and I started to really like what was happening with all of these changes.”

Another change: Carey moved to Memphis in 1984 in order to open the Memphis Culinary Academy.

“There were already too many schools in San Francisco. And there was nothing in the middle of the country. There wasn’t even a school in New Orleans,” Carey says.

He has also opened several restaurants over the years, including the Cafe Meridian and the King Cotton. And now comes the cookbook, Creole Nouvelle, which was released this month, and two more books are in the planning stage.

In Carey’s hands, King cake, the blandest of all New Orleans’ desserts, takes on a new life. The cinnamon-laced filling is rich and creamy, and the semisweet dough leans heavily in the direction of brioche. His seafood gumbo is almost airy, emphasizing the herbed stock, the shrimp, and the crab over the charred, nearly chocolate flavors of traditional brown roux.

“Most of the recipes for gumbo start ‘First, you make a roux.’ Then you throw everything into the roux,” Carey says. “In classical French cooking, you add the roux last. That’s what I do. And I use a lighter roux [so you can treat the gumbo] more like a soup.”

Even the decidedly blue-collar oyster po’ boy, a soggy French loaf stuffed with battered oysters and slathered in mayo, is given a glamorous makeover in Creole Nouvelle. Crispy fried oysters are served open-faced on an onion roll with an aïoli spread, shredded romaine lettuce, and just a dash of Tabasco. Compared to the original, it almost seems healthy.

To round out his book, Carey has included traditional Creole recipes twisted into something new by some of New Orleans’ most creative chefs. Anne Kearney of Peristyle, Susan Spicer of Bayona, John Harris of Lilette, Donald Link of Herbsaint, and Peter Vasquez of Marisol have all contributed to the recipes collected in Creole Nouvelle.

When Louisiana cooking became a national rage in the 1980s, buoyed by the marketing savvy of Paul Prudhomme and the syndicated success of Justin Wilson, the flavors were mostly Cajun.

“Cajun cooking is a bit more rustic. I like to call that kind of cooking ‘down home New World French,'” Carey says. Creole cooking is more refined and less fiery.

New Orleans was founded by French colonists in 1718, and “Creole” is derived from a word meaning “born domestically.” Creole cooking, which absorbed elements of Spanish and Italian cooking, was America’s first fully realized domestic cuisine where Old World techniques were applied to the endless supply of nontraditional ingredients available in Louisiana. From the beginning it was defined by chefs working in restaurants, not by people cooking at home.

In Creole Nouvelle, Carey and his guest chefs expand the Creole palate by extending the list of ethnic influences. The results: crab and coconut soup, boudin-stuffed quail with fig sauce, and brazed duck on a buttermilk biscuit with blood-orange marmalade. And that’s just for starters.

For more Carey and Creole Nouvelle, watch local bookstores throughout November when Carey will demonstrate recipes and sign copies of the book.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Hustle & Flow

On Friday, October 29th, Memphis filmmaker Craig Brewer screened selected scenes from his John Singleton-produced film Hustle & Flow. The preview met with rave reviews from the audience, but what did the Flyer‘s entertainment writers think? Chris Davis and Chris Herrington go head-to-head, debating the apparent merits and possible pitfalls of Brewer’s latest project.

Chris Davis: It’s pretty obvious that there are things to get excited about in Hustle & Flow — and some real concerns.

In his interview with The Commercial Appeal‘s film writer John Beifuss, Brewer addressed Hollywood’s not-so-subtle racism. He also addressed Hollywood’s concern that a white guy can’t write and direct a film which deals directly with the lives of black street hustlers. I’m on the side of the filmmaker, but it’s hard to deny that there’s a distinctly white voice driving this story. But does it matter?

In the opening scene, DJ (Terrence Howard), a crazy-haired pimp, compares men to dogs: They both get little pink hard-ons, but a dog doesn’t understand its own mortality. The monologue sounds like it was ripped from a Tennessee Williams play. That should be a good thing, but in the mouth of a Memphis hustler, the poetry feels theatrical and inauthentic. Then the soundtrack kicks in, and things are back on track.

Chris Herrington: I think your point about the “distinctly white voice” and your insight into the theatrical language in the pre-credit scene come together in the last scene shown, where the white character Shelby (DJ Qualls) sits on the front porch with DJ and his sidekick (Anthony Anderson), waxing philosophic about gangsta rap and Memphis music. Now, obviously Shelby is a cerebral character and this kind of over-heated speech fits his make-up, but it still felt like the director talking.

I may be more sensitive than most to this since hip-hop was my first musical love, and I tend to find it wearisome when white folks romanticize gangsta rap. On the positive side, these bookend speeches were about the only things that rang false to me from what we saw, and even my reservations are pretty minor.

The thing that’s always stood out to me is the potential disconnect between the way Brewer talks about the project and the way it was cast. Listening to Brewer, the films that come up as a comparison are things like Scorsese’s Mean Streets and John Cassavetes’ The Killing of a Chinese Bookie. But the résumés of the actors signify more like Hip-Hop Road Trip. Will there be tension between these opposed types or will Hustle & Flow bring them together? What do you think?

Davis: Over time, Brewer’s commentary has taken on a messianic tone: Make your own movie, and if it’s good, you’re saved. This isn’t a criticism.

But when Brewer compares Stax to the Hypnotize Minds camp, he sounds like the reincarnation of Sam Phillips: part salesman, part saint. Hustle & Flow feels like classic mythmaking, and it’s probably appropriate that this film drops faces like a rapper checks names.

In Brewer’s first film, The Poor and Hungry, the romantic entanglement between a car thief and a classical cellist is the sort of unreal thing that only happens in movies, but the film’s genuinely proletarian spunk gives it an edge. Brewer fancies himself a man of the people. His subject matter may be more Scorsese, but there’s some Frank Capra in the mix.

My sense was that Brewer is actively reinventing the Sun/Stax myth in a rap context in order to claim hip-hop as the third pillar of Beale Street. Is it fair to give hip-hop Southern roots?

Herrington: Well, hip-hop was born in the parks of New York City to Jamaican parents. You can draw parallels to blues but also to doo-wop.

Brewer is absolutely a salesman and that’s to his and his art’s benefit. In drawing the connections between his roots as a shoestring-budget filmmaker and his character’s struggle to make it in the so-called rap game, Brewer is shaping his own future reviews.

I also think it’s appropriate that you reference classic Hollywood. I find more Howard Hawks than Frank Capra in Brewer’s style — the unobtrusive visuals, the feel for dialogue- and character-driven comedy, the combination of spontaneous fun with tight storytelling.

All of these virtues were apparent in the two sequences screened, especially the recording scene, where a song called “Beat That Bitch” morphs into “Whup the Trick.” Some people might be prepared to flinch at finding comedy in that content, but the scene flowed so beautifully that the audience couldn’t help but get lost in the moment.

Brewer insists that he wants to work in the studio system. In the good old days, there was no disconnect between movies as mass entertainment and enduring works of art. A lot of that has been lost over the past few decades, but, at his best, Brewer seems like the kind of filmmaker who can bridge those distinctions. Hustle & Flow seems to have a shot at uniting the sensibilities of The Killing of a Chinese Bookie and Road Trip. I say more power to him.

Oh, and whatever else, I saw enough to know that Memphis is gonna love this movie.

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LETTER FROM MEMPHIS

Harold Ford Jr.:

November 3, 2004

Dear Congressman Ford:

Perhaps you have already seen William Safire’s column in today’s New York Times….

Actually, we at the Flyer were flattered that Mr. Safire endorsed our own Kerry as Senate Minority Leader idea, perhaps without even reading our current editorial.(www.memphisflyer.com/content.asp?ID=3060&onthefly=1 )

But seriously: I hope you will endorse the Flyer‘s and Mr. Safire’s idea. Ask your Democratic senatorial colleagues to draft John Kerry as Senate Minority Leader.

Senator Kerry is now a proven and widely-admired national leader. If the Democrats fail to make this patently-obvious choice, they deserve the possibly adverse consequences that will follow.

With all due respect to Senator Reid, appointing a relative unknown to that position will squander valuable momentum generated by this presidential campaign. Perhaps the congressional leadership doesn’t realize how close the national Democratic Party is to oblivion.

Business-as-usual in the Senate, Congressman, just won’t do. I know I speak for many committed Democrats — Democrats who donated blood, sweat, tears and dollars to the recent campaign — when I say that IT IS TIME FOR THE CONGRESSIONAL LEADERSHIP OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY TO WAKE UP AND SMELL THE COFFEE. Continuity is essential if we are ever to get out of this pickle we presently find ourselves.

I am not suggesting for a moment that Senator Kerry should be the party’s standard-bearer in 2008; that decision is light years away at this point, and a thousand events will occur in the meantime. What we cannot afford, however, is to squander all the good work that has been accomplished during this recent campaign, in terms of organization, grass-roots involvment, and sheer enthusiasm, and return to business as usual within the halls of Congress.

Senator Kerry can and will be a powerful “leader of the opposition”; after today’s magnaminous concession speech, he is perhaps the most well-respected defeated presidential candidate of modern times. Give him the chance to maintain his position as de facto leader of our party during the challenging two years ahead of us.

Please feel free to pass this along to anyone who might find the contents of interest. Thanks.

Good to see you at the game tonight; go Griz! All the best, Ken

Kenneth Neill

Publisher/CEO

THE MEMPHIS FLYER, Memphis, TN