Month: September 2008

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

High Water All Around

After hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, filmmakers Tia Lessin and Carl Deal headed south. Shooting at a FEMA assistance center in Alexandria, Louisiana, a couple hundred miles north of New Orleans, they met Scott and Kimberly Roberts, a couple of penniless refugees from the dirt-poor Ninth Ward, who had survived the storm — barely — at their home and then worked their way up to Alexandria.

Like everyone left in New Orleans during the storm, Scott and Kim had an amazing story to tell. But, more than most, they — especially Kim — had a means and drive to do so, and, in Trouble the Water, Lessin and Deal help them out while mostly staying out of the way.

An aspiring rapper (under the moniker Black Kold Madina), the 24-year-old Kim also owned a camcorder, which she used to document the coming of the storm, its full assault, and immediate aftermath. Fifteen minutes of Kim’s home-movie footage is interspersed throughout Trouble the Water, most of it in the film’s gripping first half. The second half is almost equally driven by Kim’s other mode of expression: fierce rap songs that speak of her experience before, during, and after the storm with candor and defiance.

Trouble the Water doesn’t surpass Spike Lee’s epic and mournful When the Levees Broke as the definitive documentary portrait of this national catastrophe, but it’s an intimate companion piece — somehow both more plainspoken and more poetic.

Lessin and Deal deploy damning media footage of New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin and President George Bush early on but don’t overdue it: Political anger instead bubbles up from situations largely viewed from ground level.

The foreboding found in early scenes from Kim’s camcorder footage is a real version of the creeping dread that fictional films like Cloverfield and The Blair Witch Project tried so hard to duplicate. Kim scans her kitchen, noting the bag of charcoal and meat packed down with ice — “stuff to get us through the hurricane. Everybody’s scared. Even my dogs are scared.”

Later, focusing her lens on neighbors loading up a car to evacuate, Kim’s voice, behind the camera, says, “That’s okay. I’d be gone too if I had wheels.” (This is juxtaposed with a Nagin press conference about the evacuation order. Asked how many people will be left, he responds, “I have no idea. We’re hoping everyone will leave.” No public transportation was arranged.)

Kim captures the anticipation — and lack thereof — in the neighborhood: guys outside the corner store joking that the police aren’t around (“they’re worried about the hurricane”); a man passed out on his stoop whom Kim wakes up.

Looking through her camera lens from her Ninth Ward porch as the rain starts to fall and trees start to sway, Kim delivers a monologue: “They put it on the news that we should get out. You got those people that just couldn’t leave. Like me. Not because we ain’t want to, but because we couldn’t afford the luxury. I tried to get a rental. … But I believe Jesus the Lord will send me through this one. Whenever the Lord allow it, I’ll be able to tell the story. August 28, 2005 … It’s me reporting live, Kold Madina.”

When we see Kim’s footage again, the levees have given way. Opening her screen door, she sees a car almost entirely submerged in the street. A stray voice speaks for everyone: “Damn, you see how high this shit is?” From there it gets surreal: a standing stop sign submerged in water; a neighbor floating by on a punching bag, another in a washtub.

The film retraces the couple’s escape (via a john boat that happened to float by) and subsequent journey out of New Orleans with Lessin and Deal: turned away from a military base; sleeping in an empty school; somehow (the film is vague on this point) getting hold of a truck to haul 30 people out of the city.

The first half of film — geared around Kim’s own footage — is a riveting first-person disaster movie, one that underscores the resilience of Kim and her Ninth Ward neighbors. (One of my favorite moments is Kim sitting down with a FEMA worker in Alexandria. “Do you always have TV cameras following you?” he asks nervously. “Yeah, usually,” she says, shrugging.)

Kim and Scott’s odyssey eventually ends up in Memphis (“Go up there and start my music career. Find me a church where I can worship”), where Kim has a cousin who’s watched the TV coverage of the disaster in horror. Tearful, the cousin says she won’t let her son join the military now. “You’re not going to go fight for a country that doesn’t care about you,” she says.

Unable to find work in Memphis, the couple returns to New Orleans but not, apparently, to their old lives. For Scott, life before Katrina isn’t much to be nostalgic about. In Memphis, he talks about not being able to find good work and dealing drugs to get by. “I hated my life down there, you know,” he says. “I really did. It was horrible.”

A year and a half later, Scott has found work in construction, and Kim is recording her music. They’re doing better, but the city is struggling, as a silent driving tour of lingering Ninth Ward devastation attests.

This endless tracking shot of flattened, bombed-out, debris-strewn landscape in the middle of an American city brings back to mind something one of Scott and Kim’s neighbors had said to a crew of Louisiana National Guardsmen earlier in the film: “We thank y’all for being in the city of New Orleans, and we pray y’all don’t have to go back to Iraq. It’s not our war. This is our war right here.”

Trouble the Water

Opening Friday, September 26th

Ridgeway Four

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

Okay. I’m going to write about Sarah Palin only this

once. (Well, only once this week.) I have tried to laugh at her and the idea of her being a vice-presidential nominee, because the prospect of that happening

is so incredibly weird, foolish, surreal, and embarrassing to any American with any friends in any other country in the

world, but now I’m not so sure how funny ha-ha it is.

Yes, Palin is a backstabbing rube with a nasal, insipid voice so insufferable that nails on a chalkboard sound like Mozart in comparison when she answers the two questions the McCain campaign advisers have allowed her to address with the media. She’s already proven how shallow she is with her now famous “I can see Russia from Alaska” remark about her foreign policy knowledge. She filed a lawsuit against the Bush administration for trying to put polar bears on the endangered species list because she thinks global warming is a myth and that people should be able to shoot them for trophy purposes.

She clearly is not much more than white trash, so it would seem that people would be smart enough not to base their opinion of her on the speech she gave at the Republican National Convention, which someone else wrote. But so many of the white, 50-ish, loser-ish, straight men who drool over any woman who isn’t terribly disfigured are actually going to call upon that mentality (and I use that term loosely, as it means a “thought process” must be involved) in November and cast their vote for her ticket because “she’s hot.”

Here’s a comment from a recent Salon article. It’s from a guy who used to pick up dead animals off the road but who is currently unemployed. He’s decided to cast his vote for McCain because of Palin: “She don’t mind stepping on people’s toes, and maybe Washington needs that. And she’s got a pretty nice pair of legs on her.” As if it’s not humiliating enough to be an American these days, now we have to deal with this. It’s a good thing there aren’t voting machines at Hooters. And it’s not just the ogling men who are cause for worry. If you are a woman and think you have struck pay dirt because Palin is a candidate you can get behind, I really feel for you. I feel extremely sorry for you for having so little access to information. You may or may not know that because of Palin women in that microcosmic town of Wasilla, Alaska, where she was the all-powerful mayor, got re-assaulted after being raped because the mayor made them pay an average of $1,200 for their own rape kits, for which they had to spit in cups, pull out their own pubic hairs, and submit answers to a long list of “were you really raped?” questions.

Palin freely admits to firing that state employee she fired, not on the grounds that he wouldn’t fire her ex-brother-in-law but because he failed to get her personal permission to “plan” a trip to Washington, D.C., to ask for funding to start a special program for victims of sexual crimes in Alaska, which has the highest rate of such offenses per capita in the country. Who in their right mind would ever have imagined that we would have a woman running for vice president who appears for all practical purposes to be “pro-rape”?

Of course, Palin might not have had ample time to think about all this, since she has been so busy offering her constituents $150 for each freshly severed leg of a dead wolf they bring in after their helicopter hunts. That’s not a joke, by the way. Perhaps it’s her way of stimulating the economy. Maybe if she does make it to the White House, she can help the financial crisis we’re in by doubling the cost of those kits for rape victims. I can’t even bring myself to write in detail about her support of trapping animals with leg traps, which cause animals to remain caught for up to two weeks while suffering such intense pain, starvation, and dehydration that they often end up chewing their own limbs off to escape.

So if you vote for John McCain and he wins, and then unfortunately croaks, who we’ll have as president is a gun-totin’, anti-science, untraveled, uninformed, pro-rape creationist.

But, hey, she’s hot.

Categories
News The Fly-By

Keeping It Going

CREDIT: Sustainlane

When Sustainable Urbanism author Doug Farr asked Sustainable Tennessee conference attendees last week whether Memphis had car sharing, many of them laughed.

“That wasn’t meant to be a joke,” Farr said. “Somebody tell me why that’s funny.”

Was it because the idea of a car-sharing company in Memphis — which still lacks bicycle and HOV lanes — sounded ridiculous?

Or was it because Memphis could be said to have car sharing? It’s just that, in a city of more than 6,000 auto thefts a year, it’s not always voluntary.

And when Farr talked about the relative costs of transit systems, he mentioned the Madison Avenue trolley line. But after demurring from the audience, someone spoke up and told Farr that yes, Memphis has a trolley line, but “it doesn’t work the way you think.”

With responses like those, it may not come as a great surprise that in a recent ranking of America’s most sustainable large cities, Memphis came in at number 46, down three spots from last year.

SustainLane, an online guide to sustainable living, rated cities on a number of indicators, including affordable housing, the green economy, water quality, the number of LEED buildings per capita, transit ridership, and commute.

Though the city scored highly in water and affordable housing, Memphis ranked last for both LEED buildings (built to certain environmental standards) and the green economy. It also ranked 46th for planning and land use.

But conferences such as last week’s Sustainable Tennessee Regional Opportunity Forum — organized by the University of Memphis, the local chapter of the Urban Land Institute (ULI), and the Sierra Club — are striving to change that.

Conference attendees learned about the new U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED designation for neighborhoods. Under the new standards, neighborhood development wanting LEED certification must be located close to existing town and city centers, have access to transit systems, and cannot be on a flood plain.

“You might have heard about a ‘green’ Wal-Mart,” Rusty Bloodworth of the local ULI chapter told conference attendees, “but the vehicle miles traveled to get to that Wal-Mart were not addressed in that rating.”

Vehicle miles traveled is a consistent theme for Farr. Though a third of green-house gases are generated by buildings, another third are generated by transporting people and goods between those buildings.

In the United States, the average family drives almost all the way around the planet each year.

When Farr asked conference attendees how many of them had ever walked to school, a good number raised their hands.

“It went from 75 percent [of students] walk to school to less than 20 percent,” Farr said. “It’s not because legs work less well. … It’s a cultural shift.”

Sustainable urbanism is defined as walkable, transit-served urbanism integrated with green buildings and high-performance infrastructure.

Farr believes that what might be called the low-hanging fruit — compact fluorescent lightbulbs, hybrid cars, LEED-designated buildings — will not do enough to reduce carbon dioxide levels.

“It’s not about the efficiency of objects,” he said. “As things become more efficient, we use them more.”

But by designing developments a little differently — increasing residential density, having a variety of uses in an area — people can save money and the environment.

“One way to do affordable housing is to do a no-car development,” Farr said. “It cuts down on the cost because you’re not allocating land to parking.”

Giving up their car entirely is probably a stretch for most people, but Farr gave a few examples of ways people could be influenced to drive less.

Studies have found that if parking is free at both ends of a trip, people will drive. But if employers charge their employees to park — even if they give them the money to cover the cost — “people will find a way not to drive,” Farr said.

“I’m from Detroit. I’m not anti-car,” he said. “I’m pro-family wealth.”

And in a city where “car sharing” is so common, a little extra family wealth could go a long way.

Categories
Letters To The Editor Opinion

Letters to the Editor

Bass Pro and the Pyramid

From the perspective of my 25 years of work in the Memphis tourism industry, I’m particularly sensitive to Memphis’ image. This letter is motivated by an impending disaster to the city’s image.

By chance, I happened to see renderings of the exterior alterations proposed by Bass Pro to transform the Pyramid into a retail store/Grand Lodge. I could not believe my eyes that such a grotesque plan was, I presume, seen and approved by both the City Council and the County Commission at the August 25th presentation for the project.

The Pyramid is the city’s major physical icon, so it is inexplicable to me that the Bass Pro renderings have not been made public, especially since, by virtue of their presentation at the aforesaid meeting, the report and renderings are now public record.

Attached is a subject rendering. Note the dormer windows and the rustic lodge attached to the shiny Pyramid and the American flag at its apex.

Bass Pro’s intent, I understand, is to blend the appearance of the Grand Lodge and the Pyramid into an overall rustic look. Hopefully, that look will not include camouflage paint!

Don Hassell

Memphis

McCain and Banking

Those who question the sincerity of McCain’s enthusiasm for regulating the banking industry (which would have prevented this week’s $1.5 trillion freefall) have good reason to do so.

Here’s a quote from McCain’s article, “Better Health Care at Lower Cost for Every American,” in the September/October issue of Contingencies, the magazine of the American Academy of Actuaries: “Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.”

So McCain, who now poses as the scourge of Wall Street, was praising financial deregulation, like, 10 seconds ago — and promising that if we marketize health care, it will perform as well as the financial industry!

Please note that the cost of cleaning up the current catastrophe of financiers run amok will require $7,500 from every man, woman, and child in America.

Jerry Chen

Memphis

Science and Politics

This is in response to a letter from Chris Stahl (September18th issue):

Science is the observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of natural phenomena, according to The American Heritage Dictionary. A lot of people may think that “science” is just about stem-cell research, evolution, the Big Bang, and eroding family values through the denunciation of religion. But it’s more than that.

The scientific method is humankind’s best approach to problem-solving. We should think of the results of scientific problem-solving this way: “If a human being made it, it was due to the application of scientific principles.” Think of all the items you use and interact with throughout your day. All “that” is due to scientific thinking and problem solving.

One may pray for more light, but I’ll flip the switch and thank the electrician.

I agree with Stahl that we need a debate between the candidates to determine who will problem-solve most effectively to get us out of the messes we are in.

Michael Rohr

Somerville

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Letter from the Editor: A Latter-Day Nostradamus

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced corporate power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.”

The quote is from the farewell address of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Nearly 50 years later, Ike is looking like a latter-day Nostradamus. Right on the money, so to speak.

I’m not old enough to remember Ike as president, but I liked Ike, mainly because my father, a lifelong Republican, liked Ike. Ike and my father were Republicans when being one didn’t mean you had to pander to the fundamentalist Christian right. In fact, my father thought those guys were nuts.

My father and his friends believed in low taxes and small government and balanced budgets. They went to church and worked hard and tried to raise their kids so they wouldn’t screw up too badly when they grew up. Some of their best friends were Democrats, and it was okay. They liked being “in business,” but the prime motivator of their lives was not greed.

Now, big politics and big business and big religion are in an unholy embrace, building Jenga towers of intertwined influence, payoffs, back-scratching, and golden parachutes for life. It’s become quite apparent that the “real” big money is in government. And that money, my friends, is coming from you and me.

Ike’s “military-industrial complex” is closing in on control of both parties — and the major media, a key component in shaping public opinion. Its mantra is “deregulation,” which allows unrestricted growth and unrestricted profits. Laissez-faire, baby! Capitalism. Free enterprise. And here’s the beautiful part: If these guys overreach and screw up, their bought-and-sold pals in Congress will bail them out — with our money.

Profits are capitalized; losses are socialized. Quite the economic system, wouldn’t you say? Is it too late to do anything about it? I honestly don’t know.

But here’s another quote to ponder: “The first stage of fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism, because it is a merger of state and corporate power.”

It’s from Benito Mussolini. You remember him, right?

Bruce VanWyngarden

brucev@memphisflyer.com

Categories
News The Fly-By

What They Said

CREDIT: Greg Cravens

About “It’s Not Easy Being Green in Memphis,” by Bruce VanWyngarden:

“Hello MATA: How hard can it be to better manage the timing of trolleys? Does anyone manage it? I don’t think so. There is no dispatcher (is there?), no management of the system. I routinely walk to South Main or City Hall without ever being passed by a trolley. The trolleys are an amusement ride for tourists at best and they have destroyed commerce on Madison Ave. It could be a reliable system … is anybody there?” — poolboy

About “Gloom and Doom Be Gone,” John Branston’s “encouraging views on real estate, business, and fun”:

“Mr. Branston is like a person on the Titanic saying, ‘Oh this is such fun! I just love swimming! Isn’t the ocean simply beautiful?’ And then, the sharks start to circle.” — rantboy

“I’m giving up my campaign to replace Henry Paulson and take over the Fed and Goldman Sachs, but the record will show that this column moved the market up 377 points.” — John Branston

Comment of the Week:

About “It’s Not Easy Being Green in Memphis,” by Bruce VanWyngarden:

“BELIEVE ME, give it time. There will be a TROLLEY JACKING in Memphis. It’s coming!” — V-8 Power

Categories
Opinion

How It Could Go Down

Elected officials are understandably wary of cutting themselves out of the action. They’re elected, and the rest of us aren’t. Shelby County mayor A C Wharton may be the most popular politician in town, but he couldn’t persuade the County Commission this week to get the county out of the Pyramid and fairgrounds for $5 million.

In itself, this is no big deal. The Pyramid is empty, and Bass Pro is used to delay. In fact, yet another “deadline” quietly passed for the city and county to sign a “development agreement” by September 15th. The big question is whether the city and county will cooperate when the stakes are higher than negotiating rights for the Pyramid. When the stakes are, say, a local version of what is happening this week in Washington.

Here’s one possible time line for how a recession might turn into something worse:

At the end of this week, the Mid-South Fair closes for the last time in Memphis. On my visits last Friday night and Sunday afternoon, the weather was good but the crowds were small, lines were nonexistent, rides were empty, and barkers said they were getting paid in fives and singles instead of fifties and twenties. A nostalgic, family-friendly institution goes out on a low note. Meanwhile, Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium looks more forlorn than ever, with a losing team and shrinking fan base.

In Washington, a bailout passes Congress but produces bitter resentment of what Newt Gingrich, of all people, calls a “Wall Street-centric” settlement. Regional banks including Regions and First Horizon get relief, but their stock prices slide back to single-digit territory by the November election. All over Memphis, yard signs begin to appear that say, “WHERE’S MY BAILOUT?”

The election turnout is huge, locally and nationally. The result leaves half the voters more angry and dejected than ever, and George W. Bush is still president for two more months. In Memphis, fresh political corruption indictments set off new charges of racism and further polarize the city.

The Grizzlies open the season by failing to sell-out FedExForum. It is an indicator of bad things to come. By Christmas, attendance falls below 14,800, the basis for the arena financing projections. And by early next year, it is below 10,700, the worst-case scenario, where the financing projections don’t work. The remodeled convention center, which has been officially “outed” as being third-rate and inadequate, loses bookings, but the payments on the $100 million expansion still have to be made from tourism taxes.

After a promising Thanksgiving weekend, the holiday shopping season is a dud, and charities see contributions dry up as unemployment rises and bonuses are eliminated at big Memphis companies.

In January, the new president is sworn in, vowing an end to the era of earmarks, putting an end once and for all to MATA’s plan for a $500 million light-rail line to the airport. In Nashville, Governor Phil Bredesen announces that state tax collections are down 10 percent, and cities can expect little or no help. In Memphis, mayors Herenton and Wharton break with tradition and start the New Year with a series of joint appearances. They warn of impending calamity and make a fresh pitch for consolidation. Thirty-thousand city, county, and school-system employees oppose it.

In March, the Shelby County Assessor’s Office sends out 2009 property appraisals, the first update in four years. The phones at the assessor’s office start ringing two minutes later. Thousands of homeowners complain that they can’t sell their homes at any price and demand a reduction. Many point out that the closest “comparable” home is a certifiably toxic foreclosure down the street that now belongs to the federal government.

Tax delinquencies rise to an all-time high as more people simply walk away from their homes and mortgages. For the first time in recent history, the value of assessed property in the city and county — the tax base — shrinks. The 2008 budgets look robust by comparison. Council members and commissioners, whose predecessors in the good old days lowered the tax rate as required by law to avoid a reappraisal windfall, are faced with a shortfall. They must decide whether to increase the tax rate just to stay even.

Guess what they do.

Categories
Hot Properties Real Estate

Healthy Living

The 1920s in Memphis were a time of economic expansion. All of Midtown was enjoying a building boom. Rhodes College had just relocated to Memphis and was building its new campus, and Hein Park was going up right beside it.

The increase in urban density was derided by some as unhealthy. Tuberculosis was on the rise and publications extolled the virtues of fresh air.

Rear latticed porches were commonly used as summer kitchens in an attempt to escape the heat. The large two-story houses of the early 20th century often had another porch above, to be used by the whole family as summer sleeping quarters. An outdoor place to sleep not only helped beat the heat, but the night air was considered to be freer from dust and other impurities.

This bungalow from the early 1920s went yet a step further in the fresh-air craze: The two-story house was built around a swimming pool placed in the center of the second floor, with 10-foot ceilings to help evacuate heat and nearly 15-foot ceilings in the pool area. Clerestory windows, three feet tall, filled all four sides of this elevated space over the pool, making the whole central room a “lantern” that lit the center of the house.

Fireplaces throughout the house — not just in the living and dining rooms, as you might expect, but also in the central pool room and the front screened porch, now glassed in — allowed residents to enjoy the benefits of fresh air even though it might be a tad nippy out.

The pool has long been filled in. The central room now has narrow oak floors just like the rest of the main floor. This central space feels like an industrial loft, giving it renewed appeal for contemporary living.

The perimeter rooms include a small living room, a separate dining room, a spacious kitchen with breakfast area, and four bedrooms.

Though now inhabited comfortably, the whole space would benefit from a thorough renovation in and out. The interior moldings, diamond-paned windows, and oak floors give it a lot of appeal. There is also a lower floor that is not as large as the main floor because the abandoned pool fills the center.

In these days of rising utility costs, it is impressive to see a still-working example of how passive design can ventilate and cool a house. Healthy living is always in style.

540 Hawthorne

Approximately 4,000 square feet

4 bedrooms, 3 baths; $359,000

Realtor: Marx and Bensdorf, 682-1868

Agent: Melody Bourell, 461-4016

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Intoxicating the Voter

Politics and beer. Beer and politics. The message is in the beverage. In fact, a major brewery has been a primary sponsor of the presidential debates for the last four presidential elections. Thus, if you watch the debates conducted by the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD), it should come as no surprise that the debates share some of the characteristics of the sponsor’s advertisements.

No one ever consumes a beer in a beer commercial. Presumably, there are good intentions behind this rule. The most important being the avoidance of the perception that beer companies actually support drinking. It would be quite a PR hit if they appeared to be supporting abuse of a product that can cause negative effects such as alcoholism, DUI, liver disease, and death. The preferred message is that beautiful women and muscle-bound men are attracted to people who purchase beer.

The CPD, like its beer-hawking sponsor, has an interest in hiding the negative sides of its product from consumers. The CPD sells candidates and, to a lesser extent, their ideas to the American voting public. The founders, co-chairmen, and board of the CPD are Republicans and Democrats, so naturally they exclude third parties and limit probing questions and extended discussion on any issue. It would be a travesty for Republicans and Democrats to give anything other than prefabricated talking points. What if some brazen third-party candidate tried to debate them without the assistance of a teleprompter? How could they sustain such a monumental PR hit?

Fortunately for the Republicans and Democrats, they won’t have to face such horrific circumstances. Their organization sets the rules for inclusion in the debates, making it all but impossible for third-party candidates to qualify. They also negotiate a contract, which dictates who will be asking the questions and what type of questions can be asked. The contract sets out ground rules for the candidates, such as forbidding the candidates from asking one another questions. All this is done in the interest of “educating the voting public” and “narrowing the issues” — presumably to fit in more beer commercials.

If this sounds undemocratic, others share that sentiment. The League of Women Voters, host of the presidential debates prior to 1987, withdrew its sponsorship from the debates “because the demands of the two campaign organizations would perpetrate a fraud on the American voter. It has become clear to us that the candidates’ organizations aim to add debates to their list of campaign-trail charades devoid of substance, spontaneity, and answers to tough questions. The League has no intention of becoming an accessory to the hoodwinking of the American public.”

After the league withdrew, the Democrats and Republicans simply created their own debate organization, the CPD, disguising it as a nonprofit and “nonpartisan.”

The warnings of the League of Women Voters are proving particularly prophetic in this presidential election. The U.S. is stuck in a multi-trillion-dollar quagmire in Iraq. The civil rights of Americans are eroding. Wall Street is collapsing, and health care is failing. Yet the Democrat and Republican solutions to these problems are virtually indistinguishable. There are rumors of alternatives floating around, but these are almost exclusively limited to the Internet. Ralph Nader and Bob Barr meet all but one of the criteria for inclusion in the debates and have views substantially different from the major-party candidates, but they are excluded.

It is obvious that the Democrats and Republicans are mutually responsible for the problems facing the U.S. today. What other parties have controlled both houses of Congress and the presidency for over 100 years?

Despite this, the American voters continue to buy into the tired rhetoric created by Republicans and Democrats and perpetuated by the national media that accuses third parties of being “spoilers.” It is as if the American public is voting under the influence — but of what? Perhaps the suds-soaked message of the CPD debates.

For those who believe in the concept of an informed, participatory democracy, the message is clear: “Crack open a cold beverage. It’s going to be a long night.”

Parker Dixon, a recent graduate of Mississippi College School of Law, helped arrange independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader’s recent visit to Memphis.

Categories
News The Fly-By

Second Opinion

At a recent meeting of the city’s civilian law enforcement review board, a man told members that he was beaten by one of 12 officers at the scene of a crime. The man couldn’t remember which officer was responsible, and none of the officers at the scene confessed during the Memphis Police Department’s (MPD) internal investigation.

“It turned into a he said/she said situation,” said City Council member Shea Flinn, who also serves on the independent review board.

At a council committee meeting earlier this month, Flinn told council members that the board, which offers an independent review of citizens’ complaints about Memphis police officers, needs “more teeth.”

“The board sees all this injustice, and they have no authority to do anything about it,” said council member Barbara Swearengen Ware, who has served on the board in the past. “I’m in favor of seeing what we can do to make the board more credible. Right now, it gives false hope. We need to either fix it or disband it.”

When a citizen experiences a problem with a police officer — whether it’s rude treatment or police brutality — they can file a complaint with the MPD’s internal affairs division. If the MPD disagrees with the complaint, the citizen can ask the civilian law enforcement review board for a second opinion.

If the board agrees with that citizen’s complaint, the board asks the police department to review the case again. But whether or not that happens is up to the MPD.

“We don’t have any authority to change [MPD] internal affairs decisions nor do we have the authority to recommend any discipline for the officer involved,” said Ken Moody, who oversees the board as director of neighborhoods and public services.

Mayor Willie Herenton implemented the citizen review board in 1994 in response to a high number of police brutality cases. The board’s 10 members are appointed by the mayor.

Currently, police are invited to attend meetings to tell their side of a story but are not required to be there. Flinn said he’d like the board to have some subpoena power to require officers to show up and testify.

“It would be helpful to talk to officers and get their side of the story,” Flinn said. “You always have to be wary when you’re only hearing one side of the story.”

Council member Harold Collins served on the board as an at-large citizen from 1998 to 2000. He said the board most often heard complaints of officers intimidating people or treating them with disrespect. In many cases, Collins said they heard complaints about particular officers over and over.

“We do hear common names,” Moody said. “But Director Godwin has told me that whether or not he agrees with the civilian law enforcement review board, he’ll monitor an officer whose name has come up in a complaint.”

The council has asked Moody to make a list of changes he would like to see on the board.

“It needs to be more of an independent review of police officers when complaints are filed,” Collins said. “It’s difficult for us as individual citizens to believe that police officers will be impartial when they’re investigating police officers.”