Month: November 2008

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

For the Record

Some things went on this past week that ostensibly had nothing — or very little — to do with the famous “change” election of 2008 but, in fact, were integral to some of the issues of this campaign year. Two things in particular that stick in my mind: Al Gore‘s appearance at the Convention Center, receiving one of the National Civil Rights Museum’s 2008 Freedom Awards; and Bob Corker‘s appearance at the University of Memphis Technology Center, reviewing the great bailout controversy.

The latter situation first, because Corker’s bona fides were challenged in the most unexpected — and unfair — way during the week, by Naomi Klein in The Nation. Here’s her first paragraph:

“In the final days of the election, many Republicans seem to have given up the fight for power. But that doesn’t mean they are relaxing. If you want to see real Republican elbow grease, check out the energy going into chucking great chunks of the $700 billion bailout out the door. At a recent Senate Banking Committee hearing, Republican Senator Bob Corker was fixated on this task, and with a clear deadline in mind: inauguration. ‘How much of it do you think may be actually spent by January 20th or so?’ Corker asked Neel Kashkari, the 35-year-old former banker in charge of the bailout.”

There is no reason to doubt that the junior senator from Tennessee asked such a question. But the leap that Klein takes with it betrays an astonishing amount of ignorance on her part about Corker’s role in the bailout — or, for that matter, his previous involvement in trying to stem the chucking of great chunks of federal cash in President Bush’s now almost forgotten “stimulus” program of early 2008. Corker was a diehard opponent of a package that, as he said last week, “gave out rebates and asked us to spend it all as quickly as possible.”

At the time, Corker had noted that disbursing money like that was like throwing it “into a ditch.” This past week, at the University of Memphis, he noted that he made his objections well known to the administration and to Treasury secretary Henry Paulson. “I thought it was foolish. I took him [Paulson] on publicly, and I took him on privately. I thought no good could come of that. And at the end, $168 billion was gone out of our arsenal, if you will.”

And indeed, the freshman senator, a moderate Republican if there ever was one (though all Republicans, regardless of track record or philosophy, have learned to call themselves “conservative”), was a leading critic, months later, of the original Paulson bailout package for most of the same reasons that many hard-core yellow-dog Democrats were: There was no reliable accounting mechanism, no oversight of Paulson, and no security for taxpayers’ interests. As a member of the Senate banking committee, Corker did his best to correct those omissions and was brought, reluctantly, to accept the newly revised package.

It was after these negotiations that New York senator Chuck Schumer, chairman of the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee and vice chairman of the Senate Democratic Caucus, looking optimistically into the possibilities of the next session of Congress, said this: “There are a large number, 15 or 20, of what I call traditional conservatives: John Warner, Kay Bailey Hutchison, Dick Lugar, Johnny Isakson, Bob Corker. I think they went along with the hard right for the past eight years grudgingly, because they felt the hard right had the upper hand. But if we get to 57, 58, 59 [Democratic senators], they’re going to smell the coffee. They’re going to be more pliable than before, more open to our arguments.”

What had gotten Corker on Schumer’s list of “pliables” was his penchant, so recently demonstrated, for working across the aisle to find bipartisan solutions. Asked this past week to comment on Schumer’s remarks, Corker grudgingly owned up to their accuracy:

“On this banking issue, I was, I think, the person who may have started saying that. I was a practical person. I think you’ve got to look at the issues. I mean, it depends on what the issue is. I think it was because I had sat down in the meetings and tried to be practical in our approach, and I think that was appreciated.”

In other words, had Naomi Klein done even a modicum of research, she would surely have discovered that Corker was no Bushie hack looking to drain money out of the Treasury as quickly as possible for strictly Republican purposes. His concerns had consistently been those of a guardian of the national exchequer, determined to impose caution and establish safeguards regarding any and all disbursements from the Treasury.

Corker’s question regarding the pace and quantity of expenditures from the Treasury was almost certainly not in the interests, as she carelessly put it, of “chucking great chunks of the $700 billion bailout out the door.” Rather, the opposite of all that.

Gore’s remarks at the Convention Center on receiving his Freedom Award gave the former vice president one more opportunity to place the issue of climate change high on the governmental agenda, post-election. The Academy Award winner and Nobel Prize laureate was book-ended by two other recipients: Diane Nash, a veteran of the 1961 sit-ins in Nashville, who spoke first, and Memphis’ own B.B. King, who followed Gore.

Each of the other Freedom Award recipients represented, as Shakespeare would have said, “great pitch and moment,” of course. Nash’s theorem, based on her experience risking life and limb, seemed unexceptionable and even grand: “Oppression always requires the participation of the oppressed.” And, given the splendor and authority of his life’s work, the modesty of guitar icon King was downright seductive: “It’s not often I get an audience this large. I’m not Obama, you know. And I’m not as beautiful as the governor [presumably Sarah Palin].”

Even so, the occasion was mainly Gore’s. Beginning by quoting portion’s of Martin Luther King‘s “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech, the martyr’s last prophetic one on the eve of his assassination in Memphis in 1968, Gore made the case, both implicitly and explicitly, that answering the danger of climate change was his own life’s work.

“We have a choice — blessings or curses, life or death,” Gore told the crowd concerning a climate crisis which he termed a “global and strategic threat.” Mankind reacts instinctively to “snakes and spiders, and fires and claws,” he said. “But if we are confronted with a threat that can only be received by the use of our reasoning process to connect the dots, it does not easily trigger the appropriate response we need in order to ensure our survival.” Because of “our absurd overreliance on carbon-based fuels,” he warned, “the relationship between human beings and the planet has radically altered in the last 100 years.”

Listening to Gore, as he recited his familiar litany of melting ice caps, burgeoning population growth, and proliferating pernicious CO2, it was impossible not to be reminded of the biblical prophets — of Jeremiah, say, the most doom-conscious of them all.

“Evil is the absence of truth,” Gore thundered. “If we do not recognize what we are doing to the prospects for all future generations of human beings on this planet, if that truth is absent from our consciousness, then it results in evil. … I need your help. We face an emergency … on Main Street and Wall Street and Beale Street.” And he ended thusly:

“If I have preached too much … [long pause] … what the hell! Thank you very much.”

Categories
Editorial Opinion

If All Goes Well

My fellow Americans, we have just concluded another of our quadrennial presidential elections, and we trust and pray the result is one that all our citizens will embrace as the will of the people. Like most of the other elections, this one stimulated charges on both sides that,

to put it mildly, won’t stand up to honest scrutiny. Americans like to fight almost as much as they like to vote, and a little extra use of the elbow is perhaps understandable under the circumstances.

But all that’s over — or should be. And now we’ve got to heal the wounds and remember that we’re all in this together. If we’re honest, we have to acknowledge that the last eight years haven’t exactly constituted a model period for demonstrating our unity of purpose, nor have we fully availed ourself of true consultation, not only between our two parties but between all segments of a population that has expressed itself, this time around, more fully than ever before. That’s if we can believe all the analyses we’ve seen of who voted and where and in what volume.

And we do believe it. There’s no doubting that this has been a genuine change election. Americans want some action in some important areas of their lives, and, while they may have at some level enjoyed all the discords and mud-slinging of the election, now they expect us to work together to get through these problem areas.

The first issue we’ve got to deal with is the economic crisis. It was a long time building, and, to tell the truth, both parties contributed to its creation. Democrats and Republicans in Congress looked the other way as the mortgage crisis got out of hand, and each party has proved too willing over the last few years to loosen the government’s hand on the rudder of regulation. We’ve not only got to tighten the rules, we’ve got to recognize that this crisis has claimed innocent victims. It isn’t just the banks and the investment houses and the stock market we’ve got to shore up. It’s also the ordinary folks, struggling would-be homeowners who were coaxed into investing in the American dream and now are in need of their own rescue package.

We have some repair work to do on the foreign front, too. First of all, we need to stop the unnecessary bleeding — of human lives, of resources, of national prestige, and ruptured alliances. We need to face the fact that our true goals in the Middle East require a reallocation of effort. Afghanistan and Pakistan are now, as they were in 2001, the true focus of our fight against terror, and we have to resume the role of honest broker between our Israeli allies and the honest adherents of Palestinian statehood.

Once we have our priorities reordered, we must develop independent sources of energy that are consistent with fidelity to the environment. Before it’s too late, we have to overhaul a dangerously outworn national infrastructure. And we’ll need to revamp our educational system and at least get a start on a national health-care policy that befits the leading nation of the free world.

With a little hope and a lot of elbow grease, we can do these things. I know that much of the responsibility is mine. If I didn’t know that, I wouldn’t have worked so hard to get here. Trust me on that.

Signed, Your New President.

Categories
Book Features Books

Recovery Acts

The “Anaconda” — that was the plan: Union forces during the Civil War would encircle the South by blockading Southern ports, sending gunboats down the Mississippi, and marching land forces into and across enemy territory. “Once thus invaded and constricted,” Tom Chaffin writes in The H.L. Hunley: The Secret Hope of the Confederacy (Hill and Wang), “the Confederacy, denied its economic lifeblood, would soon perish.” And in 1865, the Confederacy did.

Fast-forward 141 years. An anaconda — that’s what Chaffin called the shape of his brain tumor, which doctors discovered in the summer of 2006 after the author suffered a seizure in his Atlanta home.

Chaffin has written about that diagnosis, his surgery, and his months of recovery in The New York Times Magazine and in the Oxford American, where he described the brain scan that showed a three-inch tumor in the shape of a snake and the “logic” behind it: “invasion and constriction.”

Unlike the Confederacy, however, Chaffin didn’t perish. He survived the surgery, but he suffered for months from aphasia, which affected his ability to express himself in sentences. He also experienced temporary paralysis along the right side of his body. But thanks to months of rehab, Chaffin — a journalist turned historian now teaching at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville — made his deadline: The first draft of his fourth book was finished on August 12, 2007, the eve of the first anniversary of his seizure.

As Chaffin told the Flyer following a recent Memphis booksigning, the book was his “way back to the world” after the “cognitive Bermuda Triangle” he found himself in after surgery: He worked 12-hour days of research then writing, seven days a week, for 12 full months. He also called his seizure, surgery, and rehab “a season in hell,” but, as he admitted, “So much of this was dumb luck” — luck that his tumor was benign and luck that he made such a successful comeback. “Luck, more than any moral virtue on my part,” Chaffin added.

How about also “a willingness of the heart” on Chaffin’s part? That’s the phrase F. Scott Fitzgerald used of the men who died at Shiloh, and it’s a phrase Chaffin borrows in his book to describe the courage it must have taken to be a member of the second and third crews of the H.L. Hunley.

The first of those crews lost five men when the Hunley, on a trial run, sank in Charleston Harbor in August 1863, but the Hunley was recovered. The second crew (eight men in all, including the commander, Horace Lawson Hunley) died when the Hunley, on another trial run, sank in October, but again it was recovered. As for the third crew: mission accomplished, then disaster.

The Hunley, working for the Confederate cause, became the first submarine in history to torpedo and sink an enemy ship, the USS Housatonic, in the waters off Charleston. The date was February 17, 1864, but the manually propelled Hunley — 40 feet in length; a mere four feet in height — never surfaced, the reason for the submarine’s disappearance after the explosion, even its exact location on the ocean floor, an abiding mystery until the sub’s sighting in 1995 and recovery five years later.

It’s now the focus of scientific study at Clemson University’s Warren Lasch Conservation Center, just as it has continued to fascinate students of the Civil War, from academics to buffs.

Chaffin’s an academic but no buff. He’s a practiced reporter careful to get the details right. Where Chaffin encountered legends and half-truths (what he called “the “barnacles of accumulated lore”) attached to the rich history of the Hunley, he “unceremoniously cast [them] overboard.”

“The story of the H.L. Hunley has ebbed and flowed in the public memory,” Chaffin said. “What I wanted were the basic facts supported by primary sources. And though I was aware of the contours of the story when I started, I soon found it to be a more complicated story, animated by more nuances, than I’d imagined. After my recovery, however, I couldn’t help but wonder if I’d started on this book prematurely. Paradoxically, that led me to be even more aggressive at fact-checking.”

Let one fact speak for itself: The H.L. Hunley: The Secret Hope of the Confederacy is narrative history at its most readable and remarkable.

The Hunley: recovered. Tom Chaffin too.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Time After Time

Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-Wai may be familiar to most Memphians as the director of this year’s locally filmed My Blueberry Nights, which was his English-language debut. But he made his name, at least in the West, with a series of sleek, frenetic, über-modern, über-urban ’90s films — Chungking Express, Fallen Angels, Happy Together. Even when he’s gone period, as on the early Days of Being Wild or his career-best In the Mood for Love, it’s still been in urban settings.

For that reason, Ashes of Time is the outlier in Wong’s filmography. Made in 1994 — Wong took a break on post-production for the epic to make Chungking Express on the quick — it’s a wuxia film, the historical strain of martial-arts films. It is set in ancient China, amid a stark landscape of peasants and warriors. In setting, it couldn’t be more different from Wong’s other work.

And yet, thematically, it fits into Wong’s oeuvre perfectly. Few filmmakers have so consistent a tone and set of concerns as Wong, whose films almost always hinge on memory, loss, and romantic longing. With Ashes of Time, he imposed these themes on the wuxia genre, and the themes won.

Though considered a seminal work of modern international cinema, Ashes of Time never had an official American release, until now. With Ashes of Time Redux, Wong has re-edited and refurbished the film, cutting it down to 93 minutes (from the original 100-minute run time), adding digital tinting to enhance the color, and adding a new score from Yo-Yo Ma.

Shot by Wong’s longtime collaborator Christopher Doyle, Ashes of Time Redux is — like all Wong films — visually rich. Shot in the Chinese desert, Doyle mixes breathtaking, almost surreal landscape shots with extreme close-ups on the film’s all-star (in Chinese cinema terms) cast. Set in a “time of eclipse,” Ashes feels less like a historical piece than a missive from a past dystopia or an alternate world.

But Ashes of Time Redux is as difficult to follow as it is beautiful to look at. The film is structured around five seasons and passages from a Chinese almanac. At the center of the plot, such as it is, is Leslie Cheung as the agent Ouyang Feng, who hires famous bounty-hunters for people in need. In and out of Ouyang’s house drift assassins-for-hire and those who need them, many of them haunted by romantic regrets. All the while, Ouyang fixates on the woman (Maggie Cheung) who married his brother.

It is a highly elliptical, heavily mannered film. The action scenes are few and almost abstract, with more emphasis on natural beauty and human brooding. Wong tames the Chinese action cinema, for better or worse, into a film that fits his own character — one that luxuriates in melancholy. It is gorgeous, frustrating filmmaking.

Ashes of Time Redux

Opening Friday, November 7th

Ridgeway Four

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Clint Eastwood’s latest Oscar bid disappoints.

Clint Eastwood ought to be a more memorable and significant filmmaker than he is. Throughout his prolific career — he’s made at least seven films per decade since the 1970s — he’s told plenty of interesting stories about crime, dishonor, and corruption, history, combat, and heroism. He’s a solid if unspectacular craftsman who seldom releases movies without merit. But with the exception of four Westerns (most recently 1992’s Unforgiven), two unusual biopics (1988’s White Hunter, Black Heart and 1989’s Bird), and 1993’s heartbreaking A Perfect World, Eastwood’s films are curiously detached and curmudgeonly, with few memorable emotional or stylistic high points. When this strained seriousness is overindulged, it results in negligible work like Changeling, Eastwood’s fictionalized retelling of an actual 1920s Los Angeles missing-child case.

An emaciated and frightened Angelina Jolie stars as Christine Collins, a telephone-company supervisor whose young son is abducted one day while she’s at work. Five months later, the LAPD discovers her son and returns him to her, but she immediately suspects that he’s not her child — for one thing, this new boy is three inches shorter. The LAPD, though, is unwilling either to accommodate Collins or renege on its own story, so she begins a tentative struggle with the cops that eventually wins her an extended stay in a Los Angeles psychopathic ward — where, it turns out, she’s not the only woman who’s fought the law unsuccessfully. While she attempts to free herself, an ominous new case with terrible implications further undermines the police department’s credibility.

With Changeling, Eastwood is toiling in the shadow of numerous Southern California crime pictures, so he manufactures a mannered, opaque neo-noir world of light and dark that smudges the allusions to superior works like Chinatown and L.A. Confidential. Unfortunately, his lighting scheme doesn’t enhance character or illuminate any larger social anxieties. His actors struggle to define themselves against this creeping blackness as best they can, but the sparse natural lighting and the bisecting shadow schemes swallow up everyone from concerned minister Gustav Briegleb (a restrained John Malkovich) to concerned detective Lester Ybarra (Michael Kelly).

Yet there’s a hint of what such cool-eyed professionalism can accomplish in two consecutive scenes occurring halfway through the film. In the first scene, Collins tries to avoid the Catch-22 of life in the psych ward: If she’s hysterical and outraged by her wrongful incarceration, she’s clearly mentally unstable, but if she’s calm and collected, she’s emotionally withdrawn. During her informal evaluation scene with the menacing head doctor, each reaction shot inches closer and closer until the scene climaxes with a huge close-up of Collins’ shaken, tear-stained face.

The second scene is another two-actor affair between Detective Ybarra and a young kid about to be deported. The scene between Ibarra and the kid is a ghoulish inversion of the scene between Collins and the doctor, as the kid tries to convince the detective that his gruesome testimony is true. How these two simple, sharp, chilling scenes wormed their way into a film as diffuse and unsatisfying as this one, though, is anyone’s guess.

Changeling

Now playing

Multiple locations

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

Okay. This is it. I am writing this on the day before

the 2008 United States presidential election, and I am trying not to

run screaming into the streets in search of a psychiatrist who still uses electroshock

treatments. I’m pretty sure I have that syndrome — that election-related stress and trauma disorder — or something

like that. And I hate it. I want my life back.

On the one hand, I am certainly no diehard “patriot” of the only country in the world that has dropped a nuclear bomb on another one and has spent more than half a century wringing its hands about other countries having the same capability. It just doesn’t make sense to me. (But, then, a lot of things don’t.) So common sense would have it that I shouldn’t really care who wins this election. On the other hand, I look around at all of the poverty, injustice, bigotry, and egomaniacal us-vs.-them worldview that plagues the United States and makes us the laughingstock of the planet, and I want that to end. I want it to end because I want the country in which I live to be better than that. Maybe I am a patriot and just don’t know it.

What I do know is that there are three words I never want to hear again as long as I live: “Joe the Plumber.” By the time this issue of the Flyer hits the streets, the election will be over, I hope. I say “I hope” because of the chance that the outcome could be rigged, as it was in 2000. And my election-stress syndrome is in high gear and has me worrying that there’s a slight chance that the results won’t be confirmed immediately. And that means that the words “Joe the Plumber” might be spoken again, and I just don’t think I can take it. Call me crazy (a lot of people do!), but I firmly believe that John McCain’s campaign managers, in true Karl Rovian style, paid Joe the Plumber to attend the Barack Obama campaign stop in Ohio and told him to say the things he said so they could have some kind of thin thread to hang onto as the election neared and they could obnoxiously invoke his name over and over and over and over and over and over and over again to the point that his moniker might be listed in the next Oxford English Dictionary.

Nothing against the guy personally, but are we so dumbed down that, in what has turned out to be the most important election of this century, Joe the Plumber has become the symbol of everyman? If you are a Wikipedia freak like me, you probably know that there is now an entry on Joe that has — count them — 69 references. The entry has a table of contents with 12 chapters, and the article is as long as Ronald Reagan’s funeral. Silly me. I thought this was the first election in the history of the United States in which a black man has a chance to become the president, thereby changing the course of history forever and moving us into the real world and helping heal more than 200 years of slavery, segregation, Jim Crow persecution, and whispering at the water coolers about how blacks aren’t that bad as long as they stay in their place. But I suppose for many people, Joe the Plumber is more important than that — even if he did have his facts wrong on Barack Obama’s tax plan and will be, if Obama is elected, one of the people who gets a tax break. Now that Joe the Plumber has launched a congressional campaign, maybe he will come to understand this as he attempts to win an office with a salary we the people will pay.

See? I am losing it. Even I am writing about Joe the Plumber, whose name I never want to hear again. It’s madness. All I want, as I have written here before, is for Shirley Chisholm to come back from the dead and hold my hand through this. And that’s because there’s a lot at stake here. This is not Saturday Night Live. It’s our chance to show the rest of the world that we are not a nation of freaks. But I fear that we can’t show them something that we’re not. I hope that by the time this paper hits the streets, that fear will prove to have been unfounded. I am a nervous wreck.

Categories
Hot Properties Real Estate

Don’t Judge a Bungalow by Its Cover

Generally, bungalow layouts are predictable: a porch across the front, a bay off to one side, and an interior hall that has two bedrooms and a bath that open off of it and connect the front of the house and the kitchen. Usually, you’d wish that the rooms could be just a bit bigger — but not inside this Evergreen bungalow!

From outside, all you notice that’s atypical is that the porch is reduced to a small, covered entry with a brick archway, and — most unusual for a bungalow — the fireplace is on the front. It wouldn’t be much of a reach to suggest that the Spanish Colonial Revival, quite popular in the 1930s when this house was built, had just a little influence here.

Inside, the living room runs a generous 22 feet deep. The dining room benefits from a full-width bay that lets light stream in from three sides.

Both the living and dining rooms have gorgeous, native red-gum trim that includes a deep cove molding at the ceiling. The living room fireplace has an elegant Arts and Crafts, earth-toned tile surround and is flanked by back-lit, glass-doored bookcases.

The eat-in kitchen was renovated not long ago. One end has a breakfast area with an antique, stained glass chandelier. The other end has a built-in banquette and French doors to the rear courtyard. The cabinets are all painted. and there are plenty of them, which means that there’s also lots of counter workspace, including a breakfast bar.

The other half of the ground floor is equally surprising. The front

bedroom, entered only from the living room, is a master or guest suite with an updated but original full bath. The middle bedroom, like the dining room, is enhanced by another room-wide bay window and is now used as a media/family room. The full bath off the hall serves as the powder room and is also convenient to the back bedroom.

Upstairs has been fully renovated as an even larger master suite, with a bedroom 23-by-17 feet, and it has three pairs of large windows. Its bath has a claw-foot tub, a separate shower, and both toilet and bidet. The sink is installed in an antique cabinet.

Out back, the courtyard has a large paved area for seating and entertaining, a fairly recent development but a true patio, in keeping with the Spanish Colonial tone of the house.

The rest of the yard is lushly planted and has an arbor covered in flowering vines. A guest house provides overflow space and makes a nice rear edge for the courtyard. On the main house, a retractable awing over the French doors creates a sun screen for the summer but allows solar gain in the winter.

It’s rare to find a bungalow with rooms of this scale and with finishes and craftsmanship this good. It’s certainly not noticeably larger than average from the street, but all that proves is that you can’t judge any bungalow by its cover. •

267 Avalon

Approximately 2,500 square feet

4 bedrooms; 3 baths

$359,000

Realtor: Crye-Leike, 276-8800

Agent: Bill Malone, 359-4000

Categories
News

Local Home on HGTV

It’s amazing what you can do with a little concrete.

Local concrete artist Bernhard Meck’s Midtown home will be featured on an episode of HGTV’s “Look What I Did!” tomorrow night.

The HGTV show features home projects that were done without a design consultant or a contractor.

“It’s about the WOW! factor when people see the results and ask, ‘You did this yourself?'” says the show’s website. “It’s an extravagantly themed wall mural and mosaic tiled patio that tell complete stories, a backyard roller coaster for the grandkids, a personal water park with a series of pools and grottoes connected by caves and channels.”

For more, visit Mary Cashiola’s In The Bluff blog.

Categories
News

White Out?

Will there be a gathering of various White Power tribes in Memphis this weekend? It’s anybody’s guess, at this point, though former KKK Grand Wizard, Neo-Nazi, and member of the Louisiana state legislature David Duke says it will happen.

The fate of the conference has been uncertain since Whispering Woods Hotel and Conference Center, the Olive Branch facility where the conference was scheduled to take place, pulled the sheet out from under the group on Tuesday, citing concerns for the safety of guests and employees.

According to some local media reports, Duke said he would be in town yesterday, but he is apparently still a no-show. Fox 13 is reporting that the conference may have relocated to Germantown. Duke’s website suggests that the exact details will not be revealed until shortly before the event commences. If it commences.

Duke is calling the conference, “the first organized response to this Obamination.” Abomination. Get it? We’ll keep you posted as things develop — or not.

Chris Davis

Categories
News

Marijuana Legalization Talk Tonight at Rhodes

Terry Nelson worked in law enforcement for more than 30 years, serving in the U.S. Border Patrol, the U.S. Customs Service, and the Department of Homeland Security. During his career, he participated in the seizure of more than 230,000 pounds of cocaine. Nelson retired from law enforcement in 2005 and soon after joined Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) because he believes the ongoing “War on Drugs” simply isn’t working. Nelson will give a presentation tonight at 8 p.m. in the Orgill Room of Clough Hall at Rhodes College.

Flyer: Why do you think marijuana should be legalized?

Nelson: I want to be clear. We’re not for drug use because all of us have seen how it destroys families and everything else, but we’re for crime and violence reduction. We think that by legalizing we can reduce crime and violence in our country by about 80 percent because most of the crime and violence occurs in the distribution network.

If you arrest a kid who’s 18 or 19-years-old and give him a prison sentence because he doesn’t have the money to fight it, he’s going to have that felony record for the rest of his life. He’s going to be marginalized in society. He won’t be able to vote in some states and won’t be able to get a decent job. So we want to deal with the crime and violence issue and deal with the drug issue separately. Drug use is a social issue, not a criminal issue.

How would you approach the drug issue?

The drug problem is best addressed with education, and when that fails, treatment. Jail is not the answer for an addict because it won’t fix his problems, it will compound them.

Education is the key, and programs like D.A.R.E. don’t work because police teach those programs, and they lie to the kids. The cops tell these kids, whose older brothers and sisters or even parents smoke marijuana, that if they smoke, they’ll lose their mind and things of that nature. And they know it’s a lie.

What do you think would be the benefits of legalization?

There would be less crime and violence, and we’d have a more humane society. And our police could get back to doing police work. I could go out on any street in Memphis on any night and bust two kids with marijuana, but what have I accomplished? I just screwed them up, but I haven’t done any good for law enforcement. I took myself off the street for about 4 hours when people are really committing crimes. Our police officers need to focus on police issues. Lets focus on real crime, crime against people and property and leave people who are just hurting themselves alone.

Why do think the federal government won’t recognize that the “War on Drugs” isn’t working?

They just don’t have the political guts. In 1995 at the Hoover Institute, chiefs of police from all over the nation attended a seminar, and around 90 percent said the “War on Drugs” wasn’t working.

Unanimously, they voted for a panel to be established to study it, but the federal government ignored all of this. I was at the National State Legislators Conference about 2 months ago, and 82 percent of the staffers, state Senators, and congressman that came by our table agreed with us.

Why do you think marijuana has not been legalized?

It’s all about the money. There’s a lot of money made off of the drug war. The pharmaceutical companies make money off of drug-testing kits. There is money from helicopters being made and sold to police squads. The military also uses a lot of their budget for the so-called “War on Drugs.” And there are countless so-called criminals who have to pay to get themselves out of jail.

–by Shara Clark