Month: August 2010

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Letters To The Editor Opinion

Letters to the Editor

Transient Perspective

In his harsh criticism (Letters, July 15th issue), Tommy Volinchak denigrates the efforts of June West and Memphis Heritage to keep historical preservation in the public eye, particularly trying to save the venerable Union Avenue United Methodist Church. Volinchak shows that he knows nothing about Midtown and the aesthetics and sense of place the area has to offer.

Midtown is a prime example of the new urbanism movement, where urban sprawl, isolated neighborhoods, and indistinguishable commercial areas are discouraged and the value of mixed-use neighborhoods with walkable, bikeable amenities are strongly encouraged.

The idea that any commercial development, no matter how short-sighted, is preferable to a vacant building is nonsense. Following that line of thinking to its logical conclusion, all of Memphis would be like Summer Avenue, with businesses coming and going, short-term employment opportunities, no historic or aesthetic perspective, and a transient population that views Memphis as only a place to make a fast buck and get out.

Randy Norwood

Memphis

Terrorists

We can never kill all the terrorists. As long as the U.S. keeps trying to kill all the terrorists, the terrorists have total control over us. They are forcing us to have our young people slaughtered and our finances depleted. They are in control. Why don’t people get it?

Wouldn’t it be better to heal our own country financially, emotionally, and politically before we travel the wrong way down a one-way street?

Normally, I am a flaming liberal, and I’m not sure where my next statement will take me: Quit sending money out of the country. Quit all the wars. Spend it at home and fix us. After we’re fixed, start sending money out of the country again, but this time build up instead of tearing down.

Dagmar Bergan

Helena, Arkansas

No Apologies

C.P. Cobb’s letter (July 22nd issue) praised Congressman Steve Cohen’s practice of doing the job he was elected to do. Cohen is an excellent congressman, but, like others, he is guilty of wasting time, resources, and money by giving credence to unnecessary motions and resolutions. I was with Cobb until he listed the resolution calling for our current House of Representatives to apologize for something that a long-ago House was responsible for.

No one in our government or anyone living today is responsible for slavery. We still have prejudice and discrimination on all sides of the race issue and we can only pray for enlightenment for those filled with hate, but to ask for apologies from people or groups not responsible is absurd. It is as perverse as my asking any African American I meet to apologize for the two black men who robbed me at gunpoint on Union Avenue 15 years ago. Or to require a Japanese person to apologize for Pearl Harbor. Or to require every Muslim to apologize for the acts of the fanatics.

People need to forget what has gone before and spend time healing the ills and hatred of today. I will always apologize for my faults, but I refuse to be held accountable for the sins of others. Cohen is a good congressman, but don’t hold up that ridiculous resolution as something he should be commended for.

Al Weinerman

Olive Branch, Mississippi

Appalling Statements

There are a number of appalling statements that are uttered by people of faith in the name of their religion. However, when Steve Gaines, pastor at Bellevue Baptist, told the City Council, “We believe this ordinance against discrimination discriminates against people of faith,” my jaw dropped.

Gaines is arguing with the logic that the Mormon church used to discriminate against blacks, barring them from Mormon priesthood. Similarly, Pastor Gaines is stating that if people of faith are not allowed to freely discriminate against homosexuals, then Christians are being discriminated against.

What Gaines fails to realize, or conveniently ignores, is that discrimination is discrimination no matter how you justify it. Mormon Christians chose to end their discriminatory, racist practices against blacks in order to maintain their tax exemption status. Some day, Baptist Christians may have to make the same choice with their discriminatory practices against homosexuals.

Jason W. Grosser

Memphis

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Letter from the Editor: Educated Guessing

Last Sunday, the temperature hit triple digits, kicking off what is now the hottest week of the year. (As I write this, on Tuesday, the city of Memphis officially has the highest heat index in the United States, at 119 degrees.) But Sunday was the weekend, damn it, triple digits or not and spurred on by my pal John Ryan, I went fishing.

A friend had gotten us onto a private lake in Southeast Memphis, and we were to meet him there. After driving through suburban sprawl that looked anything but fishy, we turned into a shaded gravel drive and found a beautiful, secluded lake. Who knew? There was an aluminum jonboat, but it was so hot to the touch that we could barely hold on to it long enough to push it into the water. But we persevered, launched, and proceeded to catch several nice bass.

An hour later, our friend arrived, bearing refreshments, so we repaired to the shady bank for beer and conversation. Our friend is involved in a Republican candidate’s campaign for county office. I asked him how his man was faring in the early voting. He whipped out a notepad and said he estimated his candidate had a 1,700-vote lead going into Election Day.

“How do you figure?” I asked. A lot, it turned out.

He went through a complicated formula, based on the number of white voters, black voters, “other” voters, Democrats, and Republicans. He had a result based on “other” voters being 60 percent black; another total based on “other” voters being 50 percent black. He had voting patterns factored in from past elections and the impact of a higher-than-normal number of GOP voters. His ciphering filled several pages. Bottom line: He was making an educated guess.

On Monday, Willie Herenton called a press conference and scolded the local media for incorrectly analyzing the early- voting numbers. Voting trends in Shelby County, the former mayor said, did not parallel the voting patterns in the 9th District, where African-American turnout is very high. This, he proclaimed, meant good news for his candidacy. He may be correct. Or he may be grasping at straws.

Come Thursday night, maybe even before you read this, we’ll know the real math from the only poll that matters: Election Day. That’s where the rubber meets the road, where the guesswork finally ends.

The biggest bass we caught on Sunday weighed four and a half pounds, by the way. That’s an educated guess.

Bruce VanWyngarden

brucev@memphisflyer.com

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

Mark Williams, the chairman of the Tea Party Express, got booted from the Confederacy of Dunces last month, because, in response to an NAACP suggestion that the group repudiate racial elements within the movement, he wrote and published an “Open Letter to President Lincoln” from the emancipated slaves, something he referred to as “satire.” In his “satire,” all Williams did was put down in words what many Tea Party types refuse to say out loud.

Dear Mr. Lincoln,

We Coloreds have taken a vote and decided that we don’t cotton to that whole emancipation thing. Freedom means having to work for real, think for ourselves, and take consequences along with the rewards. That is just far too much to ask of us Colored People and we demand that it stop.

In fact we held a big meeting and took a vote in Kansas City this week. We voted to condemn a political revival of that old abolitionist spirit called the “tea party movement.”

The tea party position to “end the bailouts” for example is just silly. Bailouts are just big money welfare and isn’t that what we want all Coloreds to strive for? What kind of racist would want to end big money welfare? What they need to do is start handing the bailouts directly to us Coloreds! Of course, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is the only responsible party that should be granted the right to disperse the funds …

Perhaps the most racist point of all in the tea parties is their demand that government “stop raising our taxes.” That is outrageous! How will we Coloreds ever get a wide screen TV in every room if non-Coloreds get to keep what they earn? Totally racist! The tea party expects Coloreds to be productive members of society?

Mr. Lincoln, you were the greatest racist ever. We had a great gig. Three squares, room and board, all our decisions made by the massa in the house. Please repeal the 13th and 14th Amendments and let us get back to where we belong.

Sincerely,

Precious Ben Jealous, Tom’s Nephew NAACP Head Colored Person

Laugh? I thought I’d never start! How can you convince someone there is racism in their midst when it runs in their blood? A week later, Williams was still on cable news defending his remarks by saying the NAACP was guilty of reverse racism, which appears to be the Tea Party’s prime rebuttal for all the patriotic Americans’ outrageous behavior at the various kleagle rallies around the nation. Their new hero, Kentucky senatorial candidate Rand Paul, expressed the still-burning racist ember that private businesses should be able to choose who they serve. Not if they serve the public, they don’t. And I don’t believe for a second that Paul is a racist. However, when I grew out my beard and started hanging around with people with long hair, they called me a hippie. So, if the sheet fits …

The term “yellow journalism” was created in the late 1800s to describe the sensationalist rhetoric and fabricated stories of newspapers owned by William Randolph Hearst. The Hearst of the 21st century, Rupert Murdoch, became a naturalized U.S. citizen in order to own multiple media outlets in the same market, like The New York Post,The Wall Street Journal, and Fox News. His brand of contemporary yellow journalism is far more insidious than the sabre rattling of a few newspapers and makes the “Remember the Maine” jingoism of the Hearst era seem almost quaint.

With Fox acting as a running-dog for right-wing extremism, pseudo-smart “entertainers” like Glenn Beck get free rein to espouse their inflammatory “theories.” So, when a real journalist, like The Washington Post‘s Dana Milbank, calls Beck out for his serial use of Nazi references to describe the Obama administration, the right’s reaction is to claim that the country is experiencing a phase of “political correctness,” in which their freedom of speech is under attack. They have become oblivious to the difference between “free speech” and “hate speech,” and the saddest and most alarming statement of all about Fox News is their massive ratings success.

Fox virtually leaped on blogger and Tea Party apologist Andrew Breitbart’s odious contention that reverse racism existed at the Department of Agriculture in the person of one Shirley Sherrod. By slicing and dicing Sherrod’s speech before the NAACP, he made a convincing argument that she was discriminating against white people. I confess that I was fooled too. When I saw the initial reports and video of Sherrod on Fox News, I thought that she must certainly resign, and the outrage of the Obama administration and the NAACP was justified. They made the same mistake that I did — assuming that Fox was a semiresponsible news organization that abides by the rules of journalism. How foolish of me.

Why should I have assumed Fox News vetted the Breitbart piece, when he was the one behind the story and video of ACORN’s adventures with the now felonious, fake pimp and then spent six months lying about it? And all in the cause of proving Mark Williams’ supposed point in his “satirical” letter to Lincoln: that honest, hard-working citizens’ tax money goes directly to the support of shiftless layabouts who prefer “big-money welfare” to a job — the raison d’etre of the Tea Party movement.

Tea Party darling Tom Tancredo has announced his candidacy for governor of Colorado, only months after waxing nostalgic about literacy tests at the polls during the Jim Crow era. Since good test results are a prerequisite for entering a respected college, isn’t there some way we could institute civics literacy exams for potential candidates for public office? At least check their SAT scores.

Randy Haspel writes the “Born-Again Hippies” blog, where a longer version of this column first appeared.

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Memphis Gaydar News

Anybody Know a Gay Former City Employee?

Hey guys! I’m hoping to put together a story for a future print edition of the Flyer on the proposed non-discrimination ordinance protecting LGBT city workers.

But I’d really like to put a human face on the issue. It’s hard for some people to grasp why the ordinance matters without seeing how discrimination affects real people. If anyone knows of a LGBT former city employee (or even a current city employee willing to go on record) that I could interview about any discrimination she or he has faced at work, please contact me at bphillips@memphisflyer.com.

Thanks!

Categories
Opinion

White Guys/Black Guys

Most jobs aren’t big enough for people.

Author and journalist Studs Terkel said that in his book about work called, aptly, Working. Happy is the person who finds a job big enough for them.

Steve Cohen is such a person. Being a congressman suits his political skills, ambitions, energies, and ego.

Like a lot of Midtowners, I knew Cohen back when he was a white guy. We’re the same age, and our views were shaped by growing up in the Fifties and Sixties, Vietnam, Selma, LBJ, Goldwater, civil rights, baseball cards and football games, Watergate, and Nixon.

Willie Herenton used to have a job that was big enough for him, but he got tired of being mayor of Memphis and stayed a term and a half too long. He may not get to find out whether or not being a congressman suits him, because, under the right circumstances, a white guy can beat a black guy (or black woman) in an election in Memphis and vice versa.

It has happened before, to the benefit of both Cohen and Herenton.

In 1978, Herenton was a deputy school superintendent who had been in the Memphis system since 1963. He was ripe for the job of superintendent, but the white-dominated school board chose a white man from Michigan, William Coats, instead. There was a big uproar, Coats declined the offer, and Herenton got the job.

His key ally on the board was NAACP executive secretary Maxine Smith. He was her protégé. Large chunks of his doctoral dissertation quote from a paper she wrote about school desegregation. She is now a Cohen supporter. It would be interesting to hear why she is not supporting Herenton, but she ducked the question when I asked her a couple years ago, and I have not heard her answer it since.

In 1991, ex-superintendent Herenton decided that the mayor’s job was big enough for him, and he went for it, and he beat a white guy, Dick Hackett, by 142 votes. Hackett said it all came down to numbers and colors. In other words, there were a few more black voters than white voters that year.

In mayoral elections in 1995, 1999, and 2003, Herenton beat some low-firepower white guys and a black guy, Joe Ford, and got thousands of white votes and millions in campaign contributions. It helped that he was not a Ford, just as it helps Mayor A C Wharton that he is not Herenton. In politics, it is not only who you are but who you aren’t. Herenton’s falling out with Harold Ford and Harold Ford Jr. is described in the younger Ford’s new book, More Davids Than Goliaths.

After 2003, being mayor wasn’t big enough for Herenton’s ego. He only got 42 percent of the vote in 2007 against Carol Chumney and Herman Morris. But that was a lot better than Morris, whose over-rating in the polls is one of the main reasons for Herenton’s distrust of that inexact science.

Cohen, a state senator at the time, ran for Congress in 1996 and lost to Harold Ford Jr. in the Democratic primary. Ford’s ample margin of victory suggested that he got some white votes in the majority-black district. Cohen complained that a white guy didn’t have a chance against an established black candidate.

That Cohen is no more. In 2006, Cohen was older and wiser and luckier. He was the white guy in a crowded field of black candidates in a no-runoff primary. He won with less than a third of the vote. In 2008, he beat a black woman, Nikki Tinker, in the primary and got 79 percent of the vote.

This week, he has the advantages of incumbency, endorsements, and lots of money. And he runs like a well-tuned Ford. When I voted last month at Mississippi Boulevard Christian Church, no fewer than three Cohen vans pulled up, delivering elderly black and white voters to the polls.

The next step for Cohen would be leadership of the local Democratic Party — a remarkable thing for a white guy.

The next step for Herenton would be to become the “Just One” black member of the Tennessee congressional delegation — a remarkable omission in his view. He’s right about polls being untrustworthy. He’s right about Cohen having more friends in the media. He’s right about the glaring oddity of there not being “Just One.” But I don’t think he will be it.

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Opinion

White Flight and Memphis Democrats

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The Democratic Party in Memphis is worried about white flight reaching a tipping point.

In the short term, it could cost their man, Joe Ford, the Shelby County mayor’s job if whites vote for Steve Cohen for Congress and Republican Mark Luttrell for mayor. Plus a half dozen down-ballot offices that Republicans won by a whisker last time around in county-wide races.

In the not-so long run, it could isolate Memphis from the rest of Tennessee if the Democratic Party in Memphis and Shelby County is perceived to be the black party in a heavily black city with a nearly all-black public school system in a majority black county.

In the 1970s, Memphis saw massive white flight from public schools, which now have only about 7,000 white students. After that came white flight from neighborhoods and the relocation of churches and businesses and professional offices to the suburbs. Could the Democratic Party be next?

That’s not the case yet, as a small gathering of white Democrats demonstrated Wednesday at a press conference in Forrest Park downtown. The group included political strategist David Upton, former assessor Rita Clark, Shelby County Commissioner Steve Mulroy, Central Gardens neighborhood leader Patty Marsh, activist Scott Banbury, and former Sierra Club of Tennessee president Don Richardson.

They were all there to say nice things about Ford. He is progressive. He is a friend of the environment. He listens. He is a gentleman. He helped put The Med on sound(er) footing. He had a few financial problems but who hasn’t? He lives outside of Memphis in Shelby County but won’t promote suburban sprawl.

The broader message was this: If you are a white person and thinking of fleeing the Democratic Party because there aren’t going to be any white people in it, don’t. There are still white Democrats in Memphis and they can align with black Democrats to win elections and advance Democratic principles.

Which raises the question, what are Democratic principles? Bring home the troops? National health care? Support unions? Support Obama? Oppose the Tea Party? Mock Palin? Tax the rich? Read The New York Times? Watch Olbermann and not Fox?

I don’t know. I think it is easier for college-educated people to find more in common with each other, regardless of political affiliation, than for the Democrats to unite people who went to Rhodes College or the University of Tennessee and people who dropped out of Booker T. Washington High School and grew up in the projects or in Mexico.

In Memphis, I think there are principles that defy the labels Democrat or Republican. Call it the Middle Party. These are some of them.

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Intermission Impossible Theater

Ostrander Nominations 2010

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This has been one hell of a great year for Memphis theater and the 27th edition of The Ostrander Awards (mandatory Facebook page here) are looming large on the horizon. This year the annual ceremony honoring excellence in regional theater will held on Sunday, August 29th, from 6-11pm in Hardin Hall at the Memphis Botanic Garden. There will be cocktails and hors d’oeuvres from 6-7 followed by the awards ceremony at 7, followed by an after party with music and dancing, followed by antics that will be giggled about in gossip circles for the next 365 days at least.

This year’s nominations all seem fairly obvious, although there is at least one name missing from the list below that has me absolutely stunned. Can anybody else guess who that may be? Hint: He was in a show that received several nominations and he could have been nominated for either best leading or supporting actor depending on how the judges wanted to call it. I’ll go into greater detail about this in a later post. Meanwhile, talk among yourselves. Tell me who you think was left out, and who you think should go home with an Ozzie.

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Sing All Kinds We Recommend

Memphis Beat: “Suspicious Minds”

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Memphis Beat, “Suspicious Minds”
Originally Aired August 3, 2010

Episode Named After: The great Elvis Presley song “Suspicious Minds” — the greatest, in my opinion. Written and first recorded by Mark James, “Suspicious Minds” was released in 1969 and was Elvis’ last #1 song in the U.S. Elvis recorded it, “In the Ghetto,” and “Kentucky Rain” in his “Memphis sessions” with Chips Moman at American Sound Studio. Thematically, the song, about a troubled relationship full of doubt, is perfectly matched to several episode plots, including a strained marriage, a police officer considering taking a bribe, and a son wondering if his dad was the stand-up guy he always thought he was.

Rowdy Memphis (Plot synopsis): Detective Dwight Hendricks (Jason Lee) testifies during a criminal case about an altercation at a toy store. A pretty defense attorney — and instant love interest for Dwight — grills him on the stand, but Hendricks wins out with a speech about how he grew up knowing there’s a right way to treat folks. The jury nods in agreement. Defendant: Guilty.

After the credits, we see Dwight’s mom (Celia Weston) and her beau, Tony (Daniel Hugh Kelly), smoking a joint behind a moonbounce at Tony’s birthday party in a park. A Beechcraft airplane emergency lands on the grassy strip of the park — but there’s no one inside flying it. Whitehead (Sam Hennings) thinks it must be a “ghost plane.” An Air Force officer and FAA liaison shows up to help investigate and sparks up a flirtatious relationship with Lieutenant Rice (Alfre Woodard). The investigation leads to a missing couple, the Oneys, who recently won $82 million in the lottery. Suspects include the son, an ex-brother-in-law, and then Mr. Oney (Andrew Sensenig) himself. Turns out, the Oneys didn’t really win the lottery, they just said they did so they could glom some free stuff and get credit with businesses and friends. Mr. Oney was an inventor who needed money for a patent. His wife supported him, to the detriment of the rest of her family, and, when she was about to leave him and expose the lotto fraud, he killed her.

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News

“Waiting for Superman” in Memphis

Memphis was chosen as one of 16 sites for a special screening of Waiting for Superman, a film from Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth) about the “crisis of public education.”

Mary Cashiola was there.

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News

A Super Education?

“We have tissues in the front and tissues in the back,” Kenya Bradshaw, director of the local chapter of Stand for Children, told local educators, business people, and education advocates in the Methodist Presentation Theater at the U of M yesterday.

“People think they’re not going to cry. You are going to cry.”

Memphis was chosen as one of 16 sites for a special screening of Waiting for Superman, a film from Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth) about the “crisis of public education.”

Geoffrey Canada, the inspiring leader of the Harlem Childrens Zone, a school that seeks to increase college graduation rates in Harlem.

  • Geoffrey Canada, the inspiring leader of the Harlem Children’s Zone, a school that seeks to increase college graduation rates in Harlem.

Since 1971, the nation has doubled the amount of money spent on each student (and yes, that’s adjusted for inflation) but scores have stayed dismally static.

The film focuses on the systematic problems hardwired into the current system, such as tenure guidelines that don’t allow districts to get rid of unsuccessful teachers, but it also follows five children (and their parents) who are trying to find better educational options than the traditional public school system.