Month: November 2010

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Letter from the Editor: Free Turkeys

CREDIT: Napkinville.com

It’s Thanksgiving week, and it’s being reported that food banks around the country will be serving more Thanksgiving meals for the poor than ever before. This is not surprising. We’re still reeling from the recent recession. Unemployment remains high. People continue to lose their homes to foreclosures, leading to instability in neighborhoods that were once thriving and decreasing tax revenues. National, state, and local government budgets are strained to the breaking point. Social services are being cut, and school tuitions are being raised.

Fortunately, happy times are about to return. Our country has been “taken back,” put in the hands of responsible, straight-shooting adults who will deliver us from our economic malaise. Now that the Republicans have won Congress and gained a large majority of governorships and state legislatures, things will quickly improve, since, as we’ve now learned, Nancy Pelosi and President Obama were the cause of all our problems.

Once Republicans cut off unemployment benefits and extend tax cuts to the wealthy, the economy will rebound. That resultant $830 billion shortfall in tax revenues will actually help us reduce the deficit! Here’s how it will work: The rich will use all the money that they don’t pay in taxes to invest in businesses, which will hire unemployed people, and the money will trickle down in streams of gold to the grateful working class, which will then pay taxes to reduce the deficit. And here’s the beautiful part: After Republicans raise the age of eligibility for Social Security to 70, all the non-wealthy folks will pay taxes for five more years. Deficit reduced! Sure, it’s never worked before, but this time will be different. Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachman, John Boehner, and their Fox friends guarantee it.

And since Republicans refuse to confirm any federal judges who have been appointed by President Obama, we don’t have to worry about “activism” from the bench. Plus, they’re going to send all the immigrants back to Mexico or wherever they came from, which means lots more jobs for “real” Americans. Oh, the next two years are going to be glorious!

Post-election polls tell us that those who voted in the recent mid-terms skewed wealthy and older. No surprise. They were angry. As they should be. After all, they don’t get a free turkey at Thanksgiving like all those other lucky bastards.

Bruce VanWyngarden

brucev@memphisflyer.com

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Hairy Situation

Tangled — the new animated Disney adaptation of the Rapunzel story — is about sex, of course.

The set-up: A magic golden flower is used to heal an ailing pregnant queen, and the daughter she bears is similarly imbued with healing powers, contained in her yellow hair. A witch, who already knows about the flower power and stays young because of it, steals the baby to keep her youthful mojo working. The witch installs the child in a tower and raises her as her own daughter. The magical catch: If the kid’s hair is cut, it loses its endowment.

Eighteen years later, the child is the fresh young woman Rapunzel (voiced by Mandy Moore). She dreams of the world outside her tower, and she’s also a little terrified of it. Her ostensible mom, Mother Gothel (Donna Murphy), has been warning her about how cruel things are beyond her safe home.

But Rapunzel is enticed by mysterious lights that take to the night sky every year on her birthday. She doesn’t know it, but they’re a memorial of floating lanterns launched by the king and queen to mark their daughter’s disappearance. Rapunzel also has a bounty of hair, and mother Gothel is still getting off on the occasional dose of its regenerative power. (The relationship between Rapunzel and Mother Gothel is considerably Jungian.)

Mother Gothel’s perfect crime has its foil in the person of Flynn Ryder (Zachary Levi, TV’s Chuck), a thief who happens upon the tower while hiding from the palace guards, from whom he has stolen a crown — the baby Rapunzel’s crown, in fact. Ryder convinces Rapunzel to venture out into the world and promises to take her to the source of the lights in exchange for the crown, which the resourceful girl has beaten away from him and hidden.

And so, off the boy and girl go on their virginity-parable adventure. Mother Gothel warns that the boy just wants the girl’s crown and then is going to leave her. And those lights in the sky? What if they’re not everything Rapunzel has built them up to be — and what if they are? And Rapunzel’s hair? The threat of the girl losing her special power hangs over the entire proceedings.

The fun in Tangled isn’t purely academic, though. This is an entertaining movie and one that girls and boys alike will enjoy, with plenty of princess-wish fulfillment for the XX’s and swordplay and swashbuckling for the XY’s.

The plot takes Rapunzel and Flynn to a kind of Viking alehouse, to a dam-bursting thrill sequence, and finally to the palace. The film also includes a number of masculine voice actors as assorted toughs, such as Ron Perlman, M.C. Gainey, Jeffrey Tambor, Brad Garrett, Paul F. Tompkins — and Richard Kiel.

The songs are mostly well done by multiple-Oscar-winner Alan Menken. The animation is effective, especially the gorgeous climactic flying-lantern scene. And Rapunzel and Ryder? They look like an animated Amanda Seyfried and Adrien Brody.

Tangled

Opens Wednesday, November 24th

Multiple locations

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Jailbreak From Reality.

Based on the 2007 French film Pour Elle, The Next Three Days tells the story of John Brennan (Russell Crowe) whose life is thrown into upheaval when his wife, Lara (Elizabeth Banks), is convicted of murder. What follows is an awkwardly paced, flimsy story line in which John attempts to break his wife out of prison. Director Paul Haggis (Crash, Million Dollar Baby) seems to have forgotten the cardinal rule of crafting a thriller: The film must be, at least at key moments, smarter than its audience.

The problem is that John is not smarter than us. He does what I suppose any ordinary schmo would do in the same position. He Googles it, he asks an expert (Liam Neeson in a cameo role), he fumbles through. Unfortunately, breaking someone out of prison is not for the average guy, and at every turn, John’s escape route requires coincidence and suspension of disbelief to stay afloat.

The film’s most interesting element is John’s uncertain moral code. He bypasses society’s version of justice in favor of his own. We do not know at first whether or not Lara has committed murder. We see her fiery temper within the first five minutes of the film, and the flashbacks to the crime are intentionally vague. Would John be a hero for saving his murderess wife? What if it takes murdering anyone who stands in his way?

By the end of the film, however, Haggis has removed all doubt of Lara’s guilt, effectively deflating any moral complexities into a soporific knight’s tale. Worse, it is a long ambling knight’s tale, with too much build-up on the front end and an action-crammed ending. Rushed to the end by a series of near misses and preposterous circumstances, the audience is as eager to leave the theater as the Brennans are to leave Pittsburgh. At one moment in their escape, Lara hangs out of a speeding car, John holding her hand for dear life, the vehicle spinning out of control into the path of an oncoming semi truck. The car skids safely to the side. John gets out and waves to the trucker as a signal that everything is fine, and the trucker drives away, as if this sort of thing happens all the time.

Indeed, what the film lacks is an understanding of how remarkable a feat it is to break someone out of prison (or even a heavily guarded hospital room, in this case) and flee to a foreign country with a child in tow. More than luck and pluck, it requires connections and savvy.

Now playing

Multiple locations

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Don’t Look, Don’t Grope!

Since the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security in 2002, airline travelers have suffered a full frontal assault on their personal freedoms. The mantra “It’s for your protection” has been repeated ad nauseam to anyone who dared even to whisper a complaint about the utter absurdity of going through airport security.

Ninety-pound grannies are being hoisted out of wheelchairs to be scanned by metal detector wands. Mothers are being made to drink their own breast milk. Eighty-year-old veterans with steel plates in their hips are being patted down for setting off metal detectors. Traumatized 2-year-olds are being placed in glass puffer machines while their horrified parents watch.

Shoe removal. Clothing removal. Liquid bans. Jewelry removal. Scanning, puffing, searching, touching — of our bodies and our possessions — all being done “for our protection.” Or so we are told.

But last week the ridiculous evolved into the reprehensible: A breast-cancer survivor was forced to show a TSA agent her prosthetic breast; some would-be passengers had to publicly display their colostomy bags; some men were compelled to watch their wives and daughters being groped by TSA agents; children watched their parents being felt up. The most personal of intrusions, from total strangers, we were told once again, was for our protection.

For the federal government to assume that every person boarding a plane is equally likely to blow it up is patently knee-jerk and reactive. Consider the add-on nature of the security measures we currently use. When one would-be saboteur was able to board a plane with explosives in his shoe, what was the feds’ reaction? Everyone must take off their shoes!

Then a ring of terrorists was busted in a London flat for attempting to make liquid explosives. Our reaction? Everyone must be limited to three-ounce liquid containers in a quart-size plastic bag! (Once through the checkpoint, of course, passengers can load up on mini-containers at the airport arcade stores and bring it all onboard.)

Next, just as travelers got used to complying with the newly upgraded security measures, a man boarded a Detroit-bound plane in Amsterdam with explosives in his underwear. The reaction? Everyone must be body-scanned! Taken to its logical conclusion, the next step will be for TSA agents to glove up with KY Jelly, for without doubt, a terrorist somewhere in the world has already figured out how to make a suppository filled with explosive chemicals.

How do we pull out of this dizzying flight path, where every security measure involves a jolt not only to our civil liberties but to what remains of decency? Where does the insanity end?

It is time to listen to people like Isaac Yeffet, a New Jersey security-business owner and former antiterrorism specialist for the Israeli secret service who ran El Al Airlines for years. In a television interview, Yeffet pointed out the travesty of the U.S. system and said that technological measures used here are not only useless but actually work as a detriment to our security.

He called for a complete screening transformation by implementing the use of better employee training, eye-to-eye communication with customers, and questioning of passengers. These sensible measures have worked in Israel for years.

It is time for city officials across the country to listen to New York City councilman David Greenfield, who has proposed legislation that bans the use of all body scanners in New York City airports because they have been proven by outside security firms not only to be ineffectual but downright dangerous.

It is time for us to wake up and realize that Americans are having their Fourth Amendment rights violated by unreasonable searches, and the lawsuits that will ensue could further threaten our economy by forcing more airlines to go broke.

It is time to redeem that precious commodity called common sense. As Benjamin Franklin, who had his feet firmly on the ground, once stated, “Those who desire to give up freedom in order to gain security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one.” The use of body scanners gives us neither.

Cheri DelBrocco writes the memphisflyer.com column “Mad as Hell,” where a version of this article first appeared.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

IT or Not IT?

Is there or is there not a centralized IT function in Shelby County government? Or perhaps the question should be: Will there or will there not be such a centralized function, ever?

Those are two basic questions which lingered after the County Commission’s passage Monday of a resolution sponsored by Commissioner Heidi Shafer allowing county departments to opt in or out of a proposed umbrella system for information technology.

Other material questions resonated in the wake of the commission’s action: Did the new mayoral regime of former Sheriff Mark Luttrell drop the ball by offering what appeared to be lukewarm support?

Did the commission’s action amount to forfeiting its own responsibility for setting policy and maintaining control of expenditures?

Had Mayor Luttrell and the commission (horror of horrors in the power-centric world of local government) lost face?

Was the outcome of Monday’s vote a victory for decentralization and accountability, as Shafer and other supporters of her resolution argued? Or was it instead a concession to chaos, as resolution opponent Commissioner Mike Carpenter argued, or for “turf protection” on the part of the county’s elected charter officers, as Commissioner Walter Bailey suggested?

Perhaps most important from a taxpayer’s point of view, did the backing off from a centralized IT operation mean the loss of most or all of a projected savings in county expenditures of nearly $5 million — this at a time when the county faces a budget shortfall of $15 to $18 million? And will the action result in a rollback of a potential reduction in the county’s property tax rate, as Carpenter suggested?

Time, as they say, will tell. Or, in another time-honored phrase, that of the 17th-century poet John Donne: “Never send to ask for whom the bell tolls/ It tolls for thee.” That’s you, taxpayers.

The Race Is On …

And not to the top, either. Even as Memphis City Schools and the Memphis City Council gird for a final showdown on the issue of city funding for MCS, another conflict between public entities — one even more far-reaching in its consequences for local government and education — is suddenly upon us.

Encouraged by election results which suggest a friendly attitude from the 2011 Tennessee legislature, officials of Shelby County Schools seem bound and determined, once more, to seek legislation creating a special school district for the county schools. Fearful that the favorable funding ratio conferred on city schools by the currently operative ADA (Average Daily Attendance) formula would thereby be scuttled, MCS board members are threatening a nuclear option of their own: to surrender the MCS charter, thereby forcing countywide school consolidation.

Should both initiatives go forward, the two systems would be in a race — SCS to get immediate legislative approval in January, avoiding delaying tactics in committee; MCS to vote out their own charter and schedule a quick voter referendum approving the action.

Sensing the dangers inherent in this game of chicken, state senator Brian Kelsey has called for compromise. We second the motion.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

From the Cyber Front

CREDIT: JB

A resolution to prohibit tweeting by members of the Shelby County Commission while in session was briefly considered — and decisively rejected — as the commission’s final action on Monday. And that was appropriate, considering the barrage of online tweeting, both inside and outside the county auditorium, that had accompanied a prior discussion.

That earlier debate, a heated one on a resolution by Commissioner Heidi Shafer allowing elected county department heads to opt out of a centralized county IT operation, had involved philosophical differences, a series of interlocking power struggles, and bottom-line matters of dollars and cents for taxpayers.

At issue was whether the commission should adhere to a plan, the result of a five-year study performed for the body by the Sparks Bureau of Business and Economic Research at the University of Memphis, that had been authorized by a previous incarnation of the commission earlier this year, with only one dissenting vote.

Shafer’s resolution — which commission tweeter-in-chief Mike Carpenter announced to his considerable online following would “gut savings,” along with other undesirable outcomes — had been sprung last Wednesday on a session of the commission’s Budget and Finance Committee.

Enough members of that committee, which is comprised of all commission members but was not at full strength that day, approved the Shafer resolution to amend the prior IT authorization of July 12th. But it remained an open question what the full commission would do on Monday.

In the end, Shafer garnered the seven votes needed for passage. They came from Terry Roland and Chris Thomas, GOP newcomers to the commission like herself; Republican holdover Wyatt Bunker; returning Democrat James Harvey; and Democratic newcomers Justin Ford and Melvin Burgess. Opposing Shafer were Budget and Finance Committee chairman Carpenter, a Republican; and three Democrats: Walter Bailey, Henri Brooks, and Steve Mulroy.

Breaking that down further, all five of the brand-new commissioners voted to reverse the previous commission’s action. (A sixth newcomer, Bailey, was a commission veteran reelected this year after a four-year hiatus dictated by term-limits requirements.)

In that sense, the vote could be interpreted as a gesture of independence on the part of a reconstituted commission. Shafer, Roland, and Thomas have shown signs of forming a bloc, along with Bunker (“the Fab Four,” says Carpenter, sardonically), while Ford and Burgess have conspicuously avoided aligning themselves with holdover Democrats on a number of issues. (For his part, Harvey is a permanent variable, independent and unpredictable on almost all issues.)

Proponents of Shafer’s opt-out resolution availed themselves of traditional conservative rhetoric. She invoked the specter of a centralized bureaucracy and promoted the idea that allowing county departments to opt out furthered the goal of “accountability.” And Trustee David Lenoir, in a curious speech on behalf of the resolution, waxed ideological on behalf of “free market” competition, as if the county’s respective elected officers (sheriff, trustee, assessor, register, and several elected clerks) were all rival business entrepreneurs.

For their part, Carpenter and other opponents of the resolution stressed the goal of fiscal solvency, including the savings to taxpayers — projected to be as much as $4.7 million annually — that would result from a coordinated IT operation.

All the while, there was impressively brisk (and often exasperated) online traffic among tweeters following the debate from a distance. But behind all the hair-splitting and bloviating and cyber-sporting was the possibility — apparently independent of partisan issues — that all that was going on was what Bailey characterized as “turf protection,” pure and simple.

In the wake of the Shafer resolution’s passage, a proposal to create the position of chief information officer, at a salary of $155,000, stalled out on a 6-6 vote — opponents noting, in effect, that, in the absence of a central IT office, such a position might be the cart before the horse.

Proponents of both the office and an administrator for it will doubtless try again.

• As for the tweeting issue, it was resolved in fairly short order — with the right to tweet upheld against the same opposition (Shafer, Bunker, Roland, and Thomas) that attempted to restrict it in committee last week.

Bunker’s inclusion in the coalition may be at least partly an act of atonement. A couple of weeks ago the commission was discussing a proposal by Carpenter to ban roadside sales of animals (a measure which would achieve final passage on Monday).

During debate on the issue, Bunker got off a sally about pit bulls, apparently meant as a comradely tease of Roland, who represents Millington. “In Millington, it should be noted, they’re selling them for food, right?” Arguably, that could be seen as a tribute to the ruggedness of the folks up thataway.

The quip was immediately circulated by Carpenter, who famously exercises his hand-held for Twitter purposes during meetings and has numerous followers for his tweets, which rarely lack for candor.

Millington mayor Richard Hodges declined to see the dining-on-dog remark as a compliment, however, and he urged Roland to see to some sort of retribution.

That took the form not of a reprisal against Bunker for saying it but of the aforesaid resolution aimed at Carpenter for reporting it — though when Bunker attempted some additional humor at Monday’s meeting, Roland shot back, “That’s what got us into this situation — one of your jokes!”

• Matt Kuhn, who was appointed by a reconstituted Shelby County Democratic Committee in 2005 to become a “new broom” party chairman, is offering himself in a similar role for the state Democratic Party.

In a letter last week to members of the state Democratic Committee, Kuhn said, “I’m exploring the opportunity to run as chairman of the Tennessee Democratic Party and am actively discussing my candidacy with executive committee members as well as leaders of our party.”

Kuhn thereby becomes the first declared alternative to current state Democratic chairman Chip Forrester, who already has announced his candidacy for reelection in January but is under fire from several disaffected Democrats alarmed by adverse results for party candidates in this month’s elections.

Kuhn, now a resident of Lakeland, served as Shelby County party chair from 2005 to 2007. He subsequently served as an interim Shelby County commissioner to fill a vacancy, before resigning that post in December 2009 to serve as policy adviser to interim county mayor Joe Ford.

• Loosing a blast at former Memphis congressman Harold Ford Jr., now head of the conservative Democratic Leadership Council, the influential left-oriented Daily Kos blog wondered on Tuesday if the DLC was still in business.

Characterizing Ford as a “serial loser” (apparently on the basis of Ford’s loss of a 2006 U.S. Senate race in Tennessee and his failure to get another one going this year in his adopted home of New York), Kos looked askance at a Ford op-ed in Fortune magazine advocating that President Obama recoup his electoral losses this year by following policies congenial to the Wall Street investment community.

Kos then observed that “the DLC’s website is offline. It looks like they’re officially kaput.”

An exploratory visit to the site on Tuesday, however, indicated it was still online (though the number of “Blue Dog” members of Congress favored by the DLC was halved in the election).

On Tuesday, the site headlined an article by Ford, co-published in Politico last week and entitled (no, we’re not making this up), “Yes, We Can Collaborate.”

That article, which is similar to the one in Fortune, concludes with this advice: “Let’s not wait for another season of ‘change’ elections to force Washington to change its approach to encourage job creation, innovation, and growth here at home.”

Categories
News The Fly-By

What They Said

About “Arkansas Girl Allowed to Wear Tuxedo for Yearbook Photo”:

“So what if someone wants to dress as a cowboy or whatever they identify themselves with — let them! It’s about who they are that counts, not who the school wants everyone to believe they are!” — stuilluniqueslk

About “Scanning, Groping, and Common Sense” and airport security measures:

“How about this? Put some damned police or security actually ON THE PLANE, while it is flying. All the attempts we hear about, it is the passengers who stopped it. They screen us, then lock us in a metal tube, and hope for the best.” — Tom Joad

About “C-USA Picks: UAB Over

Memphis”:

“If a team goes 1-10 and no one is there to report it, does it happen?”

— 38103

Comment of the Week:

About “The World’s Biggest Man Cave” and the proposed development of the Pyramid”:

“With the Bass Pro Super Store Attraction MegaMall Pyramid we are on our way to becoming the world capital of kitsch!” — benpope

To share your thoughts, comments, concerns, and — maybe — get published, visit memphisflyer.com.

Categories
News The Fly-By

The Tilt Factor

The year 2011 will be the most critical year for public schools in Memphis and Shelby County since 1974, when court-ordered busing for desegregation caused 28,500 white students to bail out of the city school system.

We are at a tipping point, to use a phrase popularized by author Malcolm Gladwell but in common use long before that. Another way of saying it is “tilt factor,” the pinball-machine phrase used by the author of the Memphis busing plan. Either way, it’s the point where a trickle becomes a flood, where an uneasy equilibrium blows up. In short, game over.

For city schools, the tilt factor for black-white enrollment used to be pegged at 70-30 when there was still a significant white population. For colleges, the tipping point for female-male enrollment is roughly 60-40.

For Memphis and Shelby County, it’s the funding formula that ties the city and county schools together but places a heavier tax burden on Memphis than the suburbs. White enrollment in Memphis City Schools fell below 10 percent years ago and is nearing 5 percent. The issue now is the Memphis tax base that supports schools and services an area of 300-plus square miles.

Thanks in part to the consolidation debate, which underlined the tax inequity between Memphis and the suburbs and the drain of the Memphis tax base, any increase in city property taxes and/or reduction in county property taxes risks pushing us over the tipping point. The exact numbers depend on which suburban municipality you choose. But, in general, if Macy’s (Memphis) sells something for $7.26 and Dillards (Germantown) sells a better product for $5.50, Macy’s is going out of business sooner or later.

On one side are the Shelby County Schools (SCS) Board of Education, board president David Pickler, and some influential Republican state legislators who want to make Shelby County Schools a special school district. The goal is to ensure its independence from Memphis once and for all and leave Memphis City Schools to its own merry devices.

The Memphis City Schools Board of Education is divided.

Some members, including President Freda Williams, want to “work together” with Pickler and his friends and preserve the status quo. MCS, remember, gets more than $1 billion a year in total funding and employs 7,700 teachers and administrators. Like the consolidation debate, the issue of separate-but-equal school systems has created strange bedfellows among suburban whites and urban blacks.

Other MCS board members, including Martavius Jones and Tomeka Hart, are willing to let MCS give up its charter and become part of a giant county system. They offered a resolution Monday night that will be voted on in December.

In essence, what we have here is a little nuclear showdown. If SCS fires the special-district nuke, then MCS will fire the surrender-the-charter nuke.

Can they both do it? Will they? Who’s bluffing? We shall see. The stakes have not been this high in more than three decades.

Categories
News The Fly-By

Q&A with Michael Roberts

A few months ago, Memphis-based pilot Michael Roberts was an average guy with a wife and kids. But on October 15th, he started something of a revolution when he refused to go through the new full-body scanners and pat-downs at Memphis International Airport.

Citing privacy concerns, the ExpressJet pilot opted out of a full-body scan, which takes an X-ray photo that exposes the body as if unclothed. Roberts also refused the alternative pat-down by Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agents, in which officers have been instructed to conduct a manual search of the traveler’s entire body. Roberts was not allowed past security and was unable to report to work in Houston.

Roberts hasn’t flown since the incident, and in mid-November, Roberts and Florida-based pilot Ann Poe filed a lawsuit against the TSA and the Department of Homeland Security alleging the searches are a violation of their Fourth Amendment right against search and seizure. — by Bianca Phillips

Flyer: Last week, the TSA announced that it would exempt pilots from the full-body scans and pat-downs.

Roberts: It will not affect the lawsuit. This is not progress. It’s a political concession. By backing off of [the pilots], the TSA can continue to abuse the rest of the public. The Fourth Amendment of the Constitution was not written only for airline pilots.

What are your concerns with scanners and pat-downs? It’s the right of the people against unreasonable search and seizure. It’s a question of our fundamental relationship as sovereign citizens of a free society. You’ve got these airport security guards barking orders at people, airline pilots, moms and dads. Take off your shoes and put your belt in the tub. It’s Orwellian. It’s draconian. This is tyranny. I don’t believe it will stop at the airports if we don’t stop it now.

What’s the alternative?

Put [security] in the hands of the airlines themselves or private security firms. If they fail and wipe a 100-million-dollar jet off their books, that’s no good. And you kill a bunch of people, that’s no good. From a purely business standpoint, they have a lot of reasons to do it right.

Is this lawsuit an attempt to force a change AT the tsa?

We are taking this to the courts, but quite frankly, the problem when you sue the federal government is the defendant is the judge. How’s that going to go for us? I don’t have any illusions about the outcome here.

I believe we are going to have to protect the Constitution. I’m trying to reach the hearts and minds of [the American public]. Right now, we need to be defending our rights and liberties. Freedom does incur cost. Sometimes you actually have to shed blood to preserve or secure your freedom. In this case, that means not going home for Thanksgiving or driving instead. I know that sucks, and it’s not convenient. But it’s so important.

The latest Data show that the majority of Americans still support the scanners. Why do you think that is?

People don’t understand what’s happening. A lot of people are fearful, holed up in their homes afraid of big, bad terrorists, because the government’s been telling them for so long that there are all these bogeymen out there in the dark.

Categories
News The Fly-By

Killing Time

Attorneys for CVS Pharmacy and St. Luke’s United Methodist Church called last week’s injunction hearing over the proposed demolition of a historic Midtown church a “desperate effort.”

The parties involved will have to wait until December 16th to see if they’re right.

It’s the latest in the controversy over the Union Avenue United Methodist church property at the corner of Union and Cooper. The church’s remaining 20 congregants joined St. Luke’s earlier this year and decided to sell the property to CVS. Although the development was rejected by the Land Use Control Board, it was approved by the City Council in August.

Shelby County chancellor Walter Evans held his decision last week, prohibiting arguments from either side until mid-December. Preliminary arguments were submitted, however, and each centered on a different portion of the 1912 deed that transferred the property to the trustees of the church.

The plaintiffs, represented by attorney Webb Brewer, are heirs to the women who originally owned the property. Their argument is based on a clause in the deed that says the “premises shall be used, kept, maintained and disposed of as a place of divine worship.” The defendants are represented by attorney Henry Shelton, who cited the second part of the clause that reads “subject to the discipline, usage and ministerial appointments of said church.”

Shelton called the clause “standard practice” for United Methodist deeds and said there were local cases in which a church sold property for secular purposes despite inclusion of the clause.

The most heated part of the debate, however, centered on what each side considered “irreparable harm.” Brewer argued that the building’s demolition would cause irreparable harm to the plaintiffs. The addition of another pharmacy to the area, which already boasts a nearby Walgreens and Rite-Aid, would not equal the harm caused by destroying a church on the National Historic Register.

Shelton pointed out that the $2.3 million the congregation expected to receive from CVS has already been earmarked for community ministry. “It would leave my client stuck with a 100-year-old, deteriorating, crumbling structure to maintain and insure,” Shelton said, “and leave that money on the table, not to be used to take care of the people in Memphis and Shelby County who need it. Now that’s irreparable harm.”

The chancellor will hear the arguments December 16th.