“The concern is misplaced because if you look at the statistics, African-American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans,” said Sen. Mitch McConnell at a recent press conference.
Even if Mitch McConnell’s viral gaffe last week is as innocent as he claims it to be, the stench of something deep — the unexamined racist fear and shame at the core of GOP policy — is unavoidably noticeable: There’s “them” and there’s “us” and never the twain shall meet. And we’ll make sure of that. (Shhhh … don’t tell anyone.)
What’s fascinating to me is the fact that blatant racism — manifested in voter-suppression laws over the years, gerrymandering, and, more recently, hysteria over the teaching of actual history in the public schools — can no longer be put forth publicly and unapologetically as The Truth, as it was for most of American history. Politicians and public figures can no longer declare things like “This country must be ruled by white people. … Negro suffrage is an evil,” as a Mississippi judge named Solomon Calhoon wrote in 1890. Nowadays, racism has to be covered up with clichés and political correctness and, in particular, white victimhood.
The prevailing right-wing dogma, at least on the surface, is not that white people are no longer just plain better than Black people; white people are victimized by people of color. “Come on,” they cry, “judge us by the content of our character, not the color of our skin.”
Here’s Tucker Carlson, for instance, quoted by TheNew York Times columnist Charles Blow, explaining “white replacement theory” on his Fox News show last year as a Democratic plot “to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters, from the third world. … Every time they import a new voter, I become disenfranchised as a current voter.”
Not a white voter, simply a “current” voter. This is the impact the Civil Rights Movement has had on right-wing Republicanism.
And then there’s critical race theory (CRT). In the past year, according to Education Week, 36 states have scapegoated this otherwise unknown academic concept, introducing legislation or taking other steps to ban whatever-it-is from being taught in public schools. The state of Virginia has even established a special tip line that parents can call to report that their kids’ school has been feeding them CRT — which means, of course, teaching actual American racial history. And Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis wants to go even further, giving parents the power to sue the school if it has the nerve to teach CRT.
As I say, whatever that means. Education Week points out that there’s almost no clarity about what this might mean, and “leaders in states where these laws have passed have reported widespread confusion about what kind of instruction is and is not allowed.” Many teachers fear the rules can be broadly interpreted and amount to banning “any discussion about the nation’s complicated past or the ongoing effects of racism in the present day.”
“This isn’t an idle fear,” the report goes on. Last June, for instance, “a parents’ group in one Tennessee district challenged the use of an autobiography of Ruby Bridges, who in 1960 was one of the first Black children to integrate an elementary school after Brown v. Board of Education. The parents complained that in depicting the white backlash to school desegregation, the book violated the state’s new law in sending the message that all white people were bad and oppressed Black people.”
This is now the national divide, apparently. Jim Crow suddenly wails in anguish. As a bill in the Florida Senate puts it, a student “should not be made to feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race.” Note: Such a bill wasn’t introduced in 1890 or 1930. I wonder why?
For me, this opens a deep sense of wonderment. Mostly it opens up some profound questions about how the country can and should face not just its past but also its future. While there may be a lot of blame and guilt to spread around regarding the nation’s pre-civil rights era, addressing the future requires a larger, more complex perspective. It’s not about blaming, but healing … and changing.
The anti-CRT crowd wants to keep the clichés in place, as though “one nation, under God, yada, yada” is all that’s needed to guide us into the future. Of course, the military-industrial complex knows there’s more to it than that. Waging war, staying dominant, staying wealthy — these are not simple tasks! It’s not about saluting the flag and revering the Founding Fathers. It’s about passing gargantuan military budgets. And it’s also about keeping as much of the public as possible (in the words of Tucker C.) “obedient” — that is, patriotic, believing that the USA is the greatest country in the world and only kills evil terrorists plus occasional collateral bystanders.
If CRT were actually taught in schools — not in order to spew shame on some, but to open everyone’s minds, to grasp the nature of hatred, dehumanization, and dominance, and create a future that transcends our past — a lot more would be put at risk than some people’s psychological distress.
The meaning of nationalism itself would have to change. And suddenly everyone becomes a participant in creating the future. Robert Koehler (koehlercw@gmail.com), syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a Chicago award-winning journalist and editor. He is the author of Courage Grows Strong at the Wound.
... But I Can’t Prove It, Tom Farris (Photo: courtesy MoSH)
Centuries after Columbus sailed the ocean blue, harmful stereotypes about Native Americans have permeated our society and still have yet to be corrected. “All of our tropes about Native Americans come from these very static notions of what it means to be Native American,” says Raka Nandi, the Museum of Science & History’s director of exhibits and collections.
To challenge these stereotypes that pervade pop culture from sports mascots to Halloween costumes, the traveling exhibit “Savages and Princesses” has come to MoSH. It features more than 40 pieces by 12 contemporary Indigenous artists from different tribes, whose work of different mediums challenges and subverts preconceived ideas about Native-American cultures and people. “I tend to think that art is a really unique tool for having difficult conversations,” Nandi says, “and it’s a way in which you can surprise people and knock them out of their comfort zones, and so that’s what these art pieces are doing.”
One of the artists, Zach Presley of the Chickasaw tribe, was inspired after being rejected from Native-American art shows because his work was not “Native enough.” In response, Presley, who works in collage and digital art, created images with stereotypical imagery of tepees, leaders in headdresses, and the like, with superimposed lettering that pokes holes in what is expected of Native-American art, like Nandi’s favorite of Presley’s, which reads, “Here is yet another goddamn southwest painting to go above your couch.”
Other pieces are much darker. Micah Wesley’s examines the disturbing history of scalping. “There was a time when Native Americans’ scalps were taken and collected as artifacts,” says Nandi. “Hair, bones, and skin of Native-American people were displayed as curiosities, and this piece is examining the brutality that Native-American bodies have been subjected to.”
But by including artists of different points of view, Nandi says, “I hope when people come to see this exhibit that they realize the Native-American communities are incredibly diverse and the stereotypes these artists are confronting have a real impact on how Indigenous people are viewed today.”
“Savages and Princesses: The Persistence of Native American Stereotypes,” Museum of Science & History, 3050 Central, on display through March 16th.
Memphis is known for its sound, but which sound you consider that to be is all over the map. There are the historic sounds of Sun and Stax. There are the many variations of the trap sound that rose to world popularity this century, Young Dolph being exhibit A. Then there are the punk sounds, from the Oblivions through Jay Reatard and beyond, making their mark. But then there are the songwriters, who often combine more intricate lyrics with a full-throttle band’s wallop. Of the latter genre, Todd Snider is a prime example.
Snider is not a Memphis native and has been based in Nashville for many years, but living in the Bluff City in the ’90s marked him in ways that he carries to this day. “I’ve got a ton of friends down there,” he says. “What you call ‘cutting your teeth,’ I cut mine at the Daily Planet. And all around, all up and down Highland. Keith Sykes got me my first record contract. He was like a life coach at that time. Not only did he help me with making songs and melodies, he taught me about time, tempo.”
Memphis, it turned out, introduced young Snider to the mysteries of rhythm and groove, after he moved here from Austin. “I came to Memphis from Texas, where it was all about lyrics,” Snider recalls. “Keith and others showed me how to have the Booker T. sound as a benchmark: bass and drums and playing in time. I didn’t even know there was a way to play in time or out of time until I got to Memphis. The whole town is in the pocket.”
All those lessons came out in force with the release of his last record, First Agnostic Church of Hope and Wonder (Aimless), which delves into funk more than any of his other works. “That was a fun project. I was using old Memphis records as models. The drummer Robbie Crowell and I would both listen to old beats and things. Soul and funk grooves. And I think we got away with it for the most part.”
Another aspect of the album was trying his hand at all the parts himself, except the drums. “I always wanted to make an album where I play all the instruments. And since there was a pandemic, I had a good excuse. I couldn’t just call a better guitar player. And I got to play bass!” All told, he plays electric bass, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, banjo, and piano, and sang all the backing vocals. The end result is not unlike the arrangements of songwriters like early Beck or Ani DiFranco, but it bears Snider’s own distinctive lyrical stamp. His trademark wit and the teeth of his most politically charged work is still there in full force.
Alongside songs like the funky, spoken/sung environmental wake up call, “That Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” there are more quiet moments, like the piano ballad honoring John Prine, “Handsome John,” or the wistful “Sail On, My Friend.” Others revel in off-the-cuff lyrical riffs, as in “Stoner Yodel Number One,” or a sardonic preacherly prayer to God, the funky closer “The Resignation vs. The Comeback Special.”
“When I started, I only had the song ‘Sail On’ and one about John Prine. And the rest, I just had to come up with stuff. So I just made up the last two songs quickly. The last song’s my favorite, and I don’t think I would have been able to come up with that unless I felt I was doing a concept album or something. [laughs] I always compare it to when WASP did a concept record. Or like when Kiss did The Elder [laughs].” Snider even has a name for the recurring preacher character. “We call him Willy B. Wasted.”
This week, Snider will appear at the Crosstown Theater. “I’m gonna play five or six songs. I used to have this band called the Nervous Wrecks, and two of those guys still live in Memphis. And Will Kimbrough, who was also in the band, is coming to open the show. So we’re going to work up eight or nine songs as a full band, and then we’ll wing the encore. We had so much fun with the Nervous Wrecks. I miss it sometimes. Lots of times. I still really, really enjoy this job.”
Todd Snider plays the Crosstown Theater on Friday, February 4, andSaturday, February 5, at 7:30 p.m. Tickets start at $38. Visit crosstownarts.org for details.
@EricTweetsNBA asked the MEMernet what Ja Morant was singing in a TV screenshot. Responses ranged from “I Will Always Love You” to “Living on a Prayer.”
House party
The Memphis subreddit got in early on the viral meme that says, “There’s a house party and every neighborhood in Memphis is a different person. What are each of them doing?”
“Midtown is hosting the party,” wrote u/Wild-Care. “They had an awkward handshake-or-fist-bump moment when they met Frayser, and they are trying a little too hard as a result.”
“Soulsville brought the food and music, to the relief of everyone since Collierville decided to bring potato salad with raisins,” wrote u/irishqueen811.
“Cooper-Young is in the kitchen explaining pronouns to a visiting [Tennessee] state legislator,” wrote u/Boatshooz.
JPK Tweets
MEMernet all-star John Paul Keith tweeted the truth again: “The first question for any candidate for school board should be, ‘Do you know what cow dewormer tastes like?’”
Juan Rojo poses beside his paintings in his home studio. (Photo: Jesse Davis)
Juan Rojo credits his mother for his interest in painting.
A native of Valladolid, Spain, Rojo says, “My mother wasn’t a professional or anything, but she liked to paint with oil. I remember the house smelling like oils. I associate that with my mother. And, I suppose, that was my first connection to art, in a way.”
Between February 11th and March 1st, Rojo will exhibit 17 works in “Vanitas” at Jay Etkin Gallery.
Just as he teaches his students, Rojo creates his art inside and outside. (Photo: Courtesy Juan Rojo)
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
In addition to exhibiting his works in shows at Etkin, Rojo featured his art in numerous galleries, including the Dixon Gallery & Gardens, where he was included in “Memphis 2021,” and Galeria Rodrigo Juarranz in Burgos, Spain. His work was also in the Affordable Art Fair in London.
Closer to home, Rojo’s works are in the permanent collections of the City of Memphis and the Memphis International Airport. Showing his works in galleries in three countries didn’t happen overnight, though. “I’ve been painting 30 years nonstop this year,” says Rojo, who also teaches art at Southwind High School.
“Juan is one of the strongest figurative artists in town,” says Etkin, who has represented Rojo for many years. “He might be considered a realist, but his paintings are imbued with mystery and emotion and immersed in a surrealist sensibility.”
Rojo, who was more interested in playing “in the streets” as a child, didn’t start doing any type of artwork until he was 12 years old. “I was a very shy kid,” he says. “Very introverted. Drawing was kind of a nice excuse to be alone and do something I enjoy. I was not really good at it, but I really liked the solitude.”
His mother was a “hobbyist” artist. “She did portraits. Very surreal portraits,” Rojo remembers. “When she was young she was not ‘gothic’ — that probably wasn’t a word that was around — but she wore dark clothes.”
His mother liked painting her women in “dramatic” blues, Rojo says. “Like Picasso, in a way. Sad faces, sad women. It was kind of a naive painting. She wasn’t classically painting or trained. She did what she could.”
Rojo just began drawing one day. “I don’t remember the first thing I drew, but I liked to draw people. I started copying the masters. We had a book of art history at the house. When my mother saw that I spent all my days drawing — and my drawings were terrible — she took me to an academy where they paint and draw. I just started learning to draw there.”
Practice makes perfect, and following in the footsteps of the greats doesn’t hurt either. So he copied Michelangelo’s drawings from the Sistine Chapel. “I could draw some of those from memory.”
At the time, Rojo used pencil and charcoal. “I remember saying I didn’t want to paint because painting was boring.”
Drawing was “something I could control in my life. Drawing was very precise and a way to describe things. I got good at it.”
And, he adds, “The human figure has always been my interest. I did some landscapes, but I cannot look at a painting for more than a month if they don’t have eyes. If they don’t return the look, look back, I cannot keep painting that for a year like I do sometimes.”
One of his teachers kept pushing him to start painting, Rojo says. Finally, the teacher had him work on a big painting of one of Michelangelo’s drawings. “Instead of pencil, I did it in paint. I loved it so much. The process. The application of paint.
“I copied it on a canvas. I probably used oil because at that point acrylic was not really a thing [because] the quality was not that good. An ochre and something very toned down. White, brown, black, and ochre to create the shadows and light. The same way you do with pencil.”
Happy with the results, he thought, “Okay, we can try this painting thing.”
Rojo began copying the work of his inspirations: Alberto Giacometti, Frank Auerbach, and Lucian Freud.
He liked Giacometti, in particular, because his paintings are “the bridge between drawing and painting. His paintings are like drawings with a little bit of color. The moment I started mixing colors, I relaxed. That was what I wanted to do.”
Rojo loved the way Auerbach used so much paint in his work. “I started painting highly dense and full of paint.”
Rojo’s early paintings were very expressionistic. “I think I was a natural with painting, so it didn’t take me long. I think I was a better painter than a drawer at that point.”
But he doesn’t describe himself as a “natural artist,” Rojo says. “I tell my students I don’t believe in talent in that sense. My drawings at 14 were terrible, but I loved doing it. At some point I got better and I got good.”
“Vanitas” features 17 works, including paintings and drawings. (Photo: Juan Rojo)
Still Life with School Art
Rojo taught private art lessons to adults and children before he entered the University of Salamanca. “I’ve been teaching since I was very young,” he says, “even like being a counselor at summer camp.”
Salamanca was “very classical, so everything was working with models. We had five years of drawing nude models, five years of painting nude models. So, for me, it was like heaven.”
He met his wife, Clara, who was studying medievalist literature at Salamanca. “I think it was the theory of literature class. And she was there and we met and that was it.”
Juan and Clara married before moving to Washington, D.C., in 2004 so his wife could get her doctorate at Georgetown University.
They lived in Washington for six years. “I came on a spouse visa. You cannot do much on a spouse visa, so I was basically painting for a couple of years.”
Rojo, who got his masters of art at the University of Maryland, moved to Memphis about 10 years ago after his wife got a job teaching Spanish medieval literature and Spanish at Rhodes College.
They loved Memphis from the beginning. “We spent a year in Kentucky — Lexington — after Washington. It was good, but it was a small town. We came here and it was kind of an upgrade.”
Rojo quickly got into the Memphis art scene and began showing his work. “It’s not that hard, in Memphis, to meet the art community.”
While showing his work at the old Circuitous Succession Gallery, Rojo met Etkin. “When the gallery closed, I approached Jay and we started working together.”
Rojo taught for a couple of years at the University of Memphis until his wife got a fellowship at the University of Notre Dame. Rojo taught at Notre Dame as a visiting artist for a year. “I did a lot of photography there,” he says. “That really helped me in my work.”
Snowglobe II illustrates characters frozen in space and time as if entrapped in a snow globe with flowers and vines floating around them.
No Cookie-Cutter Compositions
After returning to Memphis, Rojo began teaching art at Southwind High School. It wasn’t easy at first. “When I started, it was just surviving,” he says.
It took him a while to learn the methods for managing a classroom, Rojo says. “The things you do and things you don’t need to do. You learn on the job. The first year was tough. The second year was tough. By the third year, I knew how to run a class and just really get the kids involved in art. Get them involved in what they want to do in art.”
He found his students responded when he told them, “Now I’ll teach you how to do this. What do you want to do with this?”
Rojo says, “They love that. They want to draw what they want. Design what they want. Within the margins of what they learn to do in class.”
And, he adds, “I realized soon if you give the kids choices and give them options to do what they want, they surprise you.”
Rojo knew what he did not want to do as an art teacher. “Sometimes art is like a cookie maker,” Rojo explains. “Kind of cookie-shaped things. You tell them everything and at the end you have 35 cookies that are the same. I hate that. I don’t do that.”
Eventually, he began having his students paint murals. “We paint some of them outside, some of them inside. We have seven murals in the high school.”
Rojo makes sure to keep his students involved in every step of the process, so the students come up with the subjects for the murals. “They choose, so some of them are weird and scary.”
The students vote on what subject they want to paint. “I take it to the principal and he approves them and they do them. I don’t have a part in the creative process of this and I don’t want to. I’m just helping them build up their ideas.”
Hidden is part of a triptych of paintings that prominently feature the floral motif within Rojo’s “Vanitas” collection.
“Vanitas”
As for his own work, Rojo says his paintings have changed over the years. He switched to acrylics instead of thick oils after he moved to the United States. His paintings became flatter. But, he says, “The common thread is the human figure.”
“Vanitas” paintings are a type of still life. “You have flowers. You have a skull. You have things that die. They are passing. Future or life is like a dream, in a way, that goes so fast.”
“Vanitas” paintings are about “the mortality of people,” the artist explains. They capture the finite nature of all things — cut flowers, human lives — and highlight the importance of these fleeting moments.
Rojo’s paintings have elements of vanitas in them, but instead of focusing on death, the paintings in his “Vanitas” show are “more about enjoying life while it lasts.”
He places flowers and other objects on his models, photographs them, and then does a painting using the photograph as a reference. The artist can be found “literally tying down the flowers to their heads. I use flowers and things that are going to die. It’s not permanent, what I build there. That beautiful scene that I build is not made to be permanent. It’s ephemeral sculpture.”
The flowers and other objects “have expiration dates. Not the painting, but the object. Once they [the models] move, they fall. And then that image disappears. Like, literally, you cannot really hold the same pose for more than a minute before things start falling from your head. Delicately placed there, it wants to be permanent, but it can’t be.”
Rojo mostly uses women models. “If I feel confident enough, I can get some level of intimacy with the models, attaching things to their heads. They need to be comfortable with me doing that. Normally, I feel more females are going to be better with that. But I have male models, too. It’s not an exclusive thing. It’s just a matter of who I have confidence and trust in that this is going to be fun for both of us, the process is going to be comfortable for both of us and they will enjoy it,” the artist explains.
It took Rojo about two years to complete his show at Jay Etkin Gallery. “This one is purely all pandemic. During the pandemic I didn’t have models. I could have, I suppose, but I didn’t feel safe bringing models to the studio. So, I’ve been painting a lot of my daughter because she was there in the house. But also using old photographs, images of models I took over the years.”
Rojo had plenty of time to paint during the pandemic. “We taught from home. So, for almost a year, I did my class from my computer. And the rest of the day I painted. I didn’t have drive time, so I could work more on the paintings.”
Some of the works, which are in a round format, are based on snow globes. “A lot of the paintings in this show are like things frozen in time. That’s how I felt with the quarantine and the pandemic. Everything is kind of still. Frozen.”
Instead of snowflakes, Rojo has “things floating like they’re inside of snow globes.” Like leaves and birds.
Evoking Shakespeare’s tragic character, Ophelia (second from left) captures the ephemeral nature of mortality, with flowers that float in space and time.
What Comes After
Rojo plans to include soap bubbles in his paintings in his next show, he says. “Soap being something that goes fast. They’re beautiful and they explode. Like death, I suppose, in a way.”
Rojo also will be in some of his new paintings. “A friend of mine took photos of me with things on my head. I’m excited about that. They were pretty amazing. Flowers and stuff. Some classical. Saint Sebastian. The guy that’s got the arrows. Some funny stuff will see the light at some point.”
Rojo also includes drawings in his Etkin show. He did a series of drawings and watercolors of lilies and carnations from the time they are alive to the time they die. He recorded their life span by observing them. “I didn’t use photographs.”
In addition to his work for the “Vanitas” show, Rojo completed an UrbanArt Commission mural last December. He created and painted a mural for Porter-Leath & University of Memphis Early Childhood Academy at Orange Mound. The 9-by-18-foot mural features 23 figures.“It’s based on classical compositions from the Renaissance. I designed it with four layers of kids running around, going on bicycles. Some are blowing bubbles.”
One of his paintings was acquired for the soon-to-open new terminal of the Memphis International Airport. “A painting of my daughter under the tree in my backyard.”
Fellow Memphis artist Carl E. Moore is a Rojo fan. “Juan Rojo is a friend and one of the most consistent and productive artists I know because of his studio practice and his work ethic,” Moore says. “His art is full of playfulness, passion, and drama created with color and composition painted as a theatrical performance. His style is a playful use of wardrobe and props, allowing his muses to become the center of the creative artwork.”
Rojo is in a good place in his life. “In terms of art and producing art and selling art, I’m getting appreciated,” he says. “It’s been a really nice time. A horrible time to be living in, but I cannot complain. I’ve been very lucky in the last year and a half.”
“Vanitas” is on view at Jay Etkin Gallery from February 11th through March 1st. Jay Etkin Gallery is at 942 Cooper Street; (901) 550-0064.
In middle school, one of my teachers assigned the novel All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque. The book is fiction, but it gives a fairly accurate account of how horribly dehumanizing trench warfare was for WWI soldiers.
Of course, there are chapters dealing with what you might expect — snipers, charges across No Man’s Land, gas attacks. Beyond the more apparent atrocities of war, All Quiet on the Western Front spends time on the poor quality of the food the soldiers eat, the sorry state of the latrines, the mind-numbing boredom between attacks. Almost as much as the violence, those seemingly mundane details drive home the book’s message. War is hell. It strips everyone involved of their humanity.
Similarly, in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, when he writes that Billy Pilgrim, then a prisoner of war, “shit thin gruel,” I was struck by the horror of having so little control over one’s body, over what and when one ate.
Some might protest the use of a four-letter word in a book often read by high schoolers or that so much time and attention is devoted to bowel movements, but they’re missing the point. When a student is told about millions of people dying or being subjugated, the scope of the horror is too big to grasp. But when you’re confronted with someone who’s not allowed to dress themself or decide when they will relieve themself, you realize without a doubt that those people were denied even the barest semblance of dignity.
I write this because of the McMinn County School Board’s unanimous decision to remove Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel about the Holocaust, Maus, from the curriculum, ostensibly because of a drawing of mouse genitalia and some profanity. The logic seems to be that a drawing of an anthropomorphic mouse’s private parts and the occasional swear word is obscene and will make children uncomfortable.
I would find their explanation a little more believable if Tennessee weren’t already leading the charge against what some erroneously call “critical race theory” and others might more accurately describe as world and U.S. history and the myriad ways systemic racism continues to impact current social and economic structures.
Let’s speak plainly. This is not about protecting children. It is a clear and concerted effort to control the lens of history, to center white Christians in every narrative, whether or not they were the victims. It is inherently authoritarian and nationalistic, and it is dangerous. If your teaching of the Holocaust or the system of American slavery or the Trail of Tears isn’t, at times, obscene, then it is failing miserably to convey the horror and dehumanization of those atrocities. It is, in short, laying the groundwork for future acts of barbarism.
Scant weeks ago, worshipers in a Texas synagogue were held at gunpoint. Even now, a Jewish couple in Tennessee is suing the state’s Department of Children Services after being denied as potential foster parents, a step on the way to adopting a child with disabilities, because the agency “only provide[s] adoption services to prospective adoptive families that share our belief system.” Among the more bizarre examples of anti-Semitism is the QAnon belief in the Deep State, a conspiracy theory which has its roots in 20th-century European prejudice against Jewish people. Just days ago, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis danced around calls for him to condemn Nazi demonstrations in Orlando. DeSantis’ spokeswoman Christina Pushaw wondered if the demonstrators were “even Nazis.” They were waving fucking swastikas, so my guess is yes. So let’s please not act as though these issues are no longer with us here in the 21st century. Hatred is alive and well. It’s big business for some people, and we must use every tool available to combat it, to help today’s young people understand history and develop empathy.
Some will point out that Maus is now a bestseller on Amazon, which is nice, but it’s not the same thing as the book being made readily available to students. Not everyone has access to Amazon or Barnes & Noble; not everyone can afford a new copy of a graphic novel.
If our kids are strong enough to sit through active shooter drills, they’re strong enough to confront the past. We owe it to them to teach them about the horrible things humanity has done, and we must remember that learning about the Holocaust should make them uncomfortable.
We must be honest about our past sins, or we’ll soon have even more atrocities to add to some future curriculum.
Weirich and Mulroy at respective fundraisers (Photos: Jackson Baker)
In these still early days of the 2022 election field, one political race above all is drawing the most attention and seems to be getting fully underway. This is the contest between Republican incumbent District Attorney General Amy Weirich and her most likely Democratic opponent, University of Memphis law professor and former County Commissioner Steve Mulroy.
Both Mulroy and Weirich are on the campaign trail, which at this stage of the game means they are holding fundraisers that function simultaneously as opportunities to get their message out. Mulroy has been getting in the first licks, never failing to call attention to Weirich’s periodic sanctions for judicial misconduct by the Tennessee Supreme Court, by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, and by the ethics panel of the Tennessee bar.
Weirich does not respond to these charges, though her supporters will cite them as proof of her zeal in pursuing crime and of a muscular approach that might sometimes cross over a line, but always in the interests of the victims of crime. “I’m tough and I’m fair,” she said Monday night at a well-attended fundraiser at the East Memphis home of GOP County Commissioner Brandon Morrison and her husband Joe. “And I’m never gonna apologize for being tough on crime. And if you want a D.A. that’s not going to fight for victims, that ain’t me. I’ll tell you that right here and right now.”
Mulroy sees things differently. At a pair of fundraisers he held this past week, at the home of Shawn and Shawna Lynch and the Donati Law Firm, he scourged Weirich for what he sees as her undue emphasis on locking offenders up as hype arrest statistics and her failure, as he said in his announcement remarks, to pursue “a conviction review unit like one now operating in Davidson County, an emphasis on justice rather than simply winning verdicts, sequestration of juveniles from adult offenders, and reform of what he called ‘bail inflation.’”
Without naming Mulroy, Weirich singled out this last point on Monday night: “I am not your D.A. if you want someone to commit to letting everyone out without bond. That is not the solution. We saw a little bit of that during the pandemic. And what happened to our crime rate is, it went up.”
Of course, Mulroy maintains, as he did at the Lynch fundraiser, that the Shelby County crime rate, violent crime in particular, “has gone up consistently every year under Weirich’s administration after having slowed down just before she took office.”
Another point of contention between them concerns what Weirich expresses this way: “Much of what frustrates the community right now and has for many years are the laws and the way the system is designed to let people out too soon, and add a disrespectful rate to the victims of those crimes. We need truth in sentencing.”
Mulroy opposes that notion and sees flexibility in incarceration procedures as ways both of applying pure and fair-minded justice and avoiding the indiscriminate long-term pile-up of bodies that, he says, turns prisons into crime schools.
All this being said, we aren’t yet in the general election. Weirich seems so far to be home free in the Republican primary, with no opponents. Mulroy, on the other hand, has two primary opponents, Linda Harris and Janika White, each seemingly well-credentialed enough to make a case for herself. They’re not crazy about Weirich’s record, either.
In Drive My Car, a red Saab becomes a safe haven for a safe haven for Yusuke (Hidetoshi Jishijima) and Misaki (Tôko Miura), both of whom dwell in tragedy.
A friend recently moved from Downtown Memphis, where they work, to a suburb beyond the 240 loop. They used to walk to work in five minutes, but now have a 30-minute commute to the office. I asked if they hated spending an hour a day in their car, but to my surprise, they said no. The commute might get old after a few years, but for now, they said the time spent inside their car is a little respite from the outside world, a time to listen to their music and be alone with their thoughts.
In Drive My Car, Yusuke (Hidetoshi Nishijima) feels the same way about the time he spends in his beloved red Saab. The Tokyo native is a theater actor and director, acclaimed for his innovative productions where he casts actors from many different countries who deliver their lines in their own languages. Yusuke used to be married to Oto (Reika Kirishima), a screenwriter, but he found her dead of a brain hemorrhage two years ago. Now, all that is left of his wife are tapes she made where she reads all the parts except for his in the plays he starred in, to help him memorize his lines. As he drives to Hiroshima for a stint as a visiting scholar at a university, he listens to Oto read Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, the play he is scheduled to direct. The Hiroshima theater department practically begs him to appear as Uncle Vanya, but after Oto died, he lost his appetite for the stage. Instead, he has inexplicably cast the handsome, young Koji (Masaki Okada) as the middle-aged, sad-sack Uncle Vanya. It’s a head-scratcher of a choice, but that’s the kind of strange juxtaposition Yusuke is famous for.
But there’s one thing the university is adamant about. Yusuke can’t drive himself. It seems that another visiting scholar got drunk and killed a pedestrian, causing the school major liability headaches. So they have hired a professional driver named Misaki (Tôko Miura) to chauffeur Yusuke. During their commutes along the picturesque Japanese coast, the red Saab becomes both sanctuary and confessional, as the production of Uncle Vanya unravels, and Yusuke’s secret pain bubbles to the surface.
Directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi and adapted from the short story collection Men Without Women by Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, Drive My Car isn’t in any hurry to get where it’s going. In what must be some kind of record, the opening credits come approximately 45 minutes into the three-hour picture, after an extended cold open which explores the last days of Yusuke and Oto’s marriage. To Hamaguchi’s credit, there’s more story and emotion before the main plot gets rolling than in most films you’ll see this year. Yusuke and Oto have an amazing sex life, where she enters a kind of erotic trance state and recites visions and stories to him while they do it. Later, he fills her in on what she said, and she turns the stories into screenplays.
Great films establish their own rhythm and seduce you into living on their time. As Drive My Car glides along country roads and squirms in uncomfortable table reads, small gestures and expressions are amplified. That’s especially true if they’re coming from Nishijima, who is a master of letting micro-emotions flit across his stoney face. Miura, in the front seat, is just as taciturn and damaged. The story of her traumatic childhood, and how she became such a good driver, are a strange counterpoint to Yusuke’s guilt and regret. Kirishima’s turn as the enigmatic Oto is so delicate and elegant that you can see why the director was reluctant to leave any of it in the editing room.
Drive My Car was the best of the “slow cinema” selections at Indie Memphis 2021, and it’s become a critic’s darling, as the first film since The Hurt Locker to win Best Picture from three different American film critic groups. It’s not for everyone — the long scenes of theater rehearsals almost drove my film editor wife around the bend, but if you’ve ever wanted to see most of Uncle Vanya performed badly in English, Korean, and sign language, this is your time. But the contemplative pacing is a deliberate reaction to the relentless information treadmill of smartphone life, and once you start vibing on Hamaguchi’s frequency, you’ll find Drive My Car a richly rewarding trip.
Say this for Brian Kelsey: The State Senator from Germantown is not letting the burden of a felony indictment (for campaign finance violations) inhibit his legislative activity. In that regard the Germantown Republican is like State Senator Katrina Robinson (D-Memphis) who also continued working legislatively in the face of a felony indictment (since resulting in conviction that has put Robinson on the brink of expulsion from the Senate).
Kelsey’s latest project is Senate Bill 1820 (companion measure: 1868 HB, by Rep. Nathan Vaughn, a Collierville Republican), which would prohibit the use anywhere in Tennessee of ranked choice voting (a.k.a. instant runoff voting), a mode of elections that has been twice approved by Memphis voters in referenda but has been prevented by the City Council and by the state Election Coordinator from taking place.
Introducing his bill in the Senate’s State and Local Government committee on Tuesday, Kelsey noted that his legislation had both Republican and Democratic co-sponsors and said, “It’s not a partisan issue. It’s really an issue about voter clarity.”
He went on to give an explanation of the ranked choice process that he himself might not regard as a model of clarity: “Instead of voting for a name, you would rank candidates, for example, one through seven. And then if for all those people who voted for the seventh place receiving vote person, those, then your first choice would be thrown out, and then you come back and they go to see okay, well, now how who did you vote for it for your second choice, and then you got to reallocate those votes that way, and then you got to go back and recount them. So you can see, this can take many rounds, and can be very confusing.”
A shorter but more informative explanation might characterize the process as one designed to prevent minority vote-getters from triumphing in winner-take-all elections. All candidates would be ranked by voters, and — absent an immediate majority winner — runner-up votes would be successively applied in subsequent rounds until a majority winner emerged.
Said Kelsey: “I do think that it’s a very confusing and complex way of doing elections, and one that does not create voter confidence in the counting system and the outcomes, and one that would not be helpful for Tennessee.”
State Senator Jeff Yarbro (D-Nashville) intervened to point out that the process had been approved in Shelby County twice. He went on to suggest that it would be helpful if someone involved in the Memphis effort would address the committee and shed some light on the issue. Kelsey suggested that Beth Henry Robertson of the State Election Coordinator’s office, which, via Coordinator Mark Goins, has previously expressed doubts about ranked choice could offer some clarification. State Senator Sara Kyle (D-Memphis) confirmed for the committee that, “In Memphis, we have had referendums, one I think past 63 percent. One 70 percent … I am just asking if the sponsor would consider moving this to a study committee this summer so that we can have people to come in and testify.”
Kelsey objected: “I first heard about a request to testify yesterday and I said, bring them on, you know, that’s great, please, it’s three hour drive. From Memphis. No one chose to make that drive this morning.”
There was discussion back and forth, with Sen. Kenneth Yager (R-Kingston) expressing agreement with the need to hear witnesses and committee chair Richard Briggs (R-Knoxville) agreeing and ultimately making a motion to roll the bill for a week and perhaps further if need be to allow witnesses to testify.
Asked his view ot today’s discussion, University of Memphis law professor Steve Mulroy, who has been the major advocate of ranked choice voting locally, pointed out that the Tennessee legislature is majority Republican and that it was both likely and desirable that Republican advocates for the process would make themselves available for testimony for it in Nashville.
More people left Memphis over the last two years than any other part of the state. That’s a bad sign for the area’s economic growth, according to a Tennessee labor expert.
Marianne Wanamaker, a labor economist at the University of Tennessee, told state lawmakers Tuesday that — from an output perspective — the U.S. and Tennessee economies are “operating as though Covid never happened.” However, fewer people are working, and 95,000 employees are needed for jobs in Tennessee. Now, there’s only half that number of workers available in the state.
Bridging the gap between high output and fewer workers means those who are working spend more time at their jobs. Wanamaker said this may explain “why working Americans express feeling burned out and exhausted.”
The American labor supply “took a beating” during Covid, Wanamaker said, and is struggling to recover. She said it’s unlikely that the labor force participation rate (the amount of Americans working or actively looking for jobs) will ever return to the record 67-percent rate experienced in the late 1990s before the dotcom bubble.
More than 2.1 million Americans retired early in the pandemic, Wanamaker said. Unlike previous times, she does not believe many of those will “un-retire” and return to the workforce, wiping out a significant portion of the “bonus labor force.”
Many blamed the so-called worker shortage on emergency pandemic unemployment insurance benefits from the federal government. So sure of this notion, Tennessee Republican lawmakers opted the state out of said benefits to prod those taking the money back into the workforce. Wanamaker said “our draw down on unemployment insurance is quite low compared to where we were last year.”
Sen. Frank Nicely (R-Strawberry Plains) said many “snowflake millennials” are now just living off the wealth of their dying parents.
“I was reading the other day that us war babies and Baby Boomers are dying off and there’s been a huge transfer of wealth to snowflake millennials — one of the biggest transfers of wealth in history — and a lot of them don’t have to work,” Nicely said. “They inherited a house and they got money in the bank. A lot of them are in pretty good shape. What impact does that have on people not working?”
In response, Wanamaker said, without unemployment insurance, people are financing non-work in other ways. She said the labor market is experiencing weakness at all education levels, but remarked vaguely on the recent increases in the stock market and housing valuations in Knoxville.
Wanamaker focused on the fact that an economy cannot grow without people, and that’s a challenge for Tennessee at the moment. Deaths exceeded births in the state by 7 percent in 2020, she said. Even without Covid deaths, Wanamaker predicted that deaths would have exceeded births here by 2024.
(Credit: University of Tennessee)
The only population growth for the state that year came from people arriving from other states. Without that, she said, Tennessee’s population would be shrinking and dragging economic growth. Those migrations did not happen uniformly across the state. In fact, Memphis was — far and away — the biggest loser.
To track migration, Wanamaker used U.S. Postal Service data from change-of-address cards. Someone moving gives the Post Office the address they’re moving from and the address they’re moving to. Each change of address card is considered one household, and each household is conservatively considered to be about two people. From this information, migration trends can be calculated.
Knoxville, the state’s biggest population winner, gained 8,202 households (or 16,404 people) in 2020 and 2021. Bristol gained 3,446 households (or 6,892 people), while Johnson City gained 1,484 households (or 2,968 people).
(Credit: University of Tennessee)
At the same time, Memphis lost 8,555 households (or 17,110 people), in those two years, losing “as many households as Knoxville has gained,” Wanamaker said. U.S. Census Bureau data show that Shelby County’s population rose by only 2,100 people between 2010 and 2020 (from 927,644 to 929,744), or 0.2 percent.
“I believe population and labor force dynamics are the major policy challenges of the next 5 to 10 years,” Wanamaker said. “Supply chain snarls will abate. … It remains very possible that the [Federal Reserve Bank] will find a soft landing on inflation that will keep us out of a double-dip recession.
“Meanwhile, the labor shortage and lack of population growth is going to be a challenge with 100-percent certainty.”
As for a remedy, Wanamaker said “recruiting migrants [from other states and legal immigrants form other countries] to the state will determine the rate of economic growth over the short and medium term.”
