Available for streaming, these documentaries get at the heart of comedy.
In the second episode of HBO’s epic, four-hour documentary George Carlin’s American Dream, Chris Rock recalls the comedy legend telling him, “I’m not an entertainer, I’m a comedian.”
Rock says the offhand comment stuck with him, and he realized that comedians inhabited the same cultural niches that used to be reserved for philosophers. In the very next clip, Jerry Seinfeld disagrees, saying, “I’ve never changed my opinion on anything because of a bit.”
That two of the most popular comedians of the last 50 years, both of whom were heavily influenced by George Carlin, could disagree so profoundly about their role in the world speaks to the breadth and depth of the comedian’s work. During his four decades in the comedy spotlight, Carlin mastered both the observational comedy of the everyday, which propelled Seinfeld to becoming the biggest TV comedy of the 1990s, and the insightful social commentary, which keeps his words alive in today’s online political discourse. The new documentary, by directors Judd Apatow (something of a comedy legend himself) and Michael Bonfiglio, aims to detail the full scope of the man who reinvented comedy many times over.
Made with the help of his daughter Kelly Carlin and second wife Sally Wade, American Dream boasts a wealth of both Carlin’s home movies and his TV appearances, of which there were literally thousands. In his early days, he idolized Danny Kaye, and every step of his journey from radio DJ to goofy variety show guest was calculated as a way to break into the movies. But the rebellious streak that got him kicked out of the Air Force made him too dangerous for the mainstream. And besides, as he would later admit when his post-Seinfeld TV comedy was canceled after one season, “I’m not much of an actor.” Kelly Carlin describes her father as “a road comic until the day he died,” and the interaction with the crowd was always at the heart of Carlin’s art.
Carlin’s real skill was his penetrating insight and brutal honesty. His final reinvention, which coincided with his development of the HBO comedy special, would prove to be the most profound. “The planet is not in jeopardy. We are in jeopardy!” he declared in his now-classic 1992 show Jammin’ in New York. The documentary’s powerful climax comes in an extended montage of events that have happened since Carlin’s 2008 death juxtaposed with clips from his comedy routines that concisely predicted and explained it all.
Around the time Carlin was reinventing himself as a philosopher, a group of Canadian 20-somethings were reinventing sketch comedy. The Kids in the Hall: Comedy Punks reveals that the group got their name from the would-be comedy writers who lingered outside Jack Benny’s office trying to sell him jokes — and Mark McKinney is still bitter that they didn’t use the name he suggested, The Audience.
But the name fit McKinney, Bruce McCulloch, Scott Thompson, Kevin McDonald, and Dave Foley. They were outsiders in the suburban Canada where they grew up, which bred an anarchic attitude in their comedy writing. The five friends spent much of the ’80s playing to tiny audiences of goth weirdos at the Rivoli, a punk rock club in Toronto, Canada, and the documentary features lots of priceless footage of the Kids both killing and dying on stage as they developed their act. By the time the talent scouts from Saturday Night Live arrived in 1986, they couldn’t get tickets to the sold-out shows. After hiring Foley and McKinney for a brief stint as SNL writers, Lorne Michaels brought the whole crew to New York, where they proceeded to spend his development money on ecstasy-fueled nights on the town while creating the defining comedy aesthetic of Generation X. After a bad, mid-’90s breakup brought on by inflated egos, Foley’s gig on NewsRadio, and the cursed production of their only feature film, Brain Candy, the Kids’ cult continued to grow, thanks to endless reruns on Comedy Central.
Where American Dream is a deep dive into the legacy of a timeless artist, Comedy Punks is more of a conventional celebratory documentary. It makes the case that the Kids’ stable of gender-fluid (nobody did drag comedy better than them) and gay-positive characters changed the comedy boys’ club for the better. Certainly, their Dadaist streak left a huge mark on contemporary comedy. Since the documentary’s release coincides with a new season of their seminal show on Amazon Prime Video, it seems the Kids themselves will get the last word.
George Carlin’s American Dream is streaming on HBO Max. The Kids in the Hall: Comedy Punks is streaming on Amazon Prime.
Jimmy “Sushi Jimmi”
Sinh has become
somewhat of icon,
not just in our
publication, but in
Memphis as a whole. (Photo: Michael Donahue)
Jimmy “Sushi Jimmi” Sinh has been on a roll since he closed his old Sushi Jimmi Asian fusion restaurant on Poplar and his first food truck. That was three years ago. Now, he plans to open a new food truck, Poke Paradise, in mid-June. In the meantime he’s doing pop-ups and catering.
Sinh, 34, is an icon — some might say even a “legend” — in the Memphis food community. Articles about him blow up with hits, views, likes, and shares on social media. He’s created his own brand. And people love him.
Here at the Flyer, we’ve followed Sinh’s many moves — his brick-and-mortar restaurant, his food truck, his cooking show, his plan to leave Memphis, and his subsequent decision to stay here — and we sometimes get a little flak for it. But what can we say? Our readers eat it up. Now, almost exactly a year after we reported Sinh’s decision to stay in Memphis, and just weeks before the debut of his Poke Paradise food truck, we’re finally telling the whole saga of Sushi Jimmi, the local legend and many foodies’ favorite.
“He is my favorite sushi chef in town,” says Jordan Beatty, executive chef at the Flip Side restaurant. “The layering of the ingredients, just the quality of the ingredients, is always extremely fresh. I’ve gone to some other sushi restaurants. The rice might have been made a couple of days ago. Or some other ingredients are not too quality. He prides himself on ordering the best fish that comes into town.”
Sugar Grits executive corporate chef Lee Anna Beatty says, “Chef Jimmy Sinh is our very own Sushi Master of Memphis.”
But just who is Sushi Jimmi? Where did he come from?
Sinh has always approached sushi with a fiery passion, sometimes at the self-admitted risk of burnout. (Photos: Michael Donahue)
On Beginnings “I was born in South Vietnam,” says Sinh, one of seven children.
When he was 2-and-a-half years old, Sinh and his family moved to Los Angeles, where the majority of his family lived. When he was 6, his parents moved the family to Memphis where they pursued better job opportunities. His mother worked in a food warehouse, and his father in an automotive business.
In Sinh’s household, his mom did the cooking. “My favorite dish my mom cooked was her pho. She cooked it pretty often. Growing up, we rarely went out. She cooked all the time. And I learned how to prep and get things ready for the next day because of her,” Sinh remembers.
“My mom was always on schedule. She worked a lot. And when she came home everything was ready. She’d make four or five dishes in 30 minutes because she had so many kids to feed. And to be able to do that, you have to prepare that the day before. You come home, you cook.”
Sinh’s mother had plenty of practice preparing many meals, both for her family and for hungry customers. “In Vietnam, she was a street food vendor, selling pretty much anything she could get her hands on,” Sinh says. “She’d make some noodle soups, fried rice, banh mi. That’s how we survived. I’ve got three brothers and three sisters.”
Though the culinary craft was on display at home, cars — not cooking — were Sinh’s first passion. “My brother loved going to car lots. When I was younger he’d always take me,” Sinh says.
“I didn’t really get interested in cooking until I was 16 in high school. Freshman year. I got my first job. I never thought in life I would ever end up in a Japanese restaurant. I thought I would end up like everyone else — in a Chinese restaurant for my first job.”
He worked as a host at Benihana, and he was mesmerized by one station in particular. “I always looked over at the sushi bar every chance I got and I’d just watch. As kids, you just see some things you just like to watch.
“I asked the head chef, ‘Can I work at the sushi bar?’ And they gave me an opportunity. I worked at the sushi bar for two weeks.”
But, he says, “I was more the helper and I didn’t like that.” Sinh is creative, an attribute that expresses itself often in his menu items, and it made him want to do more than be a “helper.”
His friend Tony Do got him a job at Do’s family’s restaurant, Nagasaki Inn, which is where Sinh really sank his teeth into preparing sushi.
Do made sure Sinh learned the foundations of rolling sushi. “I started practicing and I just got better at it,” he says.
A creative cook, Sinh also did his own thing with sushi. “I’m very good at improvising. When I see pictures I come up with something of my own. I get an idea and put it with my idea.”
Nagasaki Inn co-owner Harold Do, Tony’s father, was a mentor to young Sinh. “He’s like an uncle to me. I see Mr. Harold all the time. We always hug. That man has taught me so much. That’s why I work so hard. I’ve never seen anybody work so hard as him,” Sinh says.
Sinh admired Do’s strong work ethic, and his rapport with his customers. “Being in front of him watching him cook is an honor. He works hard and he has the opportunity to still come out and show his face. That’s why customers come to see him. How else are you going to see the man cook for you and tell you jokes?”
And, he says, “I was a teenager. And Mr. Harold was the one who was really there for me to keep me off the streets. From being around the wrong crowd. He’s not just a great chef, but a great person. I loved working there. It’s one of those memories you never forget.”
Working at Nagasaki Inn was Sinh’s favorite restaurant experience. “Harold and his son, Tony, treated me like family. I’ll never forget it. I had the best teenage life working there. I learned so much. And I always tell people, ‘Nobody cooks hibachi better than Nagasaki, in my opinion.’
“We all helped each other out. We worked together as a team. At nighttime we would sit down together as a family.”
Photo: Michael Donahue
Sushi Evolution Sinh was at Nagasaki Inn for two years. “I took the sushi game a lot more seriously when I was around 21. That was when I told myself I want to do sushi for the rest of my life. I just saw the lack of knowledge around. When people eat sushi they get confused. I told myself, ‘I want to be the one that teaches people how to eat it. And not be afraid of trying it.’”
Later, Sinh learned how to do more advanced sushi. He got a job at the old Wasabi Sushi & Asian Fusion in Cordova. “That was the first time for me to do more advanced sushi. That’s where I spent a lot of time doing more of the raw stuff like the nigiri and the sashimi.”
He got the name Sushi Jimmi while working at the sushi bar. “There was a party going on. Somebody was asking for me and one of my buddies said, ‘Who are you looking for? Are you looking for Jimmy? Jimmy who? Sushi Jimmy?’ That’s how I got the name ‘Sushi Jimmi.’”
In 2014, Sinh, who helped open Red Fish restaurant locations, decided to open his own food truck. He had plenty of experience, and the market for food trucks was growing. “The food truck scene got bigger and bigger here in the Mid-South,” he says. “I was having my third kid and it motivated me to start up my own business. Me and my wife just had a long conversation about what are we going to do.”
He wondered if he should work “paycheck to paycheck” or do what he loves “and make a living at it.” Turning a passion into a profession would be hard work and would come with no shortage of challenges, but it was the most alluring option.
Sinh had a food truck built in Dallas. It made its debut in 2015 at the Mid-South Food Truck Festival, where he did “really well,” Sinh remembers.
He didn’t just sell sushi. “We had spring rolls. We had egg rolls. We had kimchi fries. We had crawfish nachos. People love the crawfish nachos. They were one of those big-hit things.”
Flush from the success of his food truck, in 2017, Sinh opened his Sushi Jimmi restaurant at 2895 Poplar. “I was trying to provide people with job opportunities.” And, he adds, “I wanted to expand my business a little more.”
But opening the restaurant wasn’t a good idea, Sinh says. “That was the worst mistake I ever made.”
With the food truck, Sinh had more time to enjoy his family, but a brick-and-mortar restaurant, and the staff it takes to run one, means a bigger commitment and more time spent at work. “When I had the restaurant, I never had a day I could enjoy,” he says.
He closed Sushi Jimmi on May 23, 2019, and he closed his food truck the next day. “Having to run the food truck and the restaurant by myself was burning me out,” Sinh admits. “If you don’t feel happy, stop. I stopped before I hated it. You don’t want to lose what you fell in love with.”
Sinh eventually went to work at other restaurants, including Saltwater Crab and at Saito 2.
In April 2021, Sinh announced he was moving to Orlando, Florida, in May. He said it would be a better opportunity for him and his family.
He also wanted to take a two-month vacation and spend time with his wife and children.
In June 2021, Sinh announced he was staying in Memphis. He said in a Flyer interview he and his wife didn’t want to move while his children were so young. The children needed “to bond a little more as a family.” They also had another child on the way.
Sinh told the Flyer, “When I shut Sushi Jimmi down, I hopped back into my work. Worked really hard like I did at Sushi Jimmi. I never gave myself a break, so I kind of burned myself out and just hated what I was doing.”
As Sinh returns to the food truck business, he plans to go beyond the “Sushi Jimmi” moniker to expand his repertoire to poke. (Photo: Michael Donahue)
Poke Paradise The life of a chef often means hard work and long hours, and the same can be said for any small business owner. And, if the pun can be pardoned, there’s always the risk of getting burned, or burned out. That’s when Sinh came up with the idea to improve his private chef business and open his Poke Paradise food truck. He said, “I want to bring Sushi Jimmi to you. Make sure it’s something you’ll never forget.”
Sinh is happy to be “going mobile” again. Poke Paradise is “a brand you can actually franchise,” he says.
Poke is diced fresh fish, usually served with soy sauce and onion. “You can eat it spicy, and you can make it with the soy sauce base or mayo base or eat it the way it is,” Sinh explains. “It was created by fishermen with leftover fish. It was created in Hawaii. It’s a Japanese-Hawaiian dish.”
He wanted to serve something simple and healthy for people to eat. At Sinh’s Poke Paradise, people can choose from four or five different sauces.
Sinh is ready to introduce his “version of poke.”
“I’m always the person who likes the extra. I want my customers to have a little bit of an option. We’re going to have heat — mango habanero sauce. Nothing better than fresh fish and the right sauce.”
Until he gets his food truck on the road, Sinh is doing pop-ups, special orders, and catering. “Just so that we can keep ourselves busy and at the same time try new things to see what we can put on our new menu. To see if it will work on the truck once we have the truck out.” Customers can find him on Facebook (@SushiJimmi) and on Instagram (@sushi_jimmi).
Sinh “cooks with love,” says artist, actor, entrepreneur Kia Shine. “And it comes through when you’re eating.”
His sushi has “great presentation,” Shine adds. “And it’s really, really good, man. He knows what he’s doing with that sushi.”
Shine recalled a few years ago after he and members of the Heal the Hood Foundation of Memphis visited Sinh’s restaurant after delivering turkeys. “There were about 13 of us, and he was just bringing sushi dish after dish after dish after dish.”
When it came time to pay the bill, Sinh told Shine, “Nah, I got this.”
Shine continues, “He’s a giver. That speaks volumes about the individual.”
Sinh plans to one day franchise Poke Paradise brick-and-mortar restaurants in other cities. For now, he wants to be mobile with maybe one or two people to help him. “All I can tell you is if the customer keeps supporting me, better things will come,” he says. “Every dollar I make I put it right back in the business to make the business better. I’m going to take my time with this.”
“Jimmy has influenced the way we enjoy sushi in Memphis,” says Suzie “Big Sue” Purnell, iHeartMedia senior vice president of programming. “What some may see as an intimidating experience, Jimmy counters by bringing joy, pride, creativity, and fun to everything he creates. That’s a real gift and what makes him such a star.”
Memphis topped the list of CityNerd’s top 10 worst transit cities, “where taking the bus or rail may just crush your soul.” (Hat tip to u/Carpet-Early on the Memphis subreddit.)
Channel host Ray Delahanty, a transportation planning and engineering consultant, said the Memphis Area Transportation Authority had to have “the single least legible major-city bus system in the U.S. When I drop into [Google Maps’] street-view I can barely tell where the bus stop is.”
Lucinda and Bonnie
Posted to Twitter by Lucinda Williams
Some “dumb f*ck” heckled Lucinda Williams and Bonnie Raitt during their performances at the Orpheum Saturday, according to Memphis Redditor u/12frets. The heckler allegedly made fun of Lucinda’s speech (she had a stroke last year, says 12frets) and yelled to Bonnie “what’s in that cup” she was drinking from before a song about her struggles with sobriety.
“I know it was very important to you to be as much a part of the show as the people on stage, but you’re neither funny or insightful,” said 12frets. “These artists deserve better.”
Cool Shot
Posted to Twitter by Frasier Seinfeld
“As the sun sets on Memphis like the Serengeti,” said Frasier Seinfeld on Twitter.
The Ginger’s Bread & Co. officially opens June 4th at 1613 Union Avenue.
“It’s a bakery,” says Jimmy Hoxie, 43, who owns the establishment with his husband, Grant Whittle. “We have sourdough, challah, croissants, tarts, cookies and cookies and cookies.”
But that’s not what “Ginger” refers to. Instead, Hoxie says, it’s “like someone who has red hair. Like I do.”
Ginger’s Bread is more than a bakery. “We’ve also got some gallery space and a few jewelers and candle makers who are going to set up some spots in there. It’s going to be a little market.”
Hoxie is a natural for the business. “I’ve been baking and cooking since I was a kid with my mom and my grandmother.”
And, he adds, “The cooking shows were my Saturday cartoons.”
Baking didn’t come naturally for him at first, though. “I can remember lots of disasters as a kid.” He would make things that turned out “not really for human consumption. Like baking a batch of cookies and forgetting to put extract in it and trying to brush it on afterwards. It’s not quite the same.”
But, he says, “You learn from your mistakes and you just keep going.”
He also got great feedback from The Lauderdale County Enterprise owner, editor, and publisher Terry Ford, who, like Hoxie’s grandmother, lived in Ripley, Tennessee. “He was an avid cookbook collector and gourmand and friend of Julia Child. He brought Julia to Ripley once, and I got to meet her.”
Ford told Hoxie, who helped him cook for his annual July 4th parties, “You’ve got some skill and you should look into this.”
After graduating from Ridgeway High School, Hoxie went to culinary school at Johnson and Wales University in Charleston, South Carolina. He worked in between semesters at Disney’s Grand Floridian Resort and Spa, “as a cook, but [I also did] anything else that needed to be done.”
Following graduation, he worked at The Mills House Wyndham Grand Hotel in Charleston. Moving back to Memphis, his jobs included Viking Culinary Art School and Memphis Jewish Home & Rehab before working at Bonne Terre Country Inn & Café in Southaven. He also worked at Just for Lunch, Church Health, Sur La Table, The Liquor Store, City & State, and the cafe at Crosstown Arts.
After the pandemic shut everything down, Hoxie thought, “If I was going to start doing something on my own, now is the time.”
Hoxie and Whittle started an online “porch and pick-up” baking business, The Ginger’s Bread, after they converted half of a duplex they owned into a kitchen.
They moved into their current location after they outgrew the duplex. “We wanted to be in Midtown because there’s not really a bread bakery in Midtown. Certainly not where you can get a fresh croissant.”
They loved the space. “It was built circa 1930 and still has a little charm left to it. It has the feel of the 1930s, but it also has the feel of all the eras up to today. I found some old store display cases that are circa 1930s, ’40s.
“My brother and I drove all over picking up stuff and shoving it in the back of U-Hauls and figuring out how to get it off the van and into the shop as best we can.”
As for the color scheme? “We’ve got a really rich teal and then wood and burnt orange accents.”
He includes a range of new and fondly recalled baked goods. “A lot of people remember my stuff from City & State, and they wanted their old favorites they used to eat there,” Hoxie says.
That includes his pimento cheese cornmeal scones and stuffed pretzels with nuts and apple pie filling.
They have “a few tables,” but they don’t want The Ginger’s Bread & Co. to be a restaurant at his point. “We want people to enjoy their time while they’re there, but we want people to grab what they want and go.”
Future plans may include building out the space to add a commercial kitchen. And maybe one day they will open a restaurant.
And, yes, they sell gingerbread men. Hoxie makes the classic cookie, but he’ll be doing others. “For Elvis Week, I’ll do a little Elvis-shaped one.”
The experimental music scene in Memphis is an elusive thing. It’s certainly out there, as evidenced by the Memphis Concrète music festivals, but a newcomer may find it hard to discover. That was certainly the case 12 years ago, when an electronic artist and co-manager of an experimental music label in Lisbon, Portugal, found himself in the Bluff City. Luís Seixas recalls those days, after his wife’s new position at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital brought them both here, living in America for the first time.
“It was tough to find the people here,” he recalls now. “It took me a while to understand how things move in Memphis. I didn’t find the scene I was expecting to find in a city of this size. Then I came across Mike Honeycutt.” Honeycutt, an electronic musician who releases his work primarily on cassettes, had collected tapes that Seixas’ label partner, Fernando Cerqueira, had released decades before. “I was like, ‘He has tapes going back to the late 1980s! A Memphian with a radio show on WEVL!’” Seixas continues. “But he told me, ‘No, there’s not a scene. We’re struggling, it’s hard.’ And it was. Not finding a scene here was the strangest thing. I expected Memphis to be an epicenter, that would attract people, but regarding electronic music, I saw the opposite: People who were born and raised in Memphis then left for other parts of the United States.”
Seixas in turn may have become one of the scene’s best-kept secrets. Ever since he arrived here, he’s been helping to make that scene bigger, plugging Memphis artists directly into a network, centered in Lisbon, that reaches across Europe. Thanks to Seixas, Thisco (pronounced “disco”), the label that he and Cerqueira founded in 2000, has become a presence in the Mid-South. “We were about to leave Lisbon,” Seixas recalls of his pre-Memphis days, “and Fernando suggested I operate Thisco only in Memphis. But I said, ‘No, we’re going to have two headquarters, one in Lisbon and one in Memphis.’ Why not?”
By now, many local knob-twiddlers (including myself) have collaborated with Seixas, who creates his own music under the name Sci Fi Industries. And still more have benefited from the breath of fresh air he brought to that elusive experimental music scene. In 2012, when he was working for the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art (in the capacity of his trade as an art conservator), Seixas curated The Paik Sessions I – Music for the Vide-O-belisk, a collection of ambient pieces that paired well with Nam June Paik’s sculpture Vide-O-belisk (2002), then located in the rotunda of the museum. The following year, he compiled The Paik Sessions 2.
Since then, he’s become increasingly more active in local electronic music. “We released the compilation for Memphis Concrète, On Triangles, and that was totally supported and paid for by Thisco,” Seixas notes. “We gave carte blanche to [Memphis Concrète founder] Robert Traxler to pick the lineup, and of course we sent copies to Europe. We’ve also released albums by Robert, The Pop Ritual, Ihcilon (Paul Randall), and we’re still waiting on a few more to join us. The label just turned 20, and we’re still getting new artists.”
Alas, Seixas’ Memphis chapter is now coming to a close, as his art conservation work will soon take him to Florida. Yet it doesn’t appear that his labors in music will cease anytime soon. “I started Thisco partly because I’m kind of a librarian,” Seixas muses. “I want to preserve these things. I want to see what people are doing and put it out there. If I can document what was happening at this moment in time, I’ll do that. I guess that’s why I became an art conservator. I’m preserving something, and Thisco comes directly on the same path. It’s a way to capture what was going on in a moment. I know anyone can put their music on the web now, but sometimes they need that push. Someone saying, ‘This is good!’ There’s always this self-criticism. ‘I’m not good enough! Should I put this out?’ Or the opposite: They just put everything out without a filter. Sometimes you need a friend to tell you, ‘Well, maybe work a bit more on that one.’ So I think there’s still a role for people like me. Someone to say, ‘Do it this way, do it that way. But do it.’” For more information, visit thisco.bandcamp.com.
I’ve been thinking about a sign in the yard of a house in my neighborhood. It’s more of a sculpture, really — a white dog taking a poop — very realistic, complete with poop coming out of the appropriate place. The word “NO!” is painted on the dog, and the message to passersby is clear: Do not let your dog do his business on this lawn!
I keep thinking about how the (probably very nice) person who put up this sign was so concerned that a dog would poop in their yard that they erected a permanent image of a dog pooping in their yard. It’s like an homage to a pooping dog. People walk by, see that sign, and think about a pooping dog. There’s probably some sort of life-lesson here, but it eludes me.
President Biden went to Buffalo, New York, last week, in the wake of the recent mass murder there, and gave a heartfelt speech about the dangers of white supremacy, saying that it was not who we are as a country and that we should reject it. He’s right, but we might as well put up a billboard on the White House lawn picturing a Klansman with “NO!” painted on his sheet, for all the good that speech is going to do.
Signs and speeches aren’t going to fix what’s wrong with this country. In too many states, a rabid right-wing minority has control of the reins of government. Poll after poll shows that the majority of people in those states (including Tennessee) favor some kind of gun control and some level of abortion rights. And yet, their legislatures keep passing no-permit-needed, open-carry gun laws, and forcing through measures that will outlaw abortion entirely, even in cases of incest, rape, or potential death of the mother. The real “radicals” are in charge in too many states, the will of the people be damned. How do we change that?
Consider Mississippi: Thirty-eight percent of the population is African-American, and yet there has not been an African American elected to statewide office in Mississippi for 130 years. That’s primarily because the state has a law that allows the legislature to pick winners of statewide races if the winner gets less than 50 percent of the vote. But it’s also because the Democratic party has done a crappy job of getting more African Americans registered to vote and involved in elections in that state.
The Buffalo shooter lived in a town with a 3 percent Black population. He had to drive 200 miles to find enough African Americans to kill en masse. It’s fair to assume this guy had only been exposed to the ideology of his rural community and the silo of his internet habits. It’s possible he’d never had a real conversation with a Black person, which made it easier for him to perceive them as “other,” rather than as fellow human beings.
Maybe the Democratic Party should take some of the millions of dollars it spends on TV ads and billboards supporting its candidates and put it into a massive campaign to register voters in red states — a reprise of the “freedom rider” movement of the early 1960s. Send busloads of young folks into rural areas and small towns. Have them knock on doors, set up voter-registration sites, speak to civic groups — introduce themselves and the party’s priorities to people who have only known progressives in theory, as evil “libruls,” rather than actual humans.
Maybe it’s idealistic, but the only real way to send white supremacists back to their caves is to elect people who will stand up and fight against them — and to get rid of elected officials who call them “patriots” and give credence to the Great Replacement Theory.
We really do need to “replace” white supremacists and their political enablers, and not just in theory. These evil creeps are spreading hatred, intolerance, violence, and death. They are bent on destroying the most diverse country on the planet and establishing a racist autocracy. It’s time to stand up and say no. These white dogs are crapping on all we hold dear.
Do you remember April? It seems like an age ago, but it was just three or so weeks ago. Time flies when you’re watching society descend into authoritarian madness.
Anyway, it seems that April 2022 was when the QAnon “groomer” panic really took center stage in the national media landscape, largely propelled by Republican-led criticisms against then-nominee for the Supreme Court, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene accused three Republican senators of being “pro-pedophile” for the crime of announcing they would vote to confirm Jackson. I hate to give that human garbage fire any oxygen, but unfortunately it’s necessary to illuminate my point.
This is how the radical right-wing branch has taken over the Republican party — anyone who doesn’t follow marching orders is not only ostracized but becomes the target of a smear campaign that needs no grounding in fact. (Now we’re getting to that “point” I mentioned earlier.) The current groomer panic has little to nothing to do with protecting children. I admit that most Republican voters do want to protect the innocent; that’s what makes this alarm bell such a powerful motivator. But the people weaponizing the word are operating from a place of political calculation, not a desire to keep kids safe.
Last week, a report by third-party investigator group Guidepost Solutions outlining the Southern Baptist Convention’s mishandling of sex abuse allegations made nary a ripple in the media landscape.
The report says that survivors of abuse shared allegations but were met with “resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility.” There are local examples, including Bellevue Baptist Church’s current pastor failing to immediately fire an offender, according to a Houston Chronicle report in 2019.
It’s heinous. It’s wrong that trust should be taken advantage of, that children are hurt, and that the protection of the organization is prioritized over the safety and support of victims. I’m sickened and saddened, and I cannot even imagine the hurt that the victims suffered. I also cannot help but notice that, when faced with real documented examples of the thing they claim to hate the most, there is relative silence from the right. The Guidepost Solutions report recommends the creation of an “Offender Information System” database. Here we have an actionable plan to help prevent further abuse. Why isn’t MTG tweeting about it? More recommendations are expected to be announced at a national meeting scheduled for June 14th-15th in Anaheim, California, so maybe people are waiting to see what happens. Then again, waiting for more information doesn’t seem to be in the wheelhouse for these folks.
If the allegations against the SBC are a little too charged, consider this. The same week, a Kroger store in nearby Southaven, Mississippi, was hit with more than $13,000 in fines over unsafe conditions and child labor violations. “Investigators have found the store allowed three minor-aged workers, all 16- and 17-years old, to load a trash compactor with the keys in the machine to allow operation,” writes reporter Bob Bakken for the DeSoto County News. “The Labor Department investigators also found the employer allowed a 15-year-old employee to work more than three hours on a school day and more than 18 hours during a school week, all violations of the federal child labor standards.”
It seems to me that church and business are often held up as being above reproach, so these real-world instances of child abuse and endangerment don’t fit an established narrative. Neither do they provide fodder for future mud-slinging against Democrats.
The week before, 192 out of 208 House Republicans voted against H.R. 7790, the Infant Formula Supplemental Appropriations Act, 2022, which would provide “$28 million in emergency supplemental appropriations to address the shortage of infant formula in the United States.” The bill passed, at least in the House, but with little help from the party of forced birth.
The groomer panic isn’t about protecting children. If it were, we would take abuse allegations and child labor violations seriously. If it were, the vote for the Infant Formula Supplemental Appropriations Act would have been unanimous, and the expanded child tax credit, which expired in December, would have already been renewed.
People will be hurt. Children and teens will continue to be put in danger, while misdirected malice will express itself as violence against the LGBTQ+ community. Words have weight, and no one should be treated as a pawn in a political game.
So please, think before you hop on the panic bandwagon.
Forbes did its first ranking of our country’s richest people in 1981. The top of the list was a shipping magnate named Daniel L. Ludwig with a fortune of more than $2 billion.
I discovered that fact in a thought-provoking New York Times article by Willy Staley about the impact our current crop of multi-billionaires is having on our society.
Adjusted for inflation, that $2 billion would be around $5.8 billion in today’s dollars. That sum made Ludwig the richest man in the United States. Today $5.8 billion would put someone in a seven-way tie for number 182 on the list.
Most people know someone they consider rich. Maybe it is someone with a business they’ll sell for several million dollars when they get ready to retire. Or a professional athlete who makes millions a year. When people talk about “the rich” in terms of the wealth-hoarding oligarchs who control industries and media companies and buy politicians, this isn’t who we’re talking about.
We live in an oligarchy. Most Americans would agree with that fact, and agree it is a problem. From the left to the QAnon folks who believe the world is ruled by ultra-wealthy, demon-worshiping pedophile cannibals yet also insist the rich should have lower taxes and less regulation of their business dealings.
Historically, we’ve generally avoided using the word “oligarch” to describe America’s ultra-rich. That changed as the war in Ukraine caused condemnation of Russian oligarchs, and people noticed how men here like Jeff Bezos, Charles Koch, Elon Musk, Rupert Murdoch, and Peter Thiel perfectly fit the definition as well.
They didn’t become oligarchs through hard work. No one does. They needed a lot of family wealth and connections before they ever worked a day in their lives. A large pile of money easily turns into a larger pile of money. Our tax laws have been rewritten over the past 40 years to help bigger and bigger piles of money shift to be possessed by an increasingly small number of people.
Any attempt to rein in our billionaires gets denounced as socialism, but we have had capitalism with much higher taxation of the ultra-rich. That is how we created a large middle-class in this country, which didn’t exist before the New Deal and has been steadily losing ground since the early ’80s when the Forbes list was topped by a guy with $2 billion.
The beauty of a high tax rate for top earners was that it didn’t even require government to redistribute wealth. Anything you make over your first $500,000 in annual income will be taxed at 90 percent? Might as well spend those additional profits on hiring more people and giving them more pay and better benefits and working conditions. If inflation means there is too much money chasing too few goods, worry about the people who have more money than they know what to do with, not the people who are struggling.
I don’t envy our oligarchs. They don’t seem to be leading happy lives. When I think of people who seem genuinely happy, to me, they are people who seem grateful they have enough, not people who always want more. We’ve created a society where most people feel like they need more, whether they have nothing or everything. The result has been skyrocketing rates of depression, suicide, addiction, and overdoses.
Oligarchs are natural enemies of democracy. A clear majority of Americans want things like universal health insurance. Our ruling class doesn’t want that, and has made sure we don’t get it. Universal health insurance allows normal people to leave big companies to start their own businesses.
Unfortunately the elite have mastered the reverse psychology of telling people, “Here is what the elite don’t want you to think …” They control both sides of the argument. They tell people “the elite” are teachers, professors, beat journalists, and scientists. They get to frame corporate media like CNN as “the left” and the far-right as the alternative. They love giving money to centrist Democrats. They can always count on them to advance right-wing economics when Democrats are in power, while giving Republicans a chance to say, “Look what the radical socialists are doing to you.”
Our oligarchs don’t want young people learning about the amount of racism embedded in our society since our country’s founding. Racism was and still is a valuable tool for keeping poor white workers in their place. The Old South was a terrible place for white workers. But racism was so effective that impoverished white Southerners got duped into dying for plantation owners in the Civil War. Men who never owned an inch of land were willing to waste their lives to protect the fortunes of aristocrats who looked down on them. So don’t be surprised that someone buried in debt today will take five minutes to dash out a tweet in defense of whichever billionaire is currently masquerading as their champion against the elite.
Craig David Meek is a Memphis writer, barbecue connoisseur, and the author of Memphis Barbecue: A Succulent History of Smoke, Sauce & Soul.
Not too long ago, Republicans held a one-vote majority on the Shelby County Commission. Then, for a spell beginning in the mid-aughts, it was on the slim end of a 7-6 ratio — still a force. As of 2018, the ratio became eight Democrats to five Republicans, and the “gentlemen’s agreement,” whereby the parties would swap chairmanships year by year, was allowed to lapse. If the Democrats win all of the contested races remaining to be settled in August, as they are favored to do, the ratio will be 9 to 4.
Though pendulum shifts of a sort will possibly continue, the general trend is clear. Assuming the continuation of partisan elections for county offices — begun under GOP auspices in 2002 — Election Year 2022 is almost a last-stand occasion for the Shelby County GOP as an electoral force, countywide.
By general consent, the big race on the ballot is that for District Attorney General, where Republican incumbent Amy Weirich, running as “Our D.A.,” hopes to continue for another eight years.
The thrust of Weirich’s strategy is made plain by that self-description. In what is a throwback of sorts to the days of Democratic dominance in the state, she chose, in a signal event last week, to downplay her party identification. This was at a Republican Party unity rally at the Grove in Cordova, in which Todd Payne, the party’s nominee for the Commission’s District 5, played something of a host’s role.
Following remarks by Worth Morgan, the Republican nominee for county mayor, who himself struck a basically bipartisan note, Weirich began, “I’m going to say something that may offend you. I don’t want your vote just because I have ‘Republican’ by my name.” Voters, like elected officials, should think in bipartisan terms.
Stressing the issues of public safety and economic development, Morgan also minimized partisanship: “You have to be able to bring all those different divisions of county government together, including the state, including the Memphis Police Department, which has a major role to play, and sit down at the table and work through those issues.”
In short, the Republican Party needed a “reach-out” strategy to become again what, in theory, it had been for much of the previous two decades — the governing party of Shelby County.
In an interview after his remarks at the rally, Morgan pledged to pursue a policy of “transparency” and to hold regular press conferences — something he said the Democratic incumbent, Lee Harris, had been “negligent” about. And he promised to process “without resistance or delay” any press or public requests under the Freedom of Information Act.
To regain something resembling its former footing, the Republicans need strong showings in other remaining contested positions on the August ballot besides the high-profile ones. Besides Payne in Cordova, who opposes Democrat Shante Avant, another determined GOP candidate for the commission is businessman Ed Apple, who opposes incumbent Democrat Michael Whaley in District 13.
At the opening last week of the Midtown headquarters he shares with trustee candidate Steve Basar, Apple mused, “One thing that struck me early on when I was going through the hoops to kickstart this race, was that it was binary: ‘You Republican or Democrat?’ Yeah. Can’t run as an Independent. It really bothered me that people I spoke with didn’t understand what stirred my soul and what made me decide yes. And the main reason was: This is about Memphis. This has nothing to do with Democrat or Republican.”
That’s the rhetoric, anyhow, but the reality is that county elections, for the time being, are still partisan ones, and, like it or not, the two parties are on the line, not just the candidates. And the GOP is up against it.
Delicate Tension, on view at U of M (Photo: UrbanArt Commission)
Put a pin in it, hold on to that thought, we’ll circle back, let’s revisit another time — some phrases are too often used for empty, soon-to-be-forgotten promises. But sometimes, if we just have a bit of faith, people can come through. Take for instance the UrbanArt Commission (UAC), now celebrating its 25th anniversary. After launching its “Revisiting” series back in mid-2019, only to have to put the project on pause before completing its second installment in spring of 2020, UAC is ready to bring back the series this summer.
“‘Revisiting,’” explains Gabrielle Brooks, UAC’s communications and development manager, “is a series of temporary site-specific responses to existing public art projects created by UAC.” These responses that are works of art themselves can go beyond visual art forms and can incorporate performance art, dance, and music.
For the series’ first installation since 2019 and second installation ever, artist Brittney Boyd Bullock will respond to the colorful storybook trees of Nancy Cheairs’ Summer at the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library by transforming the work into an immersive forest of fabric and textiles. “Her project is centered around rememory,” Brooks says. “So the concept of thinking things through texture and color and remembering her childhood and past. She will be having a choral performance in addition to her installation. The chorus is called the Freedom Singers.”
Boyd, whose work is featured in the airport’s Concourse B, is also one of eight New Public Artist Fellows with UAC, which opened its first New Public Artists exhibition this May. The exhibition, which will remain on view until the fall at the University of Memphis, consists of sculptures by Boyd and other fellows, and is also worth a visit, Brooks urges.
In addition to adding to its roster of more than 130 public art projects, UAC plans to begin a “Responding” series, an additive to the “Revisiting” series, but these responses will be on a smaller scale, Brooks says, and with fewer rules and guidelines for the artist.
Overall, Brooks looks forward to redeeming losses incurred over the last two years. “It’s been kind of hard to hold on to some of these great ideas and put them on pause,” she says, “so we’re really glad to be able to start this again and work with more artists to showcase some of the [public art] projects we take for granted around the city.”
A reception with refreshments will follow Boyd’s “Revisiting,” along with the opportunity to speak with the artist about her work.
“Revisiting Series: Brittney Boyd Bullock,” Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library, Thursday, May 26th, 6 p.m., free.
