Author: Bruce VanWyngarden

Categories
At Large Opinion

In God We Must

Don’t mind me. I’m on a highway to hell with this godless license plate.

When you get your new, blue Tennessee license plates, you can ask for one with “In God We Trust” on it. It doesn’t cost any more and the print is so tiny, you can’t even see it from 20 feet away, but the state of Tennessee has helpfully made it quite easy for you to tell if the car in front of you is driven by a god-fearin’ Tennessean or a heathen: On the “IGWT” plates, numbers are to the left of the center logo and letters are on the right. On the secular plates, the letters are on the left, numbers on the right.

So if, say, a vehicle with license plate BRK-1234 makes an illegal turn from the center lane, it’s probably because he’s going to hell eventually, anyway.

In May, Tennessee counties were surveyed to see which plate their drivers preferred. Some rural counties were more than 90 percent IGWT-ers. Conversely, drivers in big-city counties like Davidson (86 percent) and Shelby (74 percent) favored the secular plate. (Of course, after the incompetent and delayed roll-out of the new plates in Memphis, Shelby Countians can probably be forgiven if they’ve lost their faith.)

All this begs the question: Why is the state mixing religion with license plates? The godly plates are free, so there’s not even a financial reason for it, as there is with other specialty plates you can order.

The answer, of course, is that Governor Bill Lee and our GOP-dominated state legislature would like to push their brand of Christianity on everybody, in any way they can. One has only to look at Lee’s years-long insistence on getting Hillsdale College charter schools established in Tennessee — with our tax dollars, of course.

Hillsdale president Larry Arnn, you may recall, outraged Tennessee educators in August by saying in a speech that teachers are the “dumbest students from the dumbest colleges.” Lee, who was at the speech, nodded calmly, and has yet to criticize Arnn for his remarks.

In response, local school boards in the state have vigorously opposed the granting of charters to Hillsdale, but Lee loaded up the state committee that approves charters with cronies and Hillsdale supporters, so the odds were good that they’d get approved.

That all changed this week, when Nashville television reporter Phil Williams (who’s been all over this story) found a video of Hillsdale professor David Azerrad mocking the achievements of African Americans, including George Washington Carver and the NASA mathematicians in Hidden Figures, saying that putting them in history books kept more deserving white people from being written about.

I wish I were making this up.

Governor Lee, let me remind you, has said of Hillsdale: “I believe their efforts are a good fit for Tennessee.” No, they are not, you mouth-breathing cheeseball. Hillsdale is a racist Christian-nationalist academy whose students’ academic scores are anemic. Last Thursday, Hillsdale withdrew its applications in Tennessee, due in no small part, one assumes, to the racist video being uncovered.

Perhaps, the state can take a lesson from New York. In mid-September, The New York Times broke a story about that city’s Hasidic schools, which get funding from the state, much like what Lee is pushing for in Tennessee. The story revealed that Hasidic schools were flush with government money, but that male Hasidic students were getting only five or six hours a week of secular learning (math, English, history, etc.) and spent 90 percent of the time learning Hebrew and studying religious texts.

The Times also found that rabbis routinely hit students with rulers, belts, and sticks wrapped in electrical tape, and that parents often “tipped” rabbis $100 to keep their boys from being abused. Hasidic boys’ scores in the state’s standard tests were the worst in the city. The state had let the issue slide for years because Hasidic Jews are a monolithic voting bloc that can swing elections in several districts.

There is a reason our Founding Fathers established the separation of church and state. In this country, you have the right to practice any faith you choose, but taking tax dollars to prop up the teaching of religion is patently unconstitutional.

It’s a slippery slope, and it’s wrong. Kind of like providing free specialty license plates for that guy who just cut you off and gave you the finger. Was that you, Governor?

Categories
At Large Opinion

The Old Man Tees

Playing the white tees (Photo: Agaliza | Dreamstime.com)

I used to play golf with a regular foursome almost every weekend at Galloway. However, due to injuries, age, and a general lack of desire on our parts to wallow in the Memphis summer heat for four hours, we fell out of the habit. As a result, my clubs have been sitting in my garage all summer, gathering dust.

But last week, when a friend asked me to join a foursome to play nine late-afternoon holes at Mirimichi, the splendid course near Millington that was once owned by Justin Timberlake, I couldn’t resist. I pulled out my clubs and shoes and hosed off the dust — in the process, upsetting a gecko that had taken up residence in my left golf shoe. I drove out to Mirimichi well before our tee time, so I could hit some balls on the practice range. After 15 minutes of hacking, my creaky body finally began finding its way into some semblance of my old swing. This could be ugly, I thought.

It helped that we played from the “old man” white tees, something we used to scoff about, but I was happy to take any advantage offered. A fine time was had by all, and I hit enough decent shots to keep from getting too discouraged — and even made a couple of pars.

At the end of the round, we pulled our carts up to an outdoor bar area for a beer. An older man and his son arrived soon thereafter, and we chatted amiably for a couple minutes about general things — the weather, the course, etc. After a bit, the son said he had to go, but the older fellow (let’s call him Bill) said he was going to hang around a while. “I love you,” they said to each other, as the son walked away.

Bill told us that he didn’t play much anymore and that he just enjoyed riding around the course with his son. Then the conversation took an unexpected turn. Bill let us know that he had stage 4 pancreatic cancer and was going regularly to MD Anderson Hospital for treatment. I’m no doctor but I know that prognosis is not a good one. We all offered our sincere wishes for good luck in dealing with his condition, but Bill casually moved on to other subjects: Where do you fellas live? What do you do for a living? That kind of stuff. Then, somehow, the conversation got around to how generally “crazy” things were in the country today, and I started to get a little nervous.

This is precarious conversational turf among strangers these days. You never know who’s going to pull a MAGA rant out of their butts. In fact, earlier in the week, I’d been subjected to a surprise diatribe about how the war in Ukraine was “fake” and was being promoted by the Democrats to help President Biden. This cockamamie spiel, I might add, came from a man whose name every Memphian would recognize. The crazy can come from anywhere, and I certainly had no interest in getting into a political argument with a possibly dying stranger at a golf course bar.

But one of my friends (thanks, Sam) said something to the effect of, “Well, Bruce writes about that stuff every week for the Flyer, you should ask him what he thinks.” I was stuck. And Bill didn’t mess around. “You write for the Flyer?” he asked. “Well, what do you think about Trump?”

I took a sip of my beer and said: “Well, I think he’s a crook and a conman. And I think it’s obvious he stole top-secret government documents and he should be prosecuted for a federal crime, like anyone else would be.”

There was a brief pause, then Bill said, “My son works over there at the naval base in Millington, so I asked him what would happen if he took any documents home. He said they’d arrest him so fast he wouldn’t know what hit him.”

“Well, I think that’s what should happen to anybody who does that,” I said.

Bill didn’t say anything, but he nodded his head a little. I got the feeling he’d been a Trump supporter, but that we were now playing from the same tees.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Letter from an Editor: Moving Through Tough Times

Queen Elizabeth (Photo: Miikka Makila | Dreamstime.com)

Memphis experienced some difficult days in early September. It began with the news of the shocking early morning murder of Eliza Fletcher, who was jogging near the University of Memphis. And then, just as we were trying to wrap our heads around that heinous crime, the city was terrorized for hours by a raging gunman who drove around hijacking cars and shooting random people, killing three and wounding four. What the hell was going on?

Predictably, such spectacular crimes made the national news for several nights, helped in no small part by the fact that there were videos and photos available to more easily whet the interest of a national audience. Even British papers were reporting from Memphis.

And everybody had an opinion. Fox misinformation maestro Tucker Carlson weirdly laid the blame on “Liberals like Governor Bill Lee,” which gives you an idea of how accurate Tuck-em’s typical takes are. This is a pundit, after all, who just a couple days earlier claimed that “by any actual reality-based measure, Vladimir Putin is not losing the war in Ukraine.”

But still, Memphis was in the news, and not in a good way. On social media, the “I’m so glad I got out of that hell-hole” crowd was having a field day, which always makes me wonder: If life is so great in Keokuk, how come you’re still wasting your day bitching about Memphis on Facebook? But I digress.

Then the 96-year-old Queen of England did Memphis a solid by dropping dead in Scotland. (Surprisingly, despite the presence of Scotland Yard — which should be nearby, if it isn’t — there are still no suspects.) At any rate, thanks to the long and winding royal drama, Memphis was immediately off the national news radar, for which we were all grateful. As I write this, after 27 days or so of shuttling Queen Elizabeth’s coffin around the country, the Brits are about to have a funeral, it appears. By all accounts — including the Beatles’ — Her Majesty was a pretty nice girl. Godspeed. Now it’s up to King Chuck and Queen Camilla to begin performing the arduous duties of being gratuitously rich, entitled, and powerful for absolutely no reason.

Meanwhile, back in Memphis, as the heat of the national news spotlight cooled, we learned more about the crimes that galvanized us in early September. The Daily Memphian reported Monday that more than a year ago, a young black woman named Alicia Franklin reported a rape by the same man who is alleged to have murdered Fletcher. Her rape kit sat in limbo at a lab in Jackson, Tennessee, for months, and even after repeated calls from Franklin, police apparently felt no urgency to pursue the evidence. It was only when the Fletcher case arose that analyzing the earlier rape kit was expedited. Blame is being cast in several directions, including toward the undeniable fact that the state’s three forensics labs are woefully understaffed and under-budgeted. But the bottom line is, if police had pursued the evidence of the earlier rape with the same urgency they did with the Fletcher case, Fletcher might still be alive.

The Commercial Appeal reported on Sunday that the average time for a rape kit to be processed in Tennessee is 34 weeks. This is absurd and unacceptable. The state legislature needs to address this situation, and quickly. Rape kits should be processed within weeks, not months. And there should be no difference in urgency between a case of “just an average Black girl,” as Franklin described herself in the Daily Memphian, and a wealthy white woman.

All this, I suppose, is something of a prelude to this week’s cover story, “370 Great Things About Memphis.” The city has had some tough going lately and it’s easy during times like these to lose sight of the fact that good things — big and small — are happening every day in Memphis; that good people and caring organizations are doing great things to move us forward, to bring us joy and a sense of pride. We stopped counting at “370 great things” only because of space limitations. We could have listed hundreds more. At any rate, sometimes, it’s good to take a few minutes to count your blessings. It couldn’t hurt.

The Memphis Flyer is now seeking candidates for its editor position. Send your resume to hr@contemporary-media.com.

Categories
At Large Opinion

The View from Spain

(Photo: Bruce VanWyngarden) The village of Siguenza

From the airplane window at 15,000 feet on this sunny August morning, Spain is all shades of brown, skirls of scrubby vegetation and trees on the hilltops, open beige-and-yellow fields on the plains. (Where the rains in Spain fall, mainly, I’ve heard.) We are descending into Madrid on the first day of a 12-day vacation that will take us to places in this country where neither my wife Tatine nor I have ever been.

Madrid is not on the agenda for this trip, except for the airport and Hertz office, where we’re assigned a Lynk & Co SUV, which we’re told is a Chinese/Volvo hybrid. Whatever. It works and rides nicely. And soon we’re off to the country home of Tatine’s sister, a couple hundred miles away, just north of Valencia, near the Mediterranean. Siri gets us to A-3, the main highway south, and we’re off.


Aquarium in Valencia (Photo: Bruce VanWyngarden)

It feels like we’re driving through West Texas, except with no billboards to distract from the rolling vistas of dry mountains and green valleys and olive and sunflower fields. The high ground is often covered with windmills. We counted hundreds during our stay. And the south-facing slopes often feature arrays of solar panels. A high-speed train passes us as though we are standing still instead of going 120 kilometers per hour. No monster trucks, no asshole drivers, just small-to-average-sized vehicles zipping along on a perfectly maintained four-lane highway. Did I mention there were no billboards?

Tatine’s sister’s house is set on a couple of acres filled with fruit and olive trees. They have a big garden and chickens for eggs, and the house is cooled and heated with solar power. They are not field hippies, just ordinary people living comfortably in ways that preserve energy costs and help the environment. It’s a way of life here, not a political statement.

Valencia, 20 miles south, has a population of 800,000 or so. The murder rate averages six to eight people a year. In similarly sized Memphis, we had more than 340 murders last year, more than in the entire country of Spain. These are difficult things to justify or explain. But nobody walks into a super-mercado carrying a gun, so there’s that.

The village of Chullila (Photo: Bruce VanWyngarden)

I don’t have space in this column to recount all of our further adventures driving around Spain. It was something of a family reunion, with grandchildren showing up from Brooklyn and Tatine’s mother coming over from a nearby village. We managed, in various combinations, to visit some spectacular mountainous country with ancient villages where many of the buildings were erected in the 11th century and where there were cathedrals with Moorish influences from 1,000 years ago. It was a life-affirming, eye-opening visit. Returning to the U.S. after a couple weeks in a country where there is literally no litter, where there are no vile accusations and blatant lies muddying the daily political discourse on television, where people of all races appear to live in harmony, was something of a shock.

No unbiased observer dropping into Memphis (or Nashville or Atlanta or any major American city, to be honest) and spending a few days would have a problem identifying which country was more civilized, more advanced, more livable, less polluted, less worrisome to visit.

We have made a mess of things in the United States, created a political logjam — in our states and in Washington, D.C. — that prevents us from being able to legislate the most logical and basic modern improvements to the country, such as an efficient high-speed rail system, or universal healthcare, or hell, just removing the prolific visual pollution of billboards from our beautiful landscape. We’re still fighting over oil prices and who’s to blame for them, while Spain (and Portugal) have moved ahead into a world where they don’t worry about the whims of a Saudi prince or Vladimir Putin buckling their economy or leaving them in the cold.

We are so far behind. We can do so much better here. Or can we? I guess that’s the question, isn’t it?

Categories
At Large Opinion

License to Ill

Wanda Halbert (Photo: shelbycountytn.gov)

Someone I’m close to inadvertently let their Tennessee vehicle tags expire. Since I have more time on my hands to deal with such situations these days, I decided to help out by tackling the project of getting them one of those snazzy new blue license plates. I didn’t expect to have much trouble, even given the recently well-publicized problems of Shelby County Clerk Wanda Halbert’s bureaucracy. My optimism was based solely on the fact that in early August I ordered a new plate online and it arrived within a week. Maybe, I told my friend, things are improving. Ha. Ha. Polly? Meet Anna.

Let me review the situation for those of you who haven’t been paying attention — and that includes all of you grossly uninformed Shelby Countians who just voted to reelect Halbert despite well-publicized reports on her many problems in executing the duties of her office. To enumerate: There’s an enormous backlog of ordered license plates that has resulted in thousands of people being at risk for being pulled over for expired tags; the local Auto Dealers Association has complained (and complained) that they aren’t getting temporary (or new) plates for their vehicles; the state comptroller has criticized Halbert’s performance, which opened the possibility of a state takeover; Halbert announced that the clerk’s office would close for two (non-consecutive) weeks to “catch up”; and finally the state comptroller confirmed that in the midst of all this chaos and public uproar, Halbert decided it was a perfect time to take a vacation trip to Jamaica.

Still, since I’d had no issues getting my own plate and tags, I was hopeful I could handle all of this online and be done with it. So I went to the county clerk website and typed in my friend’s address and the plate number. Oops. “No such plate number exists,” it said. What? After a little reading, I figured out the issue. The person in question had allowed their tags to expire more than 90 days ago, meaning I had to “contact the county clerk’s office.” Ugh.

So I called. The voicemail, which helpfully let me know that Wanda Halbert is the county clerk a couple of times, explained that “wait times may be longer than usual” and suggested that I write an email to explain the situation. Dutifully, I shot off an email explaining the situation, giving the address and vehicle license number, and hoped for the best, even though It felt a bit like tossing a sacrificial pineapple into an erupting volcano. Then, in the interest of science (and maybe getting a column out of it), I decided to try to get through by telephone. What’s the worst that could happen? At 9:17 a.m., I plugged my phone into a charger, put it on speaker, and dialed back into Wanda World.

I got the opening voicemail, clicked through to make a call, then soothing music began, kind of like what you’d hear if Kenny G played guitar through a Jell-O tube amp. (What, no reggae?) Anyway, every 30 seconds I heard: “Your call is very important to us and will be answered in the order it was received. Please continue to hold.” After the voicemail recording told me this 290 times, I heard a click and someone answered. THANK JESUS, a human! I explained the situation to the person on the phone and she said the issue could not be resolved without the license holder coming into the county clerk’s office in person.

“How long is the wait for people when they come into the office?” I asked.

“Sir, I’m at a call center,” the person responded. “I have no idea.”

A call center. Perfect.

I decided to drive to the county clerk satellite office at Poplar Plaza. The line to get into the office snaked around the corner, maybe 100 people deep.

Friends, Shelby Countians deserve better. Halbert needs to own this, but she won’t. Her response to all of these issues has been that it’s someone else’s fault. She claimed any criticism of her ill-timed vacation is a “personal attack.” No, it is not, Ms. Halbert. You don’t leave your troops — or your constituency — in the middle of a crisis. You were elected to do a job and you’ve failed. All of this is on your plate.

Categories
At Large Opinion

Playing Chicken

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

I’m not as old as Donald Trump, but I’m no spring chicken, either. In fact, I’m probably an October chicken, prone to all the maladies of we elder fowl. One of these maladies — very common among my friends, I’m told — is waking up and worrying about stuff in the middle of the night. And I’m not talking about the big issues — politics, climate change, mortality. No. My life is easy. I work a little, I mess around in the yard, I exercise, I see my kids and grandkids when I can. Still, there are nights when I’ll lie there and fret about pointless stuff — when to clean the gutters or do we have enough guacamole for Friday night or should I get up to pee or can I make it till morning? (I can’t.) This phenomenon is so common that I can now say to myself at, say, 1 a.m., “Hey, this is just the midnight worries. It won’t mean anything in the morning. Go to sleep, idiot.” Sometimes, that works. Sometimes, I pop a melatonin.

So, I find myself wondering how former President Donald J. Trump is sleeping these days. A week ago Monday, he was deposed in New York by the U.S. attorney who is investigating potential tax crimes by the Trump Organization. His former CFO, Allen Weisselberg, has already testified extensively as to the company’s financial practices (aka, shenanigans), basically flipping on his old boss. In his own testimony, Trump pleaded the Fifth Amendment 440 times. That seems like not a good sign, and the kind of thing that might keep you up at night. But Trump’s week was just getting started.

Down in Florida, at Trump’s hotel/home, Mar-a-Lago, federal agents were going through boxes of material the former president had had delivered to his home from the White House upon his departure from office in January 2021. The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) had determined that among the materials that Trump took were classified documents. After some negotiations with NARA, Trump allowed some of the material to be returned, and his lawyers signed a release stating that there were no more classified documents in his possession. After examining the documents they’d received, NARA determined that was likely untrue and turned over the dispute to the Department of Justice in June. After an investigation, the DOJ became convinced that more classified information was being stored at Mar-a-Lago and conducted a raid, which uncovered lots more classified and top secret information. Oops.

Trump initially claimed the FBI was planting evidence, which indicates that he knew some of the material in his home was likely to get him in trouble. Then he bleated on Truth Social that in January 2021 he’d issued a blanket statement that “declassified” all the material taken from the White House. One assumes this would include what the FBI “planted,” though I’m not sure how that would work.

But, of course, this is not how government records and archival material are declassified. Paperwork must be filed. And further, a president does not have the right to declassify nuclear material or material relating to spies or undercover operatives. The Washington Post reported that nuclear-related documents were found in Florida. Newsweek.com reported that the material seized by the FBI also contained the CIA’s “NOC list,” which identifies the agency’s covert operatives around the world. No other media organization has reported this, but if Newsweek’s reporting is correct, we’ve moved into Julius and Ethel Rosenberg territory.

And we haven’t even gotten to the revelations that could emerge about Trump in the DOJ’s January 6th investigation, or the ongoing grand jury investigation into Trump’s possible election tampering in Georgia. Tennessee’s GOP toadies like Marsha Blackburn, Bill Hagerty, and David Kustoff rushed to categorize all of this Trump bad news as a Joe Biden-led assault on a potential presidential rival. But they are fools, panderers, and liars. The truth is, with any luck, we may finally be seeing the end of Donald Trump’s lifelong extra-legal dalliances, the dozens of crimes he’s skated around using high-priced lawyers and well-connected friends. These latest charges are much more serious than paying off a porn star or setting up a fake university or selling cheap steaks — or even laundering Russian mob money in real estate deals. Donald Trump is dancing on the edge of a very high cliff without a net. Sweet dreams, old man.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Facebook is Great!

Welp, here I am, back on page 3, writing the Letter From the Editor. It’s weird, sure, but I’ve only done this 837 times in the last 20 years, so I think I can handle it. The Flyer staff is rotating this column until we hire a new full-time editor, and this week, the honor is mine.

As most publications do, the Flyer keeps close track of its internet traffic. Editorial staffers get a read-out each week of which web posts drew the most readers. Food stories get a lot of action. So do breaking news posts and oddball stories, like, say, a wallaby escaping from the zoo. My “At Large” column typically makes it somewhere into the top 10, though not every week. I don’t say this to brag, but to help illustrate the following point: Facebook literally shapes what you read. Here’s a real-world example:

On Wednesday morning, when the weekly Flyer issue goes online, I post my column on my Facebook page. Within two hours, I know whether or not Facebook approves of the content. Most weeks, by noon, I have 75 to 100 “likes.” Over the course of the rest of the week, I usually hit 120-140 likes and 40 or 50 comments. Several people usually “share” my post, which also helps get it out into the world. Facebook is a big driver of readers to the Memphis Flyer site, and not just for my column.

But then there are those weeks when Facebook apparently decides that nobody needs to see “At Large.” Two hours after I post it, the column will have two or three likes. At the end of the week, maybe 20 people will have seen the story link on Facebook. My friends say they don’t see it in their feed, even though they “follow” me. I can’t figure out what negative algorithms are being triggered on these off-weeks, but it’s frustrating as hell, knowing Facebook is “curating” my audience. And, sadly, it’s about to get worse.

In late July, Meta, er, Facebook announced it was moving entirely to algorithmic, “recommendation-based” content rather than that of a true social media platform based primarily on friend/acquaintance-based content. Instagram, owned by Meta, has already made the switch, which is why you’re seeing tons of “reels” from strangers on IG, instead of pictures of your friend’s vacation. Instagram’s algorithms are prioritizing content based on your browsing habits and geo-fenced locations, not your social media contacts.

All this is helping further de-platform and destroy local news-media operations. Facebook has since its founding used content from news operations without paying for it. News is just another piece of “content,” along with cat videos and comely “influencers” dancing on TikTok.

There is a bipartisan bill called the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA) that’s been floating around Congress for months. It would provide a temporary, limited-antitrust, safe harbor for local news publishers to collectively negotiate with Facebook and Google for fair compensation for the use of their content. The act is tailored to ensure that coordination by news publishers protects trustworthy, quality journalism and rewards publishers who invest in journalists, giving them a higher portion of the funds that result from the negotiations.

If you value trustworthy local news produced by legitimate journalists, I urge you to learn more about the JCPA and bring it to the attention of your congressperson.

And on that note, if you’re reading this online, I urge you to scroll down below this column, read the text in that big yellow box, and then click the black bar that reads “donate.” You’ll learn how to support the Flyer’s work by chipping in any amount you’d like. You’ll also see a list of the hundreds of folks who already support us as part of our Frequent Flyer program.

If you’re reading this in print, we thank you, as well! We take pride in being one of the very few progressive voices in the Mid-South, and we’d appreciate your help in keeping that voice alive and free to the public. Facebook sure isn’t going to provide original local news or content. … And they’re probably going to make it really difficult for you to read this column.

The Memphis Flyer is now seeking candidates for its editor position. Send your resume to hr@contemporary-media.com.

Categories
At Large Opinion

Out of Bounds

Phil Mickelson (Photo: Wikimedia Commons | Creative Commons | By Peter Brown)

Golfing legend Phil Mickelson stands in the first-hole tee box, staring down the fairway, picking out his target. Several yards behind him, under a mound of freshly turned earth and a bouquet of white flowers, lies the recently interred body of Ivana Trump, ex-wife of Donald Trump (and mother of the three children he pays attention to). Mickelson takes a couple practice swings and waggles over his ball. As he pulls the club back, someone in the crowd shouts, “Do it for the Saudi royal family, Phil!” Mickelson steps away, a pained look on his face. After a moment, he resets and gives the ball a resounding whack. A fan in the gallery screams, “Let’s go, Brandon!” as the little white pellet soars into the blue, blue sky.

All of the above is true. It happened last Friday at the LIV Golf Series tournament at Trump National Golf Club Bedminster in New Jersey. If you’re not a golf fan, you may be unaware of the sea-change that has upended the PGA Tour this year. The Saudi Arabian government has lured several top professional golfers (and three-dozen mediocre professional golfers) to play in eight events around the world, instead of on the venerable PGA Tour.

And by “lure,” I mean, pay them absurd amounts of money. Mickelson got $200 million to flip, plus whatever winnings he takes home. Dustin Johnson got $150 million. Consider that the greatest golfer of all time, Tiger Woods, has won a total of $120 million in his 26-year career.

The Saudi LIV tour is not serious golf. Everyone gets paid, even the guy who comes in last. Winners get a ludicrous $4 million paycheck. The golfers ride in carts, tee off from different holes, and play on meaningless “teams.” Music blares from loudspeakers during the round. It’s goofy golf.

So why are the Saudis doing this? Well, they do have some PR issues, which happens when 15 of your citizens attack the Pentagon and World Trade Center, and when your leader has a Washington Post journalist dismembered and murdered (in that order). So, maybe they’re buying European soccer teams and international gaming franchises, and, well, 47 professional golfers, in an attempt to appear, er, human?

The Saudis also paid Trump a handsome fee to use his New Jersey course, and he had no ethical qualms about it. Shocker, I know. He showed up for the Thursday pro-am, drove around in a cart with the presidential seal, and pretended to play golf. (If you’re interested in Trump’s day, I recommend reading, “Watching Trump Play Golf: Decent Drives, Skipped Putts, Lots of Sweat,” which appeared in The New York Times on Friday. It goes about how you’d expect.)

Lots of 9/11 survivor families showed up to protest outside the gates of Bedminster. And as they do at every LIV tournament, the golfers faced pointed questions from journalists about the ethics of selling out their profession to the murderous Saudi government. They don’t care. They’re rich.

It’s easy to dismiss all this as meaningless — billionaires paying millionaires to play a silly game — but consider what astoundingly good things could be done with the $60 billion(!) the Saudis have committed to fund sports and games. And maybe consider why the Saudis have such an obscene amount of money to blow on ethically challenged morons like Mickelson and Johnson. It’s oil, of course. Under the vast deserts near the Arabian Gulf lie some of the world’s greatest deposits of fossil fuel, without which Saudi Arabia would be just, well, a giant sand trap, not a country President Joe Biden recently felt compelled to travel to and give a ceremonial fist-bump to a murderer and ask if maybe, sorta, kinda he wouldn’t mind lowering oil prices.

Now think about the raging wildfires, the prolonged droughts, the empty reservoirs, the deadly heat waves, the record floods — all consequences of the global climate change caused by mankind’s inability to meaningfully reduce its global addiction to fossil fuels. And maybe think about the devastating impact on all the world’s economies when the price of gas increases by a couple bucks. Our dependence on oil is screwing the economy and the planet. The attempted deconstruction of the PGA is just another reminder of how it’s all connected — a birdie in the coal mine.

Categories
At Large Opinion

The Devil to Pay

Photo: Adrienne Wallace | Dreamstime.com

We’re hearing a lot about God in politics lately. Maybe not your god, especially if you’re Muslim or Buddhist or Jewish or, I don’t know, Episcopalian. No, the god that’s being shoved into our faces by the United MAGA Church is the American fundamentalist Christian god, the one who doesn’t approve of unmarried sex, homosexuals, abortion, interracial marriage, or even contraception. This god is a real hard-ass, and the MAGAs have attached themselves to him like a barnacle on a tugboat. (We’ll assume His pronoun is Him.)

This god was invented in backwoods American churches, where fast-talking evangelists did their best to guilt their flocks into obeisance and into donating money to “the church” before seducing the prettiest 15-year-old in the congregation and running off to dupe the next group of suckers.

As is often the case with successful small businesses in America, that model got leveraged and eventually morphed into the big mega-churches whose preachers fly private jets, live on palatial estates, and have television shows. The payoff is bigger but the game is the same — guilt and grift: “You poor schmucks are going to fry in eternal hellfire FOREVER if you don’t stop sinning. Here’s a list of stuff that’s bad. Don’t do any of it, even if most of it feels good. Like sex. Sex is really bad unless you’re heterosexually married and only doing it to have babies. Did I mention you need to send me money so we can stop all these other schmucks from sinning? In the name of JAYSUS, amen!” Millions of idiots buy into this.

All of this hustle is theoretically based on Christianity, which, applied properly, is a respectable religion, based on the life and example of one Jesus Christ of Nazareth, a poor man who lived in the Middle East a couple thousand years ago, and who, as far as I’m aware, never asked for money or said a word about abortion, guns, contraception, interracial marriage, or white supremacy (which is a good thing, since Jesus wasn’t white).

Mainly, as I recall from my Methodist raising, Jesus was against materialism (money-changers), for forgiveness — and for treating our fellow humans as we ourselves would like to be treated. If we did this, I was taught, we’d go to Heaven, where we’d see all the people in our lives again and hang out with them forever (which was a concept I spent many a night in my youth trying to get my head around).

But any religion is subject to perversion of its core beliefs, whether in the pursuit of money, power, or both. And make no mistake, nationalistic Evangelicalism is a perversion of Christianity. It has literally nothing to do with the teachings of Jesus. It’s a bizarre cult that believes a 10-year-old should be forced to carry a rapist’s baby to term, that everyone should carry guns, and whose political representatives are now passing laws prohibiting women from crossing a state line to get a medical procedure they disapprove of.

This Christian Taliban thinking led all but eight Republicans in Congress to vote last week against a bill guaranteeing the right to contraception. Think about it: Ninety percent of Congressional Republicans literally voted against guaranteeing people the right to buy condoms.

Also, last week: Georgia Congress-beast Marjorie Taylor Greene said on television: “We need to be the party of nationalism. I say it proudly. I’m a Christian Nationalist!” So were the Nazis, Marge.

Colorado Congress-gun Lauren Boebert said, “We need to get over this idea of the separation of church and state, because we’re a Christian nation.” The Founding Fathers would be surprised to learn that, LB.

And there was Florida Congress-putz Matt Gaetz, who offered the novel theory that women demanding abortion rights shouldn’t worry “because they’re all 5’2” and 300 pounds and no one’s going to want to impregnate them.” So, only hot chicks get abortion rights?

How deep does this crazy go? And more important, how far do we let these dangerous freaks go before we stand up and vote-shame them back into the guano-glutted bat-caves from whence they came? If we don’t take these people seriously — right now — we will regret it for the rest of our lives. They’ve gotten a taste of power (and money) and now they’re coming for our freedoms.

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At Large Opinion

Money for Nothing

Bill Lee (Photo: tn.gov)

I had Mrs. Bailey for two years in high school: freshman English (Beowulf, the Iliad and the Odyssey, Shakespeare, Mark Twain, etc.) and honors English in my senior year, where she introduced me to Kurt Vonnegut, J.D. Salinger, Joseph Heller, Flannery O’Connor, and other more contemporary writers. She had a tiny sneeze that she would stifle with a small hankie and that would invariably cause the class to giggle. She was well-known for these tiny sneezes and her love of bad puns.

But I remember Mrs. Bailey for another reason: She saw me for who I was — an awkward kid with a speech impediment and a good brain — and for who I could become. Mrs. Bailey probably decided that I wasn’t going to make my way in this world by being a smooth talker, so she encouraged me to write. She praised, criticized, and edited my essays. She took me aside and encouraged me to read real writers, not just the required classroom stuff. She helped forge my life’s path, and I didn’t even figure out what she’d done until years later.

I think, if we were lucky, most of us have a Mrs. Bailey in our past — a teacher who took the time to connect, who saw our potential or our pain, who saw a way forward for us or a way out. And it’s still happening, every day, all over the world: Teachers make a difference; teachers shape lives; teachers are among the most important people in our society.

Which is why every human being in Tennessee should be absolutely outraged at Governor Bill Lee, who is relentlessly fostering the destruction of our public schools via a voucher system in which parents play the middleman between our state treasury and private schools to the tune of $7,000 per family. It’s flat-out wrong, and it’s using money that rightfully should be going to public schools. If people want to send their children to private schools, let them have at it, just don’t ask the taxpayers to cover the note.

But that’s not the only reason to be outraged at Lee. He’s been pushing to bring the Michigan-based Hillsdale Academy into the state, openly stating that he wants to let them establish 100 schools with our money. Hillsdale Academy is a Christian-based private school that promotes conservative values in its “1776 Curriculum,” which appears to mean the Civil War was just a misunderstanding and slaves were just inconvenienced and everything is fine now — among other interesting theories.

At a private event in late June, Governor Lee sat on stage with Hillsdale Academy president Larry Arnn and listened, smiling, as Arnn said the following: “Teachers are trained in the dumbest parts of the dumbest colleges in the country. … We are going to try to demonstrate that you don’t have to be an expert to educate a child because basically anybody can do it.” This ramble went on for nearly two hours, with Arnn repeatedly disparaging teachers and public school systems. (Hillsdale practices what Arnn preaches. None of its eight education faculty members are certified to teach in public schools.)

So what did Bill Lee say or do as Arnn attacked and discredited all teachers, including, presumably, the thousands of public school teachers in Tennessee? Zip. Nada. He sat there and grinned like a chimp, or a chump. Your call.

Unfortunately for ol’ Bill, Nashville’s Channel 5 got a copy of the tape and all hell broke loose. All around this deep-red state, school boards, administrators, and teachers erupted in protest, demanding the governor repudiate Arnn’s remarks. Lee had his spokesperson send a boilerplate statement that mentioned nothing about Arnn’s comments. He then slipped off for a bit to Florida to hang with Ron DeSantis, who’s pushing for Hillsdale to take over public schools there. When he got back, he dodged reporters, evaded teachers’ groups, and made no public appearances for a week — a real profile in courage, this guy.

The only good that may have come out of all this is that Hillsdale is now very unlikely to get any state dollars, according to several Republican state legislators. Turns out that lots of communities around Tennessee are quite happy with their public schools and rather fond of their teachers. Mrs. Bailey would find that gratifying, I suspect. She didn’t suffer fools.