Author: Bruce VanWyngarden

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News News Feature Uncategorized

CrimeStoppers Doubles Murder Tip Reward

CrimeStoppers of Memphis and Shelby County announced today that the organization will start paying up to $2,000 in cash for tips leading to arrests in local murders — doubling the amount that has been available to be paid out in homicide cases until now.

In a Tuesday press release, CrimeStoppers said the decision was made by the agency’s board of directors in the face of a precipitous rise in the murder rates in Memphis and Shelby County in the last few years.

As of yesterday — Monday, June 7, 2021 — 103 murders have been committed in Shelby County this year, a 13 percent hike over last year’s pace. Arrests of suspects have occurred in about half of those cases, the release stated, five with the help of citizen tips to CrimeStoppers.

“This increase in the award we pay for homicides is a significant step for CrimeStoppers. It’s also a windfall for the citizen who has information about a crime and who may find an award an incentive to contact us at 528-CASH (2274),” said E. Winslow (Buddy) Chapman, executive director of the organization. “We believe we must do more in the struggle to slow the rate of violent crime, especially homicides.
We hope by doubling our award more citizens will contact us with information helping law enforcement solve more of these killings.”

From the press release: “CrimeStoppers has been paying as much as $1,000 for successful tips since its inception in 1983. Calls to 528-CASH (2274) are anonymous. Tipsters are given an ID number, so that they can check later to see if the information they provided led to an arrest and a cash award.

“CrimeStoppers is an independent, nonpartisan and nonprofit organization governed by volunteer citizens. The cash awards are paid out each month thanks to donations from individuals and businesses.
For more information, contact www.crimestopmem.org.”

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CannaBeat News

Lee Signs Modest Medical CBD Use Expansion Bill

Photo by David Gabrić on Unsplash

Several weeks after it was sent to his desk, Governor Bill Lee has signed a Republican-sponsored bill that modestly loosens Tennessee’s CBD usage restrictions and sets up a commission to examine “federal and state laws regarding cannabis.”


The new law expands patients’ access to low-THC medical cannabis (no more than .9 percent THC) to include epilepsy, Alzheimer’s disease, ALS, end-stage and wasting cancers, inflammatory bowel disease, Parkinson’s disease, HIV and AIDS, and sickle cell disease.


The only problem is that patients will have to obtain such medications as they can from other states, since Tennessee still bans in-state production of cannabis/THC products.


The bill further stipulates that no further loosening of the state’s marijuana laws will occur unless the federal government stops classifying marijuana as a Schedule 1 controlled substance.
That’s where the new nine-member commission comes in — to advise lawmakers on “legislation to establish an effective, patient-focused medical cannabis program in this state upon the rescheduling or descheduling of marijuana from Schedule I of the federal Controlled Substances.”


Tennesseans who manage to obtain the more potent CBD products will be required to have proof of their condition and signed recommendation from a physician.

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

A Moment of Felicity

Bruce VanWyngarden

“Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that he make every word tell.”

This is the instructional essence of what I believe to be the best single book on how to write well: The Elements of Style. Published in 1918 by William Strunk Jr. and amended and updated through the years, most notably by New Yorker writer E.B. White, who called it: “a forty-three-page summation of the case for cleanliness, accuracy, and brevity in the use of English.”

It has come to be known as Strunk & White, and it was particularly useful in the newspaper business when I was coming up, serving as a young editor’s guide to making writing better by making it more concise. For the first half of my career (You young whippersnappers!), I wrote and edited only for print, because, well, that’s the only place writing appeared — on paper, from trees, like God intended.

Unlike the web, paper is a finite space, limited by a measurable number of pages and the requirement for a readable type-size. That’s why word counts are so critical. This column, for example, has to be between 700 and 750 words every week, give or take an adjective. After 40 years of practice, I’ve gotten pretty good at writing to fit. I can scroll down a block of 12-point type on my computer and tell you within 25 words how long it is. It’s a fairly boring skill, to be honest, useless as a party trick or on TikTok.

I usually stop writing at around 850 words and start cutting from there. I’ve learned that pruning a piece almost always makes it better — distills it to the essence, removes verbosity and repetition.

Precise writing is becoming something of a lost art, mostly because articles and columns and essays crafted for the web no longer have to “fit.” The physical limitations of print provided in themselves a sort of editing function. No more. On the web, the words designate the space, not the other way around. Writers can let a million adverbs bloom, allow no self-indulgent digression to go unexplored.

I’m reminded of this each time I find myself scrolled neck-deep into a story online and asking myself, “When the hell is this going to stop?” It’s not a thought any writer wants to inspire in a reader, but it’s endemic on the world wide web without end: no word count, just boundless pixels waiting to be leisurely fondled into thoughtfully thoughtful thoughts.

Another of the maxims I’ve leaned on is this one, also from Strunk & White: “Aim for one moment of felicity.” The most applicable definition of that word in this case is “something that causes happiness, a pleasing manner or quality especially in art or language.” I’ve always taken it to mean we writers should attempt to offer the reader a little surprise, a bit of unexpected word-play, a fresh turn of phrase, a clever turn-around in the final paragraph. And so, with those words as my guide, I offer this: A career should carry no unnecessary parts; a life should make every day tell.

I’m retiring as editor of the Flyer, as of this issue. Twenty years is plenty. I’m going to continue to write a column each week, but I’m leaving the word counts and the pruning and the scheduling of stories to new editor Jesse Davis, who will be in this spot next week — and who I’m confident will do a wonderful job filling my worn-ass old shoes.

This weekend I’m leaving on a two-week road trip to the northeast to see longtime friends and scattered family and catch some trout in the Laurel Highlands on the way. I’ll be back in June on a new page with the same old word count. Thanks for reading.
Bruce VanWyngarden
brucev@memphisflyer.com

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Fantasy Land

Dispatches from an alternate universe …

1) “Any fair examination of President Joe Biden’s policies would conclude that his first 100 days in office have been a complete failure. His presidency has largely consisted of taking credit for Republican achievements and undoing common-sense Republican policies — with disastrous results.”

That was the opening paragraph of an op-ed by Ronna McDaniel, chair of the Republican National Committee, which ran in the local print daily last week. McDaniel’s birth name, you may recall, was Ronna Romney, and she is the niece of Senator Mitt Romney. Ronna is not a fan of her uncle, having become a full-on Trumper a couple years back.

2) “Aren’t you embarrassed?”

That was from Mitt, who had a rough weekend at the Utah Republican Convention, where he was booed mercilessly as he tried to begin a speech. The Utah Republicans weren’t at all embarrassed. They saw Mitt as a traitor because he voted for impeachment and dared to say he doesn’t think Donald Trump won the election.

3) “I think if you’ve got your weight right, and your lifestyle right, and your diet right … I don’t think this virus will bother you.”

This touching paean to the benefits of clean living came from Republican state Senator Frank Niceley, who was discussing a bill he co-sponsored that would give Tennesseans the freedom not to get a COVID vaccine — a freedom they already have. But you can’t be too careful with Biden in the White House.

4) “I want you to hear every single word of the Pledge of Allegiance. That is our pledge to each other. That is our pledge to this country. … I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America … individual … ”

That’s former national security advisor, convicted felon, and QAnon true believer Mike Flynn, who was leading the Pledge of Allegiance, then forgot the words. The rally where he was speaking was being held in support of Lin Wood, who’s running to oust the GOP chairman of South Carolina for not being QAnon-ish enough.

5) “No Joey in the Oval Office. But I did run into our President of the United States. President Trump is hanging out and working in the office in which we re-elected him to serve in a historic landslide victory on November 3, 2020.”

That’s a post on Telegram (accompanied by a picture of Trump at his White House Desk) from the aforementioned Lin Wood, who claimed to be touring the White House last week, where he found Donald Trump still in the Oval Office. Wood also called for former Vice President Mike Pence to face the firing squad for allowing Congress to certify the presidential election results.

6) “How are we doing with Iran? They would have done anything … China, the same thing, they never treated us that way, and the border … massive amounts of people in our hospitals and schools … Do you miss me? They said, ‘Sir, get 66 million votes and the election’s yours.’ Well I got 76 million and they say I lost. Who are they kidding? It was stolen big-time and everybody knows it.”

That was the former president himself, who dropped in on a wedding reception at Mar-a-Lago last week while the band was on break to offer some words of wisdom. Good to know he’s still got the gift of gab and has moved on gracefully.

7) “While Newsmax initially covered claims by President Trump’s lawyers, supporters, and others that Dr. Coomer played a role in manipulating Dominion voting machines, Dominion voting software, and the final vote counts in the 2020 presidential election, Newsmax subsequently found no evidence that such allegations were true. Many of the states whose results were contested by the Trump campaign after the November 2020 election have conducted extensive recounts and audits, and each of these states certified the results as legal and final.”

That’s a statement from right-wing news outlet Newsmax, which joined Fox News and OANN in aggressively back-pedaling from the lies they spread on election fraud and Dominion voting machines. Nothing like a multi-million dollar lawsuit to bring out truth and destroy propaganda, I suppose. After reading the quotes above, it’s pretty obvious nothing else will.

C’mon, Republicans, aren’t you embarrassed yet?

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

The Quiet Part …

Colicaranica | Dreamstime.com

The week just past brought with it a plethora of news — good, bad, and ugly.

First, some good news in the braggin’ rights department: It was announced that Memphis International Airport (MEM) is back atop the rankings as the world’s busiest cargo airport for the first time since 2009. More than 4.6 million metric tons of cargo came through MEM in 2020, enough to put MEM back on top of the ranking by Airports Council International (ACI), edging out Hong Kong International Airport.

In other good economic news, Amazon announced it was increasing its presence in the Mid-South with two new facilities: a delivery station in North Memphis and a fulfillment center in Byhalia, Mississippi. The company said it expects to employ hundreds at each facility and will pay a starting wage of $15 per hour plus benefits.

In not so good news, another proposed facility in the Mid-South was denied a permit by the Horn Lake, Mississippi, city government. Last Tuesday, that city’s board of aldermen voted 5-1 to uphold the planning commission’s decision to deny approval of the site plan for a mosque proposed by Ray Elk. The Commercial Appeal reported that the aldermen opposing the building cited “insufficient water mains for fire sprinklers, the fear that the building would break the noise ordinance, and that it would be a traffic hazard as reasons for opposing the application.”

But Alderman John Jones said the quiet part out loud: “If you let them build it, they will come. I think we need to stop it before it gets here.”

The proposed mosque would be 10,000 square feet and have 44 parking spaces and would occupy three acres of an 80-acre plot owned by Elk, who told the CA that there would be no loudspeakers outside the building to issue calls to prayer. Elk added the obvious, that a mosque would add considerably less traffic to the area than if he developed a 400-home subdivision on the site.

But my favorite part of the CA reporting was discovering that Horn Lake has an alderman named Donnie “Chigger” White, who said: “That’s strange, 79 acres to put a three-acre church on. … We must have something on the horizon that you’re not wanting us to know about.” And there, ladies and gentlemen, is your ugly.

Typically, this would be when we Tennesseans would scoff at Mississippi for its backward-ass ways. But let me remind you that Tennessee has its own ugly history with opposing mosques and that the General Assembly just last week appointed an anti-Muslim activist and 9/11-Truther to the state’s official textbook selection committee. And given the many repressive and revolting laws being passed in Nashville this session, we have no business making fun of the Magnolia State any longer. We’ve got plenty of our own ugly.

And that, unfortunately, would include the latest local COVID-19 news — which is that our infection rate is rising and our vaccination rate is at a low ebb. We can’t even give away vaccine using food coupons. FEMA set up a massive facility in Midtown a few weeks ago, no appointments necessary. Just drive up and get jabbed. They are mostly sitting on their thumbs these days and are now talking about dismantling the place and moving out of town.

A recent poll showed that about 54 percent of Tennesseans say they are willing to get vaccinated. By my math, that means 46 percent of Tennesseans don’t want to get protected against a disease that has killed 570,000 Americans and counting. The breakdown by party shows exactly how politicized this issue has become: Six percent of men who identify as Democrats say they won’t get a shot, versus 46 percent of Republican men who said they wouldn’t get it. The only possible good news here is that swinging the state blue may get easier. (Did I say the quiet part out loud?)

I know this is bad — or maybe even ugly — but by this point, I’ve pretty much had it with the viral ignorance so many seem to be infected with. The vaccine is free, easily available, and convenient. Anyone who elects to turn it down for political reasons at this point has bought a ticket for whatever ride shows up at their door. Happy trails, dumbass. Enjoy your quarantine, or worse.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Take Me to the Rio

The Rio Grande at Radium Springs (Photo: Bruce VanWyngarden)

I crossed the Rio Grande river last week — several times, actually. It wasn’t that difficult. In fact, I could have walked across and not gotten my feet wet, much less my back.

In Las Cruces, New Mexico, where I was visiting family, the Rio Grande comes down from the northern part of the state and runs along the city’s western edge. Or at least it used to. Right now, the Rio Grande is as dry as a buzzard’s brunch — a 100-yard-wide strip of sandy dirt. The river has looked like this in Las Cruces from October to February for most years since the 1990s. The Rio Grande is “turned on” again early each spring by releasing water from the Elephant Butte Reservoir 70 miles upstream.

But things are changing, and not for the better. In 2020, water wasn’t released into the Rio Grande bed until late March, and the river was back to dirt by September. This year, the Elephant Butte Irrigation District says levels are so low that water won’t be released until June, and that the river will probably be dry again by the end of July. In New Mexico, the Rio Grande is no longer grande — or even a rio — for most of the year.

Historically, the Rio Grande used to flow year-round through the Mesilla Valley from Hatch (Chile Capital of the World), through Las Cruces, down to El Paso, at least at some level. Before the Spaniards arrived, Native Americans farmed the valley and fished the river’s waters. Then as agriculture began to increasingly tap into the river in the 20th century, the Rio Grande was dammed in several places to prevent seasonal flooding, capture snow-melt runoff from the mountains, and provide water as needed to irrigate many thousands of acres of pecans, alfalfa, lettuce, chiles, onions, and cotton. Now, there is enough water for agriculture — maybe — but that’s about it.

South of El Paso, where the river becomes the border between the United States and Mexico, the water level picks up again somewhat, as the river is fed by reservoirs in both countries. But drought (which doesn’t recognize lines on a map) is also affecting flow along the border.

It’s a good thing we have that beautiful 2,000-mile wall. Or, actually, I guess it’s the 452 miles of fencing that were already in place, plus the 80 miles that the Former Guy added. According to Google, there are 300 or so miles of barrier (fencing or wall) along the dry border between San Diego and El Paso. After that, we’ve traditionally counted on the Rio Grande to handle the job of stopping would-be immigrants: making them swim for it or die trying. We may have to rethink that strategy. Wading isn’t all that dangerous.

But I digress. Las Cruces is a lovely place. It has beautiful scenery, and it’s fun to drive around and take in the vast vistas of sky and mountains. (And also to drive into the desert with my brother and shoot at Amazon boxes using my late father’s old .22. We killed several.)

On a whim, I took my tack-sharp 95-year-old mother on a drive north of Las Cruces, through the farm fields of the Mesilla Valley to Radium Springs, where there is actual water flowing in the middle of the desert and where some of the world’s largest pecan orchards are located. We veered off toward the Rio Grande on a gravel road and found a couple of small, shallow pools in the riverbed — a lovely reminder of what used to be, and, sadly, probably not a harbinger of what’s to come.

In fact, if what I saw in Las Cruces is any indicator of where we’re headed with the Rio Grande, keeping the scary hordes of brown people from invading our pure Anglo-Saxon soil is just going to keep getting harder. It’s clear that Mother Nature — or climate change, if you’re an elitist — is conspiring against our puny idea of what makes a border.

It may come down to a choice between saving American pecans or keeping a few American wing-nuts happy. I stand with the pecans.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Into the Dumb …

Did you know that the word “gullible” does not appear in any dictionary? It’s true. Look it up. I’ll wait.

For those of you who did not fall for the best joke I knew in seventh grade, I’ve got another one for you: Did you know that Tom Hanks, Hillary and Bill Clinton, George Soros, Adam Schiff, Chrissy Teigen, and many other rich and famous liberals and Hollywood types are members of a cult that sexually abuses children and then sacrifices and eats them?

Except, it’s not a joke. It’s a bizarre fantasy that is believed by the tens of thousands of Americans who buy into the QAnon conspiracy. They look for cryptic clues on the internet that suggest “a storm” is coming in which all the pedophilic evil-doers will be arrested and executed. They share the clues in chat rooms and discuss what they might mean. And I repeat: They really think liberal leaders kill and eat babies. QAnon is considered a violent threat by the FBI and has been banned from most social media platforms. And yet, it persists, having become an especially potent force in the Republican party.

There have always been cults, mostly religious-based to some degree, most often designed to channel the twisted beliefs of some charismatic leader: Jim Jones, Charles Manson, David Koresh, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, et. al. But those cults were small in comparison to QAnon. And instead of a charismatic leader, this cult is fronted by an unidentified individual called “Q,” a “top government insider close to the [former] president” who has proof that global elites extract from their child victims’ blood a life-extending chemical named Adrenochrome. Q gets on the internet to post cryptic clues and set dates for when “the storm” might be coming. When one of Q’s predictions doesn’t pan out — which is always — he tells his adherents to “trust the plan.” You see, even the wrong predictions are part of the plan. It’s like a pyramid scheme of stupid: “Where we go one we go all.”

In an effort to educate myself, I started watching Into the Storm, the six-part HBO series that looks into the phenomenon that is QAnon. After 45 minutes of watching various deluded idiots proclaim unutterably insane things as fact and brag about getting a wink or a thumbs-up from Trump at a rally for flashing their “Q” gear, I grew weary and started fast-forwarding. I watched the part where an adherent “investigates” a Washington, D.C., parlor called Comet Ping Pong, the one where Hillary Clinton’s sex ring supposedly tortured babies in the basement. “Cheese Pizza,” you see, is code for “child pornography.” I’m not making this up.

The investigator concluded “something suspicious” was going on behind a door employees kept going through, and posted his report online, neglecting to mention that the pizza joint didn’t have a basement. I still don’t know if he tried the cheese pizza. His “report” was convincing enough to compel a QAnon true believer to drive 300 miles to Comet Ping Pong and open fire with an assault rifle a few weeks later.

I decided then that there was no way I was going to spend six hours of my life learning more about these fools. So I read reviews, and what I learned was that after six episodes, Into the Storm reveals that Q is most likely an American shyster named James Arthur Watkins, who owned the controversial anonymous message board 8chan, and his son, Ronald Watkins, who runs its successor, 8kun. Watkins’ umbrella company, N.T. Technology, also hosted Japanese child pornography sites, according to a 2020 story by Mother Jones. So, yeah, he seems nice.

I still don’t quite know how we got here, how a cult as obviously deranged as this one could suck in so many adherents. Unless it’s just that ideas, even (or especially) stupid ones, can spread virally now. Charles Darwin wrote about “natural selection” and survival of the fittest in his theory of evolution. We may be seeing an accelerated version of that phenomenon, with folks buying into ludicrous online cults and absurd anti-vaccination fears and science-denying foolishness at unprecedented rates.

The outcome is yet to be decided, but as a sage named P.T. Barnum once said about Americans: “There’s a sucker born every minute.” Or maybe every second, these days.

You could look it up.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

The Tweet That Was …

Laurie Cardoza-Moore

This may seem unlikely to readers of this column who are still clinging to the golf slacks of the former president and write me uncharitable emails, but I actually do research these weekly missives. I copy links to relevant or interesting articles into a “column fodder” folder on my desktop; I save interesting emails; I even look up stuff.

I also reread my Twitter feed, which isn’t exactly research, but sometimes it can capture the zeitgeist of a particular week. To wit: Editor & Publisher posted a story last Thursday about how their publisher had pulled off a stunning deal to buy all 1,100 Gannett newspapers, including The Commercial Appeal. Whoa!

I read through the first couple graphs rapidly, slowing to reread only when I got to this part: “The new Operations Center is to be located about two miles northwest of Lebanon, Kansas, the geographic center of the contiguous United States. Newton will be recruiting retired NASCAR drivers to get the newspapers into each individual market within 72-hours of printing, which is, on average, two-days faster than currently being provided by most Gannett properties.”

Then I remembered the date: April 1st. Got me.

That same day, County Mayor Lee Harris issued a tweet urging all of us to get a COVID vaccine, citing the emergence of a highly contagious and deadlier Brazilian variant, which is definitely no joke. I’m a month post-vaccination and feeling somewhat bulletproof, though I still wear a mask in public. There’s no better feeling, right now. Seriously, if you’re sentient enough to be reading this and haven’t started the process of getting the vaccine, there’s really no excuse left, except “I’m an idiot.”

Later in the week, a Twitter debate broke out about which state had the absolute worst trifecta of governor and senators. Top contenders were Texas (Abbot, Cornyn, Cruz); Missouri (Parson, Hawley, Blunt); Florida (DeSantis, Scott, Rubio); Mississippi (Reeves, Hyde-Smith, Wicker); Alabama (Ivey, Shelby, Tuberville); and Tennessee (Lee, Blackburn, Hagerty). South Dakota (Noem, Thune, Rounds) also got some mention, to be fair, but the South truly owned this competition. So proud!

Speaking of pride, there were lots of tweets about the Tennessee legislature’s appointing Laurie Cardoza-Moore, an anti-Muslim, anti-BLM, 9/11 truther, vax-hoaxer, and all-around nutball to the state Textbook and Instructional Materials Quality Commission, which, among other things, selects the textbooks used in Tennessee’s public schools.

Memphis Senator Raumesh Akbari interviewed the candidate on the Senate floor, picking apart her past lunacy and concluding, after questioning: “I cannot think of someone who is more uniquely unqualified to be in this position.” Senator Brian Kelsey, the ever-reliable GOP tool from Germantown, pooh-poohed the idea that Cardoza-Moore would be a problem, because, well, he’s Brian Kelsey.

Our legislators and governor also bum-rushed through an open-carry law that will allow any mouth-breathing crackpot to take a gun pretty much anywhere his tiny penis tells him to go. The law was opposed by all major law-enforcement organizations, attorneys general groups, and the vast majority of Tennessee voters. After the law’s passage, Governor Bill Lee made a quick call to the NRA to thank them for their support, making it pretty clear whose opinion matters to him. I really hope I live long enough to see these shameless GOP hacks get sent packing.

But it wasn’t all bad news. There were tweets about how the Memphis Fire Department, community advocate groups, and MATA set up a vaccination center for the area’s homeless, and inoculated dozens of folks who are living in the most vulnerable of circumstances. Good for them. And for us.

What else? I met a friend inside an actual restaurant for dinner for the first time in almost 13 months. We had steaks and split a bottle of Bordeaux and bitched and told the usual stories, and for a couple of hours, life seemed normal again — except for our longtime bartender saying we were starting to sound like the two old guys in the balcony in The Muppets.

Tough crowd. Tough year.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Stop the Steal

Senator Turd Ferguson

In a democracy — or, if you prefer, a republic — the government’s actions are supposed to reflect the will of the majority. That’s why we vote: to discover who the majority of the citizenry wants to hold office and what policies they want to have put in place by those they have elected. That’s how it’s supposed to work. But the sad reality is that the United States has for years been ruled by a backward-thinking, repressive, xenophobic minority.

There are many reasons for this, starting with the fact that the nation’s most powerful legislative body — the U.S. Senate — is absurdly undemocratic. Republican senators haven’t represented a real majority of the country’s population since 1996, yet the GOP has managed to delay and obstruct the will of the majority for 25 years.

Currently, the 50 GOP senators represent 43.5 percent of the country’s population, mostly due to the absurdity of states such as Wyoming, which has 578,000 citizens (about half the number of people living in Shelby County) having the same representation in the U.S. Senate as California’s 40 million citizens. California has 80 times the number of people as Wyoming and both states have equal representation in the Senate. It’s ludicrous.

More than 56 percent of the country’s population is represented by 50 Democratic senators, but they can’t pass gun-control measures, election reform, healthcare reform, tax reform, or any number of mildly progressive laws, because Senator Turd Ferguson of South Dakota doesn’t like it.

There’s little likelihood real change will take place in the structure of the Senate, and the GOP knows the only chance of retaining power is to continue to thwart the will of the majority by making it harder for people to vote, especially people of color and people with limited resources, who tend to vote for Democrats.

All across the country in states controlled by the GOP, restrictive voting laws are being proposed and enacted, including reducing the number of polling places and early voting days, restricting voting by mail, purging voter rolls, limiting voter-registration periods, restricting absentee ballots, eliminating Sunday voting, and even banning anyone from providing water to people in long voting lines. It’s Jim Crow all over again. And it’s out in the open.

From last November through January 6th, the former president defamed the American electoral process. But those who went along with Trump’s Big Lie weren’t trying to “stop the steal,” they were trying to stop democracy. And they still are.

The U.S. House of Representatives recently passed (on a party line vote, naturally) a bill known as H.R. 1 — the For the People Act. It would eliminate the voter suppression tactics that Georgia just enacted, for example, and would codify the voting process to make it equal for all U.S. citizens, no matter what state they live in. The bill requires states to maintain a voter database with universal automatic registration. In other words, if you’re a citizen and can prove it, you’re registered to vote. No more jumping through hoops at the local level. H.R. 1 mandates at least a 15-day early voting period, and institutes independent commissions to set Congressional district boundaries to eliminate gerrymandering.

It’s a big deal, but it has no chance whatsoever to pass the Senate, since it would need at least 10 GOP votes. Which brings Senate Democrats to a crossroads decision: Should they attempt to eliminate the filibuster so that the bill could pass with 50 votes, plus one from the vice-president, or just let the GOP do what it’s done for the last 25 years: undermine the will of the majority?

Eliminating the filibuster means if the GOP gets control of the Senate back at some future date, they could ram through all kinds of racist and corporatist policies (kind of like they’ve done for the last four years). But this is no time to be timid. Democracy is in the balance. It’s time to take back the reins of power and respect the will of the people. It’s time to stop the steal.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

White Flight

Did you read the online Vanity Fair article about a few Memphis Country Club types who supposedly took a private jet to Washington, D.C., on January 6th, to help “stop the steal” and participate in that day’s fun-filled and riotous activities at the nation’s Capitol building?

The story, by Abigail Tracy, was called, A PRIVATE JET OF RICH TRUMPERS WANTED TO “STOP THE STEAL”— BUT THEY DON’T WANT YOU TO READ THIS. Not exactly a subtle headline, or even a good one, but it got circulated like the hot gossip it was, fueled by viral Memphis social media reposts and tweets.

The story was classic “helicopter journalism,” in which an out-of-town reporter touches down (in the land of the Delta blues, in this case), scrapes together a little history, (shaky) local geography, racial demographics, some socio-economic tropes pulled from helpful local academics, and uses them to underpin what is basically an anonymously sourced story about something possibly outrageous that may have happened.

Can you get Bluff City Bingo?
(By Gary Bridgman)

What we do know — and VF reported accurately, via flight logs — is that a jet owned by wealthy Memphis businessman John Dobbs flew to D.C. and back on January 6th. A photo of Dobbs and a group of seven others posing beside that plane was posted for a brief time on an Instagram account of one of the alleged passengers under the tag @memphispatriots.

It quickly spread in certain circles. The presumption being that these eight Memphis bluebloods boarded the plane and flew to D.C. to participate in the insurrection promoted by former President Trump. Within a few days, the photo had been anonymously leaked to local media, including to me. I’m assuming other editors in town did the same thing I did: look to see if we could create an accurate, factual story around the photo. It proved a tough task. Nobody wanted to talk to us. One person did tell me the names of four of the people. She didn’t know the others. Calls to the individuals did not get a response.

So, we had a photo of eight people standing beside a plane. We had an identification of four of them. (A couple days later, we IDed two of the others; none returned calls.) The photo would indicate that these people were about to board the plane. Whether they did, we didn’t know. And if they did go to Washington, D.C., we had no way of knowing if they marched on the Capitol and assaulted cops or spent the day in the hotel bar. Presumably, if they were active participants, the FBI would come calling at some point.

But we didn’t have a story, just rumors and gossip, and media outlets that run unverified photos and unsourced gossip about the people in them often end up in court answering tough questions from libel lawyers.

Vanity Fair has deeper pockets, but they encountered the same stonewall. Then the VF reporter got very lucky. When she called Dobbs, he denied any knowledge of the incident, but he accidentally left his phone on for seven minutes after talking to Tracy, during which time he was heard to say: “Well, I told ’em, I said, I don’t know what you’re talking about. … You must be talking about my dad or something. … God, the last thing I want to do is talk to them.”

Busted. The magazine had enough verification that it felt it could run the story, such as it was: Some rich Memphis people probably flew to D.C. in a private jet on the day of the Capitol riots. Also, they participate in the annual Cotton Carnival, a putrid vestige of white male privilege and mock-royalty silliness for millionaires.

Tracy did get some good background quotes from local historian and professor Charles W. McKinney of Rhodes College (who expounded accurately upon the racial inequities in the city), and other academic types. But there were a lot of unnamed sources quoted and the usual pantheon of Memphis tropes used by drop-in reporters were trotted out: Sun Studio, B.B. King, Elvis Presley, Stax Records, Beale Street, Graceland, and the National Civil Rights Museum.

To which I guess we can now add: rich white guys who cosplay revolution, then fly home and don’t want to talk about it.