Author: Bruce VanWyngarden

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News News Blog

State to Allow Vaccination of All Adults

(Credit: Dreamstime)

If you’re an adult in Shelby County, you will be eligible to receive a COVID-19 vaccination, beginning Monday, March 22nd. The Tennessee Health Department announced today that the state’s counties would be free to vaccinate anyone, as long as there was an adequate supply of vaccines.

The state of Mississippi made a similar decision earlier this week, and many local residents had been traveling across the state line to get vaccinated. That will no longer be necessary.

The Tennessee Health Department’s decision was made directly in the wake of requests late this week from Shelby County and Memphis officials to lower or eliminate the age and occupational requirements set to qualify for a vaccine.

From the state’s health department’s announcement: “As Tennessee continues working to protect those most at risk of serious illness and death from COVID-19 and provide vaccinations as quickly as possible, counties may progress through each of the phases as vaccine supply allows.”

The state health department stated that further details on its announcement would be provided on Monday.

In a tweet, County Mayor Lee Harris applauded the news and asked local residents to take advantage of the state’s decision: “I urge everyone — meaning every adult in Shelby County — to get the shot, and make the case to neighbors and loved ones about the importance of taking the vaccine.”

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Perennials

The rain poured through the downspout near my bedroom window Sunday night. It’s a sound like low soft thunder, and it continued for hours, until it grew light through the window on the second morning of the spring time-change. Then came the sun, ambitious and bright, illuminating the green sprouts in the yard, the wet newspaper, the damp streets, an upstart azalea by the door, budding pink.

Over the weekend, we’d gone into the garden and clipped away the brown stems and leaves and withered branches of last summer’s flowers, finding the fresh growth emerging from beneath, the annual return of the perennials, the Earth renewing itself as it always does.

There were casualties. February’s deep freeze took out our venerable oregano plant. The senior rosemary bush could yet make it but appears to be on life support and may have to go to assisted living. The thyme, gnarled and ancient, is brown and crispy at its tips, but when I cut an interior branch, I find green. Thyme marches on.

The Monday paper is full of sad basketball news: The Tigers miss the dance again; the Grizzlies blow a big lead. I don’t care much. Do you? Maybe it’s just that sports seem sort of pointless and irrelevant — the shortened seasons, the missed games, the empty arenas, the sideline masks. The magic isn’t there. The Big Dance? Meh. More like a junior high sock-hop. (Do they still have sock-hops? Don’t answer.)

There are signs of new life everywhere. Each day brings news of more friends and family members who’ve gotten the COVID vaccine. As an ancient and gnarled human who’s now gotten both shots, I can attest that it is a relief that’s hard to put into words after a year of constraints and fears and relative isolation. A springtime of the soul.

On Sunday afternoon, the patios of Midtown were beginning to look like patios again. Slider Inn, the restaurants of Cooper-Young, and the outdoor dining spaces in Overton Square were filled. Railgarten was stuffed to overflowing with kids, parents, volleyballers, cornholers (sorry), even a band. Outdoors feels safer to a lot of people these days, and that’s a good thing. (Just remember to respect your server and put on a mask when they approach.)

Nationally, the news is also getting better. President Biden stated that he thinks there will be enough vaccine available that all adult Americans will be able to get a shot by May 1st. That’s six weeks, if you’re counting. The catch, of course, is that many adult Americans will choose not to get a shot, most of them because they’re suffering from another illness — a viral strain of ignorance and fear spread by absurd internet conspiracy theories and the willful dispensing of misinformation by right-wing media.

Getting a COVID vaccination is all part of the “plandemic” — a genetically engineered bioweapon from China. It’s a scheme by Bill Gates to make billions off the sale of the vaccine. Dr. Fauci is an evil genius who created the virus as a bioweapon to reduce the population and undermine Donald Trump. The vaccine is a plan to put microchips into our bodies so we can be tracked anywhere.

I didn’t make these up. The AP recently reported on 19 conspiracy theories that Americans (and others around the world) are using as a rationale to avoid getting the vaccine. They are brought to you by the same people who told you masks were worthless and COVID is no worse than the flu.

Meanwhile, ICUs in Paris and elsewhere are filling back up with victims of COVID variants that have worse symptoms and poorer mortality outcomes than the original virus. The good news is that it appears the vaccine protects you, even against the new stuff. That’s why the goal should be to get every person who wants a shot inoculated as soon as possible. Those who refuse will either get lucky as a result of the rest of us taking responsibility or they will get the disease and learn the hard way.

The lessons of spring are obvious. There are perennials and there are annuals — fresh green shoots and dead brown branches. Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme.

Bruce VanWyngarden
brucev@memphisflyer.com

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Prickly City

Irish poet Oscar Wilde opined in his 1899 essay, “The Decay of Lying,” that “Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.” The shortened version of Wilde’s quote — life imitates art — has become something of a go-to aphorism in the ensuing decades. But it seems to me life is no longer imitating art so much as it is imitating a reprise of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, and we’ve all fallen down the rabbit hole.

How else to explain the bizarre phenomenon of Fox News spending countless hours of airtime last week on the decision by the publishers of the Dr. Seuss children’s books to not reprint six titles because they contained ethnically insensitive or xenophobic content? You can easily look up the images in question online. They’re mainly racial-stereotype caricatures that were commonly used in the 1930s and 1940s, and it’s pretty understandable why the books wouldn’t be reprinted in 2021.

But that reasoning doesn’t adequately stoke the Fox News outrage machine. Nope. The real reason Seuss books are going away is because of liberal “cancel culture,” the current rallying cry of the snowflake right. To their credit, it’s a useful phrase, really, one that can be applied to almost anything that is stopped or rejected.

The Commercial Appeal, for instance, has just replaced its long-running conservative cartoon, Mallard Fillmore (which “balanced” Doonesbury), with another conservative political cartoon, Prickly City, which features the adventures of a conservative young Black woman who once fell in love with Tucker Carlson. I am not making this up. Unless Wikipedia made it up.

At any rate, letter writers to the CA are predictably complaining that lame duck (literally) Mallard Fillmore is the victim of cancel culture. The truth is less outrageous: The editors at the CA, a privately owned company, decided to pull one conservative cartoon and replace it with another one. It’s kind of like when Beverly Hill SVU (or whatever) gets the axe from CBS.

Or like when thousands of Fox viewers demanded the resignation of Shepard Smith when he came out as gay. Or was that different?

But wait, there’s more. It turns out that the ancient plastic toy, Mr. Potato Head, is also a victim of cancel culture. And also the subject of many hours of pearl-clutching commentary in conservative media circles. How dare they remove the fedora and mustache of Mr. Potato Head?! What’s next, G.I. Josephine?

It’s kind of like when conservatives went nuts and boycotted the Dixie Chicks after they criticized George W. Bush. Or was that different?

Cancel culture has also become the rallying cry of conservative Republicans on Capitol Hill. Last week, in referencing public attitudes toward COVID, President Biden said, “The last thing we need is Neanderthal thinking, that in the meantime everything’s fine, take off your mask. Forget it. It still matters.” The nerve!

Thankfully, our own Senator Marsha Blackburn was quickly on the case, defending the downtrodden Neanderthal people on Fox News: “Neanderthals are hunter-gatherers. They’re protectors of their family,” she said. “They are resilient. They’re resourceful. They tend to their own. Joe Biden needs to rethink what he is saying.”

No one had the heart to tell Marsha that Neanderthals have been extinct for a few thousand years. I mean, except for a few descendents in Congress, the ones who tried to cancel the last election. Or was that cancellation different?

Senator Ted Cruz asked Attorney General nominee Merrick Garland how he felt about cancel culture in a Senate hearing. Garland responded: “I do not have an understanding of the meaning of the term sufficient to comment.” Which sounds about right.

Shouty Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan demanded that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi hold a congressional hearing on the pressing national crisis of cancel culture. She ignored him, thereby missing a golden opportunity to schedule such a hearing and then cancel it at the last moment.

That would have been artful.

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

The Yahoo Posse

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

In case you were ever worried about the GOP-dominated state government of Tennessee not having the best interests of its citizens at heart, you can relax. Our boys are on the case, battling against the vast, nefarious invasion of transgender young people into high school sports, standing firm against college basketballers who kneel for the National Anthem, and, of course, battling for the right of every Tennessean to pack a gun pretty much anywhere.

Jackson Baker

Governor Bill Lee

The truth is that this sort of legislation is just performative. Its only purpose being to stir up outrage among the mouth-breathing masses. “Dang it! We cain’t have boys competin’ against girls in softball!” Right. Because that happens so often. So the legislators propose a bill that ignores all protocols and legal ramifications of the issue and just mandates that transgender folks conform to their birth genitalia, no matter what. The Olympics and other sports organizations have rules involving testosterone levels for athletes, and other regulations that ensure fair competition, but those were ignored in favor of further inciting brocephus prejudices with a law that is very unlikely to stand up in court.

Legislators are also planning to tackle the vital issue of East Tennessee State’s men’s basketball team kneeling for the National Anthem on state property. Look for some overtly unconstitutional legislative foofawfery soon. Never mind that the First Amendment right to protest and free speech is every bit as sacred and protected as, well, the Second Amendment “right” to openly carry a gun into Costco.

Speaking of … If any of these guys ever has the nerve to say “Blue Lives Matter” again, they should be, well, arrested. Open carry laws are opposed by almost every major law-enforcement organization, by district attorneys groups, and by around 80 percent of American voters in recent polls. But Governor Bill Lee and his yahoo posse are more interested in pleasing the NRA and the 20 percent of the population that thinks gun regulations are a violation of the Second Amendment, even though most of them couldn’t spell “amendment” if you spotted them the vowels.

Then there was the egregious piling on by several Republicans of the Shelby County Health Department in the wake of the discovery of 2,400 expired or wasted COVID vaccine doses.

Eighth District Congressman David Kustoff, for example, was shocked and outraged and demanded an investigation into this chicanery. This is the same buffoon who backed Donald Trump’s ignorant and deadly approach to the pandemic for 11 months and who appeared, sans mask, slavishly praising Fearless Leader at rallies. He also voted to overturn the results of a free election after a mob violently demanding the same thing trashed the capitol building where he works, but yes, do demand an investigation into those who are trying, however imperfectly, to save people’s lives.

Lee also weighed in with his concerns, as did several other Republicans. Where was this concern when much smaller (and whiter) Knox County “lost” more than 1,000 doses earlier in February?

Look, there is no denying that Shelby County screwed up some aspects of the vaccine roll-out, but let’s not lose sight of the fact that this scenario is being replicated all over the country.

Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, told NBC News earlier this month: “This kind of thing [having to throw away] vaccines is pretty rampant. I have personally heard stories like this from dozens of physician friends in a variety of different states. Hundreds, if not thousands, of doses are getting tossed across the country every day. It’s unbelievable.”

COVID-19 vaccines have a short shelf life once they are thawed out for use, Jha said. And because of federal and state mandates, many hospitals and other healthcare providers would rather risk a dose going bad than give it to somebody who isn’t scheduled to get a shot.

So yeah, we’ve had some issues with vaccine distribution, but so have a lot of places. More than 120,000 people have been vaccinated in Shelby County, so it’s not all bad. It’s fair to point out mistakes, but let’s keep the performative politics out of it.

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Ditto.

Rush Limbaugh and I had a lot in common.

We’re both Baby Boomers, both from a small town in Missouri, and both of us grew up in a Republican family. Rush dropped out of college and then moved to Pittsburgh to try to become a radio DJ. I dropped out of college to smoke pot and protest the Vietnam War. Then I moved to San Francisco and became a night watchman and a busker for tourists in Ghirardelli Square. 

Both of our career paths were a bit murky there for a while.

Rush bounced from station to station for a few years, eventually ending up in Kansas City. I bounced from job to job out West and in Columbia, Missouri, where I eventually finished my journalism degree and found semi-honest work in the business where I still ply my trade.

Rush began his climb to glory in the wake of the overturning of the FCC Fairness Doctrine in 1987, when broadcasters were no longer constrained by having to provide equal time for opposing views, or for anyone who was attacked on air.

After getting some attention in Kansas City for his “public affairs” show, Rushbo got hired by WABC in New York and he quickly gained national notoriety for such actions as celebrating the deaths of gay men from AIDS with show tunes, coining the phrase “Femi-Nazis” for women’s rights activists, calling Chelsea Clinton the “White House dog,” and regularly saying revoltingly racist things about African Americans (too many to list here), all under the guise of “conservatism.” It was a truly deplorable schtick before deplorable became a thing, and one that resonated, appallingly, with much of white America. Rush got very rich with it.

In 1996, the Telecommunications Act allowed broadcasting companies to own stations in many markets and spawned radio syndication. Rush quickly got even bigger (literally) and richer and became a major player in the Republican Party. A slew of conservative Rush-clones emerged: Michael Savage, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and Mark Levin, to name a few. Stirring up anger and outrage at liberals, Democrats, Blacks, Muslims, and immigrants was, and is, their stock-in-trade. And it’s made them rich.

Then came Fox News, the ultimate benefactor of the abolishment of the Fairness Doctrine. (“Fair and Balanced” being the lie from which all others were spun.) Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes built a television empire on right-wing outrage, angry white male hosts, short-skirted blondes, and lies.

Now, with the internet, the genie is out of the bottle. If you want “fair and balanced,” it’s strictly DIY. Pick your news to suit your views. If you believe climate change and COVID-19 are hoaxes, that Donald Trump won the 2020 election, that Texas lost power because of a Green New Deal that hasn’t been passed, that QAnon is onto something, that Antifa spawned the January 6th insurrection, that President Biden’s dog isn’t “presidential,” that the Bidens’ marriage is a “charade” … there’s a whole news ecosystem built just for you. Likewise, if you take the opposing point of view on any or all of those issues.

But it all started with Rush Limbaugh. And now he’s dead of lung cancer, at 70, leaving three ex-wives and a widow and millions of fans to mourn his passing. Lots of Republicans want to honor what they perceive as Limbaugh’s glorious legacy. He’s being called a great American, a true patriot — lauded by GOP politicians all over America. In Florida, the governor wants to fly the flag at half-mast in Limbaugh’s honor. In Rush’s home state of Missouri, legislators are talking about establishing a state holiday in his name. A state holiday! His bust already resides in the state capitol building — kind of like Nathan Bedford Forrest’s up in Nashville.

But let’s speak the truth here: Rush Limbaugh was not a great American by any fair and balanced measure. In his radio persona, he was a divisive, hateful, homophobic, racist, misogynistic asshole. What he was like in private, I can’t say, but I doubt that he and I had much in common when Limbaugh departed this earthly vale — far from his Missouri roots. I do hope he found peace at the end. It’s more than he wished for others.

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

The Signup Genius

Have you met the Signup Genius?

He’s not really a genius. He’s an “online software tool for volunteer management and event planning  that lets you  save time with sign up sheets and schedules for schools, sports leagues, holiday events, and more!” Cool!

Signup Genius is what the state of Tennessee uses for us to sign up for COVID-19 vaccinations. It’s like using Eventbrite, only for death and disease and whatnot. The good news is that Signup Genius’ platinum plan is only $44.99 a month! No doubt, Governor Bill Lee’s crack health and science team got an even better deal.

Being in Tennessee, Shelby County is using Signup Genius, as well as a tool called VaxQueue, wherein users fill out an online form with contact information, age, and health conditions. Theoretically, these users will be contacted when a vaccination comes open. You should fill it out. It’s like buying a lottery ticket at Mapco. It can’t hurt, but don’t count on a payoff. 

Judging from posts on social media (and speaking from personal experience), neither Signup Genius nor VaxQueue have been raging successes to this point. Tens of thousands of people in Memphis and Shelby County are still confused about how vaccine signup works. There have been long lines, short lines, last-minute cancellations, and sudden open cattle calls for shots.

What is clear is that people who have online savvy, personal connections, spare time, personal transportation, or a job that allows them to repeatedly check the Shelby County Health Department website for updates (and rush over to a vaccine site on a moment’s notice), have a huge advantage in getting the vaccine into their arms.

Unsurprisingly, the advantages cited above mean poor and working-class folks and people of color are under-represented. The Hispanic populace, having been burned by ICE setting up outside community centers and courtrooms and marriage license offices, is distrustful of signing up for much of anything government-related, as are many in the African-American community. And no matter your race, blue-collar jobs usually don’t let you jump off your forklift and go get a shot on a moment’s notice. Outreach to — and vaccine access for — those communities needs to improve.

Toss in the anti-vaxxers, the COVID-hoaxers, and other assorted fruits and nuts in the white community, and a best-case scenario is that we get two-thirds of the population vaccinated by summer, according to some estimates I’ve read recently.

Since I’m eligible for the vaccine, I signed up with the Genius early this month and got an appointment in Whitehaven for a couple weeks later. A few minutes after signing up, my daughter called and said she just read online that there were open appointments that day at the Pipkin Building. I hung up, clicked on the Genius at 1:30 p.m. and got a 2 p.m. appointment! By 2:45 p.m., I had a shot in my arm. The nurse who administered it said they had 1,000 shots they needed to use that day and that I should “text or call anyone who can get over here.” So I did just that, starting with my family and co-workers, and then my social media contacts. That’s not the way vaccine distribution should work, to say the least. I canceled my Whitehaven appointment the next day.

Shelby County is not alone in having logistical problems with the vaccine. My 70-year-old brother in New Mexico signed up in that state’s version of VaxQueue weeks ago and hasn’t heard a thing. California has fallen way behind in getting the vaccine into arms. Many other states and cities are struggling. It’s a huge job, one that various local and state governments are learning on the fly.

Being able to get vaccine appointments at some local Walgreens and Walmarts is a strong positive step for Memphis, certainly a better option for those without cars than the drive-thru process. Chicago and New York and other locales around the country are using apps like ZocDoc to streamline scheduling into one do-it-all operation. West Virginia is using locally owned pharmacies and having success. Many states are creating their own online signup tools. The CDC also offers a limited signup system called VAMS.

The reason there are so many different ways to sign up for and get a vaccine around the country is primarily because our current distribution systems were created from the bottom up — by states and cities and counties, mostly using private companies and app makers — rather than by a coordinated national system. We’ve been playing catch-up for months.

And it doesn’t really take a stable Signup Genius to figure out why that’s happening.

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

The Tabloid Party

Remember “supermarket tabloids”? They were called that because when you stood in the checkout line at the grocery store, you were invariably confronted with a rack of newspapers featuring headlines such as: “HILLARY CLINTON ADOPTS ALIEN BABY!” Or, “BIGFOOT KEPT LUMBERJACK AS SEX SLAVE!” Or, “DICK CHENEY IS A ROBOT!” (All actual headlines, by the way.)

There was the Star, the Weekly World News, The Sun, and, of course, the still extant National Enquirer, most recently famous for burying stories about former President Trump’s extramarital liaisons.

I like to think most people who saw these tabloids in the checkout line back then were like me — they chuckled, rolled their eyes, maybe even bought a copy of a particularly outrageous issue ironically, thinking “Who the hell would believe this?”

But the tabloids sold millions of copies a week in their prime, and they weren’t all being purchased ironically. Some people bought tabloids because they wanted to know exactly how a “174-MPH Sneeze Blows Off Woman’s Hair,” or details about the “FBI Captur[ing] Bat Child,” or the woman who claimed “I Had Bigfoot’s Baby.”

We used to think the kind of people who believed tabloid stories were unsophisticated rubes who didn’t know any better. It wasn’t a big problem. If some goober in Horn Lake believed that Hillary Clinton adopted an alien baby, what was the harm, really? Morons gonna moron. We’ve come a long way from that sort of lunacy.

Oh wait, no we haven’t. Countless numbers of QAnon faithful believe Hillary Clinton and Anderson Cooper (and many others) are involved in a cannibalistic pedophilic sex-slavery ring. I guess for Hillary it probably all started with that alien baby.

It would be funny, except that most Republicans are now basically members of the “Tabloid Party,” because what is the QAnon conspiracy if not a gory tabloid fantasy writ large? Let’s review: A cabal of cannibalistic satan-worshipping pedophiles (cool band name) — including Democratic politicians, media moguls, and bankers (short-hand for Jews), journalists, and other powerful government figures — control the “deep state” and thereby rule the country. And remember, they eat babies. Let that sink in. Thousands of people believe this shit. Which is terrifying.

The QAnon conspiracy further alleges that a battle between good and evil is raging and that Donald Trump was sent to turn the tide for good. “Q” himself is deep within the deep state, giving cryptic clues to the faithful and orchestrating two great upcoming events: The Storm (mass arrests of the deep state evil-doers) and The Great Awakening, in which all will be revealed and made obvious to non-believers — and Donald Trump will return to his rightful place as president of our great and noble land. (Trump, by the way, is supposed to be sworn in on March 4th. Trump’s hotel in Washington, D.C., has tripled its rates for that night. Look it up. Used to be that morons just bought tabloids. Now they book $1,000 hotel rooms.)

This is all insane, right? Surely, most sentient beings can agree on this.

I mean, except for most Republicans in Congress, who gave freshman Congressperson Marjorie Taylor Greene a standing ovation after she slightly backed off a couple of her more controversial QAnon-related remarks. Among her many outrages, Greene has denied 9/11 happened, called several mass shootings “false flag operations” and berated one of the students at Parkland High School as a “coward,” claimed Bill and Hillary Clinton were involved in numerous murders, including that of John F. Kennedy Jr., and alleged that Jews in the banking business used lasers from space satellites to start last summer’s California forest fires. I could go on, but I’d run out of space. Greene is a walking, talking issue of Weekly World News, only more dangerous. She’s racist and vile, and frankly, nuts.

And yet, only 11 Republicans in Congress had the courage to vote for removing Greene from her committee positions last week. Only Liz Cheney had the guts to forcefully speak out against this madness.

And her father’s a robot.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Turn and Face the Change

CREDIT: Bruce VanWyngarden

It’s Saturday afternoon and my wife is making a pie crust, not a particularly regular occurrence, since she’s a busy professional lawyer-type person and I’m a work-at-home schlub who ends up doing most of the cooking these days. I am smart enough, however, not to offer advice on pie-crust-making.

As we chat, Tatine pulls a box of parchment paper out of the drawer where all the stuff in long, rectangular boxes goes: foil, plastic wrap, wax paper. You know. We all have one of those drawers.

“We’re almost out of parchment paper,” she says. “And it looks like we’re also really low on plastic freezer bags.”

Bruce VanWyngarden

“Okay.”

I pull out my phone and tap it a few times.

“It’ll get here Monday,” I say.

The transaction happens almost without thinking. A year ago, I would have added “freezer bags” and “parchment paper” to the standing grocery list on my phone. Five years ago, I would have added the items to a grocery list stuck on the fridge with a magnet. No more. After 11 months of COVID-19, I just order that crap instantly. I’ve got priorities, after all. I’m not gonna shower and put on hard pants and real shoes and mask up and get in my car and risk my life for a roll of parchment paper. No sir, buddy.

On Monday, a package will appear on my porch, and it’s likely I’ll have no idea what it is until I open it and discover — whee! — parchment paper and freezer bags! Or it might be fire starters for the fireplace or three new black T-shirts or a cool new meat thermometer that I convinced myself I needed late one night. Who knows? Santa comes all year now!

Sometimes change happens and it takes us awhile to realize it. Now, while we all jockey for position and wait and hope for a vaccine dose, it might be a good exercise to consider just how much the pandemic has changed us, and how much of that change might linger after COVID is just a bad memory that arises when you find a mask in a coat pocket a year from now.

I look forward to wandering through a bookstore, lingering in a coffee shop, sitting in a restaurant over a good meal, going to a concert, strolling through a museum, flying on an airplane, drinking a cold local brew at a bar where everybody knows my name. I might even miss going to the office. Sort of. Those things will come back into my life and I will welcome them.

But I think many of us, including me, will continue to order the mundane stuff we used to drive around and pick up. Not fun shopping, mind you, but yeah, parchment paper, plastic bags, vitamins — that stuff? Just drop it off on the porch, please. Thanks.

Have COVID and Amazon and Uber Eats and other delivery services transformed our urban way of shopping in a manner similar to how Walmart transformed rural America’s way of shopping? I don’t know. I read an essay this week called “Rural Doom,” by Evan Charles Wolf. I recommend it to you. It is the best analysis I’ve seen yet on the country’s now-massive rural/urban divide. Wolf acknowledges how Walmart (and globalization) deconstructed the economies of rural and small-town America, but takes it a step further, into the political ramifications.

As the factories left and small businesses died and the towns shrunk, our cities and suburbs absorbed more people — and gained more votes and more power. Joe Biden took the presidency handily in 2020 — in the popular vote and Electoral College — and yet won majorities in only 16 percent of the nation’s counties! Population density was the single most important factor in determining who won the election. The lesson: Win the cities and suburbs and you win the presidency. Walmart didn’t just transform a way of life; it transformed our electoral politics.

Will COVID leave a similar mark? Time will tell.

• Readers of the print edition of the Flyer will no doubt have noticed that the paper is a different shape — slightly wider and a bit shorter. That’s because the printer we’ve used for many years was recently shut down. We’ve found a new printer, but it was necessary to conform to a new shape. Same Flyer, same content, just a new package. We think it’s pretty snazzy.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

A French Village

For the past couple of weeks, my wife and I have been watching a television series called (in America) A French Village. It ran for seven years in France, more than 70 episodes, so it has been a long, and still-ongoing, binge. We started watching out of curiosity. My wife is French and I like watching shows in French with subtitles so I can practice listening to the language in hopes of improving my “Ou sont les toilettes”-level French. There was no way, we vowed, that we’re going to watch seven seasons of this thing. But we’re six seasons in and A French Village has hooked us, big time.

The show is set in the fictional town of Villeneuve during World War II. The village is controlled by the Nazis and the collaborative French government of Vichy. The driving conceit of the show, which becomes more apparent with each ensuing season, is that, sooner or later, almost everyone in Villeneuve has to make a choice: collaborate with the ruling Nazi/French-puppet regime, or resist.

Most try for a third option: living quietly, going about their lives as close to normally as possible, hoping to avoid incurring the wrath of the Nazis, and staying out of the way of the Resistance. But sooner or later, the moment of truth arrives for everyone: Do you stay safe, keep your mouth shut, walk away, and accept that you are on the side of people doing horrible, murderous, genocidal things, or do you somehow find the courage to resist — or give everything up and flee?

Businessmen sell lumber and concrete to the Nazis; restaurants serve them meals; city officials accommodate their demands; women at the bordello sleep with them; the local police cooperate in roundups and torturous interrogations; the local doctor treats their wounded. But as the “aryanization” of the village and its businesses widens, as the village’s Jewish families are rounded up, as they are pulled from their children and put on separate trains, never to return, the creeping horror of what is being accepted by most villagers becomes unavoidable. It’s a slow build.

This being a French show and something of a soap opera at heart, there are, of course, love affairs and trysts and intrigue and secrets and betrayals: Most of the usual trappings of existence sustain themselves amid the shooting and the bombings and the horrors. All Germans aren’t monsters. All French aren’t heroes. The world is complicated. As are men and women. Another insight from the show: Life can be banal, even in wartime.

But around season five, as the war begins to wind down and the Nazis leave, the town begins to split along a widening fissure: Were you a collaborator or not? It seems a simple delineation, but it turns out not to be. French cops who did the Germans’ bidding, hunting down resistance fighters and killing French civilians, are a simple call — they get the firing squad. But what about the young police conscript who served only a few weeks? And what about the mayor who convinced the Nazis to execute only 10 villagers instead of the 20 they’d planned? Did he do a good thing? Or is he irredeemably evil? What about the women who slept with Nazi soldiers? Collaborators or survivors? Coming back together as a community after so much trauma proves not to be easy. Much depends on who’s judging and who’s being judged.

And maybe there’s a lesson here for America, after the divisive trauma of the past four years. Here’s what Joe Biden said in his Inaugural address: “To restore the soul and secure the future of America requires so much more than words. It requires the most elusive of all things in a democracy: unity.”

Unity. Our new president speaks of it often. And so do many Republicans these days. And I think most of us would agree that some sort of unity between the country’s two major parties could be good. But here’s the thing: Unity only works if justice is done first. Unity only works if there is a mutually agreed upon set of facts, a ground from which we can begin moving forward together.

Let me suggest a few facts that should be agreed upon: Joe Biden won the presidential election; Democrats are not part of a “deep-state” secret cabal of pedophiles; QAnon is an insane conspiracy theory; the people who vandalized the Capitol and terrorized our legislators were supporters of Donald Trump, who invited them there.

People who deny any of these truths while calling for unity are collaborators. They don’t belong in the village.

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Little Dark Age

“If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence, I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon’s but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side, and superstition, ambition, and ignorance on the other.” — Ulysses S. Grant.

As I write this, it’s the day after the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, 24 hours after politicians like 8th District Congressman David Kustoff and Senator Marsha Blackburn release their annual pious MLK quotes on Twitter. Because if anyone exemplifies the ideals of Dr. King, it’s Republicans who supported the overturning of a presidential election in order to appease the deluded, hateful supporters of a narcissistic would-be autocrat.

Kustoff had the utter audacity to cite this King quote: “Hate cannot drive out hate. Only love can do that.” Are you kidding me? Tell it to your friends who were at the Capitol last week, David. Tell it to the president whose boots you licked. I expect this kind of stuff from Blackburn, who’s been a lightweight and sellout for years. But Kustoff is smarter than Blackburn. He knows better. His cynical embrace of Trump’s corruption and lies is appalling.

Today is also the day before President-elect Joe Biden gets inaugurated in front of — what? — 300 people? Thanks to Kustoff’s and Blackburn’s pals, the ignorant yahoos who destroyed the Capitol a couple weeks ago, this year’s inauguration will feature a “crowd” made up of 25,000 troops. Trump won’t be there, having pardoned a bunch of sleazos before hopping a jet to Mar-a-Lago for some well-deserved R&R before his Senate impeachment trial. But there will be some good news for him: His only inaugural crowd will no doubt have been larger than Biden’s. Sean Spicer, wherefore art thou?

This new administration and this new Congress and Senate take over a country in chaos. Millions of Americans are unemployed, facing eviction, a lack of food and money, and an epidemic that will have killed half-a-million of us by the end of February, roughly a year after we were told by President Trump that it would “just go away.”

It’s a country in which more than 70 million people bought into the Trump fever-dream, a twisted vision that tapped into fear and latent anger more effectively than most of us imagined was possible. Take a minute to think about what Trump (and his political and media enablers) convinced his base to fear and/or distrust: any Democrat, any liberal, immigrants of color, journalists and most major media outlets, Black people, Mexicans, Antifa, “cancel culture,” mail-in voting, the American electoral system, scientists and medical experts, the Justice department, military leaders … I could go on.

Joe Biden says he wants to unite the country. I wish him luck. Maybe start with bringing back some iteration of the Fairness Doctrine, some sort of legislation that will ensure that knowingly broadcasting lies and disinformation on public airways or providing a place for it on the internet won’t be tolerated. It’s not just Fox News or OANN. It’s Facebook, Twitter, Google, Instagram, you name it. There has to be some sort of recalibration, some way to monitor this stuff. Too many people are being radicalized by lies and false conspiracies. The fact that millions of people actually bought into the insanity of QAnon is itself astounding and terrifying.

Similarly, the Big Lie about Trump “winning in a landslide” was allowed to be spread unchecked in too many places by too many people without pushback or fact-checking. We’ll be dealing with the fallout from it for quite some time. Thanks, David and Marsha. Good work.

Now that we have some vaccines that work, we have to figure out how to get the medicine into as many Americans as quickly as possible. The Trump administration’s “plan” of leaving it up to the states has resulted in an ineffective, spread-shot system without consistency or logic. Over the weekend, I saw several posts on social media from folks who’d gotten the vaccine. Only one was over 75 years old. They were all from out of state. Lots of folks were asking, understandably, “How did you do that?”

I went to the Shelby County Health Department website on Monday and learned nothing about how to schedule a shot. I followed a link to the state of Tennessee COVID site, where I could fill out a multi-page survey (outdated) to see if I was eligible for a shot, but there was no mechanism for signing up, and no indication of when I’d be able to do so. We’re still stumbling around. Hopefully, when the feds take over, they’ll flip on a light switch. We’ve been in this little dark age for too long.