Author: Bruce VanWyngarden

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At Large Opinion

White Plains

The view from White Plains (Photo: Bruce VanWyngarden)

I had occasion to visit family in the New York area last week. The weather was soft, pleasant, very non-Decemberish for the Northeast. We took walks, drove to nearby restaurants and parks, and in general had a low-key great time.

One of the more pleasant discoveries I made before leaving Memphis was that Delta flies into White Plains, New York, out of Atlanta, making it possible to avoid the insanity of LaGuardia or JFK and still land in the NYC area.

The White Plains airport is tiny — one baggage carousel and one waiting area for all departing flights. You want a drink? Go to the snack bar/newsstand and order a cocktail to-go (to a nearby seat, if you can find one). It’s a long line, with the same beleaguered clerk selling bottles of water, Cheez-Its, magazines, neck pillows, M&M’s — and mixing gin and tonics in her spare time. Good luck.

But despite its small size, large jets come and go into White Plains, supplying hassle-free air travel to the swells living in White Plains, Greenwich, Fairfield, and other upscale ’burbs. It’s a great way to avoid the grinding traffic of LGA or JFK, so call me a swell. (Dad Joke Warning: Despite its misleading name, not all the planes in the White Plains airport are white.)

On my Sunday return flight, I had a 40-minute layover in Detroit, which is tight timing given the vicissitudes of modern air travel. My seat mate was a woman I guessed to be around my own age. We did the obligatory, “Hi,” then fastened seat belts, dug into carry-ons, and turned to our reading — me, a Michael Chabon novella; she, a legal-looking document onto which she occasionally scribbled margin notes. It was a short flight, and as we began to descend into Detroit, she said, “I’ve got to get off this plane in a hurry. I’ve only got 30 minutes to catch my connecting flight.”

“You’ve got me beat,” I said. “I have 40 minutes.”

Eye rolls and shoulder shrugs.

“What brought you to White Plains?” I asked, as we bumped below the cloud cover.

“Visiting my grandchildren,” she said, flashing a picture from her phone.

I nodded approvingly.

“Cute!” I said, returning serve with a photo of my own.

Then she asked me what I did for a living. I admitted I was a journalist, and she confessed that she was an attorney from Kansas City.

After a moment of silence, she asked, “Did you talk to your children about politics? My son is 40 and he and his wife are really not excited about Biden.”

“Nor are any of my kids,” I said.

“They say they’ll vote for him because there’s no alternative, but they are just really tired of Boomers running things.”

“I get that,” I said. “I remember in ’92 I was really sick of old guys like Ronald Reagan and Bush Sr. after 12 years. I remember being so excited when Clinton won. It seemed like a miracle. Presidents weren’t supposed to like Fleetwood Mac or wear jogging shorts. It seemed like we finally had a president we could relate to, which was mind-blowing after ol’ Ronnie Raygun.”

“I remember Reagan was literally senile at the end,” she said. “And I couldn’t believe Clinton won either. He was the first Boomer president.”

“Now he’s 77,” I said, “the same age as Trump.”

“Lord help us. If Trump wins, we’re so screwed.”

“And it’s weird to think about it — Biden’s older than Reagan was when he left office — but at least he’s not using astrology readings to make decisions.”

“Yeah, I think Biden’s a decent man,” she said. “I know that’s a low bar, but it’s more than I can say about the other guy.”

“True that.”

We taxied to a stop and I bid farewell to my 10-minute friend who I’ll never see again. Maybe Biden should rebrand his campaign, I thought: “Be patient. I’m just a short layover.”

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At Large Opinion

Neighbor With a Gun

Photo: Catherine Goode | Nextdoor

“Did anyone just hear gunshots and police cars in Cooper-Young?”
“Did anyone just hear that drive-by shooting? Five shots fired, I hear police now.”
“My camera caught this random guy going through my car. Around 1:55 a.m.”
“Anybody recognize this porch pirate. 4:00 in the afternoon!”
“Kittens! Found these three under my porch.”

These were the first five posts I read Sunday on Nextdoor.com, the social media network that keeps us all alerted to gunshots, porch pirates, “suspicious” youths, and stray kittens. I get email alerts and occasionally succumb to the teasing headline, often to my regret, mainly because of the comments.

But last Monday, November 27th, Nextdoor made real news. You probably heard or read about it. The Flyer’s Kailynn Johnson broke the story on our website, and local television stations soon ran with it. It was a pretty scary tale.

A woman living on Peabody posted a photo of one of her neighbors walking down the street brandishing what appeared to be a semi-automatic weapon. He was holding it high, at face level, and looked to be striding westward. Two schools are within a couple blocks of the spot where the armed man was walking: Grace St. Luke’s (GSL) and Idlewild Elementary.

From Johnson’s story: “When pictures of the individual began to circulate on the neighborhood app Nextdoor, GSL began a school-wide lockdown and notified police. At the time that parents received the initial notification, the school stated that the ‘suspect [had] been apprehended per the Memphis Police Department.’

“Shortly thereafter, parents received a second email with updates to the situation stating that they had received information from the West Precinct that ‘the individual with the weapon had been apprehended.’ However, according to the school, an in-person visit from an officer contradicted this information.”

MPD spokesperson Christopher Williams issued a statement Monday that there were complaints of a “man walking on the sidewalk armed with a rifle.” Williams said the man was not accused of committing a crime. “While it’s odd,” he said, “merely openly carrying a gun on a public sidewalk isn’t illegal. He was not located.” The spokesperson said there was “no incident report” filed on the Peabody gun-wielder.

“Odd” is not the word I would use, but that’s just me. What is odd is the fact that people on Nextdoor said they saw police officers and vehicles at the mystery man’s house, to wit: “He lives near me in a rental. And yes. It’s for real. Eight policemen were over there banging on the door and on the side of the house. He wouldn’t come out. They spoke to him thru his door and then left.”

On Tuesday, November 28th, the MPD told Johnson the individual was not accused of a crime and was not located.

So, who was lying? GSL, the Nextdoor posters, or the Memphis Police Department. The answer became obvious the following day, Wednesday, November 29th, when the MPD issued an, oops, incident report.

From the report: “The male subject told officers that he was the person walking down the street with his weapon. He said he was walking down the road with his weapon because he was scared. He told officers that Memphis is a dangerous place. He advised that he never wanted to harm anyone. He said that he only carried the rifle for his protection.

“The writer [officer] had the Real Time Crime Center check the subject, and he came back with negative results. Officers on the scene also checked him; he had no criminal history. The writer asked him if officers could see the weapon he was walking with, and he allowed officers to see the weapon. The writer … took a photo of the weapon. … The writer did not notice him to have any mental illness. The weapon was left with the subject.”

Well, that certainly makes me feel better. An MPD officer “did not notice” him to be mentally ill, so he got to keep his AK. Welcome to Governor Bill Lee’s and the GOP’s Tennessee, where a random guy can walk the streets around elementary schools with an automatic weapon.

For freedom. Or something. Please remember who put the NRA in charge of Tennessee gun laws when you vote next November. And let’s all pray that the unnamed police officer’s evaluation of “the subject’s” mental health is accurate.

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At Large Opinion

Getting Schooled

Photo: Sandra Cunningham | Dreamstime.com

“We won with young. We won with old. We won with highly educated. We won with poorly educated. I love the poorly educated.” — Donald Trump

You know who else loves the poorly educated? Tennessee Governor Bill Lee and the GOP-led Tennessee Legislature. In fact, they love the poorly educated so much that they’re determined to make a lot more of them. Let us count the ways. It’s a multi-pronged approach.

Earlier in November, the GOP formed the very seriously named “Joint Working Group on Federal Education Funding” to consider whether Tennessee should become the first state in the nation to turn down federal education funds, which amount to more than $1 billion per year.

On its face, such a move seems really stupid, since we Tennessee taxpayers contribute to that $1 billion with our federal tax dollars. And since much of that rejected funding would have to be replaced by state money, we taxpayers would take a double hit if it were rejected.

But don’t forget, this is the same bunch of loons that votes to reject billions of dollars in federal healthcare funding every year because it has “strings attached,” even as the state’s rural hospitals are folding in county after county due to lack of funds. Brainiacs, they are not.

Similarly, many Tennessee Republicans think the state shouldn’t accept federal education money because, well, “strings” — the strings in this case being requirements that some of that funding must be used for low-income students, students with disabilities, Title IX (which prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender), and school lunch and breakfast programs. You know, the communist stuff.

At any rate, when the very serious task force wrapped up its meetings last week, Republicans had not yet made a determination one way or the other about accepting the education funding, but pledged that more hearings are possible in 2024, and that they planned to invite the U.S. Department of Education to testify before the legislature.

But it gets worse. Much worse. Get ready to say hello to Governor Lee’s new statewide voucher program. He’s scheduled to announce it this week. Here’s how it works: For every school-age child in your household, you get a $7,000 voucher which can be applied to pay tuition at any school in the state — religious, secular, charter, you name it. For a wealthy Tennessee family with, say, three kids at high-tuition private schools, this amounts to a $21,000 gift from the state to go toward sending Aiden, Heather, and Maverick to Hutchison and MUS.

Or, should you choose to do so, you can spend that $7,000 per child voucher to send your kids to Billy Bob’s Jeebus Academy, where science classes are based on the Old Testament. The state doesn’t care. The GOP is doing anything it can get away with to help destroy our public schools. If it also happens to help out the state’s wealthier citizens and its evangelicals, well, so be it.

It’s wrong. It’s even unconstitutional. Article XI, Section 12 of the Tennessee Constitution declares that the state recognizes the inherent value of education and mandates that the General Assembly provide for the maintenance, support, and eligibility standards of a system of free public schools.

Government funding of religious schools strikes at the very heart of the U.S. Constitution’s Establishment Clause, which keeps the government from establishing an official religion or supporting a specific religion: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” Which means if my neighbor wants to send his kid to a Muslim school — or a Catholic school or a Baptist school — I shouldn’t have to pay for that with my tax dollars.

It’s really simple: Public funds should go to public schools and private schools should be funded privately — by those who attend them. Governor Lee and the Tennessee GOP are determined to underfund our public schools, dumb down the children who attend them, and give our tax dollars to parents to help pay for their kids’ tuition at religious and private schools.

It’s bad policy and it’s bad math. It doesn’t add up.

Categories
Letter From An Editor Opinion

Office Space

Editor’s note: Flyer writers will occasionally share this space.

The other day my Mac laptop started freezing up. I looked at its storage capacity and saw that it was more than 90 percent full, stuffed to near capacity with photos, documents, music, apps, and email files. I needed to offload some of that RAM-devouring content.

I began by deleting hundreds of photos, since they are on the iCloud, anyway. Next were thousands of old Word files, everything I’d written since 2015, most of it duplicated elsewhere. Also deleted were a couple dozen ancient apps — Chess, Stickies, Photo Booth, Lensa — all unused for years.

Then I really hit pay dirt: emails, thousands of them from 2010 to 2014. I’d transferred them to this computer from my old one for some reason. It was like finding a time capsule. All the pressing problems and issues and humor and humanity of that time brought back to life: Can we change the cover photo on the Weirich story? Is Branston’s column ready yet? Don’t forget, the annual 20<30 party is tomorrow night. Bianca put cupcakes on the Flyer table. Cashiola wants to have lunch about the size of the paper after the meeting.

As I scrolled, other names appeared that I hadn’t thought of in years — ad sales reps who didn’t make the grade, that weird receptionist who liked to use the intercom just a little too much, that snooty intern who dropped a milkshake on the front hall carpet and just kept walking. “That’s what janitors are for,” he said. Keep walking, we said.

It was a different time, a different culture. We ate lunch together, smoked on the back stairs together, stayed late when a story was breaking, ordered pizza and drank beer together on Tuesday after the paper went to the printer.

We hung out. We gossiped. And we emailed: What is going on with Rhonda’s hair? Is Phil getting divorced? What’s the deal with this new CFO? Is Donna P. wearing a f—king wig today? Are we getting a bonus this year? All this and more, captured for posterity in those long-forgotten office emails.

There were emails about snow days, which didn’t exist on Tuesdays because the paper had to get out, no matter what. There were Tuesdays when I picked up staffers from all over Midtown because I had a four-wheel-drive vehicle and used to live “up north.”

On days when school was called off, the office was filled with toddlers, as staffers brought their kids to work. The break room became a de facto kiddie lounge. We all knew the names of everyone’s kids. Most of them are in college or older now.

But the real email gold was the discovery of several issues of The Tattler, the now-defunct monthly company newsletter. It was written by senior editor Michael Finger, and to say he took liberties with the truth is, well, something of an understatement. The Tattler featured the expected office news, but it also featured long, rambling stories, very loosely based in truth, but mostly just created by Michael’s fertile imagination. No targets were spared. Once, the CEO had a fender-bender on the way to work. Not a big deal, you might think. But the story published in The Tattler featured ladies of the night (the Richardson twins), the deployment of 17 meticulously enumerated airbags, and the subsequent confinement of the CEO to a mental hospital with aluminum foil on the windows.

And no, Michael didn’t get fired. It was just business as usual for The Tattler. Everyone was fair game.

But those days are gone now, lost to the great office diaspora spawned by Covid. Millions of companies and businesses discovered they could produce their products with their employees working from home “remotely,” which is a perfect word for it. No more rent! Zoom became a noun, as in “I’ve got a Zoom at 10:30,” and now millions of us who once worked in offices mostly see our co-workers in little boxes on a computer screen.

An entire culture has vanished for millions of people. The office once was a congregation, a club, a family. People spent more daylight hours in their office than they did at home. Now, not so much. We take the change for granted because humans are nothing if not resilient. But something of value was lost and is unlikely to return.

Categories
At Large Opinion

Made Ya Look!

Heavy is the head that wears a cap. (Photo: Bruce VanWyngarden)

I’m normally not the kind of guy who likes to draw attention to myself or my politics in public. There are no candidate bumper stickers on my car. I don’t wear political T-shirts, unless it’s something like “Save the Aquifer.” I don’t put up yard signs for candidates, though my wife sometimes does.

I try to keep my professional life and my social interactions separate, but it doesn’t always work. Often, when I’m introduced, people will say something like, “Oh, the Flyer guy. Yeah, I read your column.” Then there’s often a moment of frisson as I wait to check the vibe. I got a bad vibe the other night at a restaurant in Regalia Shopping Center, when the person I was introduced to said, “Oh, yeah … You’ve got a lot of opinions, don’t you?”

Yes, I do. Pleasure meeting you. See ya. Bye.

Anyway, as I said, I try to avoid such situations. So I don’t know what on Earth I was thinking last Saturday when I decided to wear a red baseball cap to Fresh Market. It looks exactly like a Trump MAGA cap, but the text reads:

MADE YA LOOK

BLACK LIVES MATTER

It was a gag gift from my wife and it has hung from my desk lamp at home for months. I can’t tell you why I suddenly thought it was a good idea to wear it.

When I got to the store and started walking across the parking lot, I realized that anyone more than 20 feet away would just assume I was wearing a MAGA hat. The joke only worked if the jokee was facing me and close enough to read the text. Oops. Nonetheless, I persevered, while noting as I grabbed a shopping cart, that the damn hat and people’s possible reactions to it was all I was thinking about.

First stop was at the berries display to pick up my weekly ration of blueberries. There was a Black guy putting out fresh plastic tubs, stacking them neatly. I saw his head jerk my way as he noticed my hat. I stared nonchalantly down at the produce, hoping the dude was reading my hat. He was.

“I like that hat,” he said, laughing. “You had me for a minute.”

“Oh yeah, this hat? Ha ha. It always gets a reaction,” I said, shamelessly. Ha ha. Phew.

I drew a couple of looks from people in the produce section, but no one was close enough to get the joke, so I was either just another dumb-ass Trumper or a fellow patriot, depending on their politics.

At the deli counter, I studied the array of roast chickens, head lowered, as if deep in concentration. The woman behind the counter made no comment. As I pointed at my selection, she handed it to me with an inscrutable smile and said, “Have a great day.” Bupkis.

It was then that I realized the stupid hat was wearing me, instead of the other way around. I might as well have been wearing a white Klan hood with “JUST KKKIDDING” on the forehead. Or a Confederate T-shirt with “I’M A LOSER” on the back. Some things just aren’t funny, even ironically. The MAGA hat has become too loaded with political baggage to be amusing any longer.

I took off the hat and stuffed it in one of my reusable shopping bags in the bottom of the cart. Which is ironic at some level, I suppose.

That evening, being on my own for the weekend, I went to Boscos in Overton Square for dinner. I like to sit at the cozy little bar, and I like their steak sandwiches. As soon as I sat down, I realized I’d seated myself in a combat zone. The Black woman to my left was arguing with a white guy across from her about Trump. “He emboldened people to be racist,” she said. “I can’t stand the man.”

“He did a lot of good things for the country,” the man said.

And so it went for a few minutes. I managed to get my order in, as the bartender rolled his eyes apologetically. Then I watched, unbelieving, as the two protagonists stared at each other silently for a moment, then walked around the bar and hugged. I wish I’d had my hat.

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At Large Opinion

Preacher of the House

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (Photo: United States Congress, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

After three weeks of turmoil, the Republicans in Congress finally picked a speaker of the house last week. His name is Mike Johnson. He’s from Shreveport, Louisiana, and you could be forgiven if you’d never heard of him. He’s only been in Congress seven years, and his political views are, well, concerning. When asked how he would approach the issues of the day, Johnson responded, “Go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it.”

At first, I took this as possible good news. After all, the Bible commands that we love our neighbor, care for the poor, welcome refugees, judge not lest ye be judged, and treat others as we ourselves would like to be treated — all good ideas. Looks like there might be some changes in the GOP platform, I thought.

Turns out, not so much. Johnson’s Bible is nothing if not flexible. When asked about last week’s mass shooting in Maine, for example, Johnson’s governing philosophy was put to an immediate test, since, you know, nobody was packing heat in Biblical times.

Johnson said it was not the right time to consider legislation. “The problem is the human heart,” he said. “It’s not guns, it’s not the weapons. We have to protect the right of the citizens to protect themselves.” In other words, forget that Jesus-y “turn the other cheek” stuff. Lock ’n load, pilgrims.

On climate change, Johnson will likely be the most vocal climate-change denier to ever hold the speakership. He received a 100 percent rating from the pro-fossil fuel American Energy Alliance in 2022. As, no doubt, Jesus would have.

Johnson worked for years as an attorney for the Christian nationalist organization, Alliance Defense Fund, fighting to ban abortion and gay rights. He called the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade a “great, joyous occasion,” and favors a nationwide ban on abortion. As for LGBTQ rights? “States have many legitimate grounds to proscribe same-sex deviate sexual intercourse,” Johnson says, “including concerns for public health, safety, morals, and the promotion of healthy marriages.”

At this point, it won’t surprise you to learn that Johnson was one of the principal congressional leaders in Donald Trump’s attempt to overthrow the 2020 election, and an enthusiastic promoter of the absurd legal theories used by Trump’s “legal team.”

In sum, Johnson is a boiler-plate, right-wing Republican who checks all the boxes: evangelical nationalist, anti-abortion, anti-climate change, anti-LGBTQ rights, anti-gun reform, pro-cutting Social Security and Medicare, and a pro-Trump election denier. The vote to elevate him to the speakership, a position two heartbeats from the presidency, was unanimous among his fellow GOP congressmen. So much for the myth of “moderate” Republicans.

The guy is a loon. And I haven’t even gotten to the weird stuff yet.

When asked why his wife, Kelly, didn’t come to Washington, D.C., to witness his swearing-in, Johnson said, and I quote: “She’s spent the last couple of weeks on her knees in prayer to the Lord. And, um, she’s a little worn out.”

I can’t even begin to parse that. Why would she pray for two weeks prior to Johnson’s election, which took less than one day? What kind of Jeebus weirdness is this? Even Monica Lewinsky couldn’t figure it out, tweeting in response (and I’m not making this up): “Not touching this.”

Johnson and his wife are in a “covenant marriage,” a Christian construct which makes divorce exceedingly difficult. It’s an institution beloved by misogynists, er, evangelical men, because it makes it nearly impossible for a woman to leave a marriage if she’s not financially independent.

And Johnson’s finances are yet another point of intrigue. From Vanity Fair: “In financial disclosures dating back to 2016, the year he joined Congress, Johnson never reported having a savings or checking account in his name, his spouse’s name, or in the name of any of his children. In his latest filing, which covers last year, he doesn’t list a single asset.” So how is that even possible? How does he pay bills?

And it gets weirder. In the late 1990s, when Johnson was in his mid-twenties, he “took custody” of a 11-year-old Black kid. When he and his wife got married in 1999, they claim to have “taken in” the teen as their own child. The teen doesn’t appear in any of the wedding pictures or current Johnson family pictures that have been released to the media. He is said to be living in California with children of his own. It’s undeniably strange. Johnson has likened the relationship to the one in the movie, The Blind Side. Okay. More to come, I suspect.

Johnson and his wife deleted the 69 (heh) episodes of their fundamentalist podcast within 24 hours of his winning the speakership, but they’ve been archived by an activist group and are reported to be very controversial. I’m not in the prediction business (well, maybe I am), but I’m guessing Mike Johnson will come to rue the day when the national media began to take his personal history off the shelf and read it.

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At Large Opinion

Werewolf of Oman

Photo: Csaba | Adobe Stock

I’ve been a member of an email chain gang for a year or so. The other emailers are, like me, older guys with a little time on their hands. And, like me, they love to discuss (read: argue about) politics. The basic drill is that someone emails an interesting or provocative link to a story from, say, The Washington Post or Vice or The Daily Beast, and the commenting and kvetching ensues.

Everyone in the group is relatively progressive. Nobody likes Trump, and everyone’s biggest fear is that he’s going to snare the GOP nomination and somehow stumble his way back into the presidency. You wouldn’t think six or seven guys on the same side could find that many things to argue about. You would be wrong. For example, a couple of the gentlemen are dead-certain that Trump will win the nomination. They see no way for anybody else in the GOP to take it away from him and they savor being the no-nonsense, realpolitik adults in the room. “Trump will be the nominee,” they say. Period.

Others in the group aren’t so sure. They speculate that the publicity surrounding Trump’s numerous legal difficulties will grow, and as evidence against him becomes more specific and more damning, it will become increasingly difficult for him to waltz to the nomination. The “maybe not Trump” contingent also likes to point out that Trump’s mental acuity appears to be waning of late and that his 90-minute rambles are losing their zip. How, they ask, do you win the presidency with no policy proposals, and with a campaign based on a platform of “it’s not fair”?

Then there are those who raise the possibility that Trump might encounter a major health issue. He and Biden are both of an age when they should think twice before ordering a multi-year magazine subscription. Or buying green bananas. How, they ask, can anyone state with certainty that these two geezers will be the nominees?

Finally, there’s my old friend, “Kevin,” the Sir Lancelot of the group, who delights in swashing the buckles and tugging the short-hairs of the realpolitikers with ire-provoking predictions. His favorite lately is that Trump will at some point realize the jig is up, that Jack Smith and/or Fani Willis have him dead to rights, and that all his lawyers and supplicants have flipped and will provide detailed evidence of his schemes to subvert the 2020 election and conceal top secret documents. According to Kevin’s theory, Trump will then see no way to bullshit himself out of his self-created mess and, confronting the likelihood of prison time or losing his fortune or both, will decide to fly off in his private jet … to Oman. Or as Kevin likes to write: “Trump will become the Werewolf of Oman.”

No doubt it’s a phrase that has a ring to it, but why Oman? According to Kevin, it’s because of a June 30th New York Times story that centers around a multibillion dollar Trump business deal with the government of Oman. From the Times article: “The Omani government is providing the land for the development, is investing heavily in the infrastructure to support it, and will get a cut of the profits in the long run. …

“Mr. Trump was brought into the deal by a Saudi real estate firm, Dar Al Arkan, which is closely intertwined with the Saudi government. While in office, Mr. Trump developed a tight relationship with Saudi leaders. Since leaving office, he has worked with Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund to host the LIV golf tour and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner received a $2 billion infusion from the Saudi fund for his investment venture. Under its terms, the Trump Organization will not put up any money for the development, but will help design a Trump-branded hotel, golf course and golf club, and will be paid to manage them for up to 30 years, among other revenue.”

Quite the tempting retirement option, you must admit. Trump spends his final years in Mar-a-Oman, golfing, schmoozing, and sending out social media posts about how he was hounded from the country he loves by “crooked Joe Biden and thug Jack Smith and racist Fani Willis.” No foreign policy decisions or immigration messes or economic headaches. Just mid-day tee-times and endless sunshine. Sing it with me, now … “Ahhh-ooooo, Werewolf of Oman.”

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At Large Opinion

A Big Ass City

Put the Big Ass park to good use. (Photo: Marcus Jones | Adobe Stock)

These days, the Flyer staff mostly produces the paper and its web content from home. We communicate on an app called Slack, which is like a never-ending group text. We can upload copy, share photos, and discuss web posts as they’re being edited and loaded onto memphisflyer.com. We can also use Slack for snark, gossip, jokes, emojis, opinions — and did I mention snark?

Sure, we have weekly in-person meetings when possible, just to make sure we’re all still breathing, but Slack is where the daily action is. Last week, Michael Donahue wrote a story for the paper about the seminal Memphis band, Big Ass Truck, which is still performing around town when the mood hits them. The band became a subject of a long, rollicking discussion on Slack, as Donahue reminisced about the first time he wrote about Big Ass Truck — which was in the early 1990s for the Commercial Appeal.

“It was the first time the word ‘ass’ appeared in the CA,” said Donahue, proudly. “I had to get permission to use it. I even wrote about that in my lede for the story.”

So there you have it, folks. Some Big Ass history. (Also, here’s a free business idea for some enterprising Memphis culinarian: Big Ass Food Truck. You’re welcome.)

Speaking of history, some recent Memphis events have reminded me of the story of Hiroo Onoda. Onoda (as at least three of you may recall) was a Japanese soldier who famously refused to surrender at the end of World War II. Instead, he retreated into the Philippine jungles and fought on until 1974, when his aging former commanding officer managed to get orders delivered to him, and Onoda surrendered.

Similarly, some Memphians seem determined to keep on fighting long after a war is over — the war, in this case, being the one to preserve Tom Lee Park as a flat, barren field designed for partying, cooking pigs, and having a big-ass music fest two weekends a year for Memphis in May (MIM). In their eyes, that park has been maliciously redesigned by the Memphis River Parks Partnership (MRPP) as a human-friendly area with trees, grass, wildflowers, playgrounds, basketball courts, walking and biking trails, picnic areas, water features, shaded seating with river views … and did I mention trees?

Some supporters of MIM have retreated into the jungles of the internet, where they lob insults and threats at MRPP and its leader, Carol Coletta, refusing to surrender, refusing to accept reality — or truce papers.

In response to its ongoing conflict with MRPP, Memphis in May announced that it is putting the Beale Street Music Festival “on pause” for 2024. The group had previously announced that it was moving the World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest to Tiger Lane near the Liberty Bowl. And that was that. For a minute or so.

But there’s another group in town that makes Memphis in May seem, well, flexible. It’s called Friends for Our Riverfront (FfOR), and it claims to represent the wishes of the city’s founders as decreed in — get this — 1828. As “heirs” of those fine gentlemanly white landowners, the FfOR Ffolks have filed a legal motion to stop the ongoing construction of the new Memphis Art Museum on the bluff at Union Avenue and Front Street. They say the city’s founders wanted the bluff preserved for “public use,” which apparently doesn’t include a world-class art museum that will be free to the, er, public. For, you know, use.

It’s well past time to move on from this petty silliness. The museum is going to be built, and those opposed to it need to get over it. The park is already built, like, completed. Those opposed to it (the Tom Lee Flat Earth Society?) need to come down out of the jungle and move on.

Time waits for no man. In fact, within about 30 seconds of MIM announcing it wouldn’t hold a music fest next year, MRPP announced a deal with the Mempho Music Festival folks to put on a 2024 festival in, yes, the brand spanking new Tom Lee Park. Will it be just like the old music fest? Probably not. Can it be as good or better? We’ll find out, won’t we? At the least, it’s a better plan than everybody throwing a Big Ass hissy fit.

Categories
At Large Opinion

Mayor Culpa

Paul Young (Photo: Brandon Dill | MLK50 )

What’s the opposite of a landslide? Land that doesn’t move? A stable pile of dirt? A hill? There really isn’t a satisfactory answer that I could find. Whatever you might want to call it, the Memphis mayoral election last Thursday was anything but a landslide. It was more like 17 random stones rolling down a driveway.

Let’s get the doleful numbers out of the way first. There are 373,091 eligible voters in the city of Memphis according to the Election Commission. Of that number, 88,668 voted in the mayor’s race, meaning around 24 percent of us who could have voted bothered to do so. That’s some weak sauce, folks. But it gets weaker.

There were, yes, 17 candidates on the ballot, most of whom had no business being there and had no real chance of winning. Some perhaps entered the race because they were bored and/or just seeking attention; others because they are delusional nutcases; others, who can say? Maybe six of those 17 were legitimate candidates. Of these, four emerged as front-runners in the early polling: Paul Young, Floyd Bonner, Willie Herenton, and Van Turner.

I wrote a column three weeks ago about how I was conflicted because as a progressive I was leaning toward Turner, who has genuine Democratic Party bona fides and had garnered the endorsements of several elected officials whose opinions I respect on such matters. But as a pragmatist, I was leaning toward Young because he was leading in the polling I was seeing and he seemed like a solid guy with business and activist connections and no baggage to speak of. But mainly, I was thinking Young because I was dead set on making sure neither Bonner nor Herenton won — one a cop whose jail had major issues and the other an 83-year-old five-time former mayor whose platform was “I’m Willie Herenton, damn it!”

After that column came out, I got calls, texts, and emails from supporters of both Young and Turner, all of them pitching me on the merits of their guy. In the end, I decided to go with my gut and voted for Turner. He came in fourth, right behind Herenton and Bonner, all three of them drawing in the neighborhood of 18,000 votes. So much for my gut. To sum it up: Young won an election to lead a city of 628,000 people with 24,400 votes, which is 6.5 percent of eligible voters. Ridiculous.

I’m not saying Young didn’t deserve to win. He won, and he did so fair and square, and probably as convincingly as one could, given the system. But the system is absurd — nonpartisan with no runoff. It encourages rather than discourages various loose fruits and nuts to enter. With 17 candidates and a low turnout any one of them could get lucky and stumble into the mayor’s office.

It’s not like we didn’t try to change the system. Not once, but twice, the citizens of Memphis approved IRV (Instant Runoff Voting), also known as ranked-choice voting, a system in which voters select their top three choices in order, the idea being to assure that a winner gets 50 percent of the vote, and that voters don’t have to make calculated guesses like I did when selecting a candidate.

But, as with so many good things in the state of Tennessee, our GOP legislature decided to kick that bucket over and ban IRV in the state. Because … well, because they could. And it would tick off Memphis, so why not?

But enough Election Day replay. Paul Young is the new mayor. He’s put in solid work as president and CEO of the Downtown Memphis Commission. He’s smart. His victory speech was inclusive and inspiring. He’s a family guy, only 44, young enough to walk onstage after his win to the sounds of “Who Run It” by Three 6 Mafia. Which is cool, if you don’t read the lyrics, or at least don’t take them literally. But hey, if hip-hop can get young people engaged in city politics, I’m all for it — anything that can get more than 25 percent of us to the voting booth is a win.

Godspeed, Mr. Mayor. You run it.

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At Large Opinion

The Church of Trump

Photo: Triple I Ventures Llc | Dreamstime.com

“Good morning, folks, and welcome. We’ll begin today’s service with a passage from the scriptures.”

The pastor opens a thick red book and begins to read:

“A very important deadline is approaching at the end of the month,” he intones. “Republicans in Congress can and must defund all aspects of Crooked Joe Biden’s weaponized Government that refuses to close the Border, and treats half the Country as Enemies of the State. This is also the last chance to defund these political prosecutions against me and other Patriots. They failed on the debt limit, but they must not fail now. Use the power of the purse and defend the Country!”

“Amen,” says the pastor. “Thus endeth the reading from the Book of Truth Social according to President Trump. And thus sayeth our Lord.”

“AMEN!!” shouts the assembled multitude, resplendent in their go-to-meeting best: T-shirts with slogans like “Let’s Go Brandon,” “Never Surrender,” and “F—k Joe Biden,” and red MAGA hats and American flag halter tops.

“Now, please turn to page 13 in your hymnals,” says the pastor. As the organist begins the familiar opening strains, the congregation joyously breaks into song:

“Young man, there’s no need to feel down

I said, young man, pick yourself off the ground

I said, young man, ’cause you’re in a new town

There’s no need to be unhappy …”

You’ve probably seen the slogan that’s making the rounds in Democratic circles: “He Lost! And You’re in a Cult.” I saw it on a T-Shirt at Kroger the other day and hoped the wearer was ready for a possible confrontation from a true believer.

Because that’s legitimately where we are: Anyone who is still carrying water for Donald Trump is either in a cult and blindly devoted to an authoritarian wannabe, or is a cynical hypocrite who knows Trump is a lying dirtbag but thinks backing the former president will somehow accrue to their benefit. This would include most GOP members of Congress and the Senate.

In a group email chain that I’m on, a Trumper wrote the following: “Liberals fear Donald Trump because he is a real man, not a ‘woke’ liberal wuss.”

Yes, we fear a “real man” who wears more makeup and hair spray than a Miami drag queen and lives in a fading golf club that looks like it was designed by Carmen Miranda on ’shrooms. Nobody fears Donald Trump, except Republicans. He’s a clown-show, a grammatically impaired, narcissistic man-child who recently said in a speech that President Obama was going to start World War II. This is not a man to fear.

What is to be feared is what would happen if this lunatic got back in the White House. That’s a truly terrifying prospect. Imagine having this deeply flawed individual and his unbridled ego in charge of our military, our judiciary, the CDC, and/or anything else that catches his goldfish-level attention span. We’d have, in the highest office in the land, a man with virtually unlimited power, a man who wants to be president for life, a man who would surround himself with the kind of pandering con-men and yes-men who are currently facing indictments of several varieties — along with their former boss. They would no doubt be pardoned. Attorney General Rudy Giuliani, anyone? Secretary of Defense Michael Flynn? Secretary of State Paul Manafort? A Secret Service made up of Proud Boys? Sure.

Yes, that’s where the true fear lies — in the nagging possibility that there are somehow enough idiots in this country to allow this guy to pull off another Electoral College miracle, à la 2016.

Trump never goes to church, but he has disciples, a floating congregation of dead-head sycophants who see him — almost literally — as the second coming. Even the evangelicals, of all people, see this adulterous, lying, cheating layabout as reflective of their faith — faith, in this case, apparently being the ability to totally ignore reality.

In the Truth Social post cited above, for example, The Donald implores Republicans in Congress to “defund these political prosecutions,” ignoring the fact that the Democratically controlled Senate and presidency would render moot any such bill passed by Congress. But such real-world details don’t matter in the Church of Trump. All that matters is that you click your heels together and believe he won — and that you’re not in a cult.