Author: Editorial

Anyone who has spent any time in downtown Memphis has probably chanced upon Jacqueline Smith, one of the most tenacious resistors in the history of civil protest. That’s both appropriate and ironic, because as Chris Davis reminds us once again in this issue, the target of Smith’s protest is none other than the National Civil Rights Museum itself.

Smith’s argument is not with the idea of memorializing Dr. Martin Luther King, who was assassinated in 1968 at the Lorraine Motel, site of the present-day museum. It is with the way in which that project of honoring the martyr, his memory, and his mission has been carried out. As she sees it, the money spent on constructing the current facilities on Mulberry Street might have been invested instead in some kind of project that could have preserved the historical life patterns on Mulberry rather than on a museum.

It’s a point that’s somewhat conceded by Judge D’Army Bailey, one of the museum’s founders. Even making all due allowances for the grievances conceivably being nursed by Bailey, who was forced out as museum president some years ago by members still prominent on the museum’s current board of directors, it is still striking that his point of view and Jacqueline Smith’s, formerly as divergent as could be imagined, have come to rest on the same basic complaint, that of the museum’s potential alienation from the human needs of the area surrounding it.

We have no intention of judging whether that complaint is well-founded or not. Clearly the National Civil Rights Museum has much to commend it, exactly as it is now constituted. It is not only a consistent attraction for visitors to Memphis, it is a nice (in the most nuanced sense of that word) counterpart to some of the bloody history that gave it birth.

Yet neither will we dismiss the protests being made by Smith or anyone else who can make a coherent case against the process of social paving-over which goes by the name of “gentrification.” All of the nation’s major cities have seen that process in the last few decades: As economic opportunity presents itself, the buildings in a depressed area are bought up, refurbished, and rented or sold to upscale businesses and residents. Meanwhile, the low-income residents who had been maintaining an existence in the area do not share in the good fortune. They are uprooted and forced to find habitation elsewhere.

If nothing else, Jacqueline Smith’s enduring protest, whether wrongheaded or not, is a stimulus to all of us who believe in the goal of civil rights to make sure that we mean what we say when we espouse and honor the goals of Dr. Martin Luther King and the other martyrs of our time and place.

Republican leaders Thomas DeLay and Dick Armey, the House of Representatives duo who opined in the wake of September 11th that it would not be “in the American spirit” to confer emergency benefits on those Americans deprived of their jobs by the terrorist attacks, are now doing all they can to sidetrack airport security.

Never mind that a bill to federalize airport-security forces passed the Senate with the absolute bipartisan unanimity of a 100-to-1 vote. Never mind that Americans are now united in their revulsion at the makeshift pseudo-security heretofore provided at the nation’s air terminals by poorly trained minimum-wage workers.

Never mind, for that matter, the obvious and overriding need for public safety, which would be provided by a security element federalized in the mode of the armed services and trained according to the same strict standards.

DeLay and Armey are now attempting to invoke party discipline and parliamentary protocol in order to hold up passage of the much-needed enabling legislation. The reason? A fear that a federalized security force would lend itself to unionization. Armey even has the gall to suggest that the airport-security bill’s proponents are practicing “politics” to keep at bay an alternative measure that would continue to rely on private security firms.

It is to the discredit of President Bush that he continues to support the measure favored by Armey and DeLay — just as his recently improved stature was undercut by his collaboration with them in new pork-barrel proposals and tax-cut bills benefiting the rich.

Senator John McCain, now so often the spokesman for responsible congressional Republicans, said it best Sunday when he termed the GOP leaders’ opposition to the airport-security measure “indefensible.”

So it is. Would that our commander-in-chief saw things as clearly!

Changing the Play

Based on their preseason performance, the Memphis Grizzlies may be a better team than the unit that struggled to win one-fourth of its games in Vancouver. New faces like Pau Gasol, Shane Battier, Brevin Knight, and Jason Williams give fresh hope to the team that will take the floor on opening night Thursday against the Detroit Pistons.

By the same token, Memphis may also find that The Pyramid is a better arena than many people want to admit. We’ll put the over-and-under on the number of games the Grizzlies will win at a franchise-best 30 and the over-and-under on average attendance this season at 15,000 (fans in seats, not tickets sold). At least eight games — Iverson, Shaq, Jordan, Robinson, etc. — should fill all 20,000 seats.

That would make for some nice paydays all around. Nothing like the pot of gold envisioned by Grizzlies owners and their friends last spring, but probably enough to make ends meet in the new and troubling world in which we live.

It was reported in last Sunday’s New York Times that car rentals in the U.S. are down 35 percent in the wake of September 11th. Rental-car surcharges, of course, are one financing component of the proposed new $250 million arena, along with hotel taxes, state aid, and user fees. It is obvious to anyone but the vested interests that none of those sources is going to measure up to projections in the near future — and possibly longer. The Grizzlies are now slated to play in The Pyramid for three years.

And it could be longer than that.

Don’t look now, but it seems as though the General Assembly of the State of
Tennessee will actually summon up enough courage to consider a state income
tax on its merits and may even pass it.

At press time, anyhow, the auguries are good for a special
legislative session next week — the third of the last two years. The previous
ones, called by a dogged Governor Don Sundquist, were exercises in cowardice
and futility — ending without anything close to an agreement on a revenue
means whereby a state going bankrupt could escape red ink and somehow manage
to pay for its essential services.

In the abortive special sessions as well as in the last two
regular ones, the final obstacle to genuine tax reform was in the state
Senate, not the House of Representatives, whose leader, Speaker Jimmy Naifeh
of Covington, long ago signaled that the votes in his chamber were at hand,
for whatever it took. And recently Naifeh gave his endorsement to a specific
tax proposal.

This would be a 3.5 percent flat tax, subject to deduction from
the taxpayers’ federal returns and coupled with reductions in the state’s
prevailing sales tax, which is, by common consent, much too high already. The
tax would be instituted on July 1st, with a proviso — yet to be worked out —
that it be subject to an up or down vote by the people in the first,
experimental year of its operation. Altogether farsighted, sensible, and
democratic.

The good news is that the Senate leadership is in on the game
this time, unlike the case as recently as July, when senators allowed
themselves to be cowed by an unruly mob of tax protesters and backed away from
an emerging compromise measure much like the one being considered now.

All this comes at a time when the state’s fiscal situation,
already difficult enough, has become truly perilous, with estimates of next
year’s projected revenue shortfall — made worse by fallout from the recent
national catastrophe — ranging as high as $1 billion. It passed all
understanding when the legislature chose to adjourn each of the last two years
without putting the state’s books in order. As a result we have seen Draconian
cuts across the board in education, mental health, parks and recreation, to
name a but a few areas of service.

It would be the height of folly to continue in that mode. We
welcome the indications that the state’s legislators this time may choose to
forgo wearing the fool’s cap in the people’s name.

The Mayor’s Race

There was both bad news and good news in District Attorney
General Bill Gibbons’ decision not to run for county mayor. The bad news was
that we were deprived of what would have been yet another quality candidate in
a race that is shaping up as involving several. The good news was Gibbons’
refreshing indifference to running for the sake of running as well as his
demonstrated loyalty to the tasks already assigned him by popular vote. All
indications are that former city councilman John Bobango, a conscientious
public servant, will carry the Republican mantle cast aside by Gibbons. He
will join four well-qualified Democrats already in the race — banker Harold
Byrd, Public Defender A C Wharton, and two able legislators, Senator Jim Kyle
and Representative Carol Chumney. We have every reason to expect that issues
of consequence will be ably debated by these able individuals.

No more satisfying story exists than the parable of the prodigal son, reformed from a wayward past and come home to rectitude and redemption. No more dismaying sequel could be imagined than one in which the prodigal falls off the wagon and returns to his errant ways.

Yet that is the scenario we are getting with the recent proposal from Governor Don Sundquist to “reform” TennCare, the state-run medical program for Tennessee’s uninsured and uninsurables.

Since its inception in the second term of former Governor Ned McWherter, TennCare has functioned as a model, however imperfect, of a state’s concern for its citizens — an improvement over the bureaucratic federal system of Medicaid, which it replaced through a waiver granted under the administration of former President Clinton.

Now Sundquist, who has been a champion of TennCare for the last several years, is seeking a new federal waiver for a watered-down version of TennCare which would provide less care for fewer citizens — notably large numbers of uninsurables who would be sliced from the program’s rolls. It is no secret that all this was offered as a sop to the opponents of Sundquist’s various tax-reform plans in the hope that these naysayers would see the governor as cost-conscious and thereby, as if by magic, relent in their obstructionism.

This strategy was unfortunate enough, but, when a federal judge blocked the waiver at the request of protesting health-care advocates, Sundquist became miffed and threatened to junk TennCare altogether. A prodigal act indeed.

The governor himself — who transcended his traditionalist conservative background several years ago to become a proponent of a state income tax and other progressive concepts — has made the point in the past that Tennessee is better off financially with TennCare as it was initially conceived than it would be with Medicaid. Plagued as the state’s program has been with mounting costs and inefficient provider organizations, TennCare is still less of a financial burden on the state and its citizens than the federal program by itself would be.

One of the problems with Sundquist’s proposed restructuring is that not only would it cruelly expunge too many people — mainly those with prior illness who have no hope of gaining private insurance — it would also deny the state significant infusions in the way of federal matching funds.

This is one of those cases of simple arithmetic in which less is less.

We urge the governor to repress his less than commendable reaction to the judicial ruling and to forgo pushing ahead with his ill-advised restructuring of TennCare. We sympathize with a chief executive who has seen his tax-reform plans frustrated by mossback members of his own Republican Party and by opportunistic Democrats. But in this case the proposed solution, the gutting of TennCare, would not only be a bad end in itself, it is almost surely destined to fail as a concession to the professional government-bashers and ax-the-taxers, who in July conjured up a bona fide riot to sabotage tax reform and have indicated that they will continue to oppose it for the foreseeable future.

Better to see to our duty toward the uninsurables than to pander to this benighted lot.

Now that the initial shock of the catastrophe of September 11th has worn
off and the nation has settled down for a long-term combat with an elusive —
and somewhat illusory-seeming — foe, attention in Memphis and Shelby County
has returned somewhat to more local and mundane concerns.

On the high side was the debut this week of the Memphis
Grizzlies, the city’s new NBA team, which had a long-awaited exhibition game
with the Portland Trailblazers scheduled for The Pyramid. On the low side was
the latest black eye received by our community, in the form of brand-new
rankings of state schools which show that Memphis is home to fully 64 of the
98 Tennessee schools ranked as under-performing according to an official state
measure.

Without intending to make light of the current national
emergency, which is serious indeed, we would suggest that this showing by the
city school system is, in its own way, an equally grave threat to the future
of our community. And there is nothing at all illusory about this one.

Basically, these 64 schools have been put “On Notice” –
– meaning that they have a year by the terms of the state’s Basic Education
Plan to show improvement. If they don’t, they will be placed on official
probation. If within two years of that point, the schools fail to show the
necessary improvement, they are subject to state takeover. Nobody really knows
what that means in the realm of change nor how soon or dramatic that change
would be. (For the curious and/or concerned, this week’s cover story by Mary
Cashiola goes into the matter in some detail.)

What is demonstrable is that such a result would amount to a
grade of F for the Memphis public school system, and even if the system could
be upgraded via state intervention, the sense of failure would hang over the
system and the city for some time to come.

In the short run, the city system still has a chance to mend
itself through its own means albeit with some — mainly professional —
assistance from the state. Unfortunately, the state’s currently precarious
fiscal condition ensures very little of that assistance will be financial. We
hope for the community’s sake that those conservatives who are always saying
that “throwing money at a problem” doesn’t fix it are right, because
clearly there is precious little to throw our way just now.

In any case, we all have a stake in the Memphis school system’s
“instructional improvement initiative” (III), called into being to
fix the problem. We can only hope that it calls upon real effort and ingenuity
and does not become just another bureaucratic alphabet agency.

Otherwise, the community, as school board member Sara Lewis
succinctly put it, is “going to be in serious trouble in about 15
years.” As she noted, the 117,000 students currently at risk in our
under-performing system constitute the pool out of which our future decision-
makers will emerge.

As any halfway-attentive motorist driving through our part of the country must have noticed, several billboards these days advertise, in one form or another, a smaller telephone company’s determination to vie with “the big telephone company” for a share of the public’s business. It is all part of the competition that has gone on in telecommunications since Congress deregulated the industry in the 1980s.

But the fact is (as some of those billboards go on to imply or state outright), the competition is, by its nature, unequal. There are numerous natural advantages which the established network of Bell companies possess, based largely on their name recognition, long-developed infrastructures, and superior prowess in what President Bush likes to call “capital formation.”

Still, fair is fair, and the rules of a free-market society permit such advantages. What isn’t so fair is the way, documented in this issue of the Flyer, that a large company can frustrate the incentives created by Congress that both enable smaller companies or those with specialized focus to compete and provide a means for impoverished customers to afford basic telephone service.

That’s exactly what has happened, however, with the way that BellSouth, the monolith of the telecommunications industry in these parts, has handled subsidy programs for such customers that have been authorized by the state and federal governments. In the former case, the state has directed BellSouth, under its state license, to collect a small surcharge from its regular customers to help defray the monthly service costs of disadvantaged subscribers. In the latter case, the federal government provides an outright subsidy to defray the costs of installation.

As the article by Rebekah Gleaves in this issue indicates, a small company — compelled like most such to contract with BellSouth for the services it provides its low-income customers — was unable to get the larger company to pass on the collected subsidy amounts. Both the state attorney general, Paul Summers, and one of the three members of the Tennessee Regulatory Authority, Memphis’ Sara Kyle, found BellSouth at fault, but two members of the TRA decided otherwise and the smaller company, without the infrastructure to process the subsidies on its own, was forced to discontinue its hard-wired telephone service.

This is an object lesson in how competition, though technically in force, can be rendered, in effect, null and void by a dominant company that knows how to play the seams of its relationship with government agencies.

As the telephone case makes clear, those in government charged with regulating utilities and other public-service industries have only a limited wherewithal. There’s a clear moral to the story at a time when the president is suggesting that the new airport security forces to be created in the aftermath of the September 11th atrocities should not be federal, as such, but privately run under government regulation.

Understandably, the horrific events of September 11th have produced demands for giving law-enforcement authorities additional power and responsibilities. Among the proposals made by Attorney General John Ashcroft, several — like a call for stricter supervisory authority over money-laundering activities — are relatively uncontroversial. Others, that would give the Justice Department more access to private e-mail records and allow unlimited detention of suspects in security cases, are more problematic.

We yield to no one in our belief that the public safety requires stricter restraints. One clear example is the call for federal air marshals and stouter buffers in domestic aircraft between the pilots’ cabin and passengers. We are open-minded as well about a proposal to arm the pilots themselves.

But in the aforementioned cases in which long-established civil liberties are at stake, we advocate caution and at least a modicum of legislative debate, to be followed, in case the changes are instituted, by prompt judicial review. Better an ounce of careful consideration now than a pound of cure later on.

Also troubling, and somewhat overshadowed by other events this week, was the administration’s lifting of sanctions against Pakistan and India, sanctions that had been put in place to deter those countries from developing nuclear weapons. The easing of sanctions was done in order to facilitate cooperation from India and Pakistan in our efforts to build a coalition to fight terrorism. Recent history, however, shows us that often those countries and individuals to whom we have supplied arms and training later may turn those very tools against us.

Let’s hope that such tacit encouragement of the production of nuclear weapons doesn’t turn out to be another such instance. The consequences could be staggering.

Under Fire

Significant recent events at both the state and national levels have obscured the fact that Tennessee, already strapped for operating money, finds itself under an imminent deadline of losing federal funds. And the proximate cause of that is right here in Memphis, where — in a little-noticed situation two weeks ago — a man with mental disabilities died while in protective police custody.

This was the second time in the last three months thata mentally disabled resident of a Memphis group home died while supposedly under medical supervision. As a result federal health officials are now looking askance at the state’s current practice of moving mental-health patients from state care into private treatment centers under TennCare auspices. There is already a moratorium in effect on the use of federal funds to move patients from developmental centers to the community after a formal finding that the state had failed to adequately protect their “health and welfare.” The state has until October 15th to produce a plan for doing just that. If it fails, it is in danger of forfeiting roughly $160 million in federal funding — some two-thirds of its community services budget.

“Outsourcing” has become something of a watchword for governments having to operate under more straitened fiscal conditions. But the bottom line is that state-run development centers have a far better record of providing safe and effective care for mental-health patients. Community-based services may constitute an idea whose time has come, but that idea will have to go unless the state, in conjunction with the private providers, comes up with appropriate safeguards.

When New York took that dreadful hit last week, we all felt the blow. This
is true not only in the sense of emotional solidarity or of human empathy or
even of the feelings of unity or patriotism which are unquestionably resurgent
everywhere in America.

It is true because the consequences for New York will be replicated
elsewhere to some degree. One example: At a time when, in Memphis and other
urban communities, there has been a shift of both recreational and residential
venues away from the suburbs and back toward city centers, the fear of being
in high-profile zones could cause a partial or complete reversal of this
flow.

It is true because some of the conveniences that we have previously taken
for granted — relatively cheap and trouble-free airplane travel, for instance
— will henceforth be encumbered with more complication and expense.

For Memphis, which has begun to enjoy a downtown revival and plans to
begin building a new arena for the National Basketball Association’s
Grizzlies, these circumstances could not come at a worse time. If airline
travel ends up being substantially reduced for the aforementioned reasons and
because of a general diminishment of comfort and confidence factors, what will
be the effect on the tourist trade on which so much of our downtown economy
depends? Can we really pay for an arena which is leveraged so heavily on
anticipated revenues from hotel and motel lodging and car rentals?

The answers to these and similar questions will be worked out in time.
Meanwhile, it behooves us to consider the statement of Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld at a press conference this week. As we confront the new breed
of international terrorists, Rumsfeld said we have two choices: “to change the
way we live, which is unacceptable, or to change the way they live.”

Whatever the full implications of that sentence turn out to be, Rumsfeld
is right. We must respond so that our enemies are ultimately the ones to pay
for the horrors of last week and for the state of war which will ensue. It is
as unacceptable to hunker down in physical and emotional bunkers as it would
be to abrogate our traditional freedoms or our tolerance for human
diversity.

No one knows yet what is in store for us, but it is clear that our way
out of the morass of gloom and uncertainty depends on our staying close to the
guiding light of our traditions. And among those traditions is the one
described by the Forefathers as “the pursuit of happiness.” We must continue
that pursuit, even as we track down our enemies and abort their cruel mission.
They may choose to wrap themselves in the language and practice of repression;
we cannot.

Mr. Falwell’s Apology

So it was all the fault of the A.C.L.U., the federal courts, the
“abortionists,” the feminists, and the gays and lesbians, was it? That was
what Jerry Falwell, the apostle of soulless religiosity, said in the aftermath
of last week’s terrorist attacks. (We will spare you his reasoning.) As he
felt the mantle of shame being draped around him, Mr. Falwell was at length
prompted to apologize. He need not have bothered.

We always reckoned him as being sorry.

On Wednesday of this week — a day after the unspeakable horrors

that maimed the landscapes and lives of New York, Washington, and, for

that matter, the other places on Planet Earth where decency and human

hope still reside — a local attorney was making his way through the mass

of humanity that is the Criminal Justice Center in downtown Memphis

on a normal weekday.

As no one needs to be reminded, however, this was no normal

weekday, and the bottom courtroom floor, which usually has all the raucousness

and hustle of a Middle Eastern marketplace, seemed remarkably subdued.

The attorney shook his head. “I wonder why they don’t close this

place,” he said.

There are various answers to this question. There are still agreements to

be reached and verdicts to be rendered and justice to be pursued in the

sticky business of the law. And we all know that, however low our hearts may

have sunk after Tuesday, the social contract depends on our getting on with it.

The lawyer followed up his first observation with another: “Just

wait until we get home tonight and see a thousand body bags laid out

end-to-end on television.”

Unfortunately, what we have learned from those unbelievably

traumatic news reports at the disaster scenes is that not only flesh and bone but

steel and glass and mortar all seem to vaporize into random soot when

collisions and gravity-induced demolitions occur at the rate and force and

temperature present in Tuesday’s monstrous circumstances.

The most ominous lesson of this latest Day of Infamy is that people

and things can be made to simply disappear, as if they never existed.

Add to this the difficulty of determining just who accomplished this act

of mass assassination and the hows and whys of it. Not only the human

condition but the universe itself begin to seem insubstantial. The abyss truly

has opened up in a way it never has before. Our common consciousness is

stunned to the point that even the root premise of the Enlightenment — “I

think; therefore, I am” — cannot be realized.

The only solace to be taken from the day of destruction was that,

unless one’s own house was going up in flames or we ourselves or those close to

us were on our very deathbeds, nothing else seemed to matter. Tuesday was

a great inducer of Stoicism.

Yet it is still both possible and necessary to avoid a further decline

into nihilism. Life still matters, and because it does it behooves us to close

with the murderers and have done with it — and them. It is not a matter of

vengeance; it is a question of insisting that concepts like reality and justice

actually do exist — and have a value that must now be compensated.

We are down to the root cause now, and we dare not fail.

A new urgency was added to the deliberations of the Shelby County

Commission as it met Monday to consider the overdue matter of funding the
county

schools during the current fiscal and academic year. But that’s not all. A new
audience

was on hand as well.

The crowd that turned up for the meeting — composed in large part of

newcomers to commission proceedings — was loud, disruptive, and insulting. At
one point,

Commissioner Walter Bailey — a stouter-than-average man, to say the least —
was called

a “little potentate” by a man who stood up in the middle of
proceedings and shouted

out the epithet at the top of his voice. Other commissioners, and the
commission as

a body, came in for equal — and equally inappropriate — abuse.

Bailey and Chairman James Ford made several attempts to assure the

audience — clearly as determined to cut the commissioners down to size as to
pursue

their stated aim, that of resisting a tax increase — that their concerns
would be

dealt with. And, until the crowd’s more vocal members committed the strategic
error

of overkill, it was clear that several commissioners were responsive to the

anti-tax complaints and even to an organized stunt whereby several audience

members symbolically brandished empty wallets.

Inevitably, however, the demonstrators — for such, in effect, they
were —

pushed their luck to the point of using up both it and the patience of the

commissioners. Finally, it was one of the council’s known conservatives, Buck
Wellford, who

had enough. Pointedly saying, “We’re not going to have anything like
Nashville

here” (a reference to disturbances last month which erupted in occasional
violence

and which many think prevented the state legislature from properly finishing
its

work on a budget), Wellford called for a recess and for the additional
presence of

several uniformed county police and sheriff’s deputies.

“What I found interesting,” Wellford said later after the
commission’s

deliberations had resumed in a more sedate atmosphere, “was how many of
those

folks took off once they realized they weren’t going to be able to disrupt the

meeting. They didn’t want their reasons to be heard. All they wanted was to
put on a

show.” The East Memphis Republican member, who has placed much emphasis
on

curbing increases in the county property tax, said he thought the crowd had

been artificially “whipped up” by a local radio talk-show host, who
apparently,

said Wellford, was emulating two Nashville broadcasters who used their
broadcasts

to generate the mass turnout at Capitol Hill in Nashville last month.

In all fairness, the local broadcaster in question, Mike Fleming, may
not

have condoned the tactics which led Chairman Ford to say, “I have never

experienced that level of contempt for a public body in all my years of
service.” But the

behavior of the ad hoc throng summoned by Fleming was clearly beyond the pale.

All citizens have a right to be heard, and that includes their elected

representatives, whose rights were under assault on Monday afternoon. Indeed,
it is

our hope that the outburst in Nashville, which resulted in broken windows at
the

state capitol and physical intimidation of various legislators, will prove to
have been

a watershed event of sorts.

For some time in the late ’60s and early ’70s demonstrators of the
political

left pushed so recklessly against responsible constraints that they eventually

generated a backlash. Something like that is almost certainly in store for the

cureent demonstrators.