Author: Memphis Flyer

So who knew retiring Memphis police director Larry Godwin was such a raconteur?

Well, maybe former mayor Willie Herenton, who appointed Godwin from the ranks in 2004, and beyond doubt current mayor A C Wharton, who strove his mightiest to keep Godwin on beyond the mandatory retirement this year that, for all practical purposes, was dictated by Godwin’s decision in 2008 to enroll in the department’s Deferred Retirement Option Plan (DROP).

Once in DROP, Godwin could not convince some skeptics on the city council that he deserved to be exempted from the plan’s mandatory stop date, which will occur next month. Nor could Wharton. So, as they say (and not for the first time), Memphis’ loss was Nashville’s gain. The director was snatched up to serve as deputy director of state Safety and Homeland Security by that department’s director, Bill Gibbons, himself a Memphis émigré, as the longtime district attorney general in these parts.

We all knew Godwin’s admirable on-the-job achievements — notably, a 34 percent drop in the incidence of serious crime since 2006. That startling statistic, the updated version of which Godwin revealed Tuesday to members of the Memphis Rotary Club, was due chiefly to the Operation Blue C.R.U.S.H. (Crime Reduction Utilizing Statistical History) instituted by Godwin and enabled by hard research information provided by Professor Richard Janikowski of the University of Memphis. As Godwin explained to the Rotarians, crime control under that program has largely been a matter of putting the blue uniforms where the crime is occurring. (And not just the blue uniforms; Godwin takes enormous pride in having put together an extensive nexus of undercover officers capable of infiltrating criminal enterprises.)

What most of us hadn’t known (and the Rotarians, among other groups, have found out as Godwin has been going about saying his goodbyes) was how compelling a speaker Godwin is. A raconteur, as we said. The man has serious political gifts, and perhaps it is that fact which allowed Godwin to escape the fickle Herenton’s habit of appointing a director-of-the-month.

Godwin was one of a handful of presenters invited to speak at a recent international security conference held in Israel, and as he told the Rotarians a story of how he was required to sweat a prepared text down from an hour to one of six minutes total, it was hard to imagine how he achieved such a feat. This is a man who clearly loves to speak of the achievements he is leaving behind, which, besides Blue C.R.U.S.H. itself, include the creation of a state-of-the-art Real Time Crime Center.

It may well be that newly designated police director Toney Armstrong, who was promoted from the ranks, as Godwin was before him and who to the public is an unknown quantity as his predecessor was, will achieve equally impressive results. He has a hard act to follow, however.

We wish both Godwin and Armstrong good luck in their new endeavors.

Given some of the sturm und drang now circulating in several matters having to do with state government, Monday night’s maiden State of the State address from Governor Bill Haslam was eagerly awaited for clues to the chief executive’s political course.

All things considered, the address was a perfect piece of triangulation — politically equidistant from most of the state’s warring factions, studiously devoid of controversial statements, and containing long-term proposals that are (or potentially could be) actual solutions. Haslam sounded, in fact, like what he appeared to be during his gubernatorial campaign — budget-conscious, moderate, and business-minded.

His prescription for dealing with a projected $1 billion shortfall from the previous year’s revenues — namely, cuts in administrative costs and via attrition — was realistic. His proposal for modest raises for state employees at a time when right-wing members of his own party are decidedly unfriendly to such notions was compassionate, bordering on heroic.

And his proposals for educational reform were, for the most part, unexceptionable. He shied away from espousing or even mentioning any of the punitive measures being aimed at unionized teachers by right-wing zealots in the General Assembly. By contrast, his own chief proposals — lengthening public school teachers’ period of tenure probation from three to five years and tying it to student performance and lifting the cap on new charter schools — were, arguably, reasonable and worth trying.

Neither the governor nor anyone else should be deceived, however. An immoderate and reckless tide is running in the General Assembly — as exemplified by Lieutenant Governor Ron Ramsey’s suggestion last week that Memphis City Schools, about to merge with Shelby County Schools, should instead be taken over by the state.

Good luck to Governor Haslam. He’ll need it.

bad dog

The laughter that rocked Memphis every morning for 22 years has faded away. John “Bad Dog” McCormack, one of Memphis’ most beloved on-air personalities, has lost his battle with leukemia. He was 55.

McCormack’s nickname was misleading. He was fully housebroken and famously kind. Nobody called him Bad Dog until his friend and fellow Rock 103 DJ Tim Spencer bought a T-shirt in New Orleans that read, “He wouldn’t sit. He wouldn’t beg. He wouldn’t heel.” One mention of that shirt on the air was all it took. The name stuck. But when he wasn’t cutting up and cracking up with his Wake-Up Crew co-hosts, the rowdy, round-faced funnyman made time to help those who were less fortunate than himself.

“God’s got us by the heart, the devil’s got us by the balls, and we’re caught in between,” McCormack once said, explaining the Wake-Up Crew’s commitment to hosting an annual radiothon for Ronald McDonald House, an event that has brought in millions to support families while their children receive treatment at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

John McCormack may have been called Bad Dog, but he was a very good man. He will be missed.

It rained last Saturday. Rained all day. Started early in the morning and never let up. Rained in Memphis. Rained in Nashville. Rained up and down I-40, both ways, coming and going. But somehow 3,000 Tennessee teachers, union members, and sympathizers weren’t deterred. They assembled in Nashville on the Bicentennial Mall as scheduled. They marched up to War Memorial Plaza as planned. And they rallied right up to 3 p.m., just like they said they would.

They made the case against a series of laws pending in the Tennessee General Assembly and likely to be passed, some of them this very week. Among the pieces of legislation on tap are a bill to deprive teachers’ associations of the collective bargaining rights they’ve enjoyed for decades; a bill to abolish dues check-off privileges the associations have enjoyed just as long; a bill to transfer the power to make appointments of teachers to the state’s Consolidated Retirement System from teachers themselves to politicians; and, finally, a bill to ban campaign contributions by teachers’ unions or any other sort of public-employees’ unions — this at a time when the John Roberts Supreme Court has licensed corporations to make such contributions out the wazoo, virtually without limit.

All these would-be laws are products of the coalition of Republican ideologues and arch-conservatives and Tea Partiers who have taken over the Tennessee General Assembly. This coalition proved it could work in lockstep during the first week of the current session when it railroaded through, on a party-line vote, the now famous, or infamous, Norris-Todd bill that signaled the imminent return of new special school districts in Tennessee, banned since 1982 but, soon enough, to be permitted for Shelby County alone.

The coalition recorded another success this week when it passed something called the “Tennessee Health Care Freedom Act,” legislation that presumes to exempt Tennessee from abiding by the requirements of last year’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act — odious requirements such as making sure that insurors cannot deny health insurance to someone on the basis of a prior medical condition.

The rationale behind all these laws is elusive. Last week, we commented on the Orwellian aspect of some of the reasons given for passing them — how the GOP legislators said restrictions on teachers’ associations would be good for the teachers and not bad, how it would be easier for teachers to have their voices heard, not more difficult. And so forth. It is all reminiscent of something we learned about in school: the English Poor Law of 1834, which, despite its name, did not provide additional relief to the indigent but shunted them into workhouses while, in theory, reducing taxes on English society at large. Anybody who wonders how that worked out hasn’t read enough Dickens.

The teachers and union people who gathered in the rain in Nashville last Saturday proved one thing — that they are prepared to stand up for themselves. Last week, we wondered in this space about a “passion deficit.” No longer.

Last week, we dissertated briefly on what appears to be a worldwide revolution and speculated on how much of its liberating energy and particulars might filter down to our own modest realm. In the case of the Tennessee General Assembly, it would appear that very little of it will.

In Wisconsin, protesters in the thousands are still turning out to defend the collective bargaining rights of public school teachers in that state, and Democratic members of the Wisconsin state Senate remain outside the state boundaries, thereby avoiding a potential court-ordered return to their chamber that would provide a quorum for passage of the anti-union bill.

In Tennessee, a relatively modest contingent of some 200 protesters staged a rally in Nashville last week to protest legislation in the General Assembly that would abolish the existing right of teachers’ organizations, upon majority vote of the organizations’ members, to bargain with local school boards; end the practice of dues check-offs for such organizations; divest the Tennessee Education Association of its appointment rights to the Tennessee Consolidated Retirement System board; and prohibit campaign contributions by members of public-service unions — this last proviso occurring at a time when the U.S. Supreme Court has opened the gates wide for unlimited contributions by corporations.

Taken as a whole, this legislative package, which seems destined for sure passage in a legislature lopsidedly dominated by Republicans of the arch-conservative and Tea Party variety, would abrogate such minimal rights as are now possessed by teachers and other public employees. And they presage further restrictions on the state’s working population at large. It is hard to tell whether self-deception or mockery was the primary component of an assertion by state senator Jack Johnson (R-Franklin), primary sponsor of the anti-union legislation, that he knew “in my heart” that the bills would give teachers more, not less, say in determining their own welfare. Right. And war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength, just as the great satirist George Orwell said they were in his immortal dystopian novel 1984. That ignorance is indeed strength in the current General Assembly can hardly be denied, however.

So what are legislators who oppose these Draconian measures doing about them? Well, they won’t be emulating their absenting counterparts in Wisconsin. They’ve indicated they will stay on the job, voting no and taking their licking, though Tennessee law is identical to Wisconsin law in mandating a quorum of two-thirds present to constitute a quorum. And there are enough Democrats in both the Senate and the House, though just barely, to deny a quorum by their concerted absence.

And locally, the Shelby County Commission failed by a single vote this week to endorse a symbolic resolution by Commissioner Steve Mulroy to defend the threatened teachers’ rights. What was it Yeats said about the best lacking all conviction, while the worst were full of passionate intensity? Oh well, another protest rally is scheduled for Nashville this week, and maybe, just maybe, it can ignite some passion, too.

Is this 1989 all over again? Only the very young among us have no residual memory of that year, when so much of the world chose to come out from under the yoke of usurped and unearned authority. All of Eastern Europe did, as did the various peoples of the monolithic empire that had called itself the Soviet Union. China made a valiant effort with the uprisings of youthful freedom-seeking citizens who massed every day in Tiananmen Square. That revolt was crushed by the still-powerful forces of the dictatorial state, but if political democracy itself was denied, the Chinese authorities were at least forced to open the vault of economic opportunity, and all the sublimated energy of frustrated revolution would go on to transform China into a powerhouse of technology and world trade.

So here we are in 2011, a generation later, and the dominoes have started falling again — in what had seemed the least likely place, amid the oligarchic states of the Middle East. First Tunisia fell, then Egypt, and now the Libyan regime of strongman Muammar al-Gaddafi is teetering. Bahrain and Yemen may be next, or even Iran, which deposed its shah in 1979 and nearly did the same to its demagogic premier Mahmoud Ahmadinejad after a conspicuously faked election two years ago. Much is being made of the role of digital technology and social networks in effecting this change. Who would have thought, a decade or so back, that something with the effete-sounding name of Twitter could connect the previously cowed masses in those disciplined lands and organize them in concerted action against their masters?

Something like that is what Beethoven had in mind during a previous revolutionary epoch, the early 19th century, in the wake of the American and French Revolutions, when he adapted words of the poet Schiller to a stirring final work, his Ninth Symphony, which ended with the choral declaration that “Alle Menschen Werden Brüder!” “All mankind will be brothers!”

It’s taken awhile, but now it begins to seem possible, after all. As Marty Aussenberg notes in this week’s Viewpoint (p. 17), the viral energy that began in Tunisia and Egypt managed somehow to end up in Wisconsin, where protesters have taken to the streets to defend the continued existence of public employees’ unions. We’re realistic enough not to assume that something similar will happen in Tennessee, where the same cause is at stake in the current session of the state legislature. But it could.

If it doesn’t happen in Tennessee, it will be because the revolutionary tides in our state are shifting in an opposite ideological direction. Even that, however much it may dismay the losers in the last election cycle, is a sign of the popular ferment that is a fact of our lives these days. A fact, indeed, of all lives everywhere. It is not what we expected, but what did we expect? The times, they are a-changin’. Indeed they are. As they always do.

Our mailbag — okay, our e-mail in-box, this being 2011 — is filling up with unsolicited communications from the likes of Bill Wood and Denise Martin — Republican activists, if you will. Staunch conservatives.

Loyal rank-and-file types you see at every local GOP event. And what is it that prompts them to write? Nothing less than the monolithic Republican vote corralled into obedience in the Tennessee General Assembly last week for the ultimate purpose of suppressing — or, at the very least, redirecting and co-opting — the self-determination of the citizens of Memphis.

Undeceived by the stated premises of the Norris-Todd bill, passed on party-line vote in both Senate and House last week, Wood recognizes that the measure is meant not to facilitate the forthcoming citywide referendum on de facto merger of the Memphis and Shelby County school districts but to defeat that outcome with its climactic loophole allowing a special school district in suburban Shelby County.

Says Wood, the immediate past president of the East Shelby County Republican Club, the county’s largest: The members of an “illegitimate” county school board “are fanatically pursuing a special school district which would divide Shelby County into an affluent mostly white portion and a less affluent mostly black portion.”

And Martin, in a widely circulated e-mail: “This shows that you can go and change the law midstream on anything that you don’t like. I am not the only Republican that is upset over this. I never thought that I would see the day that I would support the Democrats over my fellow Republicans. This is just sickening.”

Some of us were struck by the unintentional irony of Norris’ contention — meant to be a case-clincher — that a unified Shelby County School District would be the 16th largest in the United States. That would be something on the order of Dallas, Norris lamented, as if a comparison to the booming metropolis of the Texas plains should cause us to hang our heads in shame. The senator followed that up with the solemn assertion that the teaching corps and administrations for such a district as might be created by a merger would be “larger than most towns.” Then he offered a kindly smile and a pause for the thought to mushroom into — what? A sense of horror?

It bears pointing out to Norris that, like Nashville/Davidson County itself, Memphis and Shelby County together constitute an entity within which several shopping-center malls are larger and more populous than many towns.

In the words of Walt Whitman, the legendary American poet of the 19th century, we are large, we contain multitudes. We may or may not end up with a unitary school district in Shelby County, but it’s possible we could end up with something we haven’t experienced since the days of Boss Crump — a Memphis unified in sentiment and purpose, fueled by the power of outrage, and soaring on the wings of conviction.

For which, in the long run, we may, oddly enough, have Mark Norris and his House partner, Curry Todd, to thank.

It is almost forgotten now, in the Sturm und Drang of the imminent March 8th citywide referendum on the surrender of the Memphis City Schools charter — and the de facto merger of MCS and Shelby County Schools which a positive vote would produce. But the current crisis — which now involves the several branches of state and local government — supposedly began with SCS board chairman David Pickler’s post-election boast that now was the time for the county schools to pursue legislative action on behalf of special-school-district status.

Since the onset of the crisis, it has become fairly obvious that a number of the parties involved — including MCS superintendent Kriner Cash, SCS superintendent John Aitken, and possibly Mark Norris, the GOP’s majority leader in the state Senate — would actually prefer to return to the status quo which prevailed before the current showdown got under way. To wit: the side-by-side co-existence of two separate schools systems.

Should a merger of the two systems occur as a result of the referendum, the amalgamation that would occur might, at least in its beginnings, resemble an attempt to combine an apple with an orange. SCS, for better or for worse, is a fairly bare-bones system, with minimal administrative overhead and relying on more or less traditional curricula and teaching methods. MCS, on the other hand, is — again, for better or for worse — more complicated administratively and is pursuing a number of overlapping teaching methods, some of them considered innovative enough to have interested the Gates Foundation into bestowing a $90 million grant to further their progress.

A successful union of the two systems might occur all the same, especially with the several organs of local and state government now actively involved in seeing a transition through to a positive conclusion.

But, as noted, there are those who are uneasy about the uncertainties and pine for the status quo. It is likely, for example, that Norris’ bill — which provides for an alternative referendum involving both city and county, to be conducted only after a significant delay and the intercession of a joint planning board — is designed not, as many merger advocates believe, to facilitate some treachery whereby a special-school-district bill could be introduced on behalf of the county under cover of the delay.

More likely, the senator hopes that if things are sufficiently prolonged and weighed down with enough conditions, clauses, and considerations, both the merger prospect and that of a special school district will finally just go away.

In the minds of county advocates, the aforesaid status quo is one which the two systems, both funded by Shelby County government (with MCS getting a court-compelled bonus from Memphis city government), go about their previous business as if nothing had meanwhile happened.

But cityside advocates see things differently. To them, the status quo is all of that, plus the vital ingredient missing from the Norris bill and all other alternatives put forth by suburban sources: the continued ability of Memphis voters to decide, if authorized to do so at some future point by another vote of the MCS board, to utilize existing law and start the process all over again. It is a matter, as they see it, not just of fail-safe and the right to vote but of sovereignty.

Which is the basic reason why the status quo seems dead and buried and irrecoverable.

Next week about this time, Mayor A C Wharton will be in Paris, one of FedEx’s three international hubs, discussing the role of Memphis, the company’s base and original hub. Not long after that, he said, Memphis will play host to theWorld Airport Conference. That was the result, he told members of the Memphis Rotary Club on Tuesday, of a trip he made to Peking last year. And he went on to hint that soon he would be announcing two new industrial relocations here, both from outside the country.

     The mayor’s focus on the city’s interface with the world at large had a focus, too, closer to home. Recently, Wharton said, he had addressed “members of the Muslim community” and was pleased to report that “they really want to live in Memphis. They want to stay here. They want to raise their children here.” That he cared about such a thing and wore his feelings about it so proudly on his sleeve was as impressive as any wheeling and dealing done abroad.

     As they say, the mayor had his audience in the palm of his hand. That’s the kind of salesman he is. He was in full sail Tuesday, preaching to a choir that seemed already converted but ready to go down the aisle again.

     Much of the attention lavished on Wharton in 2010 — his first full year in office as the city’s chief executive — was earned, frankly, by his highly public efforts to clean up various messes left by his predecessor, notably in the city’s graft-ridden General Services Division.      Entering 2011, Wharton seems to be focusing on his own accomplishments — appropriately enough in an election year which is expected to see him handily returned to office with minimal opposition or perhaps none at all.

     He talked of a 25 percent reduction in serious crime, “and those are real numbers, not abstract ones,” he pointed out. Yet another locally based conference, an upcoming one of Justice Department officials, he attributed to that accomplishment.

     He mentioned the press conference held that very day to cope with the teen pregnancy problem recently highlighted at Frayser High School.

     The mayor boasted of the new hand-in-glove cooperation he seems to enjoy with his Shelby County mayoral counterpart, Mark Luttrell, and of how that partnership, stripping away the red tape, was key in attracting the soon-to-be mammoth Electrolux plant here.

     And he even addressed one of the most annoying problems common to mid-city drivers: the railroad traffic that parallels Poplar Avenue, the city’s main connecting artery. The mayor pointed out what few know. Only one local customer is directly served by the pass-through (The Commercial Appeal, as it turns out), and the mayor promised to try to reroute as much as he could of the rail traffic around the perimeter of the city.

     That’s what we call curb service. We can imagine this or that critic complaining, with more or less justice, that all of this is just feel-good stuff. Well, maybe so, but maybe that’s exactly what this mayor was elected to provide.

Tennessee state Senate majority leader Mark Norris announced this week that he would introduce legislation that would effectively put a stop to a planned vote that would give Memphis residents the option to approve a “surrender” of the Memphis City Schools charter. If city voters approved the surrender, under current law, Shelby County Schools and Memphis City Schools would be forced to merge.

Norris’ law would provide a year-long period to set up a planning commission to study the process. At the end of that year, both school boards would then vote on whether to recommend approval. After that, those residing in both districts would separately vote to approve or reject the merger. The merger would require approval from voters in both districts.

Let’s not sugarcoat this: What Norris’ legislation would do is prevent a merger, since it’s highly unlikely county voters would approve it. It also neutralizes the right of city residents to vote to surrender their school charter. Even if they vote for surrender, county residents can vote to reject it. Norris’ proposed statute gives Shelby County Schools exactly what board chairman David Pickler is seeking: permanent autonomy and a legislative barrier that would maintain the current divided school systems indefinitely.

Norris told The Commercial Appeal that his legislation was designed to avoid a “hostile takeover” of county schools by city voters. We have no doubt that many in the county see Memphis’ surrender of its school charter as just that. But let’s not forget that it was the county school board that started this whole brouhaha by announcing its plans to gain “special district” status, freezing Memphis and its taxpayers into a disadvantageous position.

This “us versus them” mentality between city and county has brought us to this impasse. It’s a lose-lose situation. Memphis public schools are populated by students who are poor and black. Shelby County schools are populated by a more diverse student body, economically and racially. Educating a middle- and upper-class student population is easier and less expensive. That’s becaue these students have certain built-in advantages, including ease of transportation to optional schools and extracurricular activities, home computers, and engaged parents.

Make no mistake: There are thousands of bright, motivated, and successful students attending Memphis City Schools. The graduation rate has risen significantly in recent years. There are hundreds of dedicated teachers and administrators fighting long odds to educate a vast, disadvantaged student population and help bring them out of poverty. And yes, they are residents of Shelby County, too.

Ultimately, as Memphis goes, so goes Shelby County. It’s a hard truth that many living outside the city limits don’t want to acknowledge. But spreading the burden of educating the less-affluent among all of us who live in Shelby County makes sense in the long run.

Unfortunately, thanks to efforts in the state legislature, permanent segregation of two large school districts is likely to soon be the law of the land. Court battles will no doubt ensue. Get ready. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.