Category: At Large

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At Large Opinion

Keepers of the Flame

Photo: Evgeniya Leonova | Dreamstime.com

The presidential inauguration in the Capitol rotunda on Monday marked the return to power of the most controversial and scandal-plagued president in American history. It felt a little like when the second plane hit the tower on 9/11 — the moment when we knew it wasn’t an accident.

Monday was also Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and here in Memphis — the city where Dr. King was assassinated in 1968 — the celebration of his life takes on a special significance. The NBA’s annual MLK Day celebration featured the Memphis Grizzlies hosting the Minnesota Timberwolves, and the National Civil Rights Museum held a day of events called “Community Over Chaos,” which seemed a most fitting theme.

But before it fades into history, buried by the noisy deluge of Trump drama, I want to take note of former President Biden’s farewell address of last week. As might be expected, he cited the achievements of his administration — the record job-creation numbers, the long-desired ceasefire in the Middle East, the strengthening of NATO, and the ongoing resistance to the Russian invasion of Ukraine — but his real purpose in his speech seemed to be to deliver a warning, to address, as he said, “some things that give me great concern.”

Citing President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell address to the nation, in which he warned the country about the dangers posed by the “military industrial complex,” Biden decried the rise of a new threat, one he called the “tech industrial complex.”

“Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation enabling the abuse of power,” Biden warned. “The free press is crumbling. Errors are disappearing. Social media is giving up on fact-checking. The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit.” No errors detected.

The tech industrial complex was on full display in the Rotunda on Monday, including Sundar Pichai (Google), Tim Cook (Apple), Jeff Bezos (Amazon, The Washington Post), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta, Facebook, Instagram, Threads), and Elon Musk (X, Tesla, Starlink, xAI).

Never have so few had so much unbridled power to influence public opinion and so much money to invest in doing so. And it doesn’t help that they’re supplicating themselves (and giving millions of dollars) to the new president to curry his favor. It’s called obeying in advance, and it’s worrisome stuff. Journalism is in danger of being put out of business by “content providers” that have no ethical qualms about ignoring the truth in favor of whatever makes a profit — or makes the president happy.

CNN, ABC, and even MSNBC have also made at least token moves to ameliorate relations with the new administration. CNN buried Trump critic Jim Acosta in a late-night slot. ABC settled a libel lawsuit with Trump that it easily would have won in court. Facebook eliminated fact-checkers. Companies are getting rid of diversity hiring programs. Macho (“masculine energy”) is all the rage among the tech bros. Women’s healthcare rights continue to be eroded in red states.

Biden called it “a dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultra-wealthy people,” and cited the consequences “if their abuse of power is left unchecked.” What Biden was describing is an oligarchy. Merriam-Webster (remember dictionaries?) defines it as “a government in which a small group exercises control, especially for corrupt and selfish purposes.”

Can there be any doubt that an oligarchy of extreme wealth, power, and influence is moving into power in the United States, one that threatens our democracy and our basic rights and freedoms?

Democracy depends upon the will of the people, and if the people are misinformed, disinformed, or uninformed, they can be manipulated. As we well know, public opinion — and elections — can turn on well-funded, broadly circulated lies and propaganda.

Our social media platforms are already permeated by disinformation, mostly via bots that skillfully imitate real people and overwhelm legitimate content by their sheer numbers. Artificial intelligence is now upping that deception to previously unknown heights. Biden called AI “the most consequential technology of our time, perhaps of all time.”

The former president concluded by saying to his fellow Americans, “It’s your turn to stand guard. May you all be the keepers of the flame.” That doesn’t feel like malarkey, folks. 

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At Large Opinion

L.A. Hot Takes

Entire neighborhoods have been reduced to ashes. (Photo: MMPhoto21 | stock.adobe.com )

And the lights of L.A. County
They look like diamonds in the sky … 
— Lyle Lovett

As I write this, devastating wind-fed fires have killed at least 25 people and swept through 40,000 acres in the greater Los Angeles area. If you’re looking for a size comparison, that’s equal to a fourth of the acreage of the city of Memphis burned to the ground — an area equal to Downtown, Uptown, and everything inside the beltway. Thousands of people have lost their homes. Hundreds of schools, churches, businesses, studios, and iconic architectural structures are gone. Entire neighborhoods are reduced to ashes.

Los Angeles County officials characterized the fires as a “perfect storm” event in which hurricane-force gusts of up to 100 miles per hour prevented them from deploying aircraft that could have dropped water and fire retardant on the drought-ravaged neighborhoods when the fires first broke out. The combination of the winds, unseasonably dry conditions, and multiple fires breaking out one after another led to the widespread destruction.

But as L.A. firefighters battled the flames, disinformation was spreading like, well, wildfire: One theory pushed by right-wing media was that the blazes were raging because fire-fighting personnel were led by a lesbian fire chief and the department utilized DEI hiring criteria. X account Libs of TikTok, known for spreading anti-LBGTQ rhetoric posted: “DEI will get people k*lled. DEI MUST DIE.” Donald Trump Jr. said that donations the Los Angeles Fire Department sent to Ukraine in 2022 were somehow related to its response to the current fires.

Not to be outdone, the president-elect himself posted a deluge of misinformation on Truth Social, including this: “Governor Gavin Newscum [sic] refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snowmelt from the North, to flow daily into many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way.” 

And what’s a good tragedy without a trash take from Alex Jones, who posted that President Biden had grounded firefighters and that the fires were being spread as part of a “globalist plot to wage economic warfare”? First Buddy Elon Musk responded to Jones’ tweet in a now-deleted post with one word: “True.” 

None of it was true. The level of diversity in L.A. Fire Department personnel is typical of most urban fire departments in the U.S. The Southern California reservoirs were full, above historic levels. Water intended for the city was not diverted to save a fish called the smelt. Some hydrants went dry because they were intended for use against urban fires — houses, buildings in a self-contained area for a limited time — not wild-blown wildfires spreading over many acres for many days. 

Janisse Quiñones, chief engineer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, said, “We are fighting a wildfire with urban water systems, and that is an unprecedented kind of event.” Quiñones added that experts have seen wildland fires move into urban areas only in the last 10 to 15 years and that they’re still figuring out how to address it.

“The way that firefighting has traditionally been, there are wildland firefighters and agencies, and then there are urban firefighters and agencies,” she said. “Are we having wildland firefighters fighting fires in urban areas or the reverse? Sometimes the approaches are really different.”

All this brings to mind an interview with Denzel Washington I saw last week. When asked about today’s media, he said: “If you don’t read the newspapers, you’re uninformed. If you do read the newspapers, you’re misinformed.” 

He went on: “What is the long-term effect of too much information? One thing is the need to be first. … We live in a society where it’s just, get it out there, be first! It doesn’t matter if it’s true, who it hurts, who it destroys, just be first. So what a responsibility [the media] have — to tell the truth!” 

To which, I would add: What a responsibility you and I have — to seek out the truth, and to learn not to blindly swallow the first piece of information offered, no matter who offers it, no matter how it tickles your confirmation biases. A hot take is seldom the best take. 

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At Large Opinion

New Year, New Ewe

Don’t ew my ewe. (Photo: Timothy Large | Dreamstime.com)

So, the editor said at our last staff meeting that we all needed to come up with something to write about for our annual “New Year, New You” issue. Basically, it’s anything to do with reinventing yourself without actually saying “New Year’s resolution.” Most of the time, it comes down to writing about self-improvement projects, like taking up hot yoga, quitting drinking, getting a Peloton, or buying those puffy new running shoes that somehow make jogging in Overton Park at the crack of dawn appealing. The advertising folks will be selling to local businesses who specialize in such services, so it all tracks. 

I have threatened for years to write about adopting a sheep for this issue, because, well, not using the headline “New Year, New Ewe” just seems like a wasted opportunity. And since 2025 is looming like the open cellar door to the end-times, I figured it was now or never. 

I did a bit of research and read that a ewe is a female sheep, which I already knew. And I quickly learned that my word processing program unhelpfully corrects “a ewe” to “an ewe.” It’s ewes-less to try to reprogram it, I discover, so I move on. After all, I’ve still got to figure out how to get a new ewe in the new year.

Here are some other sheep terms I became familiar with: A male sheep used for breeding is a ram or a buck. A male that has been castrated and that will be used for meat is a wether. And, of course, the little cute ones are called lambs. Whether a lamb grows up to be a wether, a ram, or a ewe (or a chop) is all in the roll of the sheep dice. But for purposes of this story (and maintaining a commitment to the pun), I’m only thinking of ewe, dear. 

A mature ewe weighs 200 to 225 pounds, which seems like a big-ass sheep. So once I get my new ewe (on Amazon?) I’m going to need to figure out a way to keep it fed. It should be able to graze off my yard for much of the year, I’d think, but I don’t have a big lawn, so I might have to supplement it with a couple of hay bales or something. Plus, I could probably walk it around the neighborhood and let it graze in my neighbors’ lawns as we stroll along. I don’t think they’ll mind. In fact, I suspect that my ewe and I would soon become a legend on nextdoor.com — not to mention, the talk of the Memphis Reddit community. Once my sheepish girl has gotten her fill of yummy Midtown zoysia, we’ll just make a ewe-turn and head back home. And, of course, I’ll carry a sheepy-bag for the ewe-doo, just in case. I know the rules. I’m not a savage.

And here are some of the lifestyle improvements attendant with getting a New Ewe in the New Year: Exercise — walking around the neighborhood every day, hefting the occasional bale of hay, not to mention carrying the 12-pound bags of ewe-doo home from your daily walk. You’ll be fit and buff in no time. Free Wool — You just shear your ewe once a year and voila, a big bag of premium wool, ready to be spun into yarn and turned into a sweater by your dear old Aunt Nedra. 

And I’m sure that there are other benefits of ewe-ownership besides exercise and free wool but they’re not coming to me right now. Let me think … Nope. In fact, it’s beginning to become obvious that I’ve written this entire column just to justify using a stupid pun that I’ve resisted using every Flyer New Year’s issue for years. And that’s not fair to you, the reader, or to Ewe, my sheep, who’s been caught up in this awkward transition to urban living through no fault of her own. 

I had another option, too, which makes this all the more tragic. If I had gone with the alternative plan, it would have been easier for all of us. Get a shrub. Plant it. Keep your head down and hope for the best. New Year, New Yew. 

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At Large Opinion

2024 in Review

Tracy Chapman (Photo: Fabio Diena | Dreamstime.com)

As is customary at this time of year, we Flyer columnists take a look back at the preceding 12 months. And oof, it was hard, especially November, when just under 50 percent of American voters cast their ballots for an idiot, enough to put said idiot back in office for four years. Argh.

In early January, having no idea of what was to come, I mused genially about how age was an invisibility cloak because no one cares what clothes you wear, what kind of car you drive, or how your hair looks. Cute. Then January dropped the hammer with the Iowa caucuses, ending the brief fantasy that someone — DeSantis? Haley? — in the GOP could derail the Trump train. 

We got a brief respite in February with the gorgeous performance of Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs singing Chapman’s “Fast Car” at the Grammys. The lyrics transcend the categories that too often put Americans in separate silos, unable to see what we have in common with one another. A queer Black woman and a white country boy singing in perfect harmony was maybe the best three minutes 2024 had to give us. 

Shortly after that moment of kumbaya, America was treated to the viral video of 30 white men demonstrating on the grounds of the state capitol in Nashville. They carried Nazi flags, wore face masks and red T-shirts proclaiming that they were members of a group called “Blood Tribe.” According to the Anti-Defamation League, Blood Tribe members exalt Hitler as a deity. So yeah.

April brought us the most hyped event of the year, which is really saying something. I’m talking about the eclipse, but you knew that, right? Seriously, I am hard-pressed to remember any news event that generated so much social media content, so much blathering punditry, so many hours of preview television coverage as did the Big E. It was the most ballyhooed three and a half minutes since Donald Trump had sex with Stormy Daniels. Then it was over and everybody went, “huh?”

In May, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem revealed that she’d shot and killed her 14-month-old dog, Cricket, because the dog was “untrainable.” As a reward, Trump later appointed Noem head of the Department of Homeland Security.

In June, the Greater Memphis Chamber announced a deal with Elon Musk, “the world’s richest man,” to build the “world’s largest supercomputer” in Memphis. Selling points included our city’s ample water supply, cheap land costs, and the chamber’s willingness to “work fast.” Whether this will be the salvation of Memphis or the “world’s biggest boondoggle” is yet to be determined.

In July, the media wrote 47 million stories about President Biden’s senility after he floundered in a debate with Trump. “Come on, man. I’m the guy who turned this economy around and created 11 million new jobs,” Biden responded. “Sorry, Kamala Harris is now the nominee,” said the Democrat Party hierarchy. As we all know now, that worked out really well.

August brought the scandal of the year! I’m speaking, of course, about the Paris Olympics opening ceremony — which wasn’t actually a mockery of da Vinci’s The Last Supper but still provided several days of fodder for the Evangelical outrage machine.

My personal 2024 probably peaked in September, when I went to Las Cruces, New Mexico, to help celebrate my mother’s 100th birthday. We all had a wonderful time, including my feisty mom, who is now well on her way to 101, Lord willing.

Climate change paid us a visit in October as Hurricane Helene ravaged parts of six Southern states, including Tennessee. The governors of five of those states declared states of emergency in advance of the storm and quickly got federal assistance. The governor of the sixth state, our own idiot, Bill Lee, asked Tennesseans to participate in a “day of prayer and fasting.”

Speaking of idiots, I already mentioned what happened in November and I shall not speak of it again. Sorry.

In December, I continued my self-imposed ban on writing about politics and wrote about giving a guy a ride to Walgreens and back, about creating an AI picture of the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus, and about the pleasures of Mexican restaurants and drinking margaritas. Anything to avoid thinking about politics and the coming 2025 hellscape. Oh, and, uh, happy new year. 

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At Large Opinion

Margaritaville

Who’s to blame? (Photo: Bruce VanWyngarden)

There’s a Mexican restaurant near me where I go for dinner every week or so. The hostess and the waitresses know me. I’m the guy who always orders the fish (or camarones) tacos, a side of queso dip, and a house margarita — and tips nicely. They even know the booth I like. 

The place is usually populated with diners of all ethnicities. The background music is some kind of Ameri-Mexican blend with bright pop hooks and a beat you could dance to if you had more than one house margarita. There’s usually a soccer game on the television. It’s a clean, lively, friendly place. I can eat, look at my phone, and sip my margarita in peace.

The hostess and waitresses speak English better than most of their customers. They’re smart and engaging and easy to chat with. The busboys, not so much. Sometimes, I’ll stop one and ask for something — a fresh napkin, a straw — and they just shake their heads and smile, and go get a waitress. They don’t understand English very well, I assume. They could have crossed the border legally and are waiting for a work visa or a disposition on their application for asylum, but it’s also quite possible they are here without papers, working hard and laying low, hoping to avoid the coming storm. 

From my seat, I can hear the busboys and kitchen staff chattering in a Spanish spoken so quickly and colloquially that it would baffle Duo the Lingo Owl. It makes me wonder what’s going to happen in a month or so if the new president and his minions follow through on their campaign pledge to institute “mass deportations.” 

Will sheriff’s deputies, U.S. Marshals, or even the National Guard barge through the front door of my favorite little haunt at dinner time and march off with half the staff in handcuffs? Will they then sweep their way down Summer Avenue, stopping at all the Hispanic-owned businesses, demanding, “Papers, please”?

Will the same law-enforcement brigades start hitting up the construction sites around town, taking away the crews who build our homes and office buildings? Will they begin visiting the massive farming operations across the South and West that rely on millions of immigrants to harvest the nation’s crops? Will they raid the packing plants where immigrants prepare the beef, poultry, and pork for our grocery stores? 

If it happens, it’s going to be another of those moments when ideology meets reality and it’s not going to be pretty. When fulfilling a campaign promise leads to a major disruption of the economy, when ensuing worker shortages lead to abrupt price increases, when oranges, tomatoes, and all our other produce lie rotting in our fields and orchards, will Trump and the GOP hard-liners blink? Will they really risk an economic meltdown to own the libs? Will the Americans who voted for this madness finally figure out how effed-up it is?

When millions of families are separated from loved ones, when there are mass camps of “illegal” humans of all ages across the country, when the real costs and the enormous cruelty of trying to deport 10 million people become obvious, will the politicians who ran on this xenophobic bullshit back down? Who knows?

Reporters around the country are already asking governors whether they will cooperate with federal deportation plans. Such cooperation might well involve authorizing state National Guard troops to help with rounding up suspects. In red states, including Tennessee, governors have mostly spouted the GOP party line when questioned, saying that they would do whatever the president asked them to do. In blue states, the opposite reaction has mostly occurred, with governors, mayors, and other regional officials saying they would not use local resources to help with mass deportation. 

Look, if Republicans really wanted to fix immigration, they would start at the top and start prosecuting employers who hire undocumented laborers. Problem solved. But that’s never going to happen. Employers are the wrong color and they have money to grease political palms. And since the polarization game plan just won an election, I suspect it will be in play for the next four years. My advice is to speak out for justice when and where it’s possible. Then go have a margarita, if you can find one.

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At Large Opinion

The Easter Bunny

Meta AI image generated by Bruce VanWyngarden

“What if what we’re seeing today isn’t a glimpse of the future, but the new terms of the present? What if artificial intelligence isn’t actually capable of doing much more than what we’re seeing today, and what if there’s no clear timeline when it’ll be able to do more? What if this entire hype cycle has been goosed by a compliant media, ready and willing to take career-embellishers at their word?”

The quote is from a tech analyst named Edward Zitron, who’s been making the case that AI is a giant corporate Ponzi grift for several months. And he’s not alone. The essential question that AI doubters raise is this: What if enabling us to make fanciful pictures, replicate online search engines, and edit writing projects (and emails) is the highest-level payoff we’re going to get from AI? Was building out and maintaining all the ecologically destructive hardware of AI really worth it?

The Greater Memphis Chamber announced last week it was answering that question with a resounding “Yes.” Readers will recall that months ago, President-elect Trump’s First Buddy, Elon Musk, settled a deal with the Chamber to locate his xAI, powered by the “world’s largest computer,” in Memphis. Then a couple weeks ago, xAI entered a 21-year lease for 522 additional acres of land in southwest Memphis — purpose to be determined.

We still don’t know what’s going to happen with that acreage, but Chamber CEO Ted Townsend announced that three more super-computer firms would be coming to town. “We’re excited to welcome Nvidia, Dell, and Supermicro to the ‘Digital Delta,’” said Townsend. We’re living in the Digital Delta!

Similar scenarios have been happening around the globe, as tech corporations create more facilities to store and retrieve digital content. But there can be problems. In Spain, Barcelona has had to limit water usage for its residents due to the burgeoning data centers it has welcomed. Citizens took to the streets in protest.

Journalist Kasia Tarczynska of GoodJobsFirst.org, writes, “Internet companies have embraced Old Economy habits of playing states and localities against each other … causing governments to grossly overspend for trophy deals. Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon Web Services have been awarded more than $2 billion in subsidies. The average cost of their 11 ‘megadeals’ is astronomical: $1.95 million per job created.”

Now, the Memphis deal may be as wonderful as the Chamber claims it is, but transparency on this liaison is essential: How many jobs will be created, and what’s the payout for Memphis taxpayers? How much water and electricity will be used? What kind of revenues will be generated? What are the penalties for breaking contract terms or polluting our environment?

It would take a hella big fine to get Musk’s attention. Tesla’s Austin gigafactory has been accused of discharging hazardous wastewater into city sewers, emitting pollutants from a faulty furnace, and using a chemical waste pond where dead wildlife has been found. The company’s Fremont, California, facility has recorded more than 180 air quality violations since 2019. 

To that end, three local environmental groups — Memphis Community Against Pollution, Protect Our Aquifer, and Young, Gifted & Green — are asking Memphians to take part in an xAI Community Impact Survey that “aims to gauge community perspectives on the new xAI supercomputer in Memphis and the recent 522-acre expansion. The questions focus on your perceptions of the facility and ideas for Memphians to actually benefit from the project.” You can find the survey on the groups’ Facebook sites.

But eventually, it all comes back to the question raised by Zitron: What is the real end game for AI? Billions of dollars are being spent in a race to see which company’s mega-computer can scrape enough human-created content from the world’s computers to … what? Write a novel as good as The Sun Also Rises? Paint a picture to rival the Mona Lisa? Make an album as good as Songs in the Key of Life?

Or is the crest of AI’s wave my being able to create an image of “the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus eating Easter eggs,” like the one I did for my granddaughter last week? It would be nice (and would shut me up) if AI could somehow come up with a solution for global climate change. That would indeed be a win. At this point, anything is possible. And nothing is also possible. 

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At Large Opinion

Driving Mr. A

Photo: Andreblais | Dreamstime.com

It was a sunny, mild November Saturday. I was on South Idlewild Street, stopped at the corner where it intersects Madison, waiting for traffic to clear so I could pull out and turn left. I was headed to Home Depot to get a couple of keys made and pick up some paper towels. A big day, no doubt. 

Madison was busy, and I’d been idling there a bit before I noticed the man in the red jacket and khaki pants sitting on a low wall by the intersection. It appeared he was trying to pull himself upright using the nearby wrought-iron fence and was having no luck at it. 

After watching for a moment, I lowered my window and said, “Do you need some help?”

“Yes, I do,” he said. 

There was no one behind me, so I backed up a little, parked at the curb opposite from him, and crossed the quiet street. He had a stout wooden walking stick in his right hand, and I took his left hand in both of mine and pulled him to a standing position. 

“I got to be careful. It’s my knee,” he said. “It gives out after a while and I have to sit down. But then, getting up can be a problem.” 

“Where are you going?”

“Walgreens. I need to pick up my prescriptions.”

“Well, let me give you a ride.”

“Thank you. I’d appreciate it.” 

As we made the short drive to the pharmacy, he told me his name was John A ___ and spelled it out for me, and that he lived at St. Peter Manor, a few blocks away. He said he’d been to the doctor the day before and had been prescribed some new meds. 

As I dropped him off at Walgreens, I said, “I’ve got to run to Home Depot but I’ll swing back by here in 20 minutes or so, and if you’re here I’ll take you home.”

“That’s kind of you. I’ll keep an eye out for you.” 

I got to Home Depot, went in, and grabbed a jumbo package of paper towels. They were on sale, stacked right by the front door. But when I got to the key-making machine, there was a line and it took a while. Afterward, I drove back to Walgreens and cruised the lot but saw no sign of Mr. A. On a hunch, I turned off of Union onto South Idlewild, and there he was, slowly limping along by the Goodwill store, not too far from where I’d picked him up earlier. I stopped next to him, lowered the passenger-side window, and said, “You want a lift, John?”

“Boy, I sure do,” he said. “Can you come around and open the door for me?” 

“No problem. I got you.”

On the short trip back to St. Peter Manor, John asked me if I’d ever been inside the place. “It’s pretty nice,” he said. 

I told him I had and that at one point several years ago, I’d looked into getting my mother a place there, but that she’d decided she wanted to stay in New Mexico, where one of my brothers lives.  

“Oh, she’s smart. New Mexico is beautiful,” John said. “I remember the sun and the desert … and the mountains and sky. Everything is so big. I loved New Mexico. And I like the West a lot. Plenty of room to move around out there.” 

“It really is beautiful,” I said.

“Well, thank you again for the ride,” John said, as we pulled up to his home base. “I really appreciate it.”

“No problem. Glad to do it,” I said. And I was. I got out and went around to the passenger side and helped him get to a standing position. 

“Hey,” he said. “Let me give you my phone number, in case you want to get ahold of me.” So he told me his seven digits (I assumed the “901” was a given), and I entered them into my phone as he headed toward the glass doors of St. Peter Manor.

I don’t know that I’ll call him, but I texted him my number, and you never know. We didn’t get into how or why John lived out West, but I suspect he might have some good stories. Meanwhile, happy Thanksgiving, y’all. Count your blessings. 

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At Large Opinion

Voucher Bill

Photo: CDC | Unsplash

Tennessee Governor Bill Lee, who never lets a chance to try to steer public funding to private schools pass him by, is having a good week. State Senate and House majority leaders filed identical bills to create “Education Freedom Scholarships” that would give $7,075 in public funding for a private education to 20,000 Tennessee students, beginning in the fall of 2025. The plan would grow in scope in subsequent years.

The bill has been opposed by the state’s large city school systems and by legislators in many rural districts, where there are often no private school options, and where getting adequate funding for public schools is often difficult. The voucher bill is also opposed by the vast majority of the state’s public school teachers. 

That’s bad enough, but later in the week, Voucher Bill (see what I did there?) got more good news. In case you haven’t been paying attention, GOP luminaries of all stripes are now urging the abolishment of the federal Department of Education. See, that way, supporters say, the money from the feds would come directly into the state’s coffers, to be dispensed under the supervision of, well, Bill Lee. Shocker, right? It should come as no surprise that Lee is all for killing the education department.

“We know Tennessee. We know our children,” Lee said. “We know the needs here much better than a bureaucracy in Washington, D.C., does.”

No you don’t, Bill. What you know how to do — and what you have tried to do for years — is slide public tax dollars into the coffers of private education firms that will then grease the palms of pols such as yourself. If you cared about Tennessee’s children, you wouldn’t want to funnel our tax dollars to well-off Tennesseans who will use it for tuition fees for little Bradley’s third-grade year at Hillbilly Bible Kollege. 

Lee and the GOP have been fighting for vouchers to become law for years, and this time around, given the upcoming change in the White House, they might have the juice to pull it off. If the last election proved anything, it is that the average American is anything but well-informed and well-educated. One of the most googled questions on Election Day was, “Did Joe Biden drop out?” Lawd, help us. 

Here are a few numbers to ponder (and weep over): 21 percent of adults in the U.S. are illiterate; 54 percent of adults have a literacy below 6th grade level; 45 million read below a 5th grade level; 44 percent of American adults do not read a book in a year. So yeah, let’s fix that by cutting public school funding and giving people money to send their kids to private schools. 

My parents weren’t rich, but I grew up privileged. Only we didn’t call it privilege back then because it was so ordinary. In the small Midwestern town where we lived, everybody I knew — Black, white, brown, poor, middle-class, or wealthy — went to the same public schools and attended the town’s single public high school. 

It was a great equalizer, and kids learned — sometimes the hard way — not to get too snooty. I’m not so naive as to think that my Black classmates didn’t suffer negative experiences that were beyond the experiences I had, but we did all manage to get along. And we all had the same opportunity to learn with the same teachers, using the same facilities in the same classrooms, no matter a family’s income level. That is a great and powerful thing about public education — it’s an equalizer. But it needs to be funded and nourished. An investment in educating our youth is one of the best possible uses of our tax dollars. Instead of destroying the Department of Education, we should be funding it better and putting it in the hands of someone with creative ideas to support teachers and inspire students.

I’m not holding my breath, though. I’d put the odds at 50-50 that the Education Department survives the coming administration. And if it does, given the clown-car level of cabinet appointments thus far, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if Trump appointed the My Pillow guy to the job. 

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At Large Opinion

The Boy in the Bubble

The way we look to a distant constellation
That’s dying in a corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don’t cry, baby, don’t cry
Don’t cry.
— “The Boy in the Bubble,” Paul Simon

I heard that Paul Simon song on Sirius radio last Thursday. I think it was on the Classic Vinyl station. I turned it up loud and thoughts arose, mostly about the time I first heard the Graceland album on which the tune made its debut. 

It was the 1980s and we were living in Pittsburgh. My family and I were at a state park in Ohio, where we’d met up with three other families — friends with similarly aged young children. We’d rented cabins for the weekend and planned to fish and hike and cook out and probably have a little too much wine after the kids went to bed. 

I’d just bought the Graceland cassette and we adults wore it out on a big jam box over the weekend. It took a minute for us to get used to the album’s quirky African rhythms and instrumentation — it was the big-hair Eighties, after all — but when it sunk in, it stuck, hard. It’s funny how music attaches itself like a sticky note to moments in your life.

Last Thursday, I happened to be listening to music because the thought of turning the Sirius dial to CNN or MSNBC or NPR or, heaven forbid, “Progressive Talk” radio was just unthinkable. 

I used to listen to music all the time in the car, but as “The Boy in the Bubble” reached its familiar refrain in the Fresh Market parking lot, I realized I hadn’t really done so in months. I’d become obsessed with politics and the presidential race and I’d been spending all my time while in the car listening to news and political analysis. Horse race radio, basically. 

A month ago, for example, I drove to upstate New York — 17 hours over two days — and listened to nothing but news and commentary, mostly about the presidential race. Even the podcasts I listened to were about politics. I was hooked by my confirmation biases and, if I’m honest, by the progressive outrage I was stewing in for hours at a time. 

I was a boy in a bubble, and I wasn’t alone. There were millions of us, most of whom had convinced themselves that the Democrats would win, buoyed by outraged, pro-choice women, a fresh wave of committed young people, and a massive get-out-the-vote ground game. Oops.

There was another bubble, of course, one that pushed storylines supporting the GOP candidates and stirred up several ignorant and hateful narratives. There were millions of people in that bubble. I knew it existed, but I never dipped my toe into it for very long. Honestly, what kind of idiots would believe people were eating cats and dogs? Millions of them, apparently.

Some votes are still being counted as I write this, but it appears the Republican candidate won the presidency with around 25 percent of the nation’s eligible voters, about the same number he had in 2020, when he lost. The Democratic candidate garnered around 24 percent this time around. 

But here’s the sad truth: The largest party in the country isn’t the Democrats or the Republicans. It’s the Apathy Party, which makes up around 47 percent of America’s eligible voters — those who couldn’t work up the time or energy to cast a ballot. They hold the power, but apparently have no interest in using it. 

Around 8,000,000 fewer Americans voted in 2024 than in 2020. That’s a dangerous trend for a democracy, and something we need to figure out how to fix. In the end, it certainly wasn’t a landslide, as some have claimed. It was more like a slow mudslide. We need to dig out of the mud and leave our bubbles, but keep the faith. Speak the truth. These are the days of miracle and wonder. Don’t cry, baby. Don’t cry. 

Categories
At Large Opinion

The Eleventh Month

Photo: Jan Martin Will | Dreamstime.com

November is the Rodney Dangerfield of months. It gets no respect, no love, except maybe a few laughs. There are no great songs about November, and poems about the 11th month always seem to be dreary things — odes to cold wind, fallen leaves, gray skies, death, etc. Sure, there’s a big holiday near the end of the month, but no one would really care if it got moved to September. 

November is a transitional month, a boring layover in our annual trip around the sun, coming as it does just after October’s crisp blue skies and glorious autumnal foliage, and just before the crushing avalanche of December’s major holidays. November is meh. Six hours at the Omaha airport.

I decided to see if I could find anything good written about November because I’m a nerd at heart and that’s the way I roll. I went to Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations and found November getting kicked around like a rented mule by various literary lights through the centuries, from D.H. Lawrence to Thomas Hood to Sir Walter Scott, who wrote:

November’s sky is chill and drear,
November’s leaf is red and sear …

See what I mean? And in 1562, Richard Grafton (you remember ol’ Richard, don’t you?) penned these immortal words:

Thirty days hath November …

Now there’s a man who went out on a limb, poetically speaking. The best thing he could find to write about November was that it had 30 days! Sadly, a few years after his death, the poem was amended to the more familiar “Thirty days hath September …” And now they’ve got all those sexy months — September, April, May — up there at the top of that piece of doggerel. Like I said, November gets no respect.

Except for in presidential election years, when the word “November” is bandied about for months, as both a beacon of hope and a harbinger of doom, depending on what poll you last saw or which pundit you most recently read. The column you are reading right now went to press on Tuesday — Election Day — so I have no idea what kind of mood you will be in when you read this. You could be filled with joy and hope for our country or you could be pondering a move to the sunny coast of Portugal.

All of which makes me want to offer you a bit of beauty to use as solace or in celebration. It’s a poem by Molly Peacock called, well, “November.”

Novembers were the months that began with No.
“Oh no.” They died in embers. Above were
V’s of geese in skies lit from these low
Even fires. The fires of fall were
Mirrors for the feelings I felt before
Being. I’m telling you now I feel I
Exist for the first time! Neither the bareness nor
Roughness demoralize — I realize I
See much clearer what leafless branches show.

It’s a zen-like puzzle-box of a poem. You can read it over and let the words slide around and small tricks and secrets reveal themselves. I found it comforting and calming. And I’m wishing as I write this that Molly’s poem — and the events of this long-awaited November Tuesday — bring us all some kind of joy, some sense of peace.