Category: Opinion

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Opinion Viewpoint

The Rattrap Salesman

(BOMBAY) — India is driven by commerce. Despite its widespread poverty, Indians buy and sell everywhere — on the streets, in their homes, in stores and tiny stalls, even in the middle of traffic.

Once the doorbell rang in the Bombay apartment where my family and I are staying with relatives. It was after 10 p.m. When I looked out the peep hole and described the old woman in a sari I saw in the hallway, the people inside just laughed. Apparently they had encountered her before. She was selling sleepwear — lingerie — door-to-door.

Every morning we are awakened by a cacophony of sounds, which includes car and truck horns, crows cawing, and the sing-song shouts of hawkers outside the apartment selling fruits and vegetables from push carts. In the amazing tangle that is Bombay traffic we are offered toys, flowers, books, magazines, and miniature Indian flags (January 26 is Independence Day). Outside the most upscale stores, vendors set up shop, selling everything imaginable. There are even people on the street who will shine your shoes, give you a shave, or clean your ears.

Then there was the rat trap salesman in Hyderabad.

My father-in-law operates a liquor store that was owned by his father before him. One day during our stay in Hyderabad, I noticed a man outside the shop with some unusual wares. On closer inspection, I saw that he was selling all kinds of rattraps and rodent poisons. He had humane traps (both wooden and metal) for catching the rats alive and the more traditional metal traps that break the rodent’s neck.

It was an impressive array of goods and I stopped to look more closely. The man, who had very dark skin and appeared to be in his 30s, smiled at me. I returned the smile. By this time I had learned to avoid the frustrating dance of two people who don’t speak the same language. Since I don’t speak Telugu or Hindi and he didn’t know English, we were confined to smiling at each other and making the universal signs of greeting. We nodded a lot.

I found myself watching the rattrap salesman as he went about his daily chore of laying his rug down on the sidewalk and then putting out his display in an orderly fashion. He didn’t hawk but waited for an interested customer and then began the inevitable haggling. We continued to smile at each other as I went to and from the house (which is above the store).

The night before we left Hyderabad to return to Bombay one of the relatives who works in the store told me at dinner that the rat trap salesman wanted to come back with me to the United States. He had assured the relative that he would be no trouble to me and that he would be available to do any chores I wished him to perform both at my home and in my office.

Because there are so many people in India and so few jobs available, there are people who do all kinds of work. A middle-class family can easily afford someone who will come to their house and cook, another person to clean the floors and make the beds, and another to wash the clothes. (This man is called the “dobhi.”) Likewise it is affordable to have someone drive your car (or wash it), bring you a newspaper, or run your errands. This is the world the rattrap salesman visualized; this is the world he knows.

The next day, I gave him a 100 rupee note — about two U.S. dollars. (I had originally wanted to buy one of his wooden traps, but decided it would be too cumbersome to bring back.) He smiled. I smiled.

When it came time to load the cars for the trip to the train station, I shook his hand before getting into the car. From the front seat, I could see him deliberating. Finally, just before the car pulled off, he handed me a note. It read:

Respected Sir,

I wont to go to America with you. My passport is ready. I shall feel oblige if you kindly arrange for a “visa.” I can work at your office or at your house also.

Thank you.

He did not include his name. He obviously had gone to great lengths to get the note written. He couldn’t have known many people who could write English. Still at the last minute he could not decide whether or not to present it to me.

I wish I could have talked to him, explained the many reasons why he could not go back with me. But the car was pulling off. There was only time for one more universal sign. I shrugged.

That night as dusk settled on the countryside along the train tracks, as shepherds drove their goats wherever it is goats go at night, I thought about the rattrap salesman and how different his world is from mine. I felt sad — for both of us. n

You can e-mail Dennis Freeland at freeland@memphisflyer.com.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Fool’s Gold

1. Lotteries are a sucker game. In a typical state lottery you have to guess six two-digit numbers out of a possible 49. None of the six numbers is used more than once and you must guess the winning numbers in correct order. The odds of hitting the jackpot in this system are one in 14 million.

You are three times more likely to be killed in an auto accident on the way to buy a lottery ticket than you are to win the jackpot.

Fran Lebowitz quips, “As I figure it, you have the same chance of winning the lottery whether you play it or not.” Or as John Warren Kindt says in his book Gambling, “The only way to win is to never buy a ticket.”

2. The state of Tennessee will need to use blatantly false advertising to lure you in. The Publisher’s Clearinghouse contest is required by law to publish your odds of winning. The lottery is exempt from this requirement. If lotteries made plain your odds of winning, the game would be over.

3. The state will waste an obscene amount of the revenue collected from the lottery on advertising. The Washington Post calls lottery ads “the foulest of gambling lures. And they lure the poorest and most vulnerable among us through publicly sponsored, shamelessly misleading advertising.”

4. A lottery is a regressive tax. During the first year of the Georgia lottery, the lottery sold $249 worth of tickets per resident in ZIP codes with average household incomes below $20,000, compared with $97 in ZIP codes with incomes exceeding $40,000. Per-capita ticket sales were also twice as high in minority areas compared with white areas.

5. Lower-income people will pay for the education of wealthier people. Georgia’s HOPE scholarship program mostly provides scholarships to students from middle- and upper-class families. Of the 16,376 students who received HOPE scholarships for the 1994-95 academic year, the average family income was $44,876 while the average state income was $32,359.

By requiring students to apply for a battery of federal grants and scholarships, poor and minority students are diverted into Pell grants. They receive a $150 book allowance per semester from HOPE while wealthier students receive the bulk of the HOPE money.

6. A lottery will not solve Tennessee’s revenue problems. After payouts and advertising, a lottery typically provides 1 to 3 percent of a state’s revenue. It will be two years before the lottery referendum is held and another year before the lottery is up and running. Meanwhile, Tennessee will sink deeper into the hole. A lottery creates few jobs and no useful product. Compulsive gambling will create a host of social problems, which the state will pay for in the long run.

7. A lottery will not make Tennessee’s tax system any fairer. A lottery is a diversionary tactic that our legislators are using to keep from reforming our antiquated, unfair tax structure.

8. Tennessee is late getting into the lottery game. Lottery revenue has peaked in many states and is dropping off. Virginia has had a lottery for 10 years and is now hundreds of millions of dollars in the hole. How long will it take for Tennesseans to catch on to the sucker game and stop playing? Lotteries are one of the most unstable sources of revenue.

9. The state will decrease the general revenue for education by the amount the lottery makes. Educational spending tends to decline once a state puts a lottery into operation. According to one study, states without lotteries maintained and increased their educational spending more than states with lotteries.

10. The state of Tennessee has a social contract with its citizens to protect them from fraud. This contract is null and void when it comes to lotteries.

Nell Levin is a social activist living in Nashville.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Reserving Judgment

Reserving Judgment

This week was the occasion (as our Web site, www.memphisflyer.com, was first to report) for a visit to Tennessee by President George W. Bush, whose intent was to focus attention on the details of his education plan, one which stresses educational testing and a series of incentives as a means of improving student performance.

Accordingly, the president selected the venue of Townsend Elementary School in Blount County. This is a school where low-income students and high recent test scores happen to intersect, and thus Bush thought it appropriate as a place to proclaim the gospel of his results-oriented approach.

We happened to favor the somewhat more expensive and conventional approach of Bush’s recent election opponent, former Vice President Al Gore, and we remain distrustful of all those polemicists who like to dump venom on the nation’s teachers’ unions, most of whom supported Gore over Bush. These organized teachers may constitute an entrenched lobby, as their critics claimed, but we remain convinced that their hearts are in the right place.

Even so, there is something to be said for “thinking out of the box,” as the current phrase has it. And Bush’s plan, to its credit, does not commit the sin, common to many “conservative” plans, of substituting rhetoric for bona fide fiscal supports. The administration is prepared to commit more funds than have heretofore been available to most school districts, and we have no knee-jerk opposition to the plan’s emphasis on maximizing local control or its application of the carrot-and-stick approach to matters of future funding and teacher rewards.

We are pleased, too, at intimations coming from Washington that the controversial “school voucher” component of the Bush plan has been dropped. We can only hope so. It is simply wrong, however well-intended, to take taxpayers’ money and route it out by whatever formula to private institutions, some of them highly sectarian.

On balance, we are prepared to reserve judgment on the Bush plan, a stance which is in part just good fatalistic sense. For, like it or not, the plan — or something like it — is on the way. And who knows? Maybe it will marry well with the educational reforms Tennessee Governor Don Sundquist is proposing.

Reserving Judgment II

Questions about the XFL are as plentiful today as they were when the gaudy new football league, co-owned by NBC and the World Wrestling Federation, first announced it would make Memphis one of its eight charter members. After three weeks, the TV ratings have settled down to the low expectations that the league itself had before getting the first week’s unexpectedly good viewer totals.

Memphis Maniax general manager Steve Ehrhart tried to stem the tide of bad press this week, issuing a press release proclaiming Memphis as the “number one” UPN market. He spun reporters at the team’s weekly press conference to the effect that things are better than the national media make them out to be, that the Memphis TV market in particular is doing better than expected, and that the two local games drew well, especially considering the weather.

The jury is still out on the Memphis Maniax and the Xtreme Football League. But the combination of NBC’s bucks and the WWF’s chutzpah could give the league real staying power — a la the old AFL and the current MSNBC, two similarly endowed hybrids. Here, too, we’ll reserve judgment.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

The Conversion of Tom Moss

It was expected that Tom Moss, who was appointed Shelby County Commissioner
last fall, would try to get himself assimilated as a member in good standing
of the commission’s seven-member GOP majority. After all, nominal Republican
Moss had defeated mainstream Republican David Lillard and was named to his
post basically by a Democrat-dominated coalition (the same coalition that
boosted lodge brother Shep Wilbun into the vacant Juvenile Court clerkship).
Moss, along with veteran Republican Clair VanderSchaaf (who voted with the
Democrats both times), was supposed to be dog meat for righteously vengeful
Republicans to gnaw on at re-election time in 2002.

So now builder Moss, whose ascension to the commission may have
been more a developers’ coup than anything expressly political, has tried to
accommodate himself to his fellow Republicans.

But things have become almost surreal: There was Moss after
Monday’s commission meeting complaining, “I don’t think we’re a solid enough
bloc. I don’t think we’re exacting enough in return for what we give up.” We?
Why, the Republican majority, of course!

“For example, we should have demanded a quid pro quo from the
Democrats when Bridget [Chisholm] came on,” Moss continued, referring to the
young African-American woman, hitherto a political unknown like himself who
was elected to the commission to replace Wilbun.

In other words, Tom Moss — who achieved office under the cloud
of Democratic sponsorship — has now become the most zealous of GOP partisans:
No more deals with the Democrats unless something of solid value to the
Republican coalition comes from it! It’s really quite remarkable, this
turnaround saga of Moss the hardnose.

Though there are those who maintain that Chisholm is in the same
developers’ camp as Moss, she herself boasts state Senator John Ford and U.S.
Rep. Harold Ford Jr. as her chief supporters. In a key vote Monday on a
Southeast Shelby County development resisted by its projected residential
neighbors, Chisholm voted one way (against), Moss voted another (for), and
VanderSchaaf voted yet a third way, proposing an amendment that would have
split the difference.

The project deadlocked at six to six and thereby died, although
it can — and probably will — be brought up for consideration again. But the
interesting fact about the vote was that none of the three supposed New Bloc
members were together on the deal.

It may be easier than one would have thought for Tom Moss to take
on protective coloration he’ll need for next year’s election season. At last
Saturday’s annual Shelby County Republican Lincoln Day Dinner at the Adam’s
Mark, Moss was observed having a chummy conversation with Chris Norris, the
ex-commissioner’s wife and a bedrock Republican in her own right.

That was followed by an even chummier conversation with county
GOP chairman Alan Crone, who was overheard asking the new commissioner out to
lunch.

The upshot of all this? Perhaps nothing more than a modification
of the old saw that “politics makes strange bedfellows.” Sudden ones, too, we
could add. Or maybe the point is that partisanship is a substance which these
days is thicker than blood or water.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Who Is Elvis Prez-ley?

A line of attack frequently pursued by Vice President Al Gore‘s Republican adversaries in this year’s presidential race has been that he is only a nominal Tennessean, that he is actually a son of Washington, D.C., and that his contacts with home-staters are only superficial and occasional.

Whether fair or not, the approach has evidently succeeded in sowing doubt in the minds of some Tennessee voters and may be partly responsible for Gore’s recent second-place showing, behind Republican rival George W. Bush, in a variety of pollsters’ samplings of Tennesseans.

The vice president did himself little good in this regard when he appeared Tuesday night on NBC’s Tonight Show with host Jay Leno.

At one point, discussing the annual habit that he and wife Tipper engage in of dressing up for Halloween in elaborate custumes, he noted that members of the press corps surprised him Tuesday at one of his rally stops by showing up in Halloween getups of their own.

One of them was disguised, Gore noted, “as Elvis Prez-ley”– giving the name the pronunciation favored by members of the national media. But not by Tennesseans.

And certainly not by residents of Memphis, site of an eleventh-hour stop this weekend by candidate Gore, who is counting on a Shelby County turnout to give him a chance for victory in Tennessee over Bush.

The late entertainment icon Elvis Presley pronounced his name “Press-ley,” never any other way, and the difference in pronunciations has historically been regarded as one of those divides that distinguish the local sensibility from the national one.

The gaffe is only symbolic, but it prompts two thoughts, neither of which is flattering to Gore. Does he not know the right way to say the name of this late home-state eminence? Or does he know the right way and prefer to accommodate himself to the prevailing error elsewhere?

For those who would consider the incident insignificant, this question might be considered: what would it say of Gore’s home-state savvy if he pronounced the first name of a latter-day artist “Shan-ia,” which emphasis on the first syllable? Or “Shan-ee-ah” or some other wrong guess? This is, after all, a time in which Gore, Bush, and all other major candidates for office make a practice of taking an active part in popular culture and flaunting their knowledge of it.

As the vice president digs in for his last stand in Tennessee and elsewhere, some other moves of his (or of his campaign staff’s) have threatened to backfire. Early Wednesday morning, a Memphis radio reporter was awakened from slumber by a call from the Gore-Lieberman campaign urging him to conduct an interview with former state Attorney General (and current Gore CEO) Charles Burson, who was then placed on the line. (This came a day after someone from the Gore-Lieberman campaign had called the station and carried out a lengthy interrogation concerning its demographics Ñ the idea seeming to station personnel to be, ‘Are you worthy of being the medium for our message?’)

Somewhat grumpily, the reporter obliged by havng a conversation with Burson, a highly personable man but one whom he did not know personally. The reporter made no effort to record it for later broadcast purposes.

To the reporter, the episode– which no doubt had its counterpart in Bush’s campaign here and there– smacked of the artificial and the peremptory.

For all that, it is a fact that Gore has his share of long-term home-state relationships, real ones, and he will be calling on all these during his weekend sweep of Knoxville and Memphis (where a Court Square rally Friday night will be followed by Gore’s appearance at a Democratic prayer breakfast Saturday), to be followed by a return to his headquarters site of Nashville to get the last word from the voters.

“I Want You, I Need You, I Love You” is Gore’s song, and any wrong notes here at the end of things could easily create unwanted dissonance instead of the playback he’s looking for.

(You can write Jackson Baker at baker@memphisflyer.com)

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

A Herenton Indictment?

The career of Willie Herenton can be divided into two parts.

In Part One, he was the breaker of racial barriers in Memphis: the
first black assistant school superintendent, the first black school
superintendent, the first black mayor. In Part Two, he was the champion
of black power. Not the radical black power of “Burn Baby Burn” and a
clenched-fist salute, but the black economic power of an affluent
class, a growing middle class, and a rising underclass.

It was in Part Two that Herenton got himself in a jam and possibly a
federal grand jury investigation.

This is the Herenton who, a few years after becoming mayor, became a
partner in Banneker Estates, an upscale real estate development next to
his home in South Memphis that he hoped would rival similar enclaves
for wealthy whites in East Memphis.

This is the Herenton who explored selling MLGW, clashed with Herman
Morris, installed his protégé Joseph Lee, and insisted
that MLGW reallocate its lucrative bond business so that firms in
Memphis, including one where his son worked, got more business.

This is the Herenton who hired special adviser/real estate man Pete
Aviotti, who says the mayor has “a passion” for real estate.

This is the Herenton who co-existed with Shelby County mayor Jim
Rout and special adviser Bobby Lanier and a posse of hostile suburban
mayors for 16 years and ran for city mayor a fifth time to keep Morris
from getting the job.

And this is the Herenton who did deals with one E.W. Moon at
Banneker Estates and downtown near Beale Street.

How you look at Herenton, builder of black economic wealth, depends
somewhat on whether you are black or white. By Herenton’s lights, he
has been more than fair to whites by putting them in director jobs and
going along with their pet business projects.

The root of this federal investigation is minority participation,
the rule that says you don’t do a big public deal in this town without
black and white partners in the underwriting firms, the PR firms, the
law firms, on the job sites, and any place where there’s the smell of
money. Minority participation was the making and unmaking of Tennessee
Waltz star witness Tim Willis, among others.

My guess is that the feds have about a one-month window to indict.
After that, Mr. Obama goes to Washington, and a new attorney general
gets installed along with new U.S. attorneys with Democratic loyalties
and antennas.

If there is a case, it will surely have to go to Washington for
review, and I can imagine the conversation going like this.

“Mr. Attorney General, we’ve got a hot one down in Memphis against
the mayor who’s been in office for 17 years. He’s taken some shots over
the years, but he’s still a local hero to a lot of people. He knows it,
and he’ll fight like hell. Is it a go?”

“What did he do?”

“It’s a real estate deal.”

“About time. Nail a bunch of bankers and brokers, too?”

“Uh, actually, no.”

“I see. I’m kinda busy. Can we get back to you in January?”

And I can imagine the Herenton lines of defense, first in the media
and then in the courtroom: It’s the Republicans’ parting shot, the
sequel to Tennessee Waltz. If you can’t vote him out of office, indict
him. Payback for Joseph Lee. The mayor is indicted while bankers get
$25 million bonuses for destroying the global economy.

A Herenton indictment would be a national story. I can see a New
York Times equivalent to The Wall Street Journal‘s obsession
with the back story of the 1993 federal corruption trial of former
congressman Harold Ford Sr., two months after Bill Clinton was sworn
in. The pre-trial and the trial itself would be a war, tougher than the
Ford trial or the trial of former Atlanta mayor (and Herenton friend)
Bill Campbell, who was indicted after he left office.

It is very possible, of course, that the feds have some juicy
evidence of their own and a list of witnesses ready to testify. They
may even have a smoking gun.

After the Joe Lee and Ed Ford fiascoes, they better have a lot of
them.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

Rant

White House staffers have been revealing a

“genuine sadness” around the West Wing these days. One report

said that President Bush was concerned that his presidency is being
compared

to Herbert Hoover’s. But that would be an insult to Hoover. His
morale was reportedly so low, he practically

gushed when honored by the Air and Space Museum that everything was
“fabulous,” from the brave troops to his fabulous Dad. Sarah Palin went
out of her way in a Miami speech to thank Bush for keeping the nation
safe from another air attack of hijacked domestic carriers, while our
currency sank like the Lusitania. An anonymous assistant
explained that Bush is so distraught because his administration had
planned to spend his last few months in office doing “legacy stuff,”
but the sudden economic collapse prevented them from accomplishing
much. Let me clue the Bush folks in: The economic collapse is
his legacy.

While all crashes down around him, Bush still persists in believing
that a deregulated free market is the soundest regulator of itself
— a true believer until the bitter end, just like Herbert Hoover.
No, Bush’s “legacy stuff” consists of criminal capitalism masked by a
populist concern for small “bidness,” the war in Iraq, torture,
rendition, Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, Blackwater mercenaries, illegal
wire-tapping, the corruption of the Justice Department, and the No-Fly
List. And who doesn’t know in their heart that it was Dick Cheney who
ordered the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame to get even with his
critics and that it will only be a matter of days before the criminal
Bush gives a full pardon to the patsy Scooter Libby? And now we’re
treated to a battery of headlines in the conservative media about how
horribly Bush has been treated by all parties in the recently concluded
election.

Are we supposed to feel sympathy for Bush because his name was
exceeded in toxicity only by Cheney’s? No one wanted to be seen with
him, including McCain. Bush was the bubonic plague, the kiss of death,
and the evil eye for any Republican who dared utter his name. All he
has attempted is in tatters, especially the Constitution, so it will
take the new president at least half his first term to unravel Bush’s
political dingleberries. But now he’s feeling lonely because he’s no
longer popular. This from a man who came to the office with no vision,
only a cult of personality that carried him along like a leaf in a
gutter after a rain storm. The Bush presidency was the biggest farce
foisted upon a gullible populace since Milli Vanilli, and the full
effects are yet to be felt by all those hapless loyalists who have lost
their jobs and don’t even know it yet.

Possibly Bush’s greatest accomplishment, aside from re-starting the
Cold War, is his escaping impeachment. When Speaker Nancy Pelosi
announced in 2006 that “impeachment was off the table,” I remembered
Tip O’Neill, who said in reference to Nixon in similar circumstances
that “the best interests of the country must come first.” Nancy, you’re
no Tip. And Bush’s most egregious and visible violation is that he
betrayed his oath of office to protect and defend the Constitution and
he knows it. That’s why he’s working double time to write immunity for
himself and his cronies into law before he leaves office. Bush
envisions a leisurely life, commuting between a home in Dallas and the
ranch, when he’s not off on a lucrative speaking tour to “fill the old
coffers.” But I envision Bush answering summons after summons without
protection from a Republican president, in the way Gerald Ford
protected Richard Nixon. This is a man with questions to answer, and
it’s best that they be asked under oath.

George W. Bush is the Frankenstein monster created by the unholy
alliance of fundamentalist Christianity and a godless corporatocracy.
He was a Pied Piper, born-again evangelical, ruthless free-market
capitalist who granted access to untold riches for the already rich
while preaching that “government is the problem” to the social
conservatives. Even now, while jobless claims are skyrocketing, retail
sales are plummeting, and the GOP coalition has been shattered, a Pew
Poll found that 60 percent of people who identified themselves as
Republicans believe the party should go in a more conservative
direction. Nixon’s 1968 “Southern strategy” has come to its fruition,
the GOP has become the party of the Old South.

Mine is not the only family who has decided to cut back this
Christmas. Instead of lavishing presents on everyone, we’re going to
draw names and buy one nice present each. Other families are teetering
on the verge of bankruptcy or foreclosure this holiday season, with
nothing to hope for but a new administration. So when Bill O’Reilly
revs up his annual “War on Christmas,” he need look no further than the
White House to see the Grinch.

Categories
Letters To The Editor Opinion

Letters

David Duke

It’s interesting how Memphis Flyer writer Chris Davis thinks
it’s okay to call David Duke “America’s most easily recognized racist”
(“White Noise,” November 13th issue) in a so-called news feature.

Davis went on to happily chronicle how Duke was harassed and booted
from various Memphis motels during his weekend here for the
European-American Unity Conference. Let’s be real: If Duke were leading
a conference for blacks or Jews, his activities would have been seen as
“activism,” and the media — and Davis — would have covered
it as straight news.

As Duke said in the article: “They’ve got free speech in Cuba, too.
Just as long as you don’t say anything bad about Fidel Castro.” Think
about it.

Walter Lewiston

Charlotte, North Carolina

Gay Rights

In his “Viewpoint” (November 13th issue), Jim Maynard makes the old
mistake of conflating civil rights with sexual rights. One is a
nationality/birth condition; the other, a chosen behavior. Even Colin
Powell acknowledged this fallacy and major error a few years ago.

It is also a slippery slope. Where do we draw the line? Why not have
men marry animals, birds, and insects? If evolution is true, we are no
different in a “civil rights” genus/category. Maynard gets his quotes
and statistics a bit blurred by leaving out many polls across the
nation: From yes2marriage.org,
African-American leaders and pastors show a 65 percent rejection of
homosexual marriages and civil-union rights.

A homosexual couple can cohabitate and get “married,” but they can
never consummate physically due to incompatible sexual organs, unless
they make drastic alterations. Maynard’s appeal to “separation of
church and state” has nothing to do with this issue. He says that
government should not impose laws upon others. That means we should
release all criminals in jail that had laws legislated against their
actions. All law is legislated morality. The question is: Whose morals
do we legislate?

Charles Gillihan

Bartlett

Who is Obama?

Bill McAfee is right on in his letter to the editor (November 6th
issue). I just never knew Obama was from Africa. Thanks for telling me
this, Bill.

Is Obama proud to be an American or is he proud to be an African
American? I am sure he would give an answer if asked. But none of his
supporters can tell me what qualifies him to be president. No one can
tell me his tax proposals, how socialized medicine will cure all, and
how, when he becomes president, he will become militarily inclined, and
how economics can become one of his strong points. That’s what he said
in the debates: “I am not militarily inclined. Economics is not one of
my strong points.”

What are his strong points?

Jeremy Scruggs

Memphis

Hopefully, everyone who did not vote for Barack Obama will pledge to
be just as respectful, trusting, unbiased, and supportive of him in the
next four years as the editors, writers, columnists, and contributors
in the Memphis Flyer have been of President Bush these past
eight years.

Herbert E. Kook Jr.

Germantown

Marijuana Talk

In the memphisflyer.com
article “Marijuana Talk at Rhodes” (November 6th), it seems to me that
the speaker asked the wrong question. The question should be: Should
marijuana remain completely untaxed, unregulated, and controlled by
criminals?

Because marijuana is illegal, it is sold only by criminals. And they
often offer free samples of more dangerous drugs to their marijuana
customers, thus creating the so-called gateway effect.

In a regulated market, this would not happen. Do Flyer
readers know of anyone who has been offered a free bottle of whiskey,
rum, or vodka when legally buying beer or wine? I don’t either.

If we regulate, control, and tax the sale and production of
marijuana, we close the gateway to hard drugs.

Kirk Muse

Mesa, Arizona

Regarding “News of the Weird” (November 13th issue): The first story
mentions a “.22 gauge shotgun.” There is no such thing. Second, how did
the stove shoot her? (The story said she was “shot in the leg” by her
stove.)

P.J. Trenthem

Germantown

Editor’s note: I don’t know. That’s so
weird.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

It’s Up to Bass Pro

Few issues have divided sentiment on the Memphis City Council and
the Shelby County Commission more than that of the proposed leasing of
the Pyramid to Bass Pro Shop. In general, officials of the city, which
shares ownership rights to the building with the county and owns

outright the surrounding property, tend to see Bass Pro as the only
extant suitor for the facility, which city and county taxpayers are
still paying for and which continues to soak up stout maintenance costs
even while standing idle. The building’s potential uses are strictly
limited by a contract with the NBA’s Grizzlies that grants first dibs
to the FedExForum for all athletic and entertainment activities.

The prime movers for the turnover of the dormant facility to the
giant outdoors-oriented chain have always been city-side, with Robert
Lipscomb, a longtime ally of Mayor Willie Herenton and the head of the
city’s arena reuse committee, leading the charge. Even on the
commission, where several proposed agreements relating to Bass Pro
(including the sale of the county’s ownership share to the city) were
consistently blocked until this week, the main proponent for an
understanding favorable to the chain has consistently and vociferously
been Sidney Chism, another Herenton intimate.

Shelby County mayor A C Wharton has, however, also been on board for
an agreement with Bass Pro. The main county opposition has come from a
de facto caucus of commissioners who transcend the normal partisan
dividing lines. The opponents of a deal have nursed, together or
singly, a variety of objections — that a city landmark should not
be assigned to what some have called a glorified “bait shop”; that Bass
Pro has offered insufficient financial safeguards and vague development
proposals; and — something that has been spoken to only obliquely
in discussions on the commission — that the deal does not pass
“the smell test,” that somehow the “fix was in” on arrangements with
Bass Pro.

As it happened, the two commissioners who uttered those last two
caveats were on the prevailing side of the 9-3 commission vote Monday
that finally authorized Bass Pro to pursue a development deal with the
city and county. And that’s as good a sign as any that progress (if
that’s the right word) has been made more out of fatigue and
exasperation over the years of wrangling than because of anybody’s
belief that anything is likely to come to fruition. Indeed,
commissioners on both sides of Monday’s vote were predicting afterward
that a combination of a bad economy and Bass Pro’s foot-dragging
attitude made consummation of a completed development unlikely.

In any case, it’s now up to Bass Pro — which is obligated to a
$35,000 monthly rental during the next year (and very little else)
— to put up or shut up. Its critics have accused the chain of
dilatory tactics in negotiations with other cities and with floating
sham proposals for the sake of brand advertising. There is an easy way
to counter that contention now that official resistance on the part of
local government is no more. All the chain has to do, having been
granted a year for “feasibility” studies, is put something real on the
table. If, 12 months from now, Bass Pro hasn’t done so, that should be
the end of it, and the city and county will just have to start over in
looking for a tenant.