Tag: At Large

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At Large Opinion

The 10 Commandments of Woke

Thou shalt walk in a park and forest bathe. (Photo: Megan Lee | Unsplash)

Visit a Park. Follow a trail or a path until you are immersed in nature. Stop for a moment and listen. Take in the bird-song, the whisper of the breeze through the trees. Breathe in the wood-smell. Feel the earth beneath your feet. (The Japanese call it “forest bathing.”) Then give thanks that some woke folks once had the foresight to preserve the corner of nature you are now privileged to experience. 

Read a Banned Book, maybe even one you’ve read before. There are now hundreds to choose from in the U.S. And support your local libraries and independent bookstores. They are an endangered species in many parts of this country. Reading is fundamental. So is the right to choose what you want to read. 

Be a Voice for Choice. Never forget that abortion services and pregnancy counseling are also healthcare, and all women deserve the right to make their own medical decisions without government direction or interference. Religious beliefs and political ideology do not trump core human rights in this country.

Consume Real News. Don’t be fooled by websites and “news” organizations that exist only to excite your confirmation biases. While no media organization is perfectly neutral, the reporting in most major newspapers is relatively free of bias. Some of the most balanced news (not opinion) sources, according to the AllSides Media Bias Chart, are AP News, BBC News, NPR News, PBS News, Reuters, USA Today, and Wall Street Journal.

Don’t Spread BS. This could be considered a corollary of the preceding commandment. Before posting something on social media or otherwise amplifying any content, google it and check the source. If it seems too good to be true or perfectly aligns with your own beliefs, be suspicious. Mark Twain, for example, did not say all things the internet says he did. Be a spreader of truth, not, er, bullshit. 

Speak Your Mind. State your political views freely and clearly when asked or when otherwise appropriate. There’s no need to fear offending others if you speak the truth. In fact, polite silence in the face of racism, homophobia, misogyny, lies, or hate-speech indicates that you are okay with it. Don’t be okay with it. Also, it’s okay to say, “Happy Holidays.”

Don’t Fear History. The saying goes, “Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.” These days, too many people are trying to bury history so they can freely ignore it. Or repeat it. They want to suppress any portion of the past that makes them uncomfortable, like slavery, lynchings, and segregation, to name a few things some white folks don’t want to talk about. Being uncomfortable with parts of our past is part of the process. Otherwise, yes, we are doomed. 

Stand Up for Gun Reform. The United States is a scary place, a civilian battlefield where innocent people are being gunned down by military-grade weapons so often and in so many places it’s become a mind-numbing parody. Too many of our legislators are in the bloody pockets of the NRA. It’s long past time to pass sensible gun legislation, including reinstating the assault weapons ban. We can’t give up this fight. 

Do Say Gay. It’s getting hard out there for LGBTQ+ folks, so show your support for gay-friendly businesses and organizations. Hey, maybe drink a Bud Light and go see a drag show. And let young people know, as soon as they are curious about it, that being gay isn’t scary or something to be made fun of. Introduce them to your Aunt Peg and her wife. Take them to Disneyland.

Believe in Science. Climate change is real. The oceans are rising. Temperature levels that used to be unusual are now the new normal. Severe weather events are more commonplace. Floods and droughts rack the globe. Coral reefs are dying and ice caps are melting. Your beachfront property may soon be worthless — or gone. Also, vaccinations are not a government plot, tobacco can give you cancer, and you should go ahead and schedule that checkup with your doctor. Trust me on this.

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At Large Opinion

It’s Limbo Time!

Photo: Natalya Erofeeva | Dreamstime.com

The excitement began last Thursday with a post by former President Donald Trump on his Truth Social network: “These Thugs and Radical Left Monsters have just INDICATED the 45th President of the United States …” he wrote. Yes, Trump was very angry that he had been “indicated,” but the misspelling went mostly unnoticed, except by snarky liberals who were unaware that outrage doesn’t need no damn proofreader.

Trump went on in his usual grammar-free, random all-caps style: “THIS IS AN ATTACK ON OUR COUNTRY THE LIKES OF WHICH HAS NEVER BEEN SEEN BEFORE!” he wrote. Which was true, since previous attacks on our country have involved bombs, airplanes, armies, other nations, and such. But this was not an attack on our country. It was an indictment of one American citizen, which happens around 90,000 times a week in the U.S. judicial system. Still, Trump had a point of sorts: This was at least an indictment, the likes of which have never been seen before — one issued to a former U.S. president.

Those who’ve lived in this country for the past seven years have experienced a political maelstrom unlike any in our history, one involving a president — now-former president — who utters one lie after another, ignores all political and ethical protocols, and has no apparent respect for the rule of law. Trump used all of these tools during the final months of his presidency, culminating on January 6, 2021, when his planned attempt to overturn the national presidential election mercifully came up short.

Now that he’s facing real-life repercussions, the evidence is pretty clear to anyone not in the Trump cult that the former president will not hesitate for a nanosecond to do whatever it takes in order to keep himself out of jail. It’s who he is. It’s who he always has been.

The forthcoming New York case is likely just the preview before the main feature hits the screen. The charges (unreleased as I write this) in this first indictment are not expected to rise to a level that would put Trump behind bars, unless there is an egregious felony charge that no one saw coming. His punishment, if he is found guilty, will probably involve a fine, probation, and/or suspension of his business license. (There could also be a mug shot that will break the internet for a couple of days.)

But this is worth remembering: A defendant in a criminal case has to appear in court every day during his trial. With a possible 34 counts to argue, this trial could go on for weeks, meaning Trump would have to stay in New York City and sit in a courtroom for several hours every weekday. No social media, no Mar-a-Lago schmoozing, no television, no golf, no distractions. Just hour after hour of sitting still, watching other people talk about him, unable to interrupt. That scenario will be pure hell on earth for a twitchy narcissist like Trump.

But, unfortunately for millions of schadenfreude lovers, that’s not going to happen for weeks, if not months. Trump’s lawyers have those 34 charges to appeal, and they will — all the way to the Supreme Court, if necessary. Trump attorney Joe Tacopina has said that his client does not intend to take a plea deal, and that his team planned “substantial legal challenges,” including motions to dismiss or appeals on all or most charges.

The same scenario will play out in any subsequent indictments of Trump, whether they be in Atlanta, New York, or Washington, D.C. Trump’s legal tactics have remained the same for 40 years: delay, appeal, obfuscate — anything to throw gravel in the gears of the legal system. The day when Trump will have to sit down and face a jury of his theoretical peers isn’t coming any time soon. In fact, we can expect that Trump’s various legal entanglements will be ongoing during the 2024 primary season and ensuing presidential campaign.

This isn’t comforting news for any American longing for a return to normalcy. The lunacy, crudeness, and threats of violence from Trump and his die-hard supporters will be with us for the foreseeable future. The 65 percent of Americans who just want this all to go away will have to remain strong and steadfast. Maybe it will help to remember the former president’s own words: “THIS IS AN ATTACK ON OUR COUNTRY THE LIKES OF WHICH HAS NEVER BEEN SEEN BEFORE!”

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At Large Opinion

Sex, Lies, and Statuary

David by Michelangelo (Photo: Massimo Lama | Dreamstime.com)

When Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart was asked to describe his test for obscenity in 1964, he responded: “I know it when I see it.” This much-quoted bit of judiciary shorthand was offered in the case, Jacobellis v. Ohio, in which the state of Ohio fined Nico Jacobellis, a Cleveland Heights theater owner, $2,500 for showing the French film, Les Amants (The Lovers), directed by Louis Malle and starring famed actress Jeanne Moreau.

Stewart went on: “I have reached the conclusion that under the First and Fourteenth Amendments, criminal laws in this area are constitutionally limited to hard-core pornography. I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.”

In so ruling, Stewart struck a blow for art, in this instance a film that explored the emotional and physical dimensions of an affair, but that was not pornographic in any sense of the word.

One can only imagine what Potter might think of the school board and administrators in Florida who last week fired their principal for allowing a teacher to show sixth-graders in an art class what it called “pornography” — a picture of Michelangelo’s statue David, widely regarded as one of the most important artworks in the history of mankind.

The statue, which depicts David just as he’s about to go into battle against Goliath, stood in the central square of Florence, Italy, from 1504 until 1873, when it was moved indoors to Florence’s Galleria dell’Accademia due to concerns about weather damage. It should be noted that the statue was originally commissioned to stand in a cathedral but was moved to the central square so that more people would have a chance to view its magnificence.

So why, you might ask, would the administrators of Hillsdale Academy’s Tallahassee Classical School object to its sixth-grade students viewing Michelangelo’s masterwork? What could be more “classical” than Michelangelo?

There’s a one-word answer, and I bet you can guess what it is: penis. Yep, David’s artistically sculpted junk is up there, right where it’s supposed to be on a human male, and this was a big problem for the administrators. Spurred by complaints from three parents, the right-wing idiocracy swung into action.

It makes me wonder if these folks have ever heard of Stormy Daniels. I mean, if you want to see what pornography really is, just google “Stormy Daniels films.” Try explaining that to little Braxton. And how are these Hillsdale administrators going to talk to their students about the forthcoming legal brouhaha surrounding former President Trump and the aforementioned woman he paid $130,000 to for doing absolutely nothing wrong at a hotel in Lake Tahoe?

(Note: It’s at this point that I’m duty-bound to remind you that if the name Hillsdale Academy sounds familiar, it’s because it is the smarmy religious-based operation to which Governor Bill Lee wants to give millions of your tax dollars in lieu of that money going to public schools.)

But finally, to be fair, I guess I have to point out that there is some historical precedent to Hillsdale’s overreaction to the sight of David’s massive marble peen. In the mid-1800s, Great Britain’s Victoria and Albert Museum installed a full-size replica of David in one of its central galleries. Upon her first visit, Queen Victoria staggered backward, hand to chest, and was heard to exclaim, “Oh my stars and garters! What am I looking at? Make it stop!” The museum then had a fig leaf created that was hung on the statue whenever the queen paid a visit. How, er, hard was that? Perhaps Hillsdale could show its students the fig-covered version.

No, it’s not a perfect solution, but these days it’s any port in a Stormy.

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At Large Opinion

Free Speech?

Sean Hannity (Photo: The White House | Public Domain | Wikimedia Commons)

You’re likely to be hearing a lot more about the landmark Supreme Court decision New York Times Co. v. Sullivan in the coming weeks.

This is the seminal case upon which our nation’s libel law has been adjudicated since 1964.

The case involved an appeal by the Times against L.B. Sullivan, a commissioner of the city of Montgomery, Alabama, who had sued the Times and “four individual petitioners, who are Negros and Alabama clergymen,” based on the claim that an ad taken out in the Times by the defendants made false accusations and that he was entitled to libel damages.

The Alabama Supreme Court had ruled in Sullivan’s favor. The U.S. Supreme Court, however, overruled the state’s decision on the grounds that “mere negligence or carelessness is not evidence of actual malice or malice in fact,” and determined that the First Amendment requires the plaintiff show that the defendant knew that a statement was false or was reckless in deciding to publish the information without investigating whether it was accurate.

In recent years, conservatives, including former President Donald Trump have railed against the Times v. Sullivan decision, claiming it grants media outlets permission to publish false narratives under the protection of the defendant having to prove evidence of malice or intention. Here’s Trump in 2016: “I want to open up our libel laws so when the New York Times and Washington Post write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money.”

In 2019, Justice Clarence Thomas further stirred the kettle, writing: “New York Times v. Sullivan and the court’s decisions extending it were policy-driven decisions masquerading as constitutional law.”

And just last week, not to be outdone by anyone in his ongoing choke-the-woke agenda, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis upped his attacks on the “leftist mainstream media,” saying he would push to loosen Florida’s libel laws: “I’d say these companies are probably the leading purveyors of disinformation in our entire society right now.”

Here’s some free advice for these folks: Be careful what you wish for. Libel reform cuts both ways, as Fox News is now finding out the hard way.

The voting machine company, Dominion, is suing Fox for $1.6 billion for promoting fabrications about it regarding the 2020 presidential election. The case will likely turn on the court’s interpretation of Times v. Sullivan and whether Fox knew its hosts’ promotion of lies by election-deniers such as Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani, and others were false.

Turns out, they did. Shocker, I know. In a court document released last week, Dominion claimed that “literally dozens of people with editorial responsibility — from the top of the organization to the producers of specific shows to the hosts themselves — acted with actual malice.” And the company had receipts, dozens of pages of them.

Here’s a sample email exchange between hosts Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham:

Carlson: “Sidney Powell is lying by the way. I caught her. It’s insane.”

Ingraham “Sidney is a complete nut. No one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy.”

There are dozens more examples of internal communications between Fox News hosts, including Trump acolyte Sean Hannity, disparaging the false claims against Dominion. Here are a few other samples of various hosts’ descriptors of their nightly guests: “Ludicrous.” “Off the rails.” “Fucking lunatics.” “Complete bullshit.”

Yet, the election-deniers were put on the air night after night and allowed to pump their duplicitous bilge without pushback. Most troubling for Fox is that the network’s knowing duplicity extended all the way to the top. Dominion’s filing includes records of Fox News chairman Rupert Murdoch calling the voter-fraud claims “really crazy stuff,” among other things.

But the “really crazy stuff” went on the air in prime time for weeks, duping millions of Fox News viewers into believing the “Big Lie” that Dominion’s machines had altered millions of votes and helped steal the 2020 election for Joe Biden.

“Fox knew,” the Dominion filing declares. “From the top down, Fox knew.”

Fox News responded: “The core of this case remains about freedom of the press and freedom of speech, which are fundamental rights afforded by the Constitution and protected by New York Times v. Sullivan.”

Good luck with that. And you might want to give ol’ Clarence a call.

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At Large Opinion

What’s It All About?

Songwriter Burt Bacharach died last week at 94. His songs were mostly old-school paeans to romance — “Walk on By,” “The Look of Love,” “I Say a Little Prayer,” “This Guy’s in Love With You,” “Alfie,” to name just a few. Still, they popped up on the Top 40 charts for four decades, alongside the latest from the Stones, Donna Summer, Bruce Springsteen, the Temptations, the Cure, Elvis Costello, you name it. Bacharach left a musical legacy that made millions of people happy, even if only for three minutes at a time. You could do worse in this life.

I mention all this because I’ve been reading a lot about happiness lately, and the fact that we humans are essentially hard-wired for toxic or tonic thinking — stress or respite. It’s well-established now that how we process stress can either help our body heal or cause it to close itself off with anxiety.

I’m dealing with some health issues, so I’ve spent a lot of time recently consulting with Dr. Google. And even though my prognosis is pretty good, I still take heart from reading the vast trove of anecdotal “power of positive thinking” stories. These are genuine NIH medical histories, not hippie fantasies or Mexican-miracle-cures. For example, countless serious studies using placebos have demonstrated that if someone believes a medicine is helping, it will, even if it’s not medicine. Similarly, what were once considered “quack” remedies, including meditation and holistic practices, and even certain mushrooms long used in Chinese medicine, are now being tested with promising results. So that reishi mushroom tincture I take every morning couldn’t hurt, right?

Once, virtually every system of healing around the globe, from primitive jungle tribes to the kingdoms of Renaissance Europe, treated the mind and body as a whole. Then, 300 years ago or so, Western medicine started to see them as two distinct entities: The body came to be perceived more as a machine with replaceable, repairable, independent parts, with little medical connection to the mind’s influence. This led to great advances in surgery, trauma care, and pharmaceuticals, but it ignored the vital connections between mind and body, the recognition that the mind and body are not separate, but one. Our healthcare system is still primarily geared to medicate and operate, but thankfully the recognition of holistic strategies has also re-emerged.

So, back to the mind: If there are two options, what mental habits are tonic? And which are toxic? Meditation is probably the purest form of tonic thinking — just focusing on breathing and clearing one’s mind. Listening to music is tonic, as is any activity that gets your mind and body into a cohesive flow. As for toxic thinking? It’s dealing with stress. It’s worry. It’s tossing and turning at night over unpaid bills or that fight with your spouse or the pain in your chest that won’t subside. Learning to recognize stress and how to counter it is as medically necessary as remembering to take that evening cholesterol tablet.

In my, er, research, I rediscovered a book by Norman Cousins called Anatomy of an Illness. This book was a big deal in the 1960s, mainly because it was one of the first accounts of someone who ignored the medical establishment and succeeded in curing himself — and because Cousins was a well-known writer and the editor of the then-popular national magazine, Saturday Review. (I should add here that I was briefly managing editor at SR in the 1980s and had occasion to work with Cousins for a few months.)

At any rate, in 1964, Cousins was told he had ankylosing spondylitis — a crippling and irreversible disease — and should get his affairs in order. Faced with spending the short remainder of his life wasting away in a hospital room, Cousins checked into a hotel, and with the help of a sympathetic doctor, took massive amounts of vitamin C and spent hours every day watching comedies by the Marx Brothers and W.C. Fields and reading humorous books, his thesis being that laughter would free his brain from worry and negativity. It was a good call. His illness disappeared and his book became a huge bestseller, and he beat the raindrops falling on his head. You could do worse in this life, Alfie.

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At Large Opinion

Shiny Objects

Photo: Bruce VanWyngarden

Last Friday, after enduring three cold, gray days and nights beneath a quarter-inch of ice, we in Memphis were gifted with the return of the sun and a glittering display of trees sparkling in the morning light. Like many of you, I went out and took pictures and listened to the sounds of the clicking, dripping, shimmering ice-fall with some gratitude. It had been a long week.

And it felt something like closure, an offering, maybe a respite of sorts from the previous week’s civic trauma surrounding the Tyre Nichols case, though much work — and further trauma — surely lies ahead of us in that arena. 

Nevertheless, on this glorious morning, the national news media seemed to have at least temporarily moved on to other matters, and for that we could be grateful. The new shiny object (literally) that was garnering the media’s attention was the presence of a large balloon drifting high over the state of Montana that had been determined to be of Chinese origin. Was it a weather device, as the Chinese were alleging, or was it a piece of nefarious spy-machinery seeking to glean military secrets from the barren Montana terrain, 60,000 feet below?

Long ago, I spent a summer in Montana as a farm laborer, driving grain trucks through lush green fields surrounded by distant mountains during the day and drinking 3.2 beer and getting schooled at 8-ball in cowboy saloons by night. In my admittedly wan memory of those days, nothing much happens in Montana, though it is a beautiful place to spend a summer when you are young and full of yourself.

But back to the balloon, which, as it slowly crossed the country, served much like a high-altitude Rorschach test for the body politic. Republicans, including usual suspects Marjorie Taylor Greene, Mike Pompeo, Tom Cotton, Donald Trump (Jr. and Sr.), and nearly every other GOP yahoo you could name, began clamoring for President Biden to shoot it down immediately, no questions asked. Maybe they thought the balloon was “woke.” Can’t be too careful.

The current president’s advisors, on the other hand, were urging caution, both for the fact that detritus and equipment falling from a balloon as big as “three buses” might damage something or somebody below, and for the possibility that the balloon could be retrieved and brought down safely to better determine its true purpose. Or, in other words, get woke about it.

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy jumped into the fray, calling for a briefing of the “Gang of Eight” — the group of lawmakers charged with reviewing the nation’s most sensitive intelligence information. “China’s brazen disregard for U.S. sovereignty is a destabilizing action that must be addressed, and President Biden cannot be silent,” McCarthy tweeted.

Perhaps fearing the “Gang of Eight” was an actual gang in Congress (and who could blame them?), the Chinese government issued further clarification: “It is a civilian airship used for research, mainly meteorological, purposes. Affected by the Westerlies and with limited self-steering capability, the airship deviated far from its planned course. The Chinese side regrets the unintended entry of the airship into US airspace due to force majeure.”

For its part, the U.S. intelligence community pretended to know what “force majeure” meant for several critical minutes as researchers scrambled to determine what they were up against. After all, it’s not every day you get a Chinese balloon over your airspace, and it’s even more complicated when the Chinese start speaking French. Sacre bleu!

As the balloon drifted across the country on Saturday, the GOP upped its rhetoric: We were all in danger of … something, and Biden’s refusal to shoot it down was just despicable and cowardly. You’d have thought there were drag queens cooking on gas stoves in that thing.

Finally, late in the afternoon, as the evil blimp entered airspace above the Atlantic, it was shot down off the coast near Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. A Pentagon spokesperson said that the U.S. had disabled the balloon’s equipment days earlier and had decided to wait until there was no danger to those on the ground before taking it down. The Pentagon added that three Chinese balloons had crossed the country unmolested during the Trump administration. Oh. Oops.

On Sunday, the entire nation took a deep breath and began looking for the next shiny object to fight about. 

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At Large Opinion

Woke-A-Mole

Photo: KWON JUNHO | Unsplash

Here’s the latest news from Florida, the cutting edge of “conservative” politics, where Governor (and GOP presidential candidate in waiting) Ron DeSantis is determined to stamp out “wokism” in all its terrifying forms and get his name in the news as often as possible.

Last spring, at DeSantis’ urging, the state passed its own version of the “Don’t Say Gay” act, which bans mentioning sexual orientation or gender identity in any manner deemed to be against state standards in schools, and prohibits public schools from adopting procedures that maintain the confidentiality of a disclosure by a student of their sexuality or gender.

Last week, because DeSantis was apparently not content to limit his interest in harassing transgender students to undergraduates, the governor requested data on the number of students who have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria or who have received treatment in university clinics across the state.

Also, last week, in an even more stunning development, Florida banned the teaching of AP classes on African-American history in the state’s high schools. The department of education said the curriculum “is inexplicably contrary to Florida law and significantly lacks educational value.”

So, to review: In Florida, you can’t say gay or Black in schools because teaching about LGBTQ+ issues or Black history is “woke” and might make straight white people sad. Or have to think. Or learn something.

DeSantis is also now pushing for a bill that would give discounts to those wanting to buy a gas stove because gas stoves were a momentary thing that woke people were supposedly woke about last week, due to a study that revealed gas stoves can leak methane into people’s homes. It was all over Fox News, and Tucker Carlson made hay with the “issue” for several nights. Conservatives went on Twitter and dared liberals to come and take their stoves. Liberals were like, “What? Nobody wants your stupid stove, gas boy.” So the issue went away after a few days.

By the way, if you want to see what DeSantis is going to be outraged about next, you can just watch ol’ Tucker. Unbelievably, in recent days, Carlson’s been saying how good cigarettes are for America, how the country was built on smoking. This was in response to House Republicans opening a smoking lounge in the Capitol building. So maybe DeSantis will put gas stoves and cigarettes on a plane to Massachusetts. That should trigger the woke folks, right?

I know, I know, it’s hard to keep up with these fools, but here’s a handy list of woke things conservatives are (or have been) worried about in recent times: the feminization of Mr. Potato Head, the feminization of M&Ms cartoon characters (a Carlson favorite), Dr. Seuss’ Sneetches, gay Teletubbies, drag queens (including, amazingly, the movie Mrs. Doubtfire), litter boxes in schools for students “who identify as cats,” the word Latinx (banned in Arkansas by new Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders), the emasculation of alpha males by aggressive liberal women, bare arms on females (banned in the Missouri legislature), and, of course, the all-time woke pisser-offer — pronouns.

To be accurate, these are usually the kinds of trendy topics that get a lot of air-time in the right-wing news silo for a while, then fade as they lose their usefulness — or people finally see through the charade. (Is “charage” a word? It should be.)

There is, of course, a more durable outrage list that gets tapped when the base rubes really need an anger fix. These include: abortion (and nonexistent “post-birth abortions”), the morning-after pill and other contraceptives, immigrants (non-white), Covid vaccines (they kill people), crime waves (in Democrat cities), gas prices (Joe’s fault), books about sex or race, the “myth” of global warning, and “Critical Race Theory” (which isn’t taught in public schools and which no conservative can actually explain but is really scary).

So, that’s a lot of woke stuff, right? What does it mean if none of it scares or triggers you? Are you still woke? I’m pretty sure I am, but maybe it’s because I’ve come to think being woke simply means that you believe in science, medicine, education, research, fact-based reporting, and the importance of being open to new information. Honestly, I think being woke is what we used to call “normal,” before so many got sucked into their own social media bubbles by charlatans and grifters. At its heart, maybe being woke is simply being unafraid to call “bullshit” when you see it.

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At Large Opinion

Of Wanda and Wallabies

Jamie and Kaari Morant (Photo: Courtesy of Jamie Morant)

So, what do beleaguered County Clerk Wanda Halbert and a wallaby have in common? Well, one of them was found wandering around near Lick Creek in Overton Park last April after having escaped the flooded Memphis Kanga Zoo. The other was seldom to be found, as her office struggled mightily for months to get new Tennessee license plates to Memphis drivers. They have in common the fact that both of their stories were among the Top 10 viewed in 2022 on memphisflyer.com.

It’s an odd list, sort of representative of the year past, but also representative of just how easily some offbeat stories can go viral, well, just because. It can be a matter of lucky timing, or maybe a national website picks up a story, or maybe it just gets a lucky tweet from a celebrity.

Consider the human-interest story that Flyer Grizzlies writer Sharon Brown posted in May. She’d spent weeks trying to get an interview with star guard Ja Morant’s mother, Jamie Morant. When Brown finally got the go-ahead, she struck gold. Morant was forthcoming and frank and opened up about her own childhood and how she taught Ja to respect women. Here’s one exchange from the story:

Brown: Ja once said that you are his best friend and that you taught him to celebrate women every day, that he carries with him in his treatment of his sister, his daughter, and other women. Why was it important to you to teach that to him?

Jamie Morant: Treating everyone with respect is important, but as a man you should treat women with the utmost respect. I mean, you came from a woman, right? We see enough of the opposite in the world and I wanted more for my son.

Thanks to a few retweets from national writers and influencers, Brown’s insightful story became the Flyer’s most-read piece online in 2022.

Right behind that story was a clear example of how serendipity can shape readership — and not in a heart-warming way. Arguably, one of the darkest days in Memphis last year occurred in early September, when a young woman named Eliza Fletcher was kidnapped and murdered while on an early morning jog near the University of Memphis. A man named Cleotha Abston was soon charged with the crime, as we reported at the time. But strangely, it was not Abston’s first appearance in the Flyer, as googlers from all over soon discovered.

In a story from 2001, former Flyer reporter John Branston recounted the troubling tale of Memphis lawyer Kemper Durand. Here’s an excerpt:

“Durand was walking to his car around 2 a.m. on May 25, 2000, after attending a party on Beale Street when a lone gunman walked up behind him, took his wallet, and forced him into the trunk. The abductor, Cleotha Abston, drove around and picked up friends then, after about two hours, escorted Durand into a Mapco station to withdraw money from an ATM. A uniformed Memphis Housing Authority officer entered, Durand yelled that he had been kidnapped, and the kidnappers ran away.”

So, it turned out that 22 years before he kidnapped and killed Eliza Fletcher, Abston had kidnapped someone else. No one had publicly made this connection until we noticed Branston’s story getting a lot of web traffic later in September. Abston pled guilty in 2001 and served nearly 20 years before being released — with disastrous and tragic results.

Also scoring in the Top 10 was Toby Sells’ story about a controversial, Democrat-hating preacher from Mt. Juliet, Tennessee, named Greg Locke. Sample quote: “If you vote Democrat, I don’t even want you around this church,” Locke said in a sermon. “You can get out. You can get out, you demon. You can get out, you baby-butchering, election thief.” Yeah, so, he’s a lot like Jesus, and our readers gobbled it up.

Rounding out our top stories of 2022 were a couple that you might have expected to get a lot of traffic: a column (with pictures) that I wrote about exploring the Mississippi River bottom at its all-time low, and another photo feature in which Flyer film editor Chris McCoy posted a bunch of amazing shots of the same phenomenon. Sometimes the bottom can rise to the top, I guess.

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At Large Opinion

A Year At Large

Verdict’s out on whether this year was rock bottom, but we did see the bottom of the Mississippi River. (Photo: Bruce VanWyngarden)

It’s long been the custom for Flyer writers to devote their year-end column to the 12 months just past, so I’ve spent the past couple of days rummaging through my 2022 columns.

January — The brutal assassination of Memphis rapper Young Dolph dominated the news for a couple of weeks and put Memphis into an unwanted national spotlight. I also wrote about the increasingly troubling phenomenon of souped-up cars with drive-out tags ignoring all traffic laws with impunity. By the end of the month, I was reduced to writing about the joys of learning a language on Duolingo, just to catch a breather.

February — The new Republican-created Tennessee voting district maps were a joke at all three levels, a mugging of democracy in plain sight. Newly configured districts in and around Memphis, Nashville, and Knoxville were designed to break up neighborhoods and Democratic voting strongholds in urban areas, especially Black communities.

Later that month, I took in a pup I found abandoned at the Overton Park dog run. I named her Wink and soon discovered she was deaf. The story had a happy ending, eventually, as two women adopted her. She’s now Sasha, and I still get pictures of her.

Also, Marjorie Taylor Greene ranted about Nancy Pelosi’s “gazpacho police” enforcing mask requirements.

March — I urged the Mighty Lights folks to light the M Bridge in Ukrainian blue and gold after Putin’s invasion. It took a minute for them to catch on.

That was followed by a column on the right’s obsession with “wokeness.” Steve Bannon predicted that Ukraine’s “woke” army would succumb to Putin’s manly Russian forces in a couple of weeks. As usual, Bannon got it completely wrong.

March also saw the beginning of the circus surrounding the Supreme Court nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson. Despite having no real blemishes on her record and more judicial and trial experience than any nominee in decades, she suffered the slings and rubber-tipped arrows of GOP opportunists such as Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, Josh Hawley, and our homegrown lightweight, Marsha Blackburn, who cleverly asked the judge to “define a woman.”

April — I took a deep dive into the Wordle phenomenon, and how I personally got name-checked as a Wordle grinch.

Right-wingers began whining ceaselessly about saving American schools from “Critical Race Theory,” and Governor Bill Lee first tipped his hand about funneling tax dollars to Hillsdale College to fund 50 right-wing charter schools.

Blackburn once again found a way to embarrass (most of) us by slyly giving a white power symbol while questioning Judge Jackson on the Senate floor.

May — The leak of Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion supporting the overturning of Roe v. Wade was beginning to stir dissent, as American women realized that this SCOTUS was apparently quite willing to overturn the right of women to control their own bodies. I suggested the leak came from Clarence Thomas’ wife, Ginni, but it now appears the leaker was Alito himself.

A shooter in Buffalo murdered 10 Black people in a supermarket, citing as his reason the “white replacement theory” that had been spouted by Fox host Tucker Carlson and other white supremacists for weeks. Many thoughts and prayers were offered.

No uterus, no opinion, right? Well, the Supreme Court released a different opinion, called Dobbs. (Photo: © Mikephotos | Dreamstime.com)

June — Oh, hey, time for another mass shooting, this time at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. Thoughts and prayers were immediately issued and everything was fine.

A few days later, after giving a speech at the NRA convention, Donald Trump read the names of the 19 victims of the shooting (mispronouncing many of them). Then, as one does, he danced off-stage to Sam & Dave’s “Hold On, I’m Coming.”

July — Roe v. Wade was overturned and American women in many parts of the country were required to adhere to a religious tenet held by 13 percent of the country’s adults, and six of the nine Supreme Court judges. Conservative activists had spent years working to pack the Supreme Court for the express purpose of undoing Roe v. Wade, and they succeeded. Pundits wondered if women would be able to sustain their outrage until Election Day.

In Memphis, it was 100 degrees or so all month, including one day in which our “feels like” temperature reached a balmy 114.

August — After an investigation, the DOJ became convinced that Trump was lying about not having more classified information stored at Mar-a-Lago and conducted a raid, which uncovered lots more classified and top-secret information. Trump had lied. Shocker.

I wrote about the horrific problems of Shelby County Clerk Wanda Halbert’s office, then I went on vacation for a couple weeks and had a great time. Kinda like Wanda did.

September — Like I said, I went on vacation. When I got back I wrote about license plates, “In God We Trust,” and propping up religion by the state government.

October — I managed to get out a column about being a bird-nerd and getting busted for pot in college. You wouldn’t think there would be a connection, but that’s why they pay me the big bucks to write this stuff. I also commended President Joe “Cheech” Biden for letting all those dope-fiends out of prison.

The next week I went out in a boat on the Mississippi River, what was left of it, and took a lot of pictures of sand dunes that used to be river bottom.

November — Finally, there was good news. The “red wave” that was supposed to crush the Democrats’ power in Washington, D.C., and around the country turned out to be blue. People didn’t forget the Roe v. Wade debacle. People didn’t want to overturn the 2020 election or put Trump’s hand-selected clowns in high office. Huzzah.

December — We learned that the city would be getting a minor league football team called the Memphis Showboats (again). The city went crazy with all-night celebrations for a week. It was awesome.

We were also treated to another episode of the ongoing series, “I’m an anti-Semite,” starring “Ye,” Trump, and another horrible person. Then Trump demanded that we “terminate” the Constitution and make him president again because Elon Musk released an earth-shattering Twitter expose about Hunter Biden’s penis. So far, the Constitution hasn’t been terminated, but there’s always next year. See you in January.

Categories
At Large Opinion

Call Me

Don’t lose my number. (Photo: Stokkete | Dreamstime.com)

Rikki, don’t lose that number
You don’t wanna call nobody else
Send it off in a letter to yourself …

I still remember it: 581-3457. No, that wasn’t Rikki’s number. That was my family’s phone number when I was growing up. In those days, I could tell you the phone numbers of all my close friends, plus those of my grandparents, plus the local pizza joint. I never thought about having to look them up. Everyone had tons of numbers memorized. It was essential. It’s not like you could carry a phone book around with you.

Now? Well, I know my wife’s phone number, mainly because I have to use it in filling out various forms. And I know Jenny’s, of course (867-5309). But I couldn’t begin to tell you my children’s numbers. They’ve all moved around and their area codes are weird now and, well, I don’t have to know their numbers because I can just tell my phone to “call Mary.” This is a good thing. I’ve got four kids and stepkids, meaning I’d have to memorize 40 rando digits with my dwindling brain cells, and who needs that?

Speaking of my brain cells, indulge me please as I ponder for a moment the ancient days of landlines — only we didn’t call them landlines. We called them “telephones.” They were big, clunky plastic things that were plugged into walls or placed in little booths around town. Most families had a single phone shared by everybody, usually in the living room. Later, people began to get “extensions,” so you could get some modicum of privacy, unless your pesky brother in the other room stealthily picked up and listened. College dorms had a single phone in the hallway, shared by every resident living on that floor. You want to sweet talk your girlfriend? Good luck.

Times were tough, I tell ya. If you’re over 40, you can probably relate to much of this. The greatest evolutionary steps of the telephone have happened within our lifetimes.

Remember when voicemail was introduced? What a revelation that was. Everyone left those stupid explicit instructions. “You have reached 901-111-5554, the residence of George and Brenda Caldwell-Williams. We can’t answer the phone right now, but if you’ll leave your name and phone number after the beep, we’ll get back to you as soon as possible. Have a great day!”

You had to listen to that bilge all the way through every time you called before you could leave a message. Kill me. And lots of people did cute or “funny” answering machine messages, like reading the script together or making little jokes. Kill me again. Faster.

And caller ID? What a game changer! I remember with great pleasure the day we got that device on our home phone. That very night our teenage daughter called and said, “Hey, Mom, I’m at Kathryn’s and I think I’m just gonna spend the night out here, okay?” My wife responded: “Huh, that’s interesting. Our new caller ID says you’re at Brad’s house. You get your butt home right now, young lady!” It was so delicious. Good, good times.

Now caller ID, voicemail, cameras, maps, phone books, and the entire collected knowledge of the human race are built into the noisy little computers we carry with us everywhere. Today that Steely Dan song I cited above would be called, “Rikki, Yo Here’s My Digits.” You’d just airdrop her your number and start sending inappropriate texts.

And it’s not just songs that have had to be reinvented. All of modern fiction and screenwriting have changed to accommodate the new reality of constant interconnectedness. Plots involving letter writing? Nah. Heroine driving a car and can’t be reached? Nah. Hero needs to go to the library to look something up and then meets girl of his dreams? Nah.

These sorts of changes aren’t unprecedented, of course. Art and literature have always evolved to accommodate the modifications imposed by humanity’s inventiveness. The World According to Garp and Casablanca beautifully exemplify the era of their creation, and their truths stand the test of time. Bogart standing on a rainy Moroccan tarmac growling, “Here’s looking at you, kid,” over a cell phone just wouldn’t have the same magic.