Tag: Donald Trump

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Blunt Talk

Steve Cohen (Photo: Jackson Baker)

Donald Trump’s visit to the Memphis area over the weekend, at the Landers Center in Southaven, may have served as many Democratic purposes as Republican ones.

The former president’s “American Freedom Tour” netted a few thousand butts in seats on Saturday to hear his familiar litany, at prices ranging from $45 to $3,995. As a payday, that’s not small change, and it followed by a day another well-attended bonanza for Trump in Nashville.

But Democrats in Memphis, a few miles north, got some profit from the occasion, as well. Among other things, they used the then-pending Trump visit on Saturday for an “anti-Trump GOTV Rally & Happy Hour” on Friday evening at the Poplar Avenue campaign headquarters of Democratic D.A. candidate Steve Mulroy.

After flashing some signs at the late-Friday drive-time traffic on Poplar, the group went inside and got together a counternarrative of sorts. The star of the occasion was 9th District Congressman Steve Cohen, who compared published ads for the Trump event to poorly done commercials he used to see on local TV for slapped-together country music shows.

Despite reports that the Trump affair was sold out, Cohen jested to his listeners that they could get “two for one” on the $9 seats. As for the $3,995 tickets, he said, “You get to go and shake hands with the president, and then they give you some stuff to clean your hands.”

Referring to the ex-president as a “narcissistic sociopath,” Cohen reflected on allegations of illegal activity by Trump recently made public by the ongoing congressional January 6th investigative committee. “He is openly and notoriously committing criminal acts against our government, like no other person in our political history has ever done,” Cohen said.

The congressman recounted how he feared for his life on the occasion of open insurrection in the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. He told of how, barricaded in his office, he picked up a prized possession for potential self-defense — a souvenir baseball bat given to him once by former Chicago White Sox baseball great Minnie Miñoso.

“Ironically enough,” Cohen said, “Minnie’s son, Charlie, tweeted me, as did many other people during the event, and he asked, ‘How’s everybody in the office?’ I said, ‘Everybody’s okay,’ and told Charlie, ‘I’m sitting here with your father’s bat.’ He texted me back, and he said, ‘If he was there, he’d be there with you — ready to use the bat.’”

Host for the Friday evening affair, at which several Democratic candidates in the August election took speaking turns, was D.A. candidate Mulroy, who in his own remarks was at pains to connect the persona of Donald Trump with that of his own election opponent, incumbent Republican D.A. Amy Weirich.

Simultaneously with the Democratic rally, a new TV commercial on Mulroy’s behalf was getting airtime. Just as Mulroy did verbally to his audience, the commercial, entitled “Peas in the Pod,” yoked the images of Trump and Weirich, cast against a video of the January 6th mob in action.

A voice-over said, “Trump is bringing his mob to Memphis. Trump and D.A. Amy Weirich both break the rules and are out of control.” The ad continued: “On D.A. Amy Weirich’s watch, crime has jumped almost every year,” and a graph or two was shown by way of documentation. The soundtrack continued: “Now Shelby County has the worst violent crime anywhere. The worst president, the worst district attorney. We can do better with former federal prosecutor Steve Mulroy.”

Mulroy and Weirich are not playing beanbag with each other. Last week, after Mulroy had announced the results of a poll, which he said showed him with a 12-percentage-point lead, Weirich responded, “It sounds like Professor Mulroy is having trouble raising money and is cooking up bogus poll numbers to try and get donations. When your entire platform is built around freeing criminals from jail, it’s hard to raise money beyond the radical out-of-town Defund the Police activists.”

Categories
At Large Opinion

Hold On, He’s Coming

You know, I’ve really tried to avoid writing about the most-recent former president. I was the Flyer editor during his tumultuous four years in office, and I had to write about him a lot, mainly because a week seldom went by without some sort of outrageous, over-the-top, unprecedented presidential antics. We were in a continuous reactive mode. He did what??? I had to write the column at the last possible minute, just to keep up.

Emotions were high from the very beginning of his term. (You may remember the Flyer’s infamous “WTF?” cover, which led many people to call our office to tell us they would never buy another Flyer. Yes, we’re free, but you know …)

Now, as Congress’ January 6th committee finally prepares to hold public hearings on the remarkable attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election, I suspect emotions are about to kick into high gear again. The cast of characters in the plot includes generals, cabinet members, several congressmen, a few senators, sleazy lawyers, crazy lawyers, a pillow salesman, the wife of a Supreme Court justice, the minority leader of the House of Representatives, and the former president himself. 

The supporting cast includes Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Roger Stone, Steve Bannon, and other white supremacists, plus several thousand assorted idiots from around the country who actually believed they could get away with pillaging the U.S. Capitol because the then-president told them to do it. (Not to mention that some of them actually thought they were going to hang then-Vice President Mike Pence.)

The schism in American politics was always there, but Trump drove a thick wedge into it, widening the divide like never before. Healing is going to take a while. With any luck, the former president will resist the temptation to run again and just keep operating the ceaseless “fund-raising” grift he’s been pushing since he left office. It’s not as much work and there’s more time for golf, so I’m somewhat hopeful.

As you may have gathered from various billboards around Memphis, Trump is bringing the circus to town, or rather, to Southaven, Mississippi, where the “American Freedom Tour” is slated to play the Landers Center on June 18th. Opening acts include Donald Trump Jr., his girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle, former paintball salesman and now sheriff Mark Lamb, plus other as yet unnamed “Top American Conservatives.” Tickets start at $45. Cultists and other suckers are advised to jump on these before they drop to, oh, I don’t know, free? The “crowds” Trump has been luring lately are not his best people. He’s got the usual six Black guys who sit behind him, a couple hundred Trump-heads who travel and never miss a gig, plus whatever assorted moronic locals show up to feed their id. It’s a party.

And there’s a Memphis angle now. After his speech at the NRA convention last week, Trump read the names of the 19 victims of the Uvalde shooting (mispronouncing many of them). Then, as one does following such a somber moment, he broke into a dance. That was bad enough, but making it worse was the fact that the music Trump was dad-dancing to was “Hold On, I’m Coming,” the iconic Stax tune penned by David Porter and Isaac Hayes.

Porter was not amused. He tweeted: “Someone shared with me Donald Trump used the song ‘Hold On, I’m Coming’ for a speaking appearance of his. Hell to the No! I did Not and would NOT approve of them using the song for any of his purposes! I also know Isaac’s estate wouldn’t approve as well!”

Such legal niceties will not stop Trump from using the song, and no doubt he’s doing so without paying royalties. But there may be a way to get a little payback. Memphis city council members Martavius Jones and JB Smiley have introduced a measure that would prevent the Memphis Police Department from escorting the Trump caravan from the Memphis airport to the Landers Center. They rightfully point out that Trump routinely stiffs local governments for any costs his visits incur, so why should Memphis put itself on the hook for those expenses? Trump’s a private citizen now. He’s got Secret Service protection. Let Mississippi take care of it.

I couldn’t agree more. When Trump lands in Memphis, let’s send him this message: Hold On, We’re Not Coming. 

Categories
News News Blog News Feature

Council Members Request MPD to Decline Trump Escort

Photo by Library of Congress on Unsplash

Two Memphis City Council members will request that the Memphis Police Department (MPD) decline to escort former President Donald Trump during his upcoming visit to the area.

Trump is slated to speak during the American Freedom Tour stop at Landers Center on Saturday, June 18th. That tour includes Donald Trump Jr., Candace Owens, Mike Pompeo, Kimberly Guilfoyle, Dinesh D’Souza, Sheriff Mark Lamb and more.

Billboards advertising the visit have popped up around Memphis, claiming “Memphis loves Trump”. However, many on social media have pointed out that Trump will be visiting Southaven, Mississippi, not Memphis, Tennessee.

At next week’s council meeting, council members JB Smiley and Martavius Jones plan to present a resolution to request that the MPD decline escorting Trump to the tour stop.

As we know, the Memphis Police Department is already experiencing a shortage of officers to patrol our communities.

Memphis City Council member JB Smiley

“I’m sure many Memphians have seen the billboards advertising former president Donald Trump’s visit on June 18th,” reads a statement from Smiley. “The fact of the matter is that he will not be coming to Memphis, but to Southaven, Mississippi, and he will most likely be flying into Memphis International Airport.

“As we know, the Memphis Police Department is already experiencing a shortage of officers to patrol our communities. I do not believe that it is a prudent use of police manpower and Memphians’ taxpayer dollars to escort the former president to an event in Mississippi.”

The resolution is slated to be heard in the council’s Public Safety committee and voted on at the full council meeting on June 7th. 

Categories
At Large Opinion

Oh, My God!

Ginni Thomas (Photo: Wikimedia | Gage Skidmore)

It really is unbelievable, when you think about it. You have to wonder how this can possibly be happening in 2022. Women are being treated like chattel — their bodies controlled by the state as though they were livestock, their gender and sexuality no longer their own.

I’m talking, of course, about Afghanistan’s autocratic Taliban rulers, who last week ordered all Afghan women to wear body-covering burkas in public. The decree further mandated that women leave their homes only when necessary, even when wearing a burka. Male relatives will also face punishment — including possible jail time — if women in their family violate the dress code.

It was seen as a hard shift by the Taliban government, one that confirmed the worst fears of human rights activists. It is a cruel and absurd level of oppression and misogyny, but what do you expect when government and religious ideology are combined? It’s so distressing.

Meanwhile, in the United States of America, the Supreme Court (where six of the nine justices are Catholic) appears to be ready to overturn Roe v. Wade and thereby legalize religious-based laws banning or restricting abortion in 26 states (and counting). Seventy percent of Americans oppose making abortion illegal again, but this is a case where “majority rule” is truly a joke. As Republicans learned long ago: Control the judges and you control the law.

The problem, of course, is not necessarily that the justices are Catholic — liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor is Catholic, for example — the problem is that the five judges in question have been vetted and brought to the fore by the ultra-conservative Federalist Society, which opposes abortion rights. Presidents G.W. Bush and Donald Trump (both of whom lost the popular vote) followed their recommendations, and here we are. It’s been the Federalists’ stated goal to overturn Roe v. Wade for 50 years, and it looks like they’re about to succeed.

John Gehring, Catholic program director at the Washington-based clergy network Faith in Public Life, was interviewed by the AP: “The Catholic intellectual tradition has produced giants of liberal thought as well, but in recent decades the right has done a better job building institutions that nurture pathways to power.” No kidding.

And let’s not forget the Evangelical Christians’ contribution to this pending fustercluck. David Talcott, professor of philosophy at King’s College and an expert in Christian sexual ethics, told vox.com: “Conservative Catholics and conservative evangelicals have become allies of certain kinds, each defending the interests of other, a theological and philosophical overlap between the two.” Indeed.

I’m no religious expert, but I am sure of one thing: What we’re talking about here is, at its core, sexual repression. Abortion is just one spoke in the traditional religious shame-wheel that also includes opposition to sex without marriage, LGBTQ rights (including gay marriage), contraception, masturbation, etc. — pretty much anything involving fun sexy-time — because their god has decreed that sex is not for f**king around. It’s for baby-making. The guilt is just an added feature, not a bug.

It’s no accident that when contraception became readily available to women via the pill, the sexual revolution followed, and Roe v. Wade became the law of the land. The religious right and their Republican groomers have been working to turn back the clock ever since. Can’t have women acting all uppity, after all. They need to learn their place and make some damn babies. The conservatives played the long game — stacking the courts — and it looks like they may finally pull it off. Much to their regret, I predict.

There are two principal theories about the now-infamous leak that made Justice Samuel Alito’s preliminary majority opinion public: 1) A liberal justice or associate leaked it to provoke alarm among progressives and arouse the base for the midterms. 2) A conservative justice or associate leaked it to prevent any of the five in the majority from being able to back away from their initial opinion on subsequent votes.

Ironically, both results will probably happen. As for the leaker? If I were a betting man, I’d put money on Mrs. Clarence Thomas.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

Violent Dishonesty

General Michael Flynn, former national security advisor (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

On April 21st, I went to the Top Notch Diner in Cortland, Ohio. Senate candidate Josh Mandel appeared with retired General Michael Flynn, former national security advisor in the Trump administration. I listened to Flynn tell the crowd, “The election was stolen,” and Mandel brag about being the only candidate in his race to call out the theft.

The crowd was whipped into a frenzy; the Big Lie about the election was red meat — it was their main course.

Mandel described the work of the deep state: They weren’t coming after Trump and Flynn. Trump and Flynn were just caught in the middle. “The deep state is coming after all of us!”

As an educator and trained researcher, I am at a complete loss.

What do you tell the people who do not believe the countless verdicts? There were not irregularities and interference — Trump lost, and Biden won. What can reconnect people with reality?

All the Trump and Republican-led initiatives found the same results, in some cases indicating Biden’s victory was an even larger margin than initially reported.

It is a problem of scale. The problem is that it is not a matter of a few lies a few people have told and that a few people believe. The problem is cultural violence; winning and acquiring power are more important than telling the truth. Theorists have debated the so-called clash of civilizations, but in the U.S., it is a devolution to clashing with the uncivilized.

We see the devolution exploding across the right. The GOP embraces QAnon conspiracy, and the GQP is now more mainstream in conservative politics than the so-called “law and order” politics of decades past.

Uncivilized, not as a pejorative, but as individuals who have been conned by leaders who put personal gain over community and country. When the foundation is dishonesty, everything becomes party to the lie.

In Bakersfield, California, home of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, the Republican Accountability Project has placed six large billboards with the message: “WE’VE HEARD THE TAPES, KEVIN. Stop lying about January 6th.”

The cumulative impact of the categorical and ubiquitous dishonesty is hard to measure. The individual moments of malice are more easily discerned. For example, the connection between McCarthy, Trump, and their teams’ racist lies about invasions at the southern border are directly tied to many hate crimes, violent attacks, and even mass shooting events; you can read it directly in perpetrators’ manifestos.

Cumulative effects assessment — looking at everything together — presents much greater harm; it is violent dishonesty. The lies are degrading the quality of life and strength and effectiveness across the country and around the globe. But it starts at home, and it is happening in primaries across the country.

The fiction that the election was stolen is central in these tribal politics. The strength of loyalty to Trump over commitment to the Constitution is being tested and with the results the danger will come into focus.

When (and if) the faction supporting Trump’s attempted coup grows, two things will be clear. The lie will be embedded into culture and politics as a source for ongoing controversy and extreme divisions — a marker of division and existential identity. But the lie is already imprinted into the law and Republicans have limited access to the right to vote and presented increased capacity for overturning a democratic election.

The nightmare scenario is on the horizon and should be feared. A candidate who could lose by all measures (direct vote and electoral college) could still be installed by a corrupt Republican party that has already made their antidemocratic tendencies clear.

Be worried of the malice this fascist autocrat will wield. Silencing marginalized voices is a starting point, but the much more vengeful and exploitative vision has already been made clear. Trump captured the extremist crowd with declarations of the threat Black and brown bodies presented; “stop the steal” did not replace “build the wall,” it accompanies it.

Elected officials have admitted Trump’s crimes in private and delivered his lies in public. They will continue to abuse the power of their offices while they undergird the xenophobia, sexism, and bigotry that Trump championed. Start by imagining the horror show when he realizes he can do anything he wants; then prevent it before it is too late.

Wim Laven, Ph.D., syndicated by PeaceVoice, teaches courses in political science and conflict resolution.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

Ending Title 42

Photo: Vladek | Dreamstime.com

“Title 42,” an obscure section of a 1944 law authorizing extraordinary [anti-]immigration powers during public health emergencies, was “discovered” by the Trump administration in 2020 as Covid-19 spread globally. They interpreted the title “loosely,” using it to deport people and deny asylum seekers access to the USA. With the election of Joe Biden, most hoped for relief and a return to policies that reflect the generosity and spirit of the United States — a “nation of immigrants.” Yet, the past 16 months have proven difficult in walking back Trump’s inhumane immigration policies, revealing the timidity of Biden and the Democrats’ approach to the ongoing immigration conundrum.

Trump, together with his brash, anti-immigrant senior policy adviser Stephen Miller, genuinely believed that closing off the nation to immigrants (well … certain immigrants) and asylum seekers would win them re-election in 2020. The “Muslim Ban” was one of their first noxious acts upon arrival in office. Trump — sensitive diplomat always — referred to certain African nations and (in our own hemisphere) El Salvador and Haiti as “shithole countries.” He made it clear that the U.S. should do more to promote immigration from places like … Norway.

Trump rejected our obligations under the Geneva Conventions and our own legal and moral obligations by refusing to process asylum seekers, preferring instead to leave them living in squalor on the Mexico side of the U.S./Mexico border. He also cut the number of refugees we accept down to a fraction of our usual acceptance rate, thus undermining our moral standing in the world.

He seized on the pandemic, took authority under Title 42, and expelled asylum seekers, including unaccompanied minors, under the contention that they posed a health risk to the American public.

Most immigrant advocates believed Biden would end the use of Title 42 on the first day of his presidency since it appeared to be an illegal and factually unsupportable use of the law. Many thought Biden would quickly end Trump’s “Wait in Mexico” policy, which has served only to strand thousands of Central Americans, Haitians, and Venezuelans (among others); the policy has benefited smugglers of narcotics and of human beings, and the criminal networks that prey on the vulnerabilities of people who can’t or won’t return to their nation of origin.

What to do? First, let’s change the narrative on immigration. This means being truthful about “why” people are fleeing to the United States. In the case of Haiti and El Salvador, our nation has supported (in recent history) repressive, corrupt “anti-communist” regimes that have not been kind to their people.

Second, let’s stop the racist nonsense about immigrants. Norwegians don’t want to come here! They live in a nicely socialist state of prosperity with full healthcare, long life-spans, and plenty of oil to sell.

Third, our economy prospers thanks to the work, contributions, creativity, and energy of immigrants. The arguments “against” this statement are simply fake news. If we continue to cut off legitimate paths to immigration and immigrants (for short-term political gains), we run the risk of becoming Japan or Italy, with an aging population, political and social hostility to immigrants from the global “south,” all leading to long-term economic stagnation.

The palpable anger and hostility on the far right in this nation does not translate to long-term economic growth and/or social stability. Take a look at January 6, 2021, as a prime example. The “Recent Right” is simply interested in winning; they want short-term political gains, so they can control budgets, power, and money. Period.

The open hostility, last month, of some senators toward an eminently qualified Supreme Court nominee hardly helped bring the nation together, and when our own Marsha Blackburn asked a Harvard-trained judge to define the word “woman,” most Americans rolled their eyes in wonder. The real wonder? How did this unqualified person win statewide office here in Tennessee?

The media has distorted the facts on immigration with sensationalistic reporting and frightening stories of “waves” of migrants heading to our (southern) border. The fact is people are allowed to come here, apply for refugee status, and receive a hearing before a judge — assuming their case is deemed credible. Our nation’s immigration laws are unique in this regard, and rather than bemoan the fact that people want to come here, we should celebrate the story of America as an open, immigrant-friendly nation. An immigrant-friendly nation whose prosperity — culturally, socially, and economically — has centered on the welcoming of immigrants.

If comprehensive immigration reform is legislatively impossible, Biden needs to implement a comprehensive executive policy. He failed to immediately rid us of Title 42, and he can’t win the political argument by attempting to placate the unreasonable right with half-measures and reliance on Trump-era policies.

Biden must reframe the narrative with policies that demonstrate who we are as a people. Immigrants are instrumental to the prosperity of our nation — it’s always been this way. Biden should make this argument; he needs to spend some of his waning political capital to demonstrate a clear commitment to the bedrock ideals that have made America great.

Bryce Ashby is a Memphis-based attorney and the board chair of Latino Memphis. Michael LaRosa teaches history at Rhodes College.

Categories
At Large Opinion

$ave America

Somebody loves me.

Call me a masochist, but I’ve stayed in touch with former president Donald J. Trump. Or, better said, I’ve allowed him to stay in touch with me.

Trump was booted off Twitter on January 8th for violating that social medium’s “glorification of violence” policy. And there’s little doubt that his tweets surrounding the January 6th insurrection and its aftermath glorified the actions of those who violently stormed the U.S. Capitol.

“American patriots,” Trump tweeted on January 8th, “will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly.” Trump added, “I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th,” which Twitter interpreted as: “So if some of you patriots want to come and mess that up, feel free.”

That was Trump’s last tweet. He briefly experimented with other social media platforms but got no traction, and finally he settled on email as the best way to deliver his message. I signed up for it on the theory that we better keep an eye on the sumbitch.

At first, Trump’s emails were tweet-length rants in the form of a “Statement by Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States of America.” All the catchphrases were there: “Radical left Democrats,” “Disgraceful RINO Republicans,” “Fake News,” and, of course, “Russia, Russia, Russia.”

Now things have changed. Sure, Trump still emails the occasional “statement,” but it’s almost like he’s just going through the motions, like the Beach Boys playing the Beau Rivage casino — singing the hits for the money. And make no mistake: Money is what this is all about.

Consider: On October 14th, a typical day, I got 15 emails from Trump. Fifteen! I’m old, so I’m targeted by a lot of email marketers, but none of them think I’m stupid enough to open 15 emails a day in order to win a football signed by The Donald or an invitation to Mar-a-Lago or to become a member of the Day One club (where, according to Donald Trump Jr., “your name will be first on the list my father sees”). Or I could win a signed hat, a signed poster, a signed photograph, a personalized welcome mat, or (gasp!) lunch with Kimberly Guilfoyle. The approaches vary but the closing pitch is always the same: Give me, your beloved president, some money.

If you click on “Donate,” you’ll see a countdown clock at 59 minutes with the following clever text:

President Trump is working around the clock to SAVE AMERICA from Joe Biden and the Radical Left, but he cannot do it alone. He’s calling on YOU to step up.

For 1 HOUR ONLY: you can INCREASE your impact by 300%! Please make a contribution of ANY AMOUNT IMMEDIATELY to help President Trump SAVE AMERICA!

So, as you can see, it’s an emergency. Helpfully, when an American Patriot™ donates, say, $50 to Save America, he is automatically signed up to give that amount monthly forever — or until he notices the money disappearing from his bank account and decides to opt out.

If you read the fine print (so boring!), you discover that the money goes to Save America JFC, a joint fundraising committee on behalf of Save America and Make America Great Again PAC (“MAGAPac”). And if you read all the way to the bottom, you’ll reach the money shot: “Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.”

That means this money is not going to help Donald Trump or any candidate get elected. It is not going to help Donald Trump “save America.” It is going to help Donald Trump pay his bills, fuel his jet, fund his lawyers, and settle his lawsuits. It is a grift, pure and simple. It is what Trump has done all his life.

When a snake emails you who he is, believe him.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Snowblind: Our Vision May at Long Last Be Returning

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Yes, it was one hell of a week, literally.

I was put in mind of a situation five years ago involving a couple of the bad actors we heard so much about this past week. Of the seven times I’ve been able, on behalf of this newspaper, to travel to New Hampshire during a presidential caucus and to report on it from there, the occasion of 2016 was most brutal, weather-wise, with temperatures always in the oughts or teens.

Jackson Baker

Ted Cruz drew big in a blizzard in 2016.

On the first night I was there, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, one of the leading Republican candidates then (and the protagonist of this week’s “Flyin’ Ted” melodrama), happened to be having a town hall in Dover, where I was holed up, on the state’s southern rim. Cruz, who at the time was Donald Trump‘s best positioned GOP rival, also happened to be doing his thing in a sleet storm.

Inching along cravenly in my rental car on streets of ice, being honked at by locals who somehow were able to whiz by me, it took me more than an hour to get to the site, which was only blocks away. When I got there, I was astounded at the size of an overflow crowd, eager (or curious) to hear Cruz’s sternly right-wing views.

Every venture I undertook anywhere that week to catch up with the candidates, Democrat and Republican, I experienced as a life-and-death matter. I fell on the ice and almost broke my back at a Hillary Clinton event. The climax of the week was a 26-mile trek in a bona fide blizzard to Manchester, the state capital, to catch frontrunner Trump’s performance at a downtown auditorium.

The candidate was an hour late, and came in complaining about the blizzard and the many traffic accidents it had already caused. He tough-loved the crowd: “You have to do me a favor. I don’t really care if you get hurt or not, but I want you to last till tomorrow. So don’t get hurt!” The crowd loved it and reveled even more when Trump agreed with a woman supporter’s shout that opponent Cruz was “a pussy.”

The sadomasochism of the thing — of the whole week, actually — was in retrospect a perfect precursor for the four years that were to come. Survival of the fittest, every man for himself, trust to your luck and pluck. All that.

And there was the moment, over this past weekend, when I finally hazarded a trip out of the house, hopeful of buying some bottled water. I didn’t make it the first time or two. Not only was the still-unthawed ice too rough in the sloped part of my driveway, but as I looked around at the expanse of snow all around me, the glare of all that empty crystallized whiteness seemed about to annihilate my field of vision. And I suddenly knew what the term “snow-blind” meant.

Eventually I would get out and get my water, not at a store (they were out) but through the kindness of a friend. Eventually the ice would begin to melt and the stressful whiteness of the landscape would begin to fill in with renewed color. This may not seem to be much of an epiphany, but it happened simultaneously with, or in the wake of, the decision of city and county governments to open new vaccination sites and, of all overdue things, to offer guaranteed vaccine doses to the public school teachers who had been expected, martyr-like, to rush back to in-person teaching without them.

On Monday, the County Commission was scheduled to strike down residential requirements for the hiring of a new corps of vaccine workers to augment and step up the vaccination process.

In Washington, a new president, with a new commitment to the role of government in sheltering the lives and livelihoods of citizens, began to roll out an enhanced COVID-19 plan — a national plan, at last! — and declared, as well, a resolve to fix a cruel and xenophobic immigration system and a commitment to a stimulus plan capable, perhaps, of restoring a bleached-out nation’s economic hopes and of returning it to normalcy. Yes, the plan is ample, having what County Commissioner Reginald Milton says is the “girth” that government needs to survive lean times.

In many ways, the snow is melting, and our vision, fixed too long in icy indifference, may be returning.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Little Dark Age

“If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence, I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon’s but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side, and superstition, ambition, and ignorance on the other.” — Ulysses S. Grant.

As I write this, it’s the day after the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, 24 hours after politicians like 8th District Congressman David Kustoff and Senator Marsha Blackburn release their annual pious MLK quotes on Twitter. Because if anyone exemplifies the ideals of Dr. King, it’s Republicans who supported the overturning of a presidential election in order to appease the deluded, hateful supporters of a narcissistic would-be autocrat.

Kustoff had the utter audacity to cite this King quote: “Hate cannot drive out hate. Only love can do that.” Are you kidding me? Tell it to your friends who were at the Capitol last week, David. Tell it to the president whose boots you licked. I expect this kind of stuff from Blackburn, who’s been a lightweight and sellout for years. But Kustoff is smarter than Blackburn. He knows better. His cynical embrace of Trump’s corruption and lies is appalling.

Today is also the day before President-elect Joe Biden gets inaugurated in front of — what? — 300 people? Thanks to Kustoff’s and Blackburn’s pals, the ignorant yahoos who destroyed the Capitol a couple weeks ago, this year’s inauguration will feature a “crowd” made up of 25,000 troops. Trump won’t be there, having pardoned a bunch of sleazos before hopping a jet to Mar-a-Lago for some well-deserved R&R before his Senate impeachment trial. But there will be some good news for him: His only inaugural crowd will no doubt have been larger than Biden’s. Sean Spicer, wherefore art thou?

This new administration and this new Congress and Senate take over a country in chaos. Millions of Americans are unemployed, facing eviction, a lack of food and money, and an epidemic that will have killed half-a-million of us by the end of February, roughly a year after we were told by President Trump that it would “just go away.”

It’s a country in which more than 70 million people bought into the Trump fever-dream, a twisted vision that tapped into fear and latent anger more effectively than most of us imagined was possible. Take a minute to think about what Trump (and his political and media enablers) convinced his base to fear and/or distrust: any Democrat, any liberal, immigrants of color, journalists and most major media outlets, Black people, Mexicans, Antifa, “cancel culture,” mail-in voting, the American electoral system, scientists and medical experts, the Justice department, military leaders … I could go on.

Joe Biden says he wants to unite the country. I wish him luck. Maybe start with bringing back some iteration of the Fairness Doctrine, some sort of legislation that will ensure that knowingly broadcasting lies and disinformation on public airways or providing a place for it on the internet won’t be tolerated. It’s not just Fox News or OANN. It’s Facebook, Twitter, Google, Instagram, you name it. There has to be some sort of recalibration, some way to monitor this stuff. Too many people are being radicalized by lies and false conspiracies. The fact that millions of people actually bought into the insanity of QAnon is itself astounding and terrifying.

Similarly, the Big Lie about Trump “winning in a landslide” was allowed to be spread unchecked in too many places by too many people without pushback or fact-checking. We’ll be dealing with the fallout from it for quite some time. Thanks, David and Marsha. Good work.

Now that we have some vaccines that work, we have to figure out how to get the medicine into as many Americans as quickly as possible. The Trump administration’s “plan” of leaving it up to the states has resulted in an ineffective, spread-shot system without consistency or logic. Over the weekend, I saw several posts on social media from folks who’d gotten the vaccine. Only one was over 75 years old. They were all from out of state. Lots of folks were asking, understandably, “How did you do that?”

I went to the Shelby County Health Department website on Monday and learned nothing about how to schedule a shot. I followed a link to the state of Tennessee COVID site, where I could fill out a multi-page survey (outdated) to see if I was eligible for a shot, but there was no mechanism for signing up, and no indication of when I’d be able to do so. We’re still stumbling around. Hopefully, when the feds take over, they’ll flip on a light switch. We’ve been in this little dark age for too long.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

The Twitter End

It’s so nice when we finally get a slow news week.

I mean, except for the whole “Let’s instigate a mob attack on the nation’s Capitol to go after Congress members and senators and get five people killed and build a gallows so we can hang Vice President Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi” thing. Which was almost a week ago. So.

I want to talk about social media. It’s hard to imagine the Trump presidency playing out as it did (or even happening) without Twitter. No one has ever used a social medium more effectively than Donald Trump. Twitter was his hammer and everything was a nail. He utilized it to communicate directly with his base, to tap into and spur their anger, their frustrations, and the racism that still infects so many of them. Via his tweets, Trump demonized Muslims, Mexicans, and Blacks. He tweeted warnings of “caravans.” He tweeted no-fly bans. He tweeted outsized fears of immigrant gangs. He tweet-fired cabinet members. He amplified white supremacists and QAnon conspiracists by retweeting them. He tweeted about his wall, about being cheated out of the Nobel Peace Prize.

Trump also used Twitter for “diplomacy,” tweeting derisively about “Little Rocket Man” and leaders of Canada, France, Iran, and Germany. He tweeted threats of war. And Trump used Twitter to offer helpful criticism about television shows and networks; from SNL to OANN to Fox to CBS to CNN, Trump had an opinion to tweet. And, of course, Trump used Twitter to misinform Americans about COVID, over and over again. You name it, Trump tweeted about it.

Now it’s finished. Twitter has muted Trump, banning him from the platform that he could reasonably argue he helped build into what it is today. Many of Trump’s supporters are calling Twitter’s decision an assault on free speech. It is not. A private company has the right to refuse service. Twitter’s move is more like a bar kicking out a drunk who’s chasing off other customers. Or a bakery refusing to create a cake for a gay wedding, if you prefer.

Many Trump supporters got another shock when the right-wing social media platform Parler was effectively disabled by Google, Apple, and Amazon. And the shocks may keep coming. It was revealed on Monday that Parler’s entire trove of user data has been hacked and stored, to what end we still don’t know.

Social media works by collecting our data and selling it, and they’ve got a lot of it on all of us. So do cell phone companies, which came as a shock to many of the “patriots” who ransacked the Capitol last week. Turns out the building has a massive cell phone infrastructure, one that can (and will) be used to determine what cell phones were in and around the area, and who they were communicating with. Using that data, law enforcement officers pulled many rioters off their return flights last week by tracking their cell phones, much to the Trumpers’ shock and dismay. (The hashtag #noflylist on Twitter and Facebook has compiled a number of videos of these folks being hustled off planes and out of airports, in case you’re needing a quick dollop of schadenfreude.)

It’s still astonishing to me that so many people apparently thought they could break into a federal building, destroy public and personal property, attack the police, take selfies of it all, and then just hop on a plane and head back home with no consequences. Sorry, folks, if you had your cell phone with you in the Capitol last week … well, oops. And according to what limited geographic cell phone data has been released thus far, quite a number of folks in Shelby and Crittendon Counties should be expecting a call from law enforcement soon.

Meanwhile, members of Congress were given a briefing Monday about numerous plots and demonstrations still being planned for Washington, D.C., in coming days. The FBI is also warning of demonstrations of one kind or another for state capitals around the country. Whether the takedown of Parler and the arrests of what will soon be hundreds of Capitol terrorists will impact these nefarious plans is anyone’s guess.

In any event, with another impeachment in the works and the Biden inauguration still to come, the week ahead looks to be another challenging one for all of us living in these turbulent and not-so-United States. Buckle in. Stay safe. We’ll get through this. The current wave of madness is surely cresting.