The great Lewis Donelson, who died this week at age 100, left a permanent imprint on the history of both Memphis and Tennessee. My profile of Donelson, “A Man For All Seasons,” first appeared in Memphis magazine in 2012.
Tag: Jackson Baker
For this edition of Never Seen It, I was invited by Memphis Flyer Senior Editor Jackson Baker to join the Political Cinema Club for a Studio on the Square screening of 1984. The Political Cinema Club is not a formal group so much as a loose, rotating bunch of cinephiles who work in politics and sometimes get together for movie nights.
The film was a big screen adaptation of George Orwell’s seminal science fiction novel by director Michael Radford. It was shot during the exact same period of time that Orwell, writing in 1948, set his novel: April-June, 1984. It starred John Hurt as Winston Smith, Suzanna Hamilton as Julia, and Richard Burton, in his last role, as O’Brien. It was also one of the earliest feature films shot by Roger Deakins, who would go on to produce visual masterpieces such as No Country For Old Men and Fargo with the Coen Brothers.
The film was recently re-released for a week’s theatrical run, and it proved to be terrifyingly relevant to our current political situation. In addition to me and Mr. Baker, the group consisted of Reginald Milton, County Commissioner, District 10; John Gammel, a retired civil servant, artist Peggy Turley; Steve Mulroy, Associate Dean at the University of Memphis School of Law and a former County Commissioner, and David Cocke, Democratic activist and lawyer.
Peggy Turley: I knew nothing about this film. I don’t know where I was in 1984.
Chris McCoy: It was a laugh a minute!
PT: I feel beaten down. It wasn’t easy.
Jackson Baker: That was what you’d call ponderous, actually.
Richard Burton as O’Brien in 1984.
John Gammel: I didn’t know that was Richard Burton’s last film.
PT: He was almost unrecognizable. His eyes and his voice were the only recognizable things.
JG: And John Hurt, he was accused of being 45 in the movie, but if he was 45, he was rode hard and put up wet.
Chris McCoy: It’s like he was born old.
JB: It took an effort of imagination to see him with her! (Suzanna Hamilton, who played Julia)
CM: Griding dystopias will take it out of you. Had you ever seen it before?
JG: I think I tried to watch it once, but it gets off to a slow start…
CM: You were like, “OH MY GOD, WHAT IS HAPPENING?”
JG: It’s a little grim.
Suzanna Hamilton as Julia
CM: Steve, have you ever seen the movie before?
Steve Mulroy: No. I read the book, of course.
CM: Everybody reads it when they’re young. I read “Politics and the English Language” when I was about nine years old. Way too young.
SM: I think I read it when I was a freshman in college for a politics and literature course.
CM: I was a kid who read sci fi compulsively, and the essay was in the back of my copy of 1984. So what did you think?
SM: It was about what I expected. A slow, ponderous, depressing treatment of the subject, that would be visually interesting, because I read about that color thing they did. [A process known as “bleach bypass” was used on the film, which creates a washed out, desaturated color palette while retaining the sharpness of the image.] It reminded me of the [Francois Truffaut] adaptation of Fahrenheit 451. I admire them for tackling such difficult and important work, and of course the work itself has a great message and is historically important, but as cinema, I dunno. It was hard to take.
CM: Hitchcock said that mediocre books make the best movies. You can’t make a great movie out of a great book, because it’s too dependent on the language. In this case, 1984 the book is all exposition.
SM: It’s all going on inside Winston’s head… How many times did you read the book?
CM: Seems like eight or nine times. It was one of my faves. I think it may have influenced me a little too much. But I haven’t read it in a long time. I remember that there was more than one visit with O’Brien in the book.
SM: He also did a better job in the book of establishing Winston’s deep seated fear of rats. There were times that a rat would appear in the apartment, their love nest, and he would freak out. So by the time they did the horrible torture in the end, it was already baked in. In this one, it seemed like it came out of nowhere.
CM: The imagery was there. He went back and his mom was not there, but the rats were there.
SM: Hurt is a fantastic actor. He had absolutely no vanity in making himself look horrible. Richard Burton did his usual job, but it kinda felt like he was phoning it in.
CM: The idea of Richard Burton is always better than actual Richard Burton. Except for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf.
[We decamped to Bosco’s for beers and a more intense discussion]
JB: Do you remember the scene in Cabaret, where the Nazi gets up and sings “The future belongs to me” and the old folks are looking like, what’s going on? That exactly paralleled the opening scene. There were older people in the audience who were looking bewildered.
CM: How the kids were portrayed throughout is the creepiest part.
JG: Although the kids looked not as grim. Life for everyone in the outer party is pretty grim. They’re all in blue uniforms, and devoid of anything happy. The kids at least are clean.
CM: They seem to be enjoying it.
JG: They’re cleaner and they’re happier. Everyone was dirty. I just wonder, in our world, it’s so bright and shiny. For me, that was a real question. If you took all of the grimness out of that movie, what would be left?
CM: You mean the visual grimness?
JG: I mean the grimness of life. People were living lives that were tiny.
JB: The Nazis at least could craft a good story. They took care of their kids. They took them on cruises and played around. There were fairs and festivals that brought the people together, going beyond the nasty torchlight assemblies. It portrayed a situation so dystopian, I could not believe in it. There has to be a carrot…
CM: In a successful dystopia, there’s a carrot as well as a stick.
JB: If that’s how you define success for a dystopia.
SM: That might be a criticism of dystopias in real life. In the book, it was all stick and no carrot. It was as grim in the book as it was in the movie.
JB: It is a criticism of Orwell, but it really came across in the movie.
CM: The carrots are for the Inner Party.
SM: Orwell’s point, though, and it may not be convincing—Jackson, I don’t think is convinced—is that if you constantly rewrote history, and constantly changed language, with new editions of the dictionary, slimming it down, you can do such an effective job of brainwashing people that maybe you wouldn’t need the carrots any more. You could so completely brainwash people and control their thinking that your dystopia would still work.
JB: When that movie came out, I was working in Washington DC working for a Democratic congressman. It was 1984, and Reagan was president. The reason I never dragged myself to see the movie was, I figured if 1984 was about a dystopia, well, we already had the dystopia! We already had morning in America. We already had the Evil Empire. That dystopia was organized around greed. If you’re going to do that, you have to have a carrot.
CM: Does everyone always think they’re living in a dystopia? In 1984, you thought “Wow. We’ve hit rock bottom. This is no longer America…”
JB: It could have gone further, and it did!
SM: Every time you think we’ve hit rock bottom, it gets worse.
JG: I thought I was living in a dystopia until I moved to Memphis
David Cocke: First of all, it’s all relative. Orwell was just coming out of the worst totalitarian episodes, with World War II and Russia. His model was Communism.
CM: He was a disillusioned socialist.
DC: But even in France you had totalitarianism during the war. It was a whole experience of living in this grim, warlike, thought controlled society.
JB: Have any of you read Homage to Catalonia, Orwell’s book about his experiences during the Spanish Civil War? It was incredible.
DC: The thought control, the conformity that warps the independent mind, exists not only in the grim totalitarian moments, but also in social conformity. There are elements in our culture today, but none of us feel like what we saw in that movie. I think the Vietnam War was the closest this country has come to that environment.
CM: You mean the state of constant war? Because we’ve been in a state of constant war for 16 years. There are kids today who can drive who have never known anything but America at war.
DC: I’m not arguing with you, but the number of people involved in the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the number of deaths assosicated with those wars is miniscule compared to Vietnam.
JG: In Iraq and in Syria? Civilian deaths have been…
DC: I’m not talking about civilian deaths. They are other people in another world. They are on TV, but they’re not us. What we saw on TV in the 1960s was our kids getting shot, not the Vietnamese getting shot.
CM: I know kids who I grew up with who did multiple tours in Afghanistan.
PT: In the film, they were constantly seeing images of war on television. But a lot of that was just theater, right? It was not necessarily real war.
DC: And our armies are professionals, by the way. They’re volunteering.
SM: I think maybe you’re both right. Orwell wanted just enough war to distract the populace and control the populace. Then he took it farther, and they were at the brink of starvation. But that’s not the real world model in America. The real world model in America is to have just enough war to rally everyone around the flag, but not enough to actually cause sacrifice on the part of the public. George W. Bush after 9/11 said, everyone go shopping. We’re supposed to keep the same standard of living, and keep in the back of their mind that there’s a war out there, and we all have to be loyal.
CM: It’s the invisible army against the invisible enemy. That seemed very familiar to me.
JG: I think the War On Terror is as close to that situation as is possible, really. The absence of real war is a part of it. The domestic impact of the War on Terror has been in terms of the whole militarization of the country, and how that affected policing. I mean, police have always been ruffians, to a certain extent, but they’ve never in history been as entitled. They have been totally militarized. What is it, evil empire…
PT: “Bad hombres” today.
SM: With Bush it was the Axis of Evil.
JG: Only after 9/11 did you hear majors and colonels going on TV and saying, “We’re going after the bad guys.” That’s not a military term. It’s “The enemy”. In the military, the enemy is honorable.
…
SM: I thought it was interesting in that, another way the film was faithful to the book was that the proles seemed less brainwashed and really happier. If there’s any hope, it’s from the proles. When you left the main sector and went into the forbidden proletariat sector, there was at least some genuine happiness. Even the old washer woman who was singing a propaganda song created real beauty. That was the one shred of hope.
JB: There was a lot more of that in the book than the movie.
DC: In other words, it was the middle class who took the brunt of the dystopia.
JB: If you want a real example of an Orwellian dystopia today, look at North Korea.
PT: Oh yeah. That’s why I don’t think there’s a need for carrots. They are dark and beaten down, observed, and controlled.
Reginald Milton: I agree with you on that. To the elites, the enemy is actually the people themselves. There is a group who are empowered and who have a good quality of life, and everyone outside of that is the real enemy.
JB: We are their Eurasia.
RM: Right. North Korea is the same. It’s basically using people as tools to prop up a very small segment who are enjoying a high quality of life. Then there’s the situation in Cuba, where, when President Obama opened up relations, the Cuban government still attacked Obama, because at the end of the day, they still had to have an enemy. If they didn’t have an enemy, the people might go “Wait a minute, who IS our enemy? Who is to blame for all of these problems?” So the reality is that, this is how it’s always been. Imagine a boot, stamping on a human face, forever. That’s exactly what the North Korean government is. It’s an oppressive government that caters to a small segment and uses the masses to maintain them.
Never Seen It: Watching 1984 with the Political Cinema Club (2)
CM: The Eurasian government, and the East Asian Government, and the Airstrip One government—the inner parties in all three of those have more in common with each other than they have with the people they are supposed to be governing. They’re all using the same tactics to maintain power.
DC: In the book, were they real? Or were they manufactured?
CM: They were real, and the war was real. They would have skirmishes, but they weren’t having a war where they were trying to win. It was perpetual war to keep the people in line.
DC: Well, that’s what we have in this country now, right?
CM: Yeah. The idea was to eat up the excess economic production.
PT: It’s like what just happened, with the missile strikes in Syria.
SM: This is the first time I’ve actually wondered if it was real, though. Under W., I never doubted that they honestly, sincerely believed their line about evildoers. There were neocons who wanted to remake the Middle East in their own image, and they were using terrorism as an excuse. But they definitely wanted a real war. With Trump, I don’t know what he wants. It might not be real.
CM: Reginald, your point about how there has to be an enemy applies to Trump. When he started flailing was when he suddenly didn’t have an Obama or a Hillary to push around any more. They keep trying to push Hillary and Obama back out into the news, because they need an enemy, or else his incompetence becomes obvious.
JG: Best case in point: Gun sales are down 26%.
DC: The reason they were hoarding the guns is that they were afraid the liberals were going to take over and take them away. Now they don’t need them.
JG: The NRA made a deal with the Kalishnikov factory to lobby to get restrictions on their sales lifted in the United States.
CM: The elites have more in common with each other than they do with their own countrymen.
SM: Just like the pigs and the famers had more in common with each other than they did with the other animals in Animal Farm, which is also Orwell.
CM: That’s the children’s book version of 1984.
SM: Jackson said earlier about the carrots and the sticks. I think the carrot model of dystopia is Brave New World, where everything is bright and shiny, and they used drugs to control the populace.
JB: I think that’s closer to where we are.
CM: Here’s to soma!
ALL: Cheers!
[This fascinating conversation went on for another hour, and there was much more than I could possibly transcribe, so I will leave it here.]
Never Seen It: Watching 1984 with the Political Cinema Club
Between the two giant pillars of Edward Hull Crump, the white Mississippian who established an enduring political dominion over Memphis in the early 20th century, and Willie Herenton, the five-times-elected black mayor whose seeming invincibility concluded that century, lies a tumultuous story worth telling.
And Otis Sanford, the former managing editor of The Commercial Appeal and now holder of the Hardin Chair of Excellence in Economic/Managerial Journalism at the University of Memphis, tells it with accuracy and grace in From Boss Crump to King Willie: How Race Changed Memphis Politics, hot off the University of Tennessee Press.
In a way unusual for a work of history, this book reads like a novel — its facts accounted for both in concise summaries of events and circumstances and in key moments that are rendered as scenes.
Among the latter is an account of how a chance encounter in 1991 between then Congressman Harold Ford and the Rev. Ralph White at a Union Avenue video store resulted in White’s church, Bloomfield Baptist Church, becoming the venue for Ford’s long-postponed “summit meeting” to determine the identity of a consensus black candidate for mayor.
Sanford follows up that revelation with choice reportage of the upstairs meeting at the church involving Ford, Herenton, and disappointed contender Otis Higgs while an auditorium of Herenton supporters, whose energetic wall-to-wall presence had basically called the congressman’s hand, waited impatiently in the church auditorium to hear Ford’s inevitable anointment of Herenton as the people’s choice.
Sanford’s book is a textbook case of how to handle the black-and-white realities of Memphis’ political evolution with appropriate shadings of gray. His narrative concludes before the lengthy period, after Herenton’s ascension to power, of the often grim public and private struggles for preeminence between the African-American mayor and the African-American congressman stemming from the implicit rivalry of these two monumental egos.
But that feud, after all, belongs to a different historical era, post-1991, which has been intermittently post-racial. Consider the overwhelming white support for A C Wharton, an African American, first as Shelby County mayor and, in 2009, as Herenton’s immediate successor as Memphis mayor, or Steve Cohen’s serial victories over black opponents in a 9th Congressional District that is at least two-thirds African American in population, and the comfortable win of Jim Strickland, another white, in 2015 over Wharton in a city whose increasingly black complexion is unmistakable.
Consider the consistent ability of white Republican candidates to prevail over black Democrats in all the Shelby County elections that have taken place in the 21st century, a period when the county at large, like the city, has had a majority-black electorate.
From the standpoint of Sanford’s narrative, such anomalies might be regarded as signals of a modus vivendi between the two dominant races, of a political balance of sorts that required both the deconstruction of white supremacy and the liberation and triumph of an erstwhile black underclass. A viable new order may somehow have been achieved, though undeniable inequalities of various sorts persist and just plain differences endure.
Sanford’s story is one of transformation — from an urban landscape under the domination of Crump, a de facto plantation boss whose quasi-benevolent attitude toward a black population enabled both his own immediate power and the stirrings of that population’s own ultimate abilities and ambitions.
The giant-sized convulsions that belong to the intermediate stages of this saga — the strikes and assassinations and political showdowns — are not overlooked. They are covered in satisfying detail, as are the more nuanced encounters between winners and losers in the chess games of our political history.
Sanford, whose astonishing objectivity as reporter and analyst continues to be featured in his weekly columns in the Sunday CA, knows not heroes and villains. His characters, both black and white, are presented with all the roundness and complex motivations they owned as real live people.
Last week’s visit to Tennessee by President Donald Trump amply demonstrated both the highs and the lows of the current presidency, and only subsequent history will tell us which of these aspects will have predominated (assuming that we get safely to some future-tense point in a position to do what William Wordsworth referred to as recollecting with tranquility).
Perhaps urged on by a simultaneously published (and wholly unexpected) dithyramb from journalist/historian Jon Meacham likening Trump, for better or for worse, to Andrew Jackson, Trump made a point while in Nashville of laying a wreath at The Hermitage and embracing the comparison of himself to Old Hickory, whose own historical reputation became ambivalent enough in the last year to threaten the continued presence of his image on the $20 bill.
Like Trump, Jackson was a disrupter of tradition, with a single-minded focus on arrogating power to the presidency. Like Trump, he acceded to his office as a professed spokesman for the common folk. And, like Trump, Jackson trumpeted a vision of national glory. “He understood that great leadership was about putting America first,” as Trump, the self-professed America Firster, put it upon taking the stage last Wednesday night at Nashville Municipal Auditorium.
At a certain point, however, the validity of the comparison becomes tenuous. There’s no doubting that Trump has a certain mass appeal that can be called populist. That was attested to by the fact of people waiting all day in bitter cold weather, in a line stretching for more than a mile, for a chance to get inside and experience Trump in the flesh. (Sadly, the processing of these dedicated pilgrims by the Transportation Security Administration, was slow to the point of leaving thousands stranded outside.)
And the enthusiasm that, more or less continually, burst forth in shouts from approval from those who got inside to see and hear the president surely were manifestations of Trump’s oratorical power and charismatic appeal, both of which are underestimated by his critics. But, ultimately, it is difficult to see just what, other than the excitement of the moment, those audience members in Nashville stood to gain from Trump. The great $20 billion wall on the nation’s southern border, destined to be paid for by American taxpayers and most assuredly not by Mexico? The construction of pipelines to carry oil sludge across the nation’s landscape at minimal gain for American consumers but with great potential environmental perils?
Or, most notably, Congress’ (and Trump approved) recently unveiled health-care plan, a cynical dismantling of the Affordable Care Act that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates will strip 24 million Americans of their health insurance while enriching Big Pharma with billions of new tax write-offs?
Sadly, it would appear that Trump’s legions of true believers are close kin to the masses of fans who attend those wrestling extravaganzas in which nothing that appears to be happening is actually real, but instead is transparently and cynically feigned. Give Trump his due: He’s been there, done that, learned the art of stirring crowds at such make-believe scenarios in tandem with WWE impresario Vince McMahon himself. That’s his real role model, by the way, not Andrew Jackson.
As news organizations and the public struggle to come to grips with salacious new information about Donald Trump contained in a 35-page dossier released this wee by Buzzfeed, it’s a good time to think back to the 2004 campaign between John Kerry and George W. Bush.
Early in that year, The Memphis Flyer’s Jackson Baker broke a story alleging that then-President George W. Bush had, back in the 1970s, taken unauthorized leave of an Alabama Air National Guard unit that he had sought a transfer to from his regular Texas Guard unit in order to spend time working on a political campaign.
This information was an open secret among the former Alabama Air Guard members that Baker used as his sources. Indeed, several of them had heard of the forthcoming transfer to their unit of Bush, son of the prominent political figure and future President George H.W. Bush, and a Guard pilot whose well-deserved reputation as a hell-raiser had traveled far and wide in Guard circles.
These pilots had actively awaited his coming. But, three of them told Baker categorically and for the record, Lt. George W. Bush had never turned up at any point for the entire year of his supposed assignment to their
Guard base. Meanwhile, there was no dearth of Bush-sightings during the ongoing (and ultimately losing) U.S. Senate campaign, elsewhere in Alabama, of Bush-family friend Winton “Red” Blount.
Though rumors of Bush’s year-long no-show at the Alabama air base had been floating about the Internet, Baker’s Flyer story first put the concept, and the concrete first-person evidence for it, firmly into the public record, and thus set the stage for the remarkable series of events that followed.
As the 2004 campaign ground on, neither Bush nor Kerry was able to gain a clear advantage. Then, in September, Democrats got a gift: CBS TV’s 60 Minutes 2 obtained letters from Texas Air Guard commander Col. Jerry B. Killian that seemingly provided further documentary evidence of the allegations against Bush.
Democrats trumpeted the new evidence, presented by Dan Rather himself, as proof that the Commander-In-Chief was unfit for office. But within days, the story began to unravel. Commenters on internet message boards attached to conservative blogs Little Green Footballs and Powerline quickly produced convincing evidence that the Killian Documents were forgeries.
For weeks, the internet and news media were consumed with discussions of the minutiae of the command structure of 1970’s air units and the capabilities of vintage typewriters. Eventually, CBS acknowledged that the Killian Document were likely forged. Dan Rather lost his job, and George W. Bush was reelected.
After the election, not much thought was given to the provenance of the Killian Documents or what effect they had on the course of history. The source of the apparent forgery was never uncovered. But who would produce a forgery like this, and why? And how did semi-anonymous internet commenters know exactly where to look for proof of a forgery when experts CBS hired thought they were authentic?
Surely,Republicans argued, the forgery was done by political opponents of President Bush to discredit him during a tight election. But there was another interpretation of the story. What if the Killian Documents were forged by someone in the Bush campaign — a couple of famous (or infamous) Dirty Tricksters come to mind — and selectively leaked to Rather’s producers at 60 Minutes?
Then, when Rather took the bait, the debunking information was leaked to Bush’s supporters, who amplified it across their numerous media channels., eventually discrediting the campaign’s most hostile media source on television. Regardless, the reveal of the Killian Documents was to shift public debate away from Bush’s character — and the first-evidence evidence of his dereliction from Alabama Air Guard pilots — and onto the truth or untruth of the documents themselves
The publication by Buzzfeed of the new intelligence dossier filled with shocking accusations about Donald Trump’s financial ties to Russia and the possibility that Putin’s intelligence agency the FSB has sexually explicit blackmail material on the Republican has thrown the country into an uproar. But there are enough parallels to the Killian Documents incident to raise red flags for the news consumer and publisher alike.
First, the Killian documents and the Trump dossier both told Democrats and other critics exactly what they wanted to hear at a time when they were most desperate to hear it. Accusations that Trump paid Russian prostitutes to pee on the bed President Obama had once slept in were like catnip to Democrats and the left. Left-leaning social media has been a golden shower of pee jokes for going on 48 hours now.
Second, claims that the dossier was forged popped up on the anonymous message board 4chan within hours of Buzzfeed’s publication. Third, as the story gets bogged down in minutiae and side avenues, the central topic of discussion—is Trump fatally compromised by Russian intelligence?—is being pushed aside in favor of profiles of Christopher Steele, the MI6 agent who allegedly compiled the dossier, amid speculation about the authenticity of the most malicious claims.
The dossier had been passed around to major media outlets for months, all of whom — perhaps having learned the lessons of the Killian Documents — decided not to publish before the issue of authenticity could be verified. After the existence of the dossier was mentioned in a footnote to the CIA/FBI/NSA briefing to Obama, Trump, and Congress on Russian interference in the election, CNN reported on the existence of the docs and Buzzfeed jumped at the chance for a scoop, thus opening the media floodgates.
If the dossier is indeed a black propaganda operation designed to take the heat off Trump, it’s well designed, as were the Killian “letters.” Col. Killian’s son described the contents and form of the apparently forged letters from his father as askillful mixture of truth and fiction.
Associating the really important information about Trump — that, inadvertently or otherwise, he’s a possible Russian intelligence asset about to assume the office of the Presidency — with false information appealing to the preconceptions of his political opponents could have the net effect of neutralizing the issue of potential treasonous behavior with his supporters and the media at large.
Even more dangerously, sewing doubt as to the authenticity of the mainstream news outlets reporting on the story opens up new lines of attack for the Trump team. Already, the President-elect has used the story to accuse CNN of being “fake news”, a term originally coined to describe amateur propaganda designed as Facebook clickbait
Strategic uses of forgeries is nothing new to the world’s intelligence agencies. The Protocols Of The Elders of Zion was a widely circulated fake manuscript produced by Tsarist Russia’s secret police to justify the prosecution of Jews at the turn of the 20th century, for example. In 2002, the Niger Uranium documents were proved to be forgeries designed to help push the US into invading Iraq.
Yet the media and the left remain in deep denial about the nature of CIA and KGB-derived gambits they are facing. The 2015 film Truth, based on an account by Dan Rather’s producer Marla Mapes, showed that the victims of the Killian scam still believe the letters to be authentic.
This article may sound like a paranoid liberal conspiracy theory, but this whole election cycle has exceeded the wildest dreams of even the most crazed of the tin-foil-hat brigade. The Killian Documents gambit is just one arrow in the quiver of the sophisticated and unscrupulous media operators who seek to control the national conversation in these dangerous times. For media consumers, the lesson is, be suspicious of everything, especially if it confirms your biases.
Here it is, a blazing-hot late summer and the snows of yesteryear — or rather, the remnants of long-gone and well-lost presidential races — are being hauled out of cold storage by hopeful seekers after the Republican nomination for the 8th District congressional seat.
Last week, appearing for former U.S. Attorney David Kustoff, it was former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, winner of the Iowa caucuses in 2008 and a dropout from the kiddie debate rounds this year. This week, state Senator Brian Kelsey was touting a visit on his behalf by Rick Santorum, the former Pennsylvania Senator who won enough primaries in 2012 to complicate Mitt Romney‘s life but this year was running dead last among GOP candidates, or close to it, before he, too, had to take a powder.
As of our deadline, none of the other 8th District candidates with a theoretical chance to win — Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell, broadcaster/businessman George Flinn, Register of Deeds Tom Leatherwood, or Jackson advertising man Brad Greer — had called up one of these worthies from the deep. Why not? The likes of Steve Forbes or Gary Bauer or George Pataki or Bobby Jindal or Carly Fiorina are surely still out there, ready to serve.
All of which is to say, fascination for presidential races and the people who wage them still comes first in our imagination. Herewith some final observations after the GOP and Democratic conventions:
Cleveland vs. Philadelphia: Cleveland is a rust-belt city which has had hard times, and it shows. Its main drag, Euclid Avenue, an equivalent to our Poplar Avenue, is more reminiscent of Summer. Or Lamar. But it was an easy place to get around. Philadelphia is an older, posher place with lots of American history to boast, but it was a jungle of barricades and man-made obstructions during convention week. The Rock and Roll Museum vs. the Philadelphia Museum of Art? No contest. So many Monets!
Elizabeth Warren vs. Bernie Sanders as spokesperson for the left: Bernie may have been the fallback candidate when Warren chose not to run, but his bullet points were aimed with unerring accuracy and verve at the right targets, while Dame Elizabeth came off as everybody’s favorite law professor — smart, loveable, but a bit diffuse.
Most overrated orators: Cory Booker for the Democrats; Paul Ryan for the Republicans. Extremism in the pursuit of self-importance is no virtue.
Most underrated orators: The two Veep candidates, Mike Pence for the GOP and Tim Kaine for the Democrats, both exceeded expectations with clear, concise speeches loaded with zingers.
Phrases heard often at one convention, rarely, if ever, at the other: “Second Amendment” was pretty much restricted to Cleveland, while expressions of tolerance for “who you love” were de rigueur at Philadelphia but absent from Cleveland, save in a surprising use of the term by Ivanka Trump.
Done-what-they-were-‘sposed-to honors: To Chris Christie and Rudy Giuliani at Cleveland, who, for better or for worse, did their party duty with theatrical “indictments” of Hillary in one case and “Viewing with Alarm” in the other. And to Joe Biden and Michael Bloomberg at Philadelphia for reminding us what cool, no-nonsense, tell-it-like-it-is guys look like.
Ain’t-she-something-award: to Michelle Obama. Well, ain’t she? And still worth cribbing from.
Most overheated rhetoric: All that fuss and bother about Melania Trump “plagiarizing” parts of her speech. Look, folks, 99 percent of what you heard at both conventions was devised by ghostwriters; any second-story stuff took place at the staff level. In all honesty, Melania’s delivery outclassed most of the other speakers at her convention.
Darth Vader award: to Ted Cruz, who demonstrated all over again why he’s the most disliked person in the U.S. Senate. He found a way to embarrass his followers and make Donald Trump look like a victim by using his prime-time perch to unload a stink bomb.
Too-good-to-be-true award: To Khizr Khan, the Gold Star father of a slain war hero whose shaming of Trump’s indiscriminate Muslim-baiting was the stuff of movie climaxes.
‘And-still-champ’ awards: to Bill Clinton for a graceful speech honoring his lifetime mate (though calling her a “change maker” was overdoing it); and to President Barack Obama, whose modesty and overlooked accomplishments both shone in the course of his handoff to Hillary Clinton.
PHILADELPHIA — Unsurprisingly, internal tensions are predominating at this week’s Democratic National Convention — held, ironically, in a city whose name translates from its Greek roots as “city of brotherly love.”
In that regard, the Democrats gathered here face a challenge somewhat similar to one the rival Republicans had to deal with at their own nominating convention last week in Cleveland. In a rough sense, both parties have nominees that a significant part of their membership have doubts about.
In the case of the GOP, that was Donald Trump, the shoot-from-the-lip billionaire and newly minted politician who continues to be anathema to right-of-center Republicans who favored Texas Senator Ted Cruz, as well as a continuing irritant to establishment Republicans in general.
Cruz eased Trump out of his predicament somewhat by making a prime-time convention speech that conspicuously avoided even a wink and a nod toward formally endorsing the nominee. The speech was generally regarded, even by many delegates thitherto loyal to Cruz, as so lacking in elementary class and protocol as to deflate whatever resistance might have been building up against Trump.
The issue in Philadelphia also concerns a case of two rival candidates — former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whose nomination for President was a given as the week began, and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, the “democratic socialist” whose challenge to Clinton’s inevitability seemed capable of succeeding at several points during their extended Democratic primary contest.
So close was that race, so late was Sanders’ concession to Clinton, that a WikiLeaks release of hacked emails showing what appeared to have been a concerted effort by DNC officials to slant the outcome toward Clinton threatened to cast asunder the party’s tenuous and newfound sense of unity.
Certainly it galvanized the doubts of disenchanted supporters of Sanders and his call for a political revolution, especially the youth brigades that had come to his support during the primary race in numbers huge and enthusiastic enough to recall the reformist fervor of the 1960s.
And those Sanders followers, along with partisans of Jill Stein of the Green Party, Black Lives Matter activists, and various other representatives of the political left, came together in Philadelphia to form a protest contingent so large and potentially unmanageable as to challenge local law enforcement (heavily augmented by police forces from elsewhere, as was the case in Cleveland).
On Monday, as delegates and other conventioneers inside the Wells Fargo expectantly awaited a prime time address by Sanders, thousands of protesters collected in a fenced-in park area, several miles long, adjacent to the arena, where they bore signs and shouted chants decidedly hostile to Clinton and the D.C. — the mildest of which was “Hell No, DNC, We Won’t Vote for Hillary!”
For all that, the Democratic establishment in Philadelphia, like the Republican establishment in Cleveland, caught a break. But, whereas the stroke of fortune fore GOP had come, as indicated, from the churlishness of the dissidents’ potential leader, Cruz, the deliverance from the Democrats was owing to the good will of Sanders, who acquiesced to Clinton’s victory with a strong statement of support for her in his convention speech, coupled with encouragement to his legions to fall in line.
The only potential mischief coming from Sanders was a statement from the dais congratulating his thousand-plus delegates on the convention floor and the glee he demonstrated in anticipating their votes for him during roll-call time on Tuesday night.
The strong Sanders feeling, and the unease of party members regarding the offending DNC emails released by WikiLeaks, could be observed in meetings of the Tennessee delegation, as well.
In a rousing address to the delegation’s Tuesday breakfast meeting at the Radisson Tower hotel in Valley Forge, one of that morning’s featured speakers, 9th District congressman Steve Cohen, minced no words.
Hailing the Sanders delegates in attendance, Cohen, a Clinton supporter, declared, “It was wrong, what the party did,” and said the responsible DNC members should be fired because “they crossed the line.”
But, said Cohen, “Bernie wants you to be for Hillary.”
The congressman also used the occasion to attack the administration of Republican Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam for what he saw as adulterations to the mission and purpose of the state lottery, which Cohen is acknowledged to have been the father of, as a long-time state Senator prior to his election to Congress in 2006.
Cohen criticized Haslam for freezing the maximum amount of the Hope Scholarships subsidized by the lottery at $4,000 per annum, even as inflation has raised in-state tuition rates to levels far beyond that figure, while meanwhile draining off lottery funds to pay for the free community-college tuition grants under Haslam’s Tennessee Promise initiative.
Arguing that those changes had routed money from a scholarship program that was both need-based and merit-based toward a “needless- and meritless-based” pattern of community-college subsidies, Cohen said the Promise program was created “because Bill Haslam wanted to leave office saying he did something,” and he said flatly “Bill Haslam is a terrible Governor.”
Another Memphian making an impact at the convention and elsewhere is District 91 state Representative Raumesh Akbari, who was scheduled to receive on Wednesday the National Juvenile Justice Network’s 2016 Reformer Award for her leadership efforts in juvenile justice reform.
That award was to be part of the Network’s annual forum at the University of Memphis Law School. It was unclear whether Akbari would be able to receive the honor in person, since she began the week as a member of the Tennessee delegation in Philadelphia, where on Thursday, as she will be one of the featured speakers on the main convention stage — one of several chosen to represent her party’s diversity.
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What They Said…
Greg Cravens
About Toby Sells’ story, “Tina Sullivan Talks Trams in the Old Forest” …
There are alternative routes to get from any one place to another on any given surface. This is basic geometry. It’s not really hard to see that the Memphis Zoo leadership is full of elephant droppings here. Again.
OakTree
The zoo continues to be adamant about using the roads through the Old Forest, a practice which is illegal, according to the state of Tennessee. That area is off limits to motorized vehicles.
Everyone is trying to compromise and work out a solution. Chuck Brady continues to be the chief impediment to any solution to this problem. It’s time to approve the mayor’s plan, end parking on the Greensward forever, and get a new CEO for the zoo.
Save Overton
About Jackson Baker’s column, “Filling the Space” …
Very sorry for your loss, but I’m glad you intend to stay on the job for another few decades.
CL Mullins
Thanks, always, for your good work.
Bill Andrews
About the Flyer’s cover story, “Woke.” …
I think you can look for police numbers to decline and policing to get more difficult and crime to go up. That does not mean that changes should not take place, but behavior still goes back to childhood, parenting, schooling, discrimination, and economics.
TruthBeTold
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On Austin … and Jackson
Four of us from the Flyer spent a few days last week in Austin, attending the annual Association of Alternative Newsmedia conference. It’s always a great opportunity to meet and socialize with our peers around the country who are working to keep alternative journalism alive and thriving in these perilous times.
I came away both encouraged and discouraged. Encouraged, because so many papers are still doing such fantastic work, publishing stories that are making a real difference in their communities. Discouraged, because so many papers are fighting to retain the advertising support necessary to pay the reporters and editors who do that fine work.
“We are taken for granted,” is a sentence I heard from several editors. “Everyone reads us, but our ad dollars are down.” It echos a column I wrote a few weeks back, bemoaning the reliance of local businesses on free social media promotion rather than utilizing the local media that are telling their stories.
But everyone is carrying on, exploring new revenue streams, including seeking foundation support, coming up with more profitable events, and trying out ideas such as allowing readers to become “patrons” who pledge a modest amount to support the paper each year.
I’m also happy to report that the Flyer was nominated for three writing awards, more than most papers at the conference.
On Saturday night, many of us in Austin were gathered around a television watching the events in Baton Rouge, where cops in riot gear roughed up peaceful protest marchers and used tear gas and batons to disperse them. Shades of 1963, and very troubling.
On Sunday, when I landed at MEM, my phone’s Twitter and newsfeed were filled with reports about a demonstration happening in downtown Memphis. I went home to watch, fearing the worst. But Memphis came through. The contrast between Baton Rouge and the Bluff City was astonishing. It made me proud of my city. (It also made me proud of the Flyer for its work last year in helping to stop the TDOT closure of the I-55 bridge. Imagine how much worse the situation would have been had we had only one bridge across the Mississippi.)
I would be remiss in not mentioning our sadness here at the Flyer over the death last week of Linda Baker, the beloved wife of Jackson Baker. Jackson has long been the public face for this paper, and when I tell people I work at the Flyer, the first thing I usually hear is, “Oh, I love Jackson Baker.”
We do, too. And we mourn with him this week, even as we marvel at his indomitable spirit. An example (one of many): As I was driving to Linda’s visitation Monday night, I got a call from Jackson — suggesting a tweak to the cover story. His dedication to this paper, to his family, and to his community is second to none. And we’re lucky — all of us in this town — to have him. Be sure and read his column this week. It’s a keeper.
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Filling the Space
Because I admire Lou Gehrig’s legend as much as anybody else’s who ever lived, I try never to skip a week’s column. Gehrig, for those who don’t know, was the New York Yankee great who set a record for playing in consecutive games — 2,130 before his forced retirement in 1939, a plateau that was only overcome in 1995 by the Baltimore Orioles’ Cal Ripken Jr.
Gehrig kept playing until he was felled, literally, by a fatal illness — amyotrophic lateral sclerosis — called “Lou Gehrig’s disease” ever since.
Lou Gehrig
I am also inspired by a more recent case — that of Shirley Povich, father of today’s TV host Maury Povich but best known as a sportswriter — and a good one — for The Washington Post from 1933 until his death in 1998 at the age of 92.
How good was he? Povich’s last column, written the day he died and published the day after, on June 5, 1998, was, in part, a shot across the bow of the rest of the media for its uncritical enthusiasm over the the ongoing home-run heroics of Mark McGwire. Povich noted with some suspicion that McGwire had somehow “bulked up” on what he chose to call “the new diet of ‘nutrition shakes’ popular in the clubhouses.”
We would soon learn to call that diet by a now all-too-familiar name: steroids.
And then there’s the case of 60 Minutes‘ Mike Wallace and, well … I hope you get the idea. More than longevity, I’m really talking about perseverance, the kind, say, that was for so long demonstrated in Memphis by the late great newspaperman/broadcaster George Lapides.
My dear wife Linda died last week, an agonizing death from pancreatic cancer. She persevered through pain and discomfort that you cannot imagine. With grace — the amazing, proverbial kind.
For reasons that surely go without saying, I had to take some time off during and after her ordeal. But I found myself in the aftermath attending an event or two on my beat, more or less as an observer — to get out of the house, the way another person might take a long, head-clearing walk.
I went, for example, to last Thursday night’s meeting of the Shelby County Democratic executive committee. As anybody knows who’s been reading me or the other political scribes in town, the Democrats are riven right now, locked in a civil war of sorts over the issue of whether to endorse an arrangement, insisted on by the state party chairman. In the arrangement, a former chairman, charged with misappropriation of funds, would pay back a certain portion on an installment plan, thereby avoiding the prosecution that half of the committee members were insisting on.
After two hours of utmost rowdiness, the committee failed to ratify the arrangement by a tie vote of 10-10.
But the most memorable aspect of that meeting, to me, was the fact that partisans on both sides of the issue, at various times during all the furor, took time out to come over to me and express the kindest sort of condolences. It reminded me of the genuine human stuff they were all made of. I never at any point felt like taking sides, and I thought I saw the way forward to their all getting somehow on the same page some day in a way that had nothing to do with politics.
I had the same feeling a couple of days later at a candidate forum at the IBEW union hall. There was a lack of venom and a comity in the way rivals for the same office spoke, something I found unusual and distinctive.
And I saw it again on TV Sunday night, as cops and protesters walked along together in downtown Memphis in an ambulatory common dialogue of sorts. You don’t see that sort of thing every day, either. (You didn’t even see it, by all accounts, at the follow-up public meeting at Greater Imani Church on Monday.)
So what am I saying? Well, maybe that it’s important, in cases like mine, to keep filling the space, if that’s what you’re supposed to be doing. We all have our space to fill, and the more we do it, the more we realize that it’s all really the same space. Q.E.D.