Tag: Politics

Categories
Cover Feature News

Memphis 2017: The Year to Come

Business and Development …

Memphis ought to be used to crazy, impossible blockbusters by now.

For example, it may be tough to remember that the Pyramid was once a dim, vacant, hopeless reminder of good times gone by instead of a game-changing outdoor retailer, hotel, restaurant, bowling alley, shooting range, and gator pit with the best view in town. Weird, right? Who saw that coming?

The coming year promises a ton of similar projects, the kind of projects that make you marvel that someone could imagine the thing in the first place — and that teams of people had the guts and determination (and money) to pull it off.

But taking something old and making it new again is just how we do. You can call it “adaptive re-use” if you want. We’re just going to call it the Memphis Way, something that sets us apart from, ahem, other cities of music.

Crosstown Concourse

This is without a doubt the blockbuster-est of 2017 blockbusters. Crosstown is a $200 million renovation project for 1.1 million square feet, about 17 football fields spread across 10 floors. The mammoth structure closed in 1993 and sat dormant, vacant, and hopeless for years, until energy formed around the project, beginning with the formation of the nonprofit Crosstown Arts in 2010. More money was raised, tenants were signed, and work crews have mobbed the place since 2014.

Crosstown will officially open on May 13th, with a day-long celebration of music, food, speeches, and all the rest. But residents of Parcels at Crosstown, the apartments inside the building, will begin moving in on January 2nd, according to Todd Richardson, project leader for the Crosstown Development project.

Crosstown Concourse

Business tenants, including Tech901, Memphis Teacher Residency, the Poplar Foundation, Pyramid Peak Foundation, and Church Health Center will start moving in next month, as well. Richardson expects all of the 31 business tenants, except Crosstown High and the American Lebanese Syrian Associated Charities (ALSAC), to be moved in by May.

“We have a healthy panic about us, in terms of shifting from construction to operations,” Richardson said. “I always say once we finish construction we’re about 50 percent done.” The other 50 percent, Richardson said, is the “magic” of Crosstown, the people, the programming, and the activity of the place.

Expect construction inside the building to last at Crosstown for a full year and a half after the celebration — on tenant projects and the high school. Construction of the new, 425-seat performing arts theater will begin next month and continue through June of 2018.

Here’s a list of all the other tenants expected to move into Crosstown: A Step Ahead Foundation; Daniel Bird, DDS; the YMCA; Christian Brothers University; City Leadership; The Curb Market; Crosstown Arts; Crosstown Back and Pain Institute; FedEx Office; French Truck Coffee; G4S; Hope Credit Union; Juice Bar; Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare; Mama Gaia; Madison Pharmacy; nexAir; the Kitchen Next Door; So Nuts and Confections; St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital; Tanenbaum Dermatology Center; Teach for America; and Teacher Town.

Trader Joe’s

“Coming 2017” is all the Trader Joe’s website offers Memphians about its plans for a store here. However, a building permit was pulled this month for a $2.5 million renovation of the former Kroger store on Exeter in Germantown. The project has been on again and off again since officials announced the move here in 2015. So, Two-Buck-Chuck fans, keep your fingers crossed for news in 2017.

Poplar Commons

That old Sears building close to Laurelwood has been razed to make way for a new $15.5 million, 135,000 square-foot shopping center called Poplar Commons, to be anchored by Nordstrom Rack. Store officials said to expect Nordstorm Rack to be open by “fall of 2017.”
Ulta, the beauty products retailer, has also signed on as a tenant at Poplar Commons. Nordstrom officials said the center will include “national retailers, specialty retail, and several well-known restaurants.”

Wiseacre Brewing

Will they or won’t they? Wiseacre Brewing officials have until early 2017 to tell Memphis City Council members if they will convert the long-vacant Mid-South Coliseum into a brewery, tasting room, event space, and retail location.

The idea was floated to the council this summer by brewery co-founder Frank Smith. The council approved the lease terms for the Coliseum, and Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland lauded the deal.

But Wiseacre would have to bring the 104,000 square-foot building up to code. They’d also have to retrofit it for their uses. It all comes with a price tag of about $12 million, brewery officials said earlier this year.

ServiceMaster

Crews have been hard at work converting the former Peabody Place mall into a new headquarters for Memphis-based ServiceMaster, parent company of Terminix, American Home Shield, Merry Maids, and more. The company says about 1,200 employees will be moved to the new location by the end of 2017.

The transformation will bring light and life to a long-darkened corner of Peabody Place in downtown Memphis. The company, which reported $160 million in profits for 2015, received about $24 million in taxpayer-supported incentives.

South City

Demolition will begin on the Foote Homes housing complex sometime early next year, said Marcia Lewis, executive director of the Memphis Housing Authority. When it’s gone, the massive, $210-million South City project will revitalize the area, which is a stone’s throw from Beale Street and South Main.

Only 40 Foote Homes residents were still living in the complex in mid-December, Lewis said. Those residents all have housing vouchers, are looking for new housing, and will all have moved out by early 2017. Once it’s gone, there will be no more “projects” in Memphis.

Foote Homes will be replaced with an apartment complex, to be filled with tenants of mixed incomes. The apartment campus will have green space, retail, and on-site education centers. Developers and government officials hope the new apartment will spur further economic growth in the area.

Lewis said no solid timeline for construction exists, since some federal government approvals are still being sought.

Tennessee Brewery

Work continues at the former Tennessee Brewery site, and the project’s developers say the brewery — slated to become an “urban apartment home community” — will be “re-established in 2017.”

Tennessee Brewery

Construction crews have spruced up the old brewery, completed the parking garage across the street, and have raised the bones for the two other new apartment buildings that will complete the project.

The brewery building was saved from the wrecking ball in 2014, when developers bought it for $825,000. The planned mixed-use development will cost about $28 million.

Central Station

The 100-year-old train station at Main and G.E. Patterson is getting a major, $55-million makeover, and parts of that project will become visible in the new year. Construction of the new Malco movie theater on G.E. Patterson will begin in January as will the major improvements at the Memphis Farmers Market, including the construction of a more-permanent market plaza area that will front Front.

Work is in full swing on the new South Line apartment buildings on Front, which are expected to be completed in February. Design work has begun on the concourse area around Central Station, which will connect trolleys, buses, bike riders, and pedestrians with Central Station from Main Street, the South End, and Big River Crossing. Dirt should move on these projects in the next few months.

ALSAC/St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital & the Pinch District

No formal plans have been revealed for the St. Jude/ALSAC hospital campus or the long-dormant Pinch District. But one thing is clear, the plans are really big.

ALSAC/St. Jude officials say they are investing between $7 billion and $9 billion to expand the organizations’ facilities and operations. Leaders there say the newly expanded ALSAC/St. Jude will bring an annual $3.5 billion economic impact to the city.

The expansion is expected to bring about 1,000 new jobs, more beds for more patients, and officials hope to double the amount of patients in the hospital’s clinical trials.

The Pinch got $12 million in state funds this year. City leaders have promised to invest $25 million in the area with funds from the already-approved Tourist Development Zone. Again, no final plans for these infrastructure investments have been made public. City leaders wrapped up a series of public meetings on Pinch development last month.

Also Upcoming for 2017

The Hampline should break ground on a project to connect Broad and Tillman.

New plans for the skyline-changing One Beale project are expected to be revealed to city leaders.

Plans for upgrades at the Cook Convention Center should come into focus.

Work on a new luxury boutique hotel called Teller (with a rooftop bar called Errors and Omissions) on Madison should be finished.

Construction should begin on a new Hilton Garden Inn Downtown at the former Greyhound bus station site on Union.

The fully-restored Memphis Grand Carousel is expected to open at the Children’s Museum of Memphis.

The Memphis Bike Share program will launch with a networked system of 60 stations throughout Memphis — and about 600 bikes. — Toby Sells

Theater and Dance …

Prediction #1: You will see a lot more dance in 2017, even if you never go to the theater. All you have to do is go to the Overton Square area.

For years, Ballet Memphis has been hidden away on Trinity Road in Cordova where “street life” is limited to cars zipping by. “Transparency” was the word most frequently used by architect Todd Walker on a late November media tour of the construction site for Ballet Memphis’ new Midtown home on Overton Square, one of the city’s most heavily pedestrian areas. The 38,000 square-foot building will literally bring dance to the corner of Madison and Cooper.

Ballet Memphis

The Ballet’s new, glass-walled home has five studios, all linked together by a series of courtyards. It will house business offices, conference rooms, a physical therapy room, and an egg-shaped cafe. Dancers rehearsing in Studio A will be visible from the street.

There’s also limited retractable seating in Studio A, and an observation area. This brings the number of available stages in Memphis’ growing theater district to six. Eight if you include the Overton Square amphitheater and Circuit Playhouse’s cabaret space. Ballet Memphis has a long history of scheduling public rehearsals in places where they are accessible to pedestrians. This takes that idea a little further.

Prediction #2: You’ll see a lot more of everything else. Memphis’ performing arts community has been experiencing a growth spurt, and that trend promises to continue. The Hattiloo Theatre, which moved to its Overton Square facility in 2014, will complete its first expansion in 2017, creating additional rehearsal and office space. A little further to the west, Crosstown Arts will begin construction on a new, versatile 450-seat theater in the Crosstown Concourse community.

Byhalia, Mississippi, which co-premiered in Memphis last year, went on to become one of the best reviewed and most talked about new American plays of 2016. Memphis continues to cultivate its reputation as a fertile environment for new work with Playhouse on the Square’s January 6th world premiere of Other People’s Happiness, a family drama by Adam Seidel. Haint, a spooky rural noir by Memphis playwright Justin Asher gets its second production at Germantown Community Theatre starting January 27th.

Although she will continue to direct, Memphis’ Irene Crist will retire from the stage in June, following her performance in David Lindsay-Abaire’s comedy, Ripcord. — Chris Davis

Politics …

The year 2017 will be an off year as far as elections go, and the politics that really counts may happen in our state capital. The venerable (if indelicate) political adage that “money talks and bullshit walks” may come in for an overhaul in Nashville in 2017. The second term in that expression may, in fact, be on as firm a footing as the first.

For the second year in a row, the State Funding Board in Nashville is projecting a sizable budget windfall — stemming from an increase of almost $900 million in revenue growth for 2017-18. And for the second year in a row, the forecast of extra money is actually complicating, rather than facilitating, some overdue state projects — the most vulnerable of these being overdue infrastructure work on increasingly inadequate and dilapidated state roadways. 

Governor Bill Haslam, who, with state transportation director John Schroer, went on a fruitless statewide tour in 2015 trying to drum up support for a state gasoline-tax increase, is almost certain to raise the idea of upping the gas tax when the General Assembly reconvenes in January. 

But the projected revenue windfall may actually undercut his hopes. Not only does all the windfall talk create a difficult atmosphere to talk about new taxes. There are also indications that the governor’s Republican party-mates in the GOP legislative super-majority see the dawning surplus as an excuse to dream up new tax cuts and eliminate existing ones — a double whammy that would sop up such financial gain as actually materializes.  

Democratic legislators (five in the 33-member state Senate and 25 in the 99-strong state House of Representatives) are too few in number to do much about the matter, and even some members of the Republican majority are troubled. State Representative Ron Lollar (R-Bartlett) touched on the problem at a recent forum of the National Federation of Independent Businesses (NFIB) in Memphis, when he lamented that the ongoing elimination of the state’s Hall tax on interest and dividends — slated for staged reductions and final abolition over a five-year period — will mean the ultimate loss to financially struggling local governments of the fairly significant portion of the Hall tax proceeds that they are accustomed to getting annually.

At that same NFIB meeting, state Senator Lee Harris of Memphis, leader of the Democratic minority in his chamber, pointed out another fiscally related conundrum that he thinks has escaped the consciousness of the GOP super-majority. 

In their categorical rejection of Haslam’s “Insure Tennessee” proposal to permit state acceptance of federal funding of as much as $1.5 billion annually for Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), Republican leaders like retiring state Lieutenant Governor Ron Ramsey always said their attitudes would likely be different under a Republican president, who would surely reapportion such funds as block grants for the states to dispose as they saw fit. 

Harris maintains that the new block grants would be converted from the previous A.C.A. outlays and could be extended only to those states that had already opted for the federal funding. The truth could be even harsher; with congressional Republicans and President-elect Donald Trump both having sworn to “repeal and replace Obamacare” as a first order of business in 2017, it is uncertain just how much federal bounty — if any at all — would actually be available for the states, in whatever form.

Money is at the root of another pressing issue sure to be vented in the General Assembly. At the very moment that the state’s short-changed urban school districts, including the Shelby County Schools system, are entertaining a variety of legal actions to force the state to honor full-funding commitments to them under the Basic Education Program (BEP), word is that enough steam may have finally gathered among legislators to allow passage of long-deferred school voucher legislation that would re-route a significant proportion of the state education budget toward private institutions and out of public schools altogether. 

Under the circumstances, even a rumored bipartisan willingness among legislators to at least begin the consideration of medical-marijuana legislation may not be enough to ease such doldrums as continue to afflict the state’s population. — Jackson Baker

Food and Dining …

Old Dominick

For those keeping your eye on the Old Dominick Distillery, Alex Canale tells us, “We’re 100 percent, well, 99 percent, sure we’ll be open by late spring. We’ll definitely be open in 2017.”

Old Dominick

Old Dominick will sell bourbon, a nod to forebear Dominico Canale. There will be a tasting room, and the distillery will be open for tours. Construction is currently wrapping up, and all licenses have been secured. Shipments of grain and malt are currently on the way. Bourbon takes a few years to age, so Old Dominick will be selling vodka at first. They hope to have stock ready to sell by the spring.

Sunrise

The breakfast concept by Sweet Grass’ Ryan Trimm and Central BBQ’s Craig Blondis and Roger Sapp now has a name: Sunrise. They hope to have both places — one on Central, one on Jefferson — up and running by January or February. The Central location will serve breakfast from 5 to 11 a.m. and then switch to a Central BBQ to-go. The Jefferson location will open at 5 a.m. as well and will serve lunch.

Trimm says the coffee program they’ve come up with is particularly impressive. Cold-pressed and nitro will be on the menu, as well as “normal hot coffee.”

“The biscuit sandwiches will be more interesting than your typical sausage and egg biscuit,” says Trimm. Think bologna and house-cured meats and house-made sausage.

The lunch at Jefferson will offer hometown cooking and large sandwiches piled high with house-cured meats. The meats will also be available for purchase.

Crosstown Concourse

The Crosstown Concourse will be one of the biggest food stories of the upcoming year. The revitalized Sears building already has a stellar list of food and drink venues: I Love Juice Bar, Next Door, Mama Gaia, French Truck Coffee, Curb Market, Crosstown Cafe, and Crosstown Brewing Company.

“Our vision was to curate a really great mix of offerings to add to the food scene,” says Crosstown’s Todd Richardson. Richardson says that about 65 percent of the retail space has been rented. He’s in talks with what he calls a “really great ice cream concept” and a pizzeria.

With all that plus a bank and barber and apartments, it seems like there would never be a reason to leave the Concourse. Richardson says that’s not the goal at all. “We’re not trying to create a city within a city. We want something that draws interest and has the greatest impact on the neighborhood.”

South Main Market

Shooting for a summer opening is the South Main Market. Rebecca Dyer has been busy converting the building at 409 S. Main into an event venue. Once she has the third floor ready, she’ll then re-renovate the first floor into the market. (“If I survive,” she says.)

The market will feature 12 to 15 kitchens. Think Boston’s Faneuil Hall. Dyer says she’s already got 11 chefs signed on, all local. “It’s going to be very varied,” says Dyer. That means each kitchen will serve a distinct cuisine — no three cupcake spots or duplicate falafel shops.

“We don’t want our chefs to compete with each other,” Dyer says. “We want to give our customers the best opportunity for dining.”
The Liquor Store
Lisa Toro, who owns City & State with her husband Luis, estimates that 50 percent of the businesses on Broad Avenue are owned by women. In that ladies-doing-for-themselves can-do spirit, Toro helped form an all-woman angel investment group. Their first investment is the Toros’ latest project The Liquor Store.

Toro describes it as a modern take on a diner. There will be blue-plate specials but with cured meats and fresh vegetables. There will be a bar as well, offering boozy milkshakes and soda fountain cocktails. The diner is being carved out of an old liquor store space. Floors are being ripped up, electrical and plumbing added.

The Toros hope to be open by early spring. — Susan Ellis

Film …

It’s safe to say that 2016 was a less than stellar year in the world of film. Will 2017 be better? Early signs point to probably not. The slate of announced films for the year so far is more of the same: Franchises, sequels, reboots nobody but a branding specialist could possibly want, and superheroes, superheroes, superheroes.

In January, a few 2016 films currently in limited release will make it to Memphis, such as Hidden Figures, starring Taraji P. Henson and Janelle Monáe as unsung black women engineers and mathematicians who helped America land on the moon, and A Monster Calls, a modern Irish fairy tale about loss and grieving. Then there’s Monster Trucks, a big-budget film so bad Paramount took a preemptive $100 million write-down on their earnings report. I have to see it, but there’s no reason you should.

In February, the pop S&M sequel Fifty Shades Darker is sure to both light up the box office and contribute to this reviewer’s depression. Hopefully The Lego Batman Movie will cheer me up. If that doesn’t work, there’s the Oxford Film Festival, which just announced a stellar lineup, and Indie Memphis’ new Indie Wednesday series, which will bring in quality arthouse and indie films from all over the world to Studio on the Square, Malco Ridgeway, and Crosstown Arts.

March brings Logan, Hugh Jackman’s final turn as X-Man Wolverine; Kong: Skull Island, a King Kong spinoff with an all-star cast; and the controversially Scarlett Johansen-led anime adaptation Ghost in the Shell. In May, the Marvel drought ends with Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, which will be answered in June by DC’s Wonder Woman movie. Pixar’s weakest series, Cars, gets a third installment before Marvel fires back with Spider-Man: Homecoming, which looks promising in previews. Later that month, I’m looking forward to War for the Planet of the Apes, which concludes the underrated Planet of the Apes reboot trilogy, and the Stephen King epic The Dark Tower.

All I know about August’s Baby Driver is that Edgar Wright of Scott Pilgrim fame is directing, but that’s enough to get me excited. September looks bleak except for the unexpected remake of the ’90s cult film, Flatliners, and the only oasis in the wasteland of October is Denis Villeneuve directing Harrison Ford in Blade Runner 2049.

November will kick off with the Indie Memphis Film Festival, before Marvel and DC go at it again with Thor: Ragnarok and Justice League. The holidays will bring the as yet untitled Star Wars: Episode VIII, directed by Breaking Bad badass Rian Johnson, and Mark Wahlberg going bionic in The Six Billion Dollar Man.

Basically, the year in film will be like everything else in 2017: Hope for the best, cherish the bright spots, but expect the worst. — Chris McCoy

Music …

As productive as this year was for Memphis music, you can expect 2017 to be just as fruitful for the local scene. From where to be to who to watch, here are some early tips for following Memphis music in 2017.

What to Buy and Why:

Valerie June will be releasing her new album, The Order of Time, on January 27th, her third full-length and first for Concord Music Group. June recently toured with Sturgill Simpson and Norah Jones, but she’ll come back home for a show at the Hi-Tone on Friday, February 17th. As for her new album, the song “Astral Plane” is already being heralded by NPR, which is a good indication that the three years that have passed since Valerie June released an album weren’t in vain. Expect big things in 2017 from one of our city’s most intriguing songwriters.

Another band with a considerable amount of hype behind them that’s releasing a record in 2017 is Aquarian Blood. The band’s debut effort will be released through Goner and is expected to be out in February. Aquarian Blood has released singles on Goner and New Orleans label Pelican Pow Wow, but their first LP has been months in the making, and should showcase the Midtown supergroup and musical freak show.
Southern Avenue is also set to release a new record in 2017, after burning up the Midtown bar circuit with their take on modern Memphis soul. Their debut record is coming from the fine folks at Stax. Being promoted as the first Memphis band to be signed to Stax since the ’70s, you can expect Southern Avenue to kill it in 2017, but don’t count on the band being in town very often.

Where to Be

The FedExForum has an impressive lineup early next year, including the Red Hot Chili Peppers on January 12th and Garth Brooks doing an entire weekend February 2nd-4th . Minglewood also continues to impress, with Lil Boosie, Juicy J, and Ben Folds all scheduled to play in the first few months of the new year. You can also expect shows to start cropping up at both the Galloway House and the Clayborn Temple downtown, and don’t forget about the excellent River Series at the Maria Montessori School; the laid-back, all-ages shows are becoming a staple for live music enthusiasts. And you can always catch a good mix of local and traveling talent at Overton Square and on Beale Street.

Memphis music will be well represented at the largest music festival on planet Earth — South by Southwest — this year. Music Export Memphis will host the Memphis Picnic at SXSW on March 14th in Brush Square Park. The lineup is still being finalized — expect an announcement around mid-January — but the event promises a totally Memphis experience, complete with the Amurica photo trailer booth and Gus’s Fried Chicken on site. — Chris Shaw

Categories
From My Seat Sports

Politics = Sports = Politics

CREDIT: diffen.com

diffen.com

Like the Republican Party, college football’s reigning champions have an elephant for a mascot. Like the Democrats, the reigning NFL champs have a donkey — on steroids — for a mascot. As we enjoy (endure?) the national conventions that officially brand this year’s campaign season, consider a few other parallels between the worlds of sports and politics. (Plagiarize this wisdom at your peril.)

• Charisma trumps credentials.
The National Football League’s highest-profile owner is Jerry Jones, whose Dallas Cowboys have been valued at $3.2 billion by Forbes magazine (tops among American sports franchises). The Cowboys — under Jones’s guidance as president and general manager — have not so much as reached a conference championship game in 21 years. (Before Jones’s arrival, the franchise’s longest drought between Super Bowls was 14 years.) Winning football games, you see, simply doesn’t matter when you have a brand like the Cowboys and a salesman like Jerry Jones.

Likewise, experience in public office means squat when you have a brand like Donald Trump and a salesman like Donald Trump. A big smile, a loud voice, and millions of dollars to burn mean value in politics. Reagan over Carter. Kennedy over Nixon. Personality is what we want, damn the record (or standings).

• A family name goes a long way.
The NFL has the Rooneys and Maras. Modern politics has the Clintons and Bushes. If your last name is Kennedy, you’re bound for public glory and, if you manage the right details, public office. (The late Ted Kennedy proved that such details — those behind closed doors — may not actually matter. We’ve learned the same applied to JFK’s rise to the White House.) If your last name is Roosevelt, it doesn’t matter if you’re a Republican (Teddy) or Democrat (FDR). The presidency is yours for the taking.

Likewise, if you’re last name is Manning, you’ll likely play quarterback — and quite well — in the NFL. Three generations of Boones and Bells have played baseball in the major leagues. Ken Griffey played long enough to actually become a teammate of his son, the newest member of baseball’s Hall of Fame. This family-first phenomenon goes all the way back to our founding fathers. Who was president when John Adams died on Independence Day in 1826? Why his son, of course: John Quincy Adams.

• Underdogs win.
The 1968 New York Jets — winners of Super Bowl III in January 1969 — have nothing on Harry Truman in 1948 when it comes to measuring unlikely wins. Bill Clinton was called “the Comeback Kid” before spending two terms in the White House. George W. Bush — this is hard to remember — was better known as a former owner of the hapless Texas Rangers than for any achievements as governor of Texas when he announced his candidacy for president four election cycles ago.

And of course, there’s Barack Obama. One remarkable speech — at the 2004 Democratic convention — proved enough for Obama to become a national figure and, in 2008, defeat an opponent with credentials not only as a senator for 21 years but a Vietnam War hero. An underdog with charisma? Unbeatable. You saw what the Cleveland Cavaliers did last month, right?

• Team loyalty can be tested.
This is known in some parts as the Cruz Clause. Jerry Seinfeld famously equated cheering team sports with “rooting for laundry,” as players come and go, coaches are fired . . . yet we still pull for the boys in red (or blue, or green, or teal). But what happens when a Dallas Cowboys fan of 30 years finds himself cheering a team mismanaged one season after another? What about a millennial raised in a Washington Redskins family who realizes the flag outside his house features a racial epithet?

And what happens when a national party is forced — by the people, for the people — to stand behind a man prepared to sell a wall (literally) to Mexico and screen any and all Muslims before they enter the Land of the Free? Last week, two living former presidents chose not to attend the Republican convention, a staggering statement considering these two former presidents were Republicans themselves. It was like Roger Staubach and Emmitt Smith refusing to attend a Super Bowl featuring the Dallas Cowboys.

Laundry can be soiled, it turns out, in politics as well as sports.

Categories
Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Full Frontal With Samantha Bee

For many, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart was an island of television sanity in the W era. For others, it was just proof of how smug liberals are. But there’s no denying the show’s lasting impact on TV comedy. It’s most famous alumni are The Two Steves: Colbert and Carell. After batting cleanup for Stewart on Comedy Central for years, Colbert is currently killing it in David Letterman’s former slot on CBS. Carell, on the other hand, abandoned topical comedy for The Office and, later, movie stardom, most recently as a high strung financial analyst in The Big Short.

To replace Stewart, The Daily Show brought in outsider Trevor Noah, who so far has been holding the brand together, and little more. But two Daily Show alums are taking the old formula and running with it. John Oliver was the leading candidate for Stewart’s chair until HBO snapped him up in 2013. He’s tweaked the formula, dropping the fake news deadpan, with decent results. But both the Daily and Oliver are going to be hard pressed to keep up with Full Frontal With Samantha Bee.

I’ll admit, I’m pretty burned out on political TV comedy. But Bee’s opening monolog instantly won me over. Where Noah is a little bland, and Oliver channelling everyone’s favorite Addreall addled British exchange student roommate, Bee is relaxed, confident, and looks like she’s actually having fun in front of the audience. It seems the two primary skills of the liberal political comedian are effectively channeling exasperation and articulating a lot of words clearly and quickly, and Bee can do both through a smile that seems genuine.

On this week’s show, which aired last night, she held a focus group for Trump supporters, with a promise to “actually treat them nicely”—which included an after-focus group party complete with live entertainment and “Welcome Trump Supporters” sign. After two decades of increasingly hostile partisan warfare intensified by information bubbles that isolate audiences and feed them only the news they agree with, this little bit of cultural exchange borders on a revolutionary act. Bee defanged the rancor by being respectful of her opponents, while still wringing laughs from the distance between their opinions. In this season of political anxiety, Bee might be the comedy remedy you’ve been looking for, and the true heir to Stewart’s chair. 

Categories
Intermission Impossible Theater

“All the Way” Comes Up Short at Playhouse on the Square

All the Way isn’t nearly as straightforward as it seems. It’s not a piece of naturalistic theater you can just stage. It’s not a musical either, but with grand themes, leitmotifs  of venality and an orchestra-sized cast, this overstuffed sausage-grinder about Lyndon Johnson’s first 11-months in the White House needs to be conducted like a tense modern symphony full of explosive tragedy and punctuated by brassy squawks, and soaring metaphoric strings. If careful attention isn’t paid to the show’s desperate melodies, and ever-shifting time signatures All the Way turns bloodless, like Disney World’s Hall of Presidents without the Morgan Freeman gravitas. Playhouse on the Square has transformed the show into a fashion parade of gorgeous vintage suits, and unconvincing wigs on a pink (marbled?) set that looks for all the world like it was wrapped in prosciutto. It’s a remarkable showcase of extraordinary talent grinding its wheels in a low-stakes historical pageant. When actors as sharp as Delvyn Brown and George Dudley can’t make historically large characters like Martin Luther King and Lyndon Johnson interesting, there’s something powerfully wrong with the mix.

I’m a fan of director Stephen Hancock, but have noted occasions where concept muddled clarity. The opposite is true this time around. Kennedy’s assassination can’t be treated like melancholy Camelot nostalgia. All the Way may open with a funeral march, but it needs to be bathed in horror and bubbling over with chaos that threatens to grow worse as the play progresses. The Gulf of Tonkin incident isn’t an aside, it’s an explosion. Every provision cut from the 1964 Civil Rights bill in order to get some version of the legislation passed before the election has to bleed real blood and stink of the strangest fruit.

George Dudley is a pleasure to watch. He’s whip-smart, and even when he’s badly used the man’s a damn powerhouse. But everything is different this time around. He’s not surefooted like he usually is. Like so many of the actors in All the Way, Dudley seems unfocused, and not entirely in control of his lines. Still, you can’t act height and vertical advantages aside, he’s still the only actor in Memphis I can imagine capturing Johnson’s crude and conflicted brand of Texas idealism. And when he’s on, he’s on fire.

‘All the Way’ Comes Up Short at Playhouse on the Square

For all of its shortcomings, All the Way is something of a landmark. I can’t recall when I’ve seen such a gifted assemblage of swinging D plopped down on a single stage. With a handful of exceptions, every noteworthy Memphis actor has been called on to do his patriotic duty, and most have answered with gusto. Curtis C. Jackson and John Maness stand out as NAACP leader Roy Wilkins and FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover. Greg Boller relishes his time inside the skin of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. Michael Detroit makes a sympathetic, if never entirely convincing, Hubert Humphrey and John Hemphill, Sam Weakly, and John Moore all do some fine character work. The women of the 60’are finely represented by Claire Kolheim, Irene Crist and Kim Sanders, but they are outnumbered, outgunned, out shouted, and pushed to the edge of the picture. It’s an historically appropriate dynamic, of course, but it could stand crisper translation to the stage.

Regretfully, Robert Schenkkan’s script requires more than quality acting.

All the Way is a fourth wall breaker. At the end of the show Dudley asks the audience if anybody was made to feel uncomfortable about by the things they witnessed as ideation becomes legislation, slaw, then law. He asks if we wanted to hide our faces or look away. That moment should be the key to reverse engineering an American “teaching play” that lists ever so slightly toward German Lehrstücke. It should make us want to look away. Not because of the sad black and white photographs projected on enormous screens behind the actors, but because when politicians “make the sausage” people are the meat in the grinder.

And it’s always the same people in the grinder.

There’s a frequently repeated line in All the Way about how Johnson is the most, “sympathetic president since Lincoln [to African Americans].” It’s ordinary sloganeering, of course, and an uncomfortable truth when considered from even a relatively short distance. It’s also a helpful line for considering how easily mimesis fails this kind of play where dynamic interpretation makes the difference between horrorshow and hagiography.

Face full of Johnson. Michael Detroit and George Dudley in All the Way at Playhouse on the Square.

All the Way isn’t bad, it’s worse than that. It’s boring. It’s a play that should make us see that soldiers are blown up in boardrooms not on battlefields, and how even progressive politics can play out like a slow motion lynching. It should make us flinch and look away often. But it never does.

It’s an election year, of course — in case anybody out there in Flyer-land hasn’t noticed. I suspect there’s a certain crowd caught up in the pageantry who are in the perfect mood for a three-hour reminder of the “good old” “bad old” days when even an oil-funded politician as crude and bullying as Donald Trump could dream of a “more perfect union” and get elected. Once, anyway.

Even political junkies and policy wonks may wish to spend cocktail hour chugging coffee. 

Categories
Fly On The Wall Blog Opinion

Country Music Stations Ban Albums By GOP Senators

CREDIT: Photographer unknown; the image comes from KCEN-TV’s archive and was provided by Dan Archer of KCEN. [Attribution], via Wikimedia Commons

Photographer unknown; the image comes from KCEN-TV’s archive and was provided by Dan Archer of KCEN. [Attribution], via Wikimedia Commons

– Nashville, TN

The National Association of Country Music Broadcasters (“NACMB”) today announced that all albums by GOP senators who signed a letter to Iran are banned on member station airwaves.

“We have a long standing policy of banning albums by people that bad mouth the U.S.A. and the President to foreign nations or on foreign soil,” said Bonnie McReba, NACMB President. “When the Dixie Chicks pulled their little treason stunt in England back in ’03, we were swift to punish them. We have no choice but to do the same to those traitors in the Senate.”

The banning follows an open letter signed by 47 Republican senators to Iranian leaders indicating any agreement reached with the Obama administration on issues relating to nuclear materials would not “count” and would not last beyond the current administration.

“Country music fans are nothing if not intellectually honest and consistent,” McReba said. “Can you imagine how mad they are that someone is bad mouthing our current President? We really have to take this action or face huge blowback from our listeners.”

He may be grinnin’, but after today’s decision he won’t be pickin’!

A spokesperson for Senator Tom Cotton, the Arkansas Republican who spearheaded the letter said, “Obviously, we are very disappointed in [NAMCB]’s decision. But, we have to do what we feel is right for America. It’s just sad that anyone who wants to hear Senator Cotton’s new album Jug Band Hootenanny will have to go through iTunes or the Senator’s website.”

Top tracks from that album include Why You Done Kilt My Dog?, She Don’t Know Why She Left (But She Did), and Obama Ain’t Nothing But A Dang Stinkbug.

Joey Hack is a regular contributor to The Fly on the Wall, and is a member of The Wiseguys improv troupe.  For more of his stuff check out The Howling Monkey blog or The Howling Monkey Magazine.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

POLITICS: New Mayor, New Council?

CREDIT: jb

Naming “crime, cronyism, and corruption” as major issues in
this year’s mayoral election, candidate Carol Chumney addressed the
Germantown Democratic Club Monday night, pledging if elected to “get a good
team” in order to bring renewed efficiency to Memphis city government.

Subsequently, city council member Chumney fielded at least
two questions from the membership (which includes several Memphis voters who
live in Cordova) about her reported difficulties with the mayor’s office and
fellow council members.

One member asked: What about her “relation building” and
“leadership style”? Would these be obstacles?

Chumney responded that she had developed good relations
with fellow legislators while a state House member for 13 years and said, “City
government has been a little different because there’s been quite frankly some
corruption. Many times I would be the only one who would stand up and say
anything. Some folks are going to get mad at you. I’m a strong leader, I will
tell you that.”

When another member followed that up by asking if the city
council would back her proposals if she were elected mayor, Chumney said, “We’re
going to elect a new city council.” Noting the virtual turnover of membership in
the county commission in last year’s elections, she expressed confidence that
city voters would follow suit. “It’s going to happen here. They’re going to vote
and vote in a new team.”

Pledging to renew cooperation between city and county
law-enforcement teams, Chumney said, “It’s disrespectful to expect the police to
go two years without a pay raise while asking them to risk their lives for us.”

She repeated her objections to Riverfront Development
Corporation proposals, including the recently approved Beale St. Landing
project, and called both for the city’s retention of The Coliseum and for
“something classy” in the downtown Pyramid.

Chumney said she’d heard “disturbing rumors” about the past
management of Memphis Networx and reported plans for its pending sale and
promised “to get to the bottom of it.” She said the council’s authority over a
prospective sale was uncertain but said she was seeking authoritative word on
that from the state Attorney General’s office.

  • Germantown is becoming an important campaign venue for
    candidates running for office in adjacent Memphis. A week or so earlier members
    of the Republican Women of Purpose organization heard a presentation at the
    Germantown Public Library from Brian Stephens, city council candidate in
    District 2, the East Memphis-suburban seat being vacated by incumbent Brent
    Taylor

    Stephens has been active in an effort to strengthen laws
    regulating sexually oriented businesses (S.O.B.’s in the accepted jargon) and
    specifically to make sure that veteran topless-club entrepreneur Steve Cooper
    does not convert a supposed “Italian restaurant” now under construction in
    Cordova into an S.O.B.

    He discussed those efforts but offered other opinions as
    well, some of them surprising – a statement that “consolidation is coming,
    whether we like it or not,” for example – and some not, like his conviction (a
    la Taylor) that tax increases are not necessary for the city to maintain and
    improve basic services.

    In general, Stephens, who seems to have a head start on
    other potential District 2 aspirants, made an effort to sound accommodationist
    rather than confrontational, stressing a need for council members to transcend
    racial and urban-vs.-suburban divisions and expressing confidence in the ability
    of currently employed school personnel to solve the system’s problems.

  • Also
    establishing an apparent early lead over potential rivals is current school
    board member Stephanie Gatewood, running for the District 1 council seat
    being vacated by incumbent E.C. Jones. Gatewood’s fundraiser at the Fresh
    Slices restaurant on Overton Park last Thursday night drew a respectable crowd,
    and her membership in Bellevue Baptist Church on the suburban side of District 1
    provides an anchor in addition to an expected degree of support from the
    district’s African-American population.

  • One night
    earlier, Wednesday night, had been a hot one for local politics, with three
    more-than-usually significant events, and there were any number of dedicated
    and/or well-heeled visitors to all three:

    –Residents of the posh
    Galloway Drive area where U of M basketball coach John Calipari resides
    are surely used to long queues of late-model vehicles stretching every which way
    in the neighborhood, especially in election season when Calipari’s home is
    frequently the site of fundraisers for this or that candidate.

    But Wednesday night’s event, a $250-a-head fundraiser for District 5 city
    council candidate Jim Strickland, was surely a record-setter –
    out-rivaling not only Calipari’s prior events but most other such gatherings in
    Memphis history, including those for senatorial and gubernatorial candidates. A
    politically diverse crowd estimated at 300 to 500 people showed up, netting
    Strickland more than $60,000 for the night and bringing his total “cash on hand”
    to $100,000.

    –Meanwhile, mayoral candidate Herman Morris attracted
    several hundred attendees to the formal opening of his sprawling, high-tech
    campaign headquarters on Union Avenue – the same HQ that, week before last,
    suffered a burglary – of computers containing sensitive information, for one
    thing – a fact that some Morris supporters find suspicious in light of various
    other instances of hanky-panky currently being alleged in the mayoral race.

    — Yet a a third major political gathering took place Wednesday night, as Shelby
    County Mayor A C Wharton was the beneficiary of a big-ticket fundraiser
    at The Racquet Club. Proceeds of that one have been estimated in the $50,000
    range – a tidy sum for what the county mayor alleges (and alleged again
    Wednesday night) is intended only as a kind of convenience fund, meant for
    charitable donations and various other protocol circumstances expected of
    someone in his position.

    Right. Meanwhile, Wharton declined to address the most widely speculated-upon
    subject in Memphis politics: Will he or won’t he enter the city mayor’s race? As
    everybody knows, and as the county mayor has informally acknowledged, he is the
    subject these days of non-stop blandishments in that regard, and there’s very
    little doubt that these have accelerated since a dramatic recent press
    conference by Memphis Mayor Willie Herenton alleging “the 2007 Political
    Conspiracy.”

    While some of
    Mayor Wharton’s intimates at the Wednesday night affair were keeping to the line
    that the chances of his running for city mayor were minimal to non-existent,
    their answers to inquiries about the matter were delivered after what we’ll call
    meaningfully inflected pauses. The door may be shut for now, but it clearly
    isn’t padlocked.

    jb

    Chumney in Germantown

  • NASHVILLE
    — The name of McWherter, prominent in Tennessee politics for most of the latter
    20th century, will apparently resurface in fairly short order, as Jackson lawyer
    and businessman Mike McWherter, son of two-term former governor Ned
    McWherter    , is making clear his plans to challenge U.S. Senator Lamar
    Alexander    ‘s reelection bid next year.

    Apparently only one thing could derail Democrat McWherter — a renewed Senate
    candidacy by former Memphis congressman Harold Ford Jr., who last year
    narrowly — lost a Senate race to the current Republican incumbent, Bob
    Corker    . “I don’t think I would compete against Harold. But I don’t think he
    will run,” McWherter said in an interview with The Flyer at Saturday’s
    annual Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner in Nashville.

    The 52-year-old activist sees Alexander as a slavish follower of President
    George W. Bush.

    “With one or two exceptions, he’s done everything the president has wanted him
    to do. He’s toed the party line,” said McWherter, who has recently paid courtesy
    calls on ranking Democrats, both in Tennessee and in Washington, D.C., informing
    them of his interest in running next year and soliciting their support.

  • Keynote speaker
    at the Democrats’ dinner in Nashville was presidential hopeful Bill
    Richardson    , whose situation somewhat paralleled that of former Massachusetts
    governor Mitt Romney, who earlier this month had been the featured
    speaker at the state Republicans’ Statesmen’s Dinner, also in Nashville.

    On that occasion, Romney – who had been invited before the entrance of former
    Tennessee senator Fred Thompson became likely – was a de facto lame-duck
    keynoter, and, mindful of the attendees’ expected loyalty to favorite-son
    Thompson, cracked wanly, “I know
    there’s been some speculation by folks about a certain former senator from
    Tennessee getting into the presidential race, and I know everybody’s waiting,
    wondering. But I take great comfort from the fact than no one in this room, not
    a single person, is going to be voting for — Al Gore.”

    That bit of verbal bait-and-switch got the expected laugh, and so did a joke
    Saturday night by New Mexico governor Richardson, who uttered some ritual praise
    of native Tennessean and former presidential candidate Gore and then, when the
    crowd warmly applauded the former vice president, jested, “Let’s not overdo it.
    I don’t want him in this race!”

    jb

    • Categories
    Politics Politics Feature

    POLITICS: Looking Back

    CREDIT: jb

  • Remembering
    Ernest Withers

    One of the great serendipities I’ve experienced as a
    journalist was the decision by former Memphis Magazine
    editor Tim Sampson back in 1993, on the 25th anniversary of
    the death in Memphis of Dr. Martin Luther King, to use as the centerpiece
    of an anniversary issue an archival piece of mine, along with pictures by the
    great photographer Ernest Withers.

    Uncannily often, Withers’ photographs directly illustrated
    specific scenes of my narrative, which had been written originally on the day
    after the assassination and concerned the events of that traumatic day. It was a
    little like being partnered with Michelangelo, and I was more than grateful.

    The publication of that issue led to an invitation from
    Beale Street impresario John Elkington for Withers and me to collaborate
    on a book having to do with the history of Beale Street, and the two of us
    subsequently spent a good deal of time going through the treasure trove that was
    Withers’ photographic inventory.

    For various reasons, most of them having to do with
    funding, the book as envisioned never came to pass (though years later Elkington
    published a similar volume), but the experience led to an enduring friendship.

    One day, when I was having car trouble, Ernest gave me a
    ride home, from downtown to Parkway Village, the still predominantly white area
    where I was living at the time, just beginning a demographic changeover. At the
    time it appeared as though it might become a success of bi-racial living, and we
    talked for some time about that prospect.

    That very evening, Ernest was a panelist on the old WKNO
    show, Informed Sources, and, instead of focusing on the subject at hand,
    whatever it was, chose to discourse at length on the sociology of Parkway
    Village. Watching at home, I was delighted – though the host and other
    panelists, intent on discussing another subject, one of those pro-forma
    public-affairs things, may not have been.

    They should have been. This was the man, remember, who
    documented the glory and the grief of our city and our land as both passed from
    one age into another, which was required to be its diametrical opposite, no
    less. Ernest saw what was happening in Parkway Village as a possible trope for
    that, and whatever he had to say about it needed to be listened to.

    Sadly, of course, the neighborhood in question was not able
    to maintain the blissfully integrated status that Ernest Withers, an eternally
    hopeful one despite his ever-realistic eye, imagined for it.

    As various eulogists have noted, last week and this,
    Withers not only chronicled the civil rights era but the local African-American
    sportscape and the teeming music scene emanating from, an influenced by black
    Memphians.

    He was also, as we noted editorially last week, a family
    man, and it had to be enormously difficult for him that, in the course of a
    single calendar year while he was in his 70s (he was 85 at the time of his
    death), he buried three of his own children.

    Among my souvenirs is a photograph I arranged to have taken
    of Ernest Withers with my youngest son Justin and my daughter-in-law
    Ellen    , both residents of Atlanta, on an occasion when they were visiting
    Memphis a few years back. Happy as they were with the memento, the younger
    Bakers expressed something of a reservation.

    What they’d really wanted, explained Ellen, a museum
    curator who was even then, in fact, planning for a forthcoming Withers exhibit
    in Atlanta, was a picture of the two of them taken by the master.

    Silly of me not to have realized that. To be in a picture
    by Ernest Withers was to become part of history – a favor he bestowed on legions
    of struggling ordinary folk as well on the high and mighty of our time.

  • Remembering Kenneth Whalum Sr.

    There was a time, before Mayor Willie Herenton became the
    acknowledged alternative within the black community to the Ford family’s
    dominance, that councilman Kenneth Whalum was a recognized third force to reckon
    with.

    jb

    The Rudy Williams Band led Ernest Withers’ funeral procession down Beale on Saturday.

    Rev. Whalum was both the influential pastor of Olivet
    Baptist Church in the sprawling mid-city community of Orange Mound and the
    former personnel director of the U.S. Postal Service, locally. In effect, he had a foot planted
    firmly in each of the two spheres that make up the Memphis political community.

    That fact made him a natural for the city council during
    the period of the late ’80s and early ’90s when the era of white dominance was
    passing and that of African-American control was dawning.

    During the 1991 council election, Whalum, along with Myron
    Lowery, achieved milestones as important in their way as was Herenton’s mayoral
    victory, taking out long-serving at-large white incumbents Oscar Edmunds and
    Andy Alissandratos, respectively.

    Whalum was uniquely able to serve both as a sounding board
    for black aspirations and a bridge between races and factions on the council. He
    was a moderate by nature, though sometimes his preacherly passions got the best
    of him and he sounded otherwise. Something like that happened during a couple of
    incendiary sermons he preached during the interregnum between the pivotal
    mayor’s race of 1991 and Herenton’s taking the oath in January 1992 as Memphis’
    first elected black mayor.

    Word of that got to me, and I was able to acquire a
    recording of one of the incriminating sermons. I had no choice but to report on
    it, and – what to say? – it made a bit of a sensation at the time, no doubt
    limiting Whalum’s immediate political horizons somewhat.

    It certainly limited the contacts I would have, again in
    the short term, with a political figure that I had previously had a good
    confidential relationship with. Whalum’s sense of essential even-handedness
    eventually prevailed, however, and we ultimately got back on an even keel.

    To my mind, in any case, Whalum’s outspokenness never
    obscured his essential fair-mindedness, and his occasional prickliness was more
    than offset by his genuine – and sometimes robust – good humor.

    There are many ways of judging someone’s impact on society,
    and one might certainly be the prominence of one’s offspring. In Rev. Whalum’s
    case they included the highly-regarded jazz saxophonist Kirk Whalum and the
    councilman-minister’s namesake son Kenneth Whalum Jr., a school board member and
    an innovative pastor himself — so innovative in his wide-open 21st-century
    style as to cause a generational schism involving Olivet church members. That
    would result in two distinct churches, one led by the senior Whalum, one by
    Whalum Jr.

    Kenneth Whalum Sr. had been something of a forgotten man in
    local politics since leaving the council at the end of 1995 (he would also run
    losing races for both city and county mayor). But he got his hand back in
    briefly during last year’s 9th District congressional race, making a
    point of endorsing Democratic nominee Steve Cohen, who ultimately prevailed.

    Appropriately, Rep. Cohen took the lead, along with Senator
    Lamar Alexander, on behalf of a congressional resolution re-designating the
    South 3rd Street Post Office in honor of Whalum, closing a cycle of
    sorts and forever attaching the name of Kenneth T. Whalum Sr. to one of the
    city’s landmarks.

  • Political Notes:

    Kenneth Whalum Sr.

    –Congressman Cohen was the target recently of what many local Memphians report on
    as a “push” poll taken by random telephone calls to residents of the 9th
    District. Purportedly the poll contained numerous statements casting Cohen in a
    negative light before asking recipients who they might prefer in a 2008 race
    between him and repeat challenger Nikki Tinker.

    (At least one person called recalled that the name of
    Cohen’s congressional predecessor, Harold Ford Jr., now head of the
    Democratic Leadership Council, figured in a triad of potential candidates being
    asked about.)

    –Early voting is now underway in the four city council
    runoffs that will be determined on November 8th.

    Those involve Stephanie Gatewood vs. Bill
    Morrison     in District 1; Brian Stephens vs. Bill Boyd in
    District 2; Harold Collins vs. Ike Griffith in District 3; and
    Edmund Ford Jr    . and James O. Catchings in District 6.

    • Categories
    Opinion Viewpoint

    Back to the Future?

    The unsurprising moderation of Barack Obama has caught many people by surprise. At this point, he seems intent on restoring a version of the old Clinton presidency — Hillary Clinton running foreign policy, Robert Rubin’s ensemble running the economy, Bill Richardson at Commerce and nary a certified “cut ‘n’ runner” on Iraq anywhere in sight. The erstwhile “change” candidate seems intent on vindicating that old French expression: The more things change, the more they remain the same. Oui.

    What is surprising is that any of this should come as a surprise. All during the primary campaign, the main difference between Obama and Hillary Clinton was supposedly Iraq. This was the issue that propelled him to victory in Iowa, and this was the issue that stoked his supporters to paroxysms of enthusiasm. One candidate was for peace and the other was for the war — and that was all there was to it.

    Not quite. There was always a synaptic gap between Obama’s ethereal image and his more grounded reality and the sneaking suspicion that he and Clinton were not all that far apart on anything — Iraq included. He conceded as much before the presidential race began. “I think very highly of Hillary,” he told New Yorker editor David Remnick in 2006. “The more I get to know her, the more I admire her.” In that same interview, Obama even narrowed the gap on Iraq: “I was running for the U.S. Senate. She had to take a vote, and casting votes is always a difficult test.” In other words, who knows?

    This is not to suggest that Obama thought the war in Iraq was really a good thing. It does suggest, though, that he recognized that the issue was never an easy one, and had he not represented a dovish Chicago district in the Illinois Senate, he might well have expressed a more nuanced opposition. After all, not a single one of Obama’s U.S. Senate rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination voted against authorizing the war. Two of them are now about to play prominent roles in shaping and executing Obama’s foreign policy — Joe Biden, the vice president-elect, and Clinton, the presumptive secretary of state. As for the economy, a third Clinton administration would probably have looked like an Obama first: Lawrence Summers doing macro, Timothy Geithner doing micro, and both of them making late-night calls to Bob Rubin in New York.

    What, then, can explain the length and bitterness of the Democratic primary campaign? For the answer, we must look not to some talking head but to Sigmund Freud and his phrase “the narcissism of small differences.” By this, he meant the antipathy we feel toward people who resemble us. To an outsider, this explains the age-old Protestant-Catholic enmity or the proclivity of Shiites and Sunnis to slaughter one another. It also explains why Clinton and Obama supporters were at each other’s throats. With the exception of the candidates themselves, they had so few differences. This is why so many Obama supporters despised Hillary Clinton — and were despised in return.

    Remember that? Remember when Clinton had no integrity, no character, when she lied about almost everything and could be trusted about almost nothing? Remember when she was excoriated for diabolically exonerating Obama of the charge that he was, secretly and very ominously, a Muslim with the portentous phrase “as far as I know”? And remember when her husband had supposedly revealed himself to be a racist? That was a calumny, a libel, and a ferocious mugging of memory itself. But it was believed.

    As is sometimes the case with passionate love, one can look back after a campaign and wonder: What was that all about? Usually, the passion of the campaign is shared by the candidates themselves and, for sure, their staffs. They live in a bubble infected by rumor and suspicion, a latter-day Borgian court of intrigue. But with Obama, he seemed always to distance himself from the heat of the campaign and to look down at it, as he did with that immense crowd in Berlin, as being of short-term use.

    A presidential campaign is really a government looking for a parking space. Obama’s campaign showed us a candidate of maximum cool. He has always remained ironically detached, and that has served him — and now us — very well indeed. It’s now clear that he will not govern from the left and not really from the center but, as his campaign suggested, from above it all.

    Richard Cohen writes for the Washington Post Writers Group.

    Categories
    Politics Politics Feature

    It’s a “Change Election,” All Right

    CREDIT: by Jackson Baker

    It had been a feel-good Democratic rally in Whitehaven last Sunday — replete with rah-rahs and collective self-congratulations and nifty munchables and a laundry list of party politicians pleased to be there — when it came city councilman Myron Lowery‘s time to speak. And, depending on one’s taste for verisimilitude, Lowery either broke the mood or enhanced it with some bona fide straight talk.

    First off, he noted something publicly that had been on the minds of almost all the Democratic cadres at the event: “Tennessee has been given up by Barack,” Lowery said bluntly. He thereby gave voice to what everybody knew — that the Obama-Biden campaign organization, despite having laid claim to Democratic national chairman Howard Dean’s concept of a “50-state strategy” and despite having raised a formidable amount of money, including a record $150 million in September alone, had decided to bypass Tennessee, doling out only a modest amount of expense money for Nika Jackson (the campaign’s representative in Memphis) and one other state employee.

    No money for anything else, meaning that those Obama-Biden signs you see here and there were paid for by private fund-raising activities here and elsewhere in Tennessee. Just as Lowery said (and despite conjectures, based on a favorable poll or two, that the state could be competitive in the presidential race), Tennessee had indeed been given up by Obama’s campaign. Nor was the Republican McCain-Palin ticket pulling out the stops.

    Turning to Bob Tuke, the Nashville lawyer and former state Democratic chairman who took up the Senate race when few others were willing to, Lowery complimented the candidate for taking his challenge to Republican Lamar Alexander seriously and excoriated those Democrats who were “hanging on to the coattails of our incumbent senator, Bob, and they really let you go.”

    That was after Tuke had earlier said this: “When Barack Obama becomes president of the United States, he’s going to need to have 60 senators in the United States Senate in order to vote for his legislative agenda, so that it’s more than just a promise and more than just a dream, but a reality. And, ladies and gentlemen, I volunteer.”

    A late-coming dignitary, 9th District congressman Steve Cohen, would, some minutes later and with evident enthusiasm, make the same point that Tuke had — that the candidate, if elected, could be number 60, the filibuster-killer. But even Cohen, though no coattail-grabber, has been careful to observe the amenities with his colleagues in the Tennessee congressional delegation, and a courtesy visit of his to a fund-raiser for Alexander (following a joint visit to the Med by the two) had not exactly been treated as a secret by the senator’s people.

    Another late arrival at the rally, Shelby County mayor A C Wharton, was asked at one point by event impresario Bret Thompson to list for the crowd’s sake the four magic names of Democratic candidates who needed full-fledged support. That might have been a stumper in any case, but the mayor’s prolonged hemming and hawing, which required Thompson himself to do fill-ins on the list, might have owed something to the fact that Wharton, along with Memphis mayor Willie Herenton and a number of other name Democrats, had formally endorsed Alexander.

    Which is as good a way as any of pointing out one of the anomalies of the current political season. At a time when, if the pre-election polls are to be believed, the rest of the nation is trending — even racing — toward the Democrats, Tennessee not only holds fast to its status as a Republican state, it seems to be getting redder.

    Some of this conundrum is due to purely personal factors. Tuke is the Democratic Party’s official alternative to Lamar Alexander because, as the former chairman and genial ex-Marine himself confesses, the party had trouble finding someone to take on an incumbent with so formidable a pedigree in the Volunteer State.

    In the late ’70s, while still in his 30s, Alexander had become governor, succeeding a corrupt good-ole-boy Democrat (Ray Blanton, who did prison time for selling favors). In office, he sponsored educational reforms and went on to serve as president of the University of Tennessee and secretary of education under Ronald Reagan. In 1996, Alexander mounted a serious run for the presidency, losing the vital New Hampshire primary by inches after Bob Dole, ultimate winner of the Republican nomination, put non-stop ads on TV accusing the ex-Tennessee governor — unjustly — of having been a mad taxer in office.

    Elected to the Senate in 2002, Alexander had succeeded by 2008 in both creating an image of a moderate who could work across the aisle and becoming the GOP caucus chairman — i.e., his party’s point man. No mean trick, that, and a tribute to his versatility.

    by Jackson Baker

    Bob Tuke

    One example of the man’s prowess: He took on Democratic majority leader Harry Reid over the issue of appointing the Rev. William Graves, a Memphian and C.M.E. bishop, and (assisted by Cohen) won that showdown, thereby scoring with both African Americans and his Republican peers in Congress.

    Hence the polls showing Alexander over Tuke by a two-to-one margin and hence a staggering fund-raising edge over Tuke, a man of parts but still a relative unknown.

    But that’s just one case. It remains a mystery why the Obama-Biden campaign should be forsaking Tennessee. The campaign, after all, has targeted such hitherto red states as Virginia and North Carolina and, with recent help from former president Bill Clinton himself, is gaining toward a possible upset even in next-door Arkansas. It’s especially puzzling given the campaign’s momentum, record bankroll, and the fact of a highly motivated African-American voter base in Tennessee’s urban centers.

    And the national party’s reticence toward Tennessee isn’t helpful for either the state Democratic Party’s tenuous hopes of regaining control of the state Senate (three key races are at stake statewide, and the party must win all of them) or the local Democrats’ hopes of getting their act together.

    For all the exuberance of that Sunday rally on Elvis Presley, the Shelby County Democratic Party is a divided house — riven periodically by factional strife, most recently over an “official” sample ballot that includes among its mugshots of party nominees and other recommended candidates a box which, without any authorization whatever, calls for the defeat of each and every one of 10 referenda on the November 4th ballot. At press time, there has not yet been a full explanation for this mysterious event. (See memphisflyer.com for more coverage.)

    The Shelby County Republicans have their own case of Ballotgate — a free-booting Germantown group having, according to Chairman Bill Giannini, misappropriated the party’s name and logo to issue a sample ballot pushing its own unauthorized slate of alderman candidates.

    So much for old-fashioned party discipline.

    And, symbolically, at least, the ballot confronting all Memphis and Shelby County voters begins with a choice of no fewer than eight presidential tickets, electors for pairs of presidential and vice-presidential candidates. Topping the list are Democrats Obama and Joe Biden and Republicans John McCain and Sarah Palin. With time running out, and with the Electoral College system requiring them to fry their fish elsewhere, no member of either ticket has bothered to campaign locally.

    Of the six choices which follow the two major-party tickets, three have attracted some note, in Tennessee or elsewhere.

    by Jackson Baker

    Lamar Alexander

    The Libertarian Party slate of Bob Barr (a former Republican congressman from Georgia) and Wayne Root has made modest inroads on the national consciousness for its damn-their-eyes attitude toward both Democrats (too much government) and Republicans (too much social control). Neither Barr nor Root has made a local campaign visit, however, so far as is known.

    Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney, yet another former member of Congress from Georgia, has been here, however — though without her running mate, Rosa Clemente.

    Another visitor to Memphis was the venerable Ralph Nader, running again on the fumes of his reputation made long ago as a consumer advocate par excellence. Nader’s veep partner, Matt Gonzalez, hasn’t come this way, however.

    Other pairings are Chuck Baldwin and Darrell Castle, Charles Jay and Thomas L. Knapp, and Brian Moore and Stewart Alexander — all listed on the Tennessee ballot as “independent candidates,” whatever their doctrinal claims.

    Outlook: Though Tennessee seems locked up for McCain-Palin, according to the polls, Obama-Biden should win the nation. Skeptics are well within their rights to make arch references to Presidents Dewey and Kerry. For what it’s worth, early voting in Memphis and Tennessee, as elsewhere, has been brisk.

    The U.S. Senate race is listed next. Besides Democrat Tuke and Republican Alexander are candidates Edward L. Buck, Christopher G. Fenner, David Gatchell, Ed Lawhorn, Daniel Towers Lewis, and Chris Lugo. Lugo, a Nashvillian, represents the Green Party and made a run-through, in tandem with McKinney, back in August.

    Outlook: If Tuke is a praying man, he might qualify for a miracle. Otherwise, Alexander would seem to be a shoo-in. Aside from a certain potential in Shelby County and in Davidson County (Nashville), Tuke, whose name recognition remains minute, has limited prospects.

    OTHER CONTESTED RACES

    Congress, 7th District: Democrat Randy Morris is a name on the ballot, little more. If Republican incumbent Marsha Blackburn is ever to be challenged, it won’t be this year.

    Congress, 8th District: Democrat John Tanner, a blue-dog perennial from Union City, is all by himself on the ballot. Literally, no contest.

    Congress, 9th District: Steve Cohen, the first-term Democratic incumbent who now hovers on the edge of national stardom, scored a 4-to-1 win over primary opponent Nikki Tinker, who made a serious, if misdirected, run at him.

    by Jackson Baker

    Kemp Conrad

    None of the three opponents running as independents against him in the general can expect to do better. Not Dewey Clark, Mary Taylor-Shelby Wright, or Newton Jake Ford — though the latter has planted some prominent yard signs of late. Some of these bill him as “N.J. Ford,” which may stir echoes of his late grandfather, the founding patriarch of the well-known funeral home which bears his name. There is no evidence, however, that candidate Ford is drawing support from his extended family, still a political clan to be reckoned with.

    State House of Representatives, District 86: For some reason, Republican George T. Edwards feels obliged to challenge Democratic incumbent Barbara Cooper every two years in this reliably Democratic inner-city district. It won’t work this year, either.

    State House of Representatives, District 88: Another inner-city district — this one, like Cooper’s, mainly north-side — and another slam-dunk for the Democratic incumbent, Larry Miller. Independent David Vinciarelli‘s only hope was his legal challenge to Miller’s somewhat uncertain residential status, which failed. (Vinciarelli, who had the Republican endorsement in a previous race, was erroneously referred to as the Republican nominee in an earlier draft of this article. A spokesman insists that he shares some of the precepts of both parties.)

    State House of Representatives, District 91: This centrally located district is the bailiwick of House Speaker Pro Tem Lois DeBerry. Republican Tim Cook Jr. has negligible hopes.

    State House of Representatives, District 93: Tim Cook Sr. has somewhat better prospects for the GOP against longtime Democratic incumbent Mike Kernell, whose son David Kernell, a student at UT-Knoxville, is currently under indictment for hacking Sarah Palin’s e-mail account. Kernell has turned away many a challenger of yore, though, and should do so again.

    City Council District 9, Position 1: There’s a real race on here in this special election to replace former councilman Scott McCormick, now president of the Plough Foundation. The main contestants are businessman Kemp Conrad and IBEW business manager Paul Shaffer. Conrad, who started with a wide lead, has official support from the GOP, and Shaffer from the Democrats, but the issue in a somewhat narrowing race will likely be decided by nonpartisan voters. Arnett Montague, an unknown, and former Shelby County commissioner John Willingham, a perennial, are not expected to figure.

    Memphis School Board, At Large Position 1: Incumbent Freda Williams should be well-positioned to hold off challengers Menelik Chiremba Fombi and Cynthia A. Gentry.

    COUNTY REFERENDA

    Ordinance No. 364: This ordinance basically recreates, with more or less the same defined duties, the five positions — sheriff, trustee, assessor, register, and county clerk — which the state Supreme Court ruled did not qualify as constitutional offices on grounds of a technicality. Prospects for passage are good.

    Ordinance No. 365: More controversial is this one, which establishes limits of two consecutive four-year terms for the five newly recreated offices. Though favored to prevail, the term-limits ordinance — and only it, along presumably with a companion referendum, City Charter Referendum No. 1, which prescribes similar limits for city officials — has been formally opposed by the Shelby County Democratic Party. Resistance to the term-limits provision among inner-city Democrats is so virulent that, in a controversy that still rages, some unauthorized person or persons succeeded in grafting a box onto the party’s published sample ballot stating opposition to all referendum items, city and county.

    Shelby County commissioner Steve Mulroy, a proponent of City Charter Referendum No. 5 (see below), had offered to defray the cost of affixing labels to the party’s sample ballot obscuring the offending box. But apparently copies of the original, unauthorized ballot were being passed out as recently as Sunday, at the Democratic rally mentioned earlier in this article.

    CITY REFERENDA

    Ordinance No. 5232: This ordinance allows for recall elections of City Council members on the basis of petitions bearing a number of qualified signatures equivalent to 10 percent of those voting in the preceding municipal election. The recall election would take place during the next succeeding general election and, if successful, would create a vacancy that would be filled by vote of the remaining council members.

    Ordinance No. 5265: This would require all non-civil-service city employees, including members of city boards and commissions (the board of the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art excepted) to live within the city limits of Memphis under pain of discharge. New employees would have six months to arrange compliance.

    CITY CHARTER COMMISSION REFERENDA

    2008 Referendum No. 1 (Term Limits): Establishes two consecutive four-year terms as the limits for the mayor, council members, and the city court clerk.

    2008 Referendum No. 2 (Staggered Terms): Mandates staggered terms for the above offices and proposes a formula to begin the process with the elections of 2011. It also would cause future municipal elections to be held in even-numbered, rather than odd-number, years.

    2008 Referendum No. 3 (regarding the potential sale of MLGW): Mandates that any such sale of the city utility or any of its facilities would require prior approval of city voters in a referendum.

    2008 Referendum No. 4 (Suspension from Official Duties): Reads “Any elected or appointed official charged with or indicted for official malfeasance or misconduct shall be suspended with pay pending final resolution of the charge.”

    2008 Referendum No. 5 (Instant Runoff Voting): Provides a mechanism whereby voters can list candidates in a multi-candidate race in order of preference, so that in cases short when one candidate doesn’t gain a majority, the rankings are weighted so as to produce a winner, obviating the need for a subsequent runoff election.

    2008 Referendum No. 6 (Filling Vacancy in the Office of the Mayor): Provides that the City Council chairman, bearing the title of Mayor Pro Tem, shall fill any mayoral vacancy for as much as 180 days, after which another mayor will be elected, either by special election or in the next general election if it occurs within the 180-day period.

    Categories
    Opinion

    In Shelby County Isolation Trumps Consolidation

    CREDIT: Jackson Baker

    To call consolidation a tough sale is an understatement.

    Crime and fear of crime, bad schools, higher taxes, lost jobs and fear of lost jobs, old grudges, apathy, suburban (or urban) opposition, political cowardice, the “King Willie” factor, questionable “efficiencies” — any one of those could sink it.

    There’s another problem that is not so obvious. In his state of the city speech, Mayor Willie Herenton urged residents of Memphis and Shelby County — black and white, rich and poor, urban and suburban — to pull together for their common good. But the prevailing spirit for at least the last 25 years in Memphis has been anything but “all for one and one for all.”

    It has been just the opposite. It is the spirit of isolation, not consolidation. Consider:

    Me and mine first, as evidenced by all the elected and appointed officials who, legally and illegally, gamed the system and padded their paychecks.

    Self-segregation in schools, churches, and even sporting events and entertainment has replaced legal segregation.

    Gated communities from South Memphis to South Bluffs to Southwind.

    “Special” taxing districts or TIFs that get dedicated tax streams that would otherwise go into the general fund.

    “Special” tourism development zones or TDZs around FedExForum, Graceland, the convention center, and Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium that, when implemented, further erode the general tax fund unless they attract new money.

    “Special” incentives in the form of tax freezes given to businesses that promise investment and new jobs, whether they actually deliver them or not. These also erode the tax base. No other city in Tennessee grants nearly as many of these as Memphis does.

    “Special” boards and commissions like the Riverfront Development Corporation (RDC) and Center City Commission (CCC) that are narrowly focused to develop and oversee choice pieces of downtown Memphis.

    “Special” building authorities for big projects like FedExForum.

    Selective annexation of Cordova, Countrywood, and Hickory Hill which didn’t mobilize opposition quickly or effectively enough, while savvier, wealthier, and more politically powerful areas like Southwind and Southeast Shelby County got a reprieve.

    As a reporter covering government, this is the biggest change I have seen in Memphis since I moved here in 1982. Not only are city and county government often not in synch, the elected officials in both governments have willingly given away much of their authority in the name of expedience and efficiency.

    The pay has gone up 300 to 500 percent but the job description has shrunk. The City Council and County Commission, which theoretically represent all city and county residents, are often not where the action is any more, or at least not to the extent they once were. To attempt to effectively cover “government” nowadays means to go to meetings or keep tabs on the Sports Authority, RDC, PBA, CCC, CVB, MLGW, Industrial Development Board, Agricenter, Airport Authority, and various nonprofits.

    They’re all in their own, often isolated worlds, sometimes for better and sometimes worse. They come to the mayors or council members and commissioners when they need a fix, and if they can do it quietly and out of the public eye, so much the better.

    Obviously, in a city of 675,000 people and a county of more than 850,000 people, there’s something to be said for specialization, and maybe a lot. If you want to run an airport, build a FedExForum on a schedule, or attract the big convention of square-dancers, you need focus and partners from the private sector.

    But there’s a price for all of this specialization, and it’s not just the bruised egos and additional bureaucracies and lost taxes. It’s the loss of community and the idea that we’re all in this together. As citizens and elected officials in Memphis and Shelby County, we reap what we sow. And what we have sown are the seeds of separation and isolation, not consolidation.