Tag: Washington Post

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Stir Crazy

I’ve got an announcement: The Memphis Flyer will temporarily be going to an every-other-week print schedule. Next week’s issue — April 9th — will be digital-only, available for free, of course, on memphisflyer.com. We’ll still have a “cover story,” plus all of our regular columns and features — maybe even a few more, since we won’t be constrained by a page limit. You’ll just have to read us on your computer or hand-held device. There is also a handy map on the website that tells you where you can get a copy of the paper on the weeks we do publish in print.

As I mentioned in this space last week, the current health crisis has put a dent in the Flyer‘s revenue, as it has for most of our regular advertisers. Cutting back on print costs is one way we hope to be able to weather the storm until this horrific disease gets put back into its box.

How long will that be? Nobody really knows. But what we do know for certain is that the more aggressively all of us socially isolate, the sooner all of us will be able to get back to some sort of normal life. I want you to read the opening paragraph of a Washington Post story that came out Saturday:

“When historians tally up the many missteps policymakers have made in response to the coronavirus pandemic, the senseless and unscientific push for the general public to avoid wearing masks should be near the top. The evidence not only fails to support the push, it also contradicts it.”

I urge you to read the rest of it, if you can. The bottom line of the story is that all of us should be wearing masks when we go out into public spaces. Not so much because masks will protect us (though they do at some level), but because wearing masks protects others.

This disease, COVID-19, has a particularly devious design: Up to 80 percent of those who get it won’t show symptoms. Meaning, you might have it. I might have it. And we will never know it unless we’re tested. Since testing is still not easily available or simple, millions of us could (and do) have it and never know. Meaning many of us are walking around unknowingly infecting others. To put it more bluntly: Many of us are potential killers.

If we wear masks, we’re protecting others — and ourselves. We’re aggressively slowing the spread. The more of us who wear masks, the more acceptable the practice will become. And, as the article points out, wearing masks doesn’t mean using personal protective equipment that should be saved for medical personnel. The latest thinking is that anything that covers your nose and mouth will help — a scarf, a bandana, a cut-up T-shirt, a bra cup, a homemade mask with Tony Allen’s face on it.

So let’s do it, Memphis. We’re the city of innovators and inventors and one-of-a-kind artists and iconoclasts and weirdos. Let’s be the city that stops this evil crud faster than any other. I want to see clever, colorful, provocative, Memphis AF masks out there. I want to see mask-making co-ops fire up. It’s a perfect side-hustle for these times. Don’t go to Home Depot or Kroger or Cash Saver (where more Flyer print copies are distributed than anywhere else) or CVS (where Flyers are also available) or anywhere there’s a crowd, without a mask.

And lest you think this is just cranky Bruce going stir-crazy (which is certainly possible), you should know that officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are right now considering altering their official guidance to encourage people to take measures to cover their faces, so let’s get ahead of that curve. If we wait for the president or our governor to lead us, we’ll never catch up. It’s DIY Memphis.

And, another thing: This “six feet apart” social distancing thing? It’s meant to apply for when we go out into the aforementioned public spaces. It’s not a guideline for backyard gatherings or pandemic porch parties or corona cocktail hour. This is serious stuff, and we’ll all have to restrain our impulses for instant gratification for a while. I know it’s hard, but we can do it. It’s not like you’re being sent to ‘Nam for a year to fight the ‘Cong. If we don’t do it, we’ll be stuck in our houses for a lot longer — and you’ll know more people who get sick. You’ll know more people who will die.

Stay home as much as possible. Wear a mask if you go out into public gathering spaces. See you next week at memphisflyer.com.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Richard Cohen’s Last Column

Richard Cohen

I’ve been lucky.

In February 1968, I came down to Washington from the Columbia University Gaduate School of Journalism to do some research, stopped up at The Washington Post, and walked out with a job. A week later, for reasons I never understood, I got a raise. After graduating in June, I started work, and now, 51 years later, I am about to stop. This is my final column. I think I’ve earned that raise.

In 1976, eight years after I started, I was offered a local column. Ben Bradlee, the executive editor, made the offer at a lunch I had requested so I could tell him I was quitting. A rival news organization had offered to make me its White House correspondent. But before I could resign, Bradlee upset my plans. I never got around to quitting and never told Bradlee I had intended to.

I was lucky.

Bradlee asked me to show him five sample columns. Instead, knowing I need the juice of a deadline, I wrote one the next day and gave it to the city editor. “I’m the new local columnist,” I brazenly told him. “Check with Bradlee.” He never did.

The next day, my column was in the paper.

I was lucky.

Back then, I wrote three columns a week — an exhausting but exhilarating schedule. Little by little, I broadened my scope until, in Bradlee’s telling, he picked up the paper one day and discovered that I was in Beirut. By fiat, he moved me from the Metro page to the A Section and, later, at the insistence of the publisher, to the op-ed page. I wrote what I wanted from where I wanted, and not once did the publishers ever tell me what to write or what not to write. On occasion, though, Katharine Graham offered some constructive criticism. Once, at a formal lunch for the new Russian ambassador, she strode purposely across the dining room to tell me that my column that morning “was a real piece of s—-.”

“Don’t hold back, Katharine,” I responded. “Tell me what you really think.”

She laughed.

There were no better bosses than the Grahams — and, more recently, Jeff Bezos. I roamed the world on their dime. Flying into Cairo for the first time, I looked out the window. A sandstorm obscured the pyramids, but I envisioned them anyway and could not get over the fact that I was being paid to see them. What fools the Grahams were. I would have done it for nothing.

Back in 2017, I helped produce a documentary for HBO on the life of Ben Bradlee. HBO called it The Newspaperman, and I thought, how wonderful, how apt. That was Bradlee and, with the same permission he gave me to write a column, I take that appellation for myself as well. It is, I think, the highest of callings, and I never wanted to be anything else. You go to work and someone pins an imaginary badge on you and deputizes you to go forth and discover life, ask questions, turn over rocks, and, in the case of a column, think so hard it’s physically draining.

I had grown up reading the once-liberal New York Post. It was a brave, scrappy paper with great, iconoclastic writers, particularly its columnists. I gorged on Murray Kempton, Jimmy Cannon, and Pete Hamill. I read them all, envied them all, and wanted to be like them. Later, I became a copyboy for the New York Herald Tribune and noticed that reporters were required to read the paper. They got paid for it. Amazing. Professional ballplayers must feel the same way. Imagine getting paid to play a game!

That first day at the Post, I was assigned a desk next to Carl Bernstein. We became fast friends and so, like a barnacle on a ship, I attached myself to him and Bob Woodward, going through Watergate with them. Earlier, I watched in awe and pride as the Post risked all sorts of legal and financial penalties to publish the Pentagon Papers after The New York Times had been enjoined from doing so. This was one great newspaper that I had just walked into. Again, what luck!

Now, it is over. I have written books and screenplays and will continue to do so. My girlfriend and I are going to Paris for a month, and we’re getting a dog. I will have time to walk it now. I will miss newspapering, but I know I had the best it ever had to offer.

I was very lucky indeed.

This is Richard Cohen’s last column for the Washington Post Writers Group.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

We Are Not Great Again

CREDIT: Gints Ivuskans | Dreamstime.com

Okay, America, are we great again yet? Are we respected throughout the world? Are the Chinese quaking in their boots as we hike tariffs? Has Saudi Arabia come clean about murdering a Washington Post columnist after covering up the atrocity so clumsily that you could almost see blood dripping from the hands of the crown prince?

If America is great again, how come we grovel before a nation that needs us more than we need it? Tweet me an answer, Mr. President. But keep it short.

Has America reversed global warming by simply denying it? Are factory jobs up? How about iron and steel? The same. And coal mining — “beautiful, clean coal” in the hallucinatory words of the president? Not what it once was.

Gints Ivuskans | Dreamstime.com

President Trump

Is NATO stronger? Does America enjoy moral leadership? Would our allies rush to our aid, as they did after September 11, 2001? President George W. Bush’s grand “coalition of the willing” might be impossible to reassemble. President Trump has managed to unite Western Europe in one respect. All its leaders loathe him.

The president, like Gulliver, is being tied down by numerous investigations. The explanation is apparent even to Republicans. Trump is an immoral man, a chiseler and a liar and a deadbeat and a damned fool. His eccentric collection of aides are tiptoeing off the stage one by one, some to jail, some to ignominy, none to glory. And then, when they are gone, comes verbal abuse, sometimes in retaliation for a tardy admission of truth. Rex Tillerson said Trump does not read up to grade. For that, he got spitballed. “Dumb as a rock,” the president opined.

The mess is getting messier. Trump lies himself into one corner after another. Is there anyone in all of America who does not believe that Trump paid off two women for their silence? Whether these alleged payments were campaign finance violations or not is almost beside the point. We know the story. Trump is dirty and uses cash as a disinfectant. He thinks it can make any manner of sin go away. Maybe not this time, Mr. President. As with your former Atlantic City casino, you overpaid.

But blaming Donald Trump for behaving like Donald Trump is like blaming a scorpion for acting like a scorpion. The lie is his sting. He cannot help himself. He thinks only of himself because narcissism, like a sixth toe, is a condition of birth. There is no changing it. In the Trump White House, the president’s intense love of himself is about the only consistent policy.

But what about you, Chris Christie? I am talking of course of the former New Jersey governor who jumped from presidential candidate to Trump acolyte. Are you proud of what you did? Didn’t you see any of this coming? Didn’t you talk to any bankers or real estate people from just across the Hudson River? They wouldn’t do business with Trump. They don’t trust him. You knew all this but wanted a cabinet position anyway. What is the word for what you’ve done? It’s something like moral treason.

And you, Mike Pence. You won’t eat alone with any woman other than your wife, but you’d sup at Trump’s table, the womanizer, instead of the woman. Were you the only adult in Washington who had not heard the stories about him? What were you willing to do to advance your career? Is there a principle you hold dear?

I get it. Christie, Pence, and other Republican politicians — as well as financial figures such as Carl Icahn — had other considerations. Some wanted a conservative, anti-abortion judiciary; still others wanted lower taxes and fewer regulations. Steve Schwarzman, the billionaire head of the Blackstone Group, even said in 2016 that he preferred Trump because America needed a “cohesive, healing presidency.”

Trump, these savants thought, would grant all their wishes, and so they tossed the dice on a maniac, comforting us (or themselves) with the hope that once in office Trump’s inner Madison would emerge. Don’t worry, they said, he ran a business and, anyway, the solemnity of the Oval Office would sober him up. Didn’t Augustine of Hippo go from a libertine to a saint of the Catholic Church?

John F. Kelly’s leaving. Gary Cohn and H.R. McMaster are gone. Michael Flynn sings, and Paul Manafort lies. The stock market is tanking for the usual reasons, but this one as well: Investors know that no one’s home at the White House. Trump’s a human pinball, ricocheting off events and emitting tweets like a rundown smoke alarm. We’re not great again. We’re drifting toward disaster.

Richard Cohen writes for the Washington Post Writers Group.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

All the News That’s Fake

Did you read where purchasing the items in the song “The Twelve Days of Christmas” would cost you $567,000 this year? Crazy, huh? Well, it’s not true. I just made up that number. It was fake news. But if I had put that information on your Facebook wall, you’d have had no real reason to doubt it; a variation of that same silly story comes up every year at Christmas. You might have even shared it. LOL.

Did you read where Vladimir Putin’s popularity among Republicans rose 56 points in the past year? Not fake. Though I wish it were.

Did you hear that conservative Republican State Senator Brian Kelsey has teamed up with liberal Democratic State Senator Lee Harris to fight against TVA drilling in the Memphis Sand aquifer? That’s also true — and heartening. I read it in Jackson Baker’s column last week, and Jackson doesn’t do fake news.

I also read a commentary last week wherein the writer was denouncing The New York Times and The Washington Post as pawns of the liberal establishment and how you couldn’t trust anything you read in those papers. It’s the new frontier of debate; you debunk the source of your opponent’s facts, and thereby render his arguments moot. If you cite a story in the Times to back up your argument, you’re just citing biased, and thereby “fake,” news. Check and mate, libtard!

The Flyer is a liberal paper, but when Toby Sells reports on a Memphis City Council meeting, it’s news, not liberal opinion. Differentiating between opinion and reporting is a nuance that’s lost on many. Unless it’s intentional.

For example, in a speech last week to a conservative group, Newt Gingrich, that paragon of truth and honor, said about mainstream media: “All of us on the right should describe it as the ‘propaganda media,’ drop the term ‘news media’ until they earn it, and begin to realize that the propaganda media cannot come to grips with the level of talent that they’re dealing with.” 

I must agree that it is difficult for traditional media to come to grips with the “level of talent” that’s being put forth as President-elect Donald Trump’s cabinet, but not for the reasons Newt thinks it is.

But it’s been part of the strategy of strongmen and dictators throughout history. Destroy the public’s trust in the media, and you control how they think. And the GOP is doing its best to make that happen by demonizing any American media outlet that publishes or broadcasts negative news or opinions about them.

Our boy king-elect is one of the worst perpetrators. Last week, while thousands were dying in Aleppo, Trump was upset by a bad review of a Trump Tower restaurant in Vanity Fair, so he tweeted: “Has anyone looked at the really poor numbers of Vanity Fair magazine. Way down, big trouble, dead! Graydon Carter, no talent, will be out!”

The following day, more people subscribed to Vanity Fair than in any 24-hour period in its history. And that’s how you beat a political bully. You support his enemies, those speaking truth to power, and those who support that truth by advertising with them. I just took out digital subscriptions to the Times and the Wall Street Journal. I did so because both publications do real reporting, even if their political viewpoints are appositional. I also gave Vanity Fair subscriptions to a few folks for Christmas.

And I’m still holding out hope that I can tick off The Donald enough that he’ll attack The Memphis Flyer. That would make for a merry Christmas, indeed.

Categories
Opinion The BruceV Blog

Washington Post Likes Grizzlies’ Dab Game

The Grizzlies had an in-game “Dab-Cam” promotion the other night, playing off Carolina Panthers’ quarterback Cam Newton’s favorite move. Everybody knows Memphis has the hippest music and the coolest fans in NBA arenas, but this clip is getting a lot of love. You’ll enjoy the Washington Post‘s cute analysis of some of our Memphis moves.

Check it out.

Categories
News The Fly-By

Marvels of Meatcraft; or, Fly on the Wall 1386

It’s a Sign!

The fast food signs of Memphis are a never-ending fountain of memorable prose. We’re especially fond of the new Arby’s campaign, although “Sliders: Marvels of Meatcraft” sounds less like a sandwich promotion and more like a porn movie. Or a History Channel special event.

On a related note, have you seen the incredibly fair deal being offered by the Union Avenue Krystal? Buy one, get one Spicy Chik Biscuit.

That’s just about as equitable a transaction as one could hope for. It’s a better guarantee than you get from most drive-through windows, and so much nicer than “buy one, get bent.”

Neverending Elvis

“On Dec. 21, 1970, Elvis Presley visited Richard Nixon in the Oval Office. On Feb. 21, 1972, President Nixon visited China. On April 16, 1972, two giant pandas — Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing — arrived at the National Zoo in Washington.” — Washington Post columnist John Kelly on “incongruity,” “cause and effect,” and why “we must name the National Zoo’s new panda cub after the King of Rock and Roll.” Kelly further pleads his case saying, “In their day, Richard Nixon and Elvis Presley were polarizing figures. Their legacies are controversial. But we must not forget that one brought us unforgettable music. The other opened the door to China. Together, they brought us giant pandas.”

Categories
Sports

Do’s and Don’ts of Competitive Bridge and Bridge Whores

Rounded_Suits.jpg

The big convention of the American Contract Bridge League, which has its headquarters in nearby Horn Lake, Mississippi, is in town this week. Thousands of players, supposedly including Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, are at the tables over at the Memphis Cook Convention Center.

My friend Bob Levey is also there. Bob is a former columnist for the Washington Post and a former journalism instructor at the University of Memphis. He is also a very good bridge player and has been after me to write something about bridge, which I will now do, and in return I expect him to write something about the Memphis City Council, which will make sitting through a bridge marathon seem easy.
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I play bridge but not the kind they play in this tournament, which is called duplicate. Same players play same hands, so the cards don’t matter. In party bridge, on the other hand, it’s all about the run of the cards, the compatibility of the couples, and the host’s supply of snacks and liquid refreshments.

Here are some helpful do’s and don’ts of tournament bridge.

If you run into Bill Gates, don’t say “Hey Bill, can I borrow your iPad?”

If you run into Warren Buffett, do say in a loud voice “Man, I can’t believe the Dow just fell 1000 points in the last five minutes” and see how he reacts.

Don’t wear sunglasses and a baseball cap and talk about “the flop” or “the river” or going “all in.”

Do, however, ask people if they will, for the right sum of money, be your partner for a few hours or even fly to your home town and meet you at a hotel to play games. In bridge, this is known as “consulting” although it is ok to refer to it as being a “bridge whore” in the right crowd.

Don’t say “Oopsie, these clubs look so darn much like spades that I mixed them all together. Is that all right?”

Don’t fist bump your partner after making a contract. A chest bump is much better.

Do wear team t-shirts while at play and at play. Don’t, however, make up insulting chants about the other teams’ parentage, ethnicity, or IQs.

Don’t burst out laughing if someone at your table says that big pyramid across the street is empty but is soon going to be a giant Bass Pro Shops.

Don’t say “director” unless you mean it.

Do try to execute finesses, coups, end plays, and squeeze plays.

Don’t mistake the barbecue served outside the meeting rooms for the real thing.

Do revel with self-satisfaction in the intellectual superiority of this form of March Madness, but don’t miss the Sweet Sixteen pre-game show.

Do come back.

Categories
Opinion

School Sports and Home Schooling

Jonathan Loe, with trophy

  • Jonathan Loe, with trophy

Here’s a good column by reporter Preston Williams in the Washington Post that highlights the schools issues we are debating in Memphis and Shelby County.

It’s about home schooling, but it goes to the heart of the underlying issue: schools and sports teams as vital parts of communities and the passion that parents and students feel for them.

As Williams writes, there is a Tennessee angle in the story because home schooling came up last year in the state legislature. There are some 6,000 home-schooled children in Tennessee.

“But according to Bernard Childress, executive director of the Tennessee Secondary School Athletic Association, just a few students have been denied spots on their schools’ teams. “It really hasn’t been a big issue,” Childress said. “This is what we were told by some of the states that we surveyed prior to our implementation.”

In 2001, Bartlett High School won the state AAA basketball championship with star player Jonathan Loe, who was home schooled in Mississippi but came to Bartlett for his senior year before going to Ole Miss. Loe attended classes. In Virginia, the focus of Williams’ story, the issue is home schoolers who play for a school they do not attend.

Williams has some thought-provoking comments: “And if high school fields and gyms are extensions of the classroom, a home-schooled student has no more right to elbow Johnny off of a team’s roster than he does to kick him out of his seat in history class.”

In Memphis, we’re talking about merging city and county school systems and the possible establishment of municipal school districts in the suburbs. But the issue is really bigger than that because of the thousands of children who attend private schools, charter schools, or are home schooled. And those numbers are likely to grow as the deregulation of public education picks up steam in Nashville.

I believe there’s a case to be made for a merged school system and traditional public schools, but backers must emphasize the benefits of such things as teams, tradition, and marching bands. There is a lot of movement — and some recruiting and cherry picking — between schools as parents, coaches, and motivated students zero in on a particular team, special academic offering, or talent.

For a longer take on the schools merger story from an outside perspective, check this article in the Atlantic Monthly magazine. Thanks to Tom Guleff for sending it over.

Finally, the documentary film “Undefeated” about the 2009 Manassas High School football team, is getting wide release and a lot of good publicity since it was nominated for an Oscar. Here’s a review by John Anderson in the Wall Street Journal which, unfortunately, puts the school in “West Memphis, Tennessee.” Manassas has come a long way since 2003 when it was barely able to field a team and lost to Mitchell 81-0.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Washington Post Covers Memphis “Judith Miller” Movie

The Washington Post weighed today with a story on Nothing But the Truth, the newpaper-themed movie being filmed in Memphis:

MEMPHIS — What Hollywood is calling “the Judith Miller movie” is now filming on location here, but prepare yourselves: Some changes are being made to the story inspired by the outing of a CIA agent.

For starters, in the movie Judith Miller is no longer Judith Miller of The New York Times, but Rachel Armstrong of the Washington Capital Sun. And while the real Judith Miller may be remembered as a stylish, slightly scary reporter of 59, headed off to jail in a quilted black jacket and tortoise-frame sunglasses, in the movie she is a sizzling Kate Beckinsale, 34, dressed in a, shall we say, form-fitting skirt …

There’s lots more. Read it here.