Born-Again Hippies

Oh Happy Day

2012-02-12T08:20:00.025-06:00

Another football season is in the books. Eli was great in the Superbowl and a Manning for all seasons, and Madonna showed that the only thing flatter than her abs, is her voice. Plus, the actual game was exciting. Not the most exciting I've ever seen, however. That distinction would go to the game between Memphis State and Mississippi State at Crump Stadium, Oct. 26, 1963, back when they still used leather helmets. The previous year, the Tigers had claimed Mississippi State as their first victory ever over an SEC team, and the Bulldogs were looking for payback. Memphis State was quarterbacked by Russell Vollmer, who was among my first boyhood heroes. I was in junior high when Vollmer starred in football and basketball for Central. Although I cheered for East, my big sister dated a benchwarmer on the Warriors basketball team, and I sometimes ventured onto enemy turf to watch Vollmer play. Consequently, I was excited when Vollmer announced he would play football at Memphis State, especially since my parents had season tickets since the dawning of mankind.

The Tigers already had a spectacular season going. A month earlier they had battled Ole Miss, ranked #2 in the nation, to a 0-0 tie in a game that still stands as a milestone in Memphis football. When the Bulldogs and their cowbell ringing fans came to town, Memphis had the #3 ranked defense in the country. Vollmer started the game with a 70 yard punt return before Memphis' Justin Canale kicked a 39 yard field goal for the Bulldogs. Vollmer returned the kickoff and was running out of bounds. In Crump Stadium, the locker rooms were located under the stands and the players reached the field by walking up a steep set of concrete stairs, which was protected on the surface by a steel railing. As Vollmer ran out of bounds, he received a late hit, or shove, which sent him careening toward the Bulldog bench, which he vaulted, then hitting the protective railing at full gallop, Vollmer flipped heels over head and plunged ten feet onto the concrete steps below. The capacity crowd of 31,650 was stunned silent as medical personnel ran to tend to the motionless Vollmer. After an excruciating wait, Vollmer was carried up the stairs on a stretcher and placed into an ambulance waiting to race him to nearby Methodist Hospital. It appeared as if his injuries were going to be extensive.

With Vollmer gone, the Bulldogs pulled ahead to take a 10-9 lead at halftime. The fans' mood was somber as the second half began with the star quarterback in the emergency room, and no word yet about his condition. In the third quarter, it was beginning to look like the Tigers' dream season might be over, when suddenly, ascending the stairs from the dressing room came Russell Vollmer. It had been loud at Crump Stadium before, but nothing like this. As Vollmer trotted around the field to the Memphis State side, section after section of Tiger fans went delirious. The air was electric when Coach Billy "Spook" Murphy said to Vollmer, "Do you hear that? Now get out there and let's win this game." Vollmer led the team on a final, 70 yard drive, culminating in a touchdown run by fullback Dave Casinelli, giving Memphis State the win, 17-10. The Tigers finished the season 9-0-1 but turned down an invitation from the Sun Bowl, hoping for a call from the Gator Bowl, which unfortunately never came. Casinelli led the NCAA in rushing and scoring, and unheralded Memphis State, shunned by the major conferences, rose as high as #15 in the national rankings. Russell Vollmer ascended to that high place of esteem reserved for all-time Tiger heroes.

There's been nothing like that magical season when a combination of hometown stars, like Vollmer, John Fred Robilio, and John "The Bull" Bramlett, along with some key recruits like Casinelli and Harry Shuh, went undefeated in front of a packed stadium for every game. However, there's something new in the air, and regardless of recent frustrations, I'm beginning to think that sort of passion for Tiger football is once again within our grasp. I've been walking on a cloud ever since it was announced that Memphis would be joining the Big East Conference in all sports for the 2013 season. I'm rapturous over the return of our traditional basketball rivals, along with some of the most fabled programs in college hoops. But this is a stellar chance for Tiger football. New head coach Justin Fuente needs the football equivalent of a "Larry Finch moment," when a couple of bona-fide hometown star athletes, like Melrose's Finch and Ronnie Robinson, decided to stay home to play their college ball. With admission to the Big East, Fuente can now offer a local, blue-chip recruit that might want to stay and play in front of his friends and family, the chance to play big-time football. Suddenly all things are possible. Sink or swim, the Tigers are in the big leagues now.

For long-time Tiger basketball fans, this is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Since 1976, Memphis has not been in a conference that wasn't of our own invention. We've had more conferences than COGIC. Joining the Big East is like finally being called up to the majors. When the news broke in the middle of the night, I woke my wife singing choruses of "Walking On Sunshine," by Katrina & the Waves. Memphis need no longer be the Rodney Dangerfield of college sports. Jaded northeastern fans say it's not the same Big East since Syracuse, West Virginia, and Pittsburgh are leaving. To paraphrase CeeLo Green, "Forget them." Syracuse is the powerhouse basketball program Memphis is replacing, and we don't need to play those other teams in football yet anyway. Under a bigger spotlight and with major media coverage, perhaps some of our players that might have jumped to the NBA will consider returning to have some fun and raise their profiles. (Hear that, Barton brothers)? The renewal of the rivalry with Louisville is gravy. Like most Tiger supporters, I hate their city, their school, their fans, and their team - but I love their coach. I never thought I'd say this, but, "Thank you, Rick Pitino." And while we're expressing gratitude, thank you, R.C. Johnson. I couldn't have imagined a better going away present. And it's a helluva lot better than the one left us by that greaseball Calipari.

Say My Name!

2012-01-28T07:54:00.051-06:00

Let's be honest. The only grizzly bear within 500 miles from here is in the Memphis Zoo. And I'm sure there's some hip jazz bands in Provo, but no great Be-Bop giant ever came from Utah. So, the Utah Jazz should give New Orleans its team name back, only New Orleans is now using the old Charlotte nickname, the Hornets. Everyone knows that the Packers are in Green Bay, the Bears are in Chicago, and the Colts are in Baltimore. Only, they're not. We've got Cardinals in Arizona; Rams in St. Louis; and Colts in Indiana, and the names are all mismatched to the locale. Instead of franchises moving around, I propose a trade of a different sort. Let's have a one-day, giant name swap and return all sports team names to the places where they have meaning. Memphis would be better served known as the Kings; for MLK, B.B., and Elvis, only Sacramento is using that name. What king is from Sacramento? Larry King? Let's swap names. Memphis gets the Kings, and a grizzly bear is featured on the California state flag. Perfect.

It was a sad day in 1957 when two fabled New York baseball franchises packed up and split for the coast, leaving the palaces where Duke Snider and Willie Mays roamed the outfields as rubble for the wrecking-ball. The Dodgers and Giants' move to California was, for many, the first generational lesson in hardball capitalism. It raised the question of what's more valuable; free enterprise or fan loyalty and trust. Still today, there are wounded men walking the boroughs of New York in tears, wearing faded, old baseball caps, mumbling, "what happened to my team?" The New York teams move west was the also the first example of corporate greed entering pro sports. But, when some greedy bastard sees greener pastures and decides to relocate a beloved sports franchise with emotional roots to a community, at least have the decency to change the name. Imagine Boston's hoops team moving to Salt Lake City and calling themselves the Utah Celtics. (Why is Boston the only place that pronounces it "sell-tics," instead of the correct, "kell-tics?"). Finding a Celt in Utah is as rare as finding a Mormon pimp. When the Washington Senators moved to Minnesota, they changed their name to the Twins. Since Indianapolis is not known for horses, give Baltimore their Colts back, retire the morbid name "Ravens," and rename the Indianapolis football team the Racers. It rhymes so well with Pacers.

Some regulations will be necessary. After all, we don't want the Baltimore Orioles returning to St. Louis to become the Brown Stockings. So some locations get to remain as they are. The Milwaukee Brewers now have a descriptive name preferable to their old one. Atlanta has no business, however, naming their baseball club the "Braves" when their stadium sits on what once was Indian territory. So, Atlanta must drop the "tomahawk chop," and return to the team name they used until the early 60s, the "Crackers." In football, St. Louis gets to reclaim their Cardinals from Arizona. Only they must first return the name "Rams" to Los Angeles, so that city can have their team back. Arizona is then free to choose a new moniker. Since their governor is Jan Brewer, I recommend "the Haints." But, the Rattlers would fit well with the baseball Diamondbacks. "The Haints," however, might go well with the New Orleans Saints. But "Jazz" is synonymous with the Crescent City, so return the name to its proper place and then Utah can become the "White Polygamists." It's sort of like the Crimson Tide, only kinkier. Finally, give the Lakers back to Minnesota and retire the silly Timberwolves name. L.A can become the "Stars," like they were in the old ABA. Charlotte can then reclaim their Hornets from New Orleans and put the Bobcat mascot in play. Maybe Utah has bobcats. When fans get back their traditional mascots, everyone will be happy, and there's nothing so pliable as a happy customer next time they decide to raise ticket prices.

It's curious that some of the most durable teams are located in the most economically distressed areas. That's because they have owners with a stake in the community that understand the value of long-time fan loyalty. The Rooney family has owned the Pittsburgh Steelers since the leagues' inception. Founder Dan was known for his generosity, and son Art developed the "Rooney Rule," which says any NFL team with a coaching or managerial vacancy must interview a minority candidate. "Papa Bear" George Halas both coached for and owned the Chicago Bears. Born in Chicago, Halas was noted for his philanthropy. The Packers have the only publicly owned franchise in pro sports, with over 100,000 Green Bay fans holding stock in the team. When the Packers leap into the stands after a touchdown, they're just saying "hello" to the boss. But corporate money has corrupted sports. Where teams once played their games in Veterans Stadium, the Polo Grounds, and Soldier Field; they're now in Qualcomm Park, MetLife Stadium, and Bank of America Stadium. Corporations are so fond of splashing their name on every sports edifice in the nation, here's a thought: spend some of that tax-exempt cash putting your names on hospitals, schools and colleges, rather than just college bowl games.

Finally, a word to the Grizzlies front office. I've said this before but in vain, so permit me to say this once again, only louder. LISTEN TO ME! You are wasting a unique opportunity to promote Memphis' most famous export; music. The formulaic techno music used throughout the league is not inspiring, it's annoying. Imagine the excitement if the team enters the arena to the sound of the Bar Kays' "Soulfinger." Rather than "We Will Rock You," picture the crowds' response to the opening two chords of "Jailhouse Rock." And, after a Grizzlies rally, the audience might enjoy a bit of Jerry Lee Lewis' "Whole Lotta' Shakin' Going On." You have everyone from Carl Perkins to Three 6 Mafia to choose from. I'm not fishing for a job here. If you throw a rock in this town, chances are it will come down and hit a music expert. So, pick your consultant, but be bold and plant your own flag. In the words of celebrated philosopher Sam the Sham, "let's not be L-7," and be just another follower of the formula. Sam Phillips once said, "If you're not doing something different, then you're not doing anything." You Grizzlies execs aren't in Vancouver anymore. You're in the town of visionaries like Sam Phillips of Sun Records, and Dewey Phillips, the free-spirited disc jockey immortalized in "Memphis, the Musical." So, like the man said, "let's get hot, or go home!"

Generation Gas-X

2012-01-15T01:02:00.000-06:00

Hi Kids! Uncle Randy here. As a younger man, I found nothing quite so boring as listening to old people complain about their ailments. But I'm here to help you and give you some insight into growing older so that you might prepare yourself. Also, I'm here to remind you to dance as much as you can. You'll miss that. My advice comes with an appeal. Can we finally stop using the infantile term, "Baby Boomers" to refer to my generation? I'd prefer Atomic Kids or Original Mouseketeers, but I'd like to find the person that branded me a "baby boomer," and throttle him. There's nothing baby-like about growing older but the diapers, and hopefully, that's still down the road a few decades. I believe the party that's guilty for the "boomer" moniker worked for Life Magazine? Remember magazines? They're those things that sit on the tables in doctors' office waiting rooms. I'm sure Kindle will make them obsolete before you have a seat. But you will take a seat, nonetheless. The doctor will see you now.

While visiting with a friend and listening to him complain about a hernia, I felt the need to one-up him with my gruesome tales of last year's gall bladder surgery. I've embellished the story over time, though the basics are true. They had to open me up the old fashioned way and remove the gelatinous mass that was my gall bladder, except I didn't have health insurance, so they scooped it out with an old, rusty, garden hoe. It's been over a year, and I'm still walking around like Groucho Marx. Except, I'm not the only one. It seems like all my contemporaries are either being scoped, scanned, prodded, or pricked. In these trying times, I can understand how someone might develop stomach problems, but everybody at once? The number of clinics waiting to probe you for the insurance money are growing like Pizza Huts, and the "oscopy factories" are as efficient as the Cadillac assembly line. The unseen consequence of this explosion of invasive procedures is a generational obsession with digestive regularity. When a group of older people go out to dinner, they'll call the next day not to ask how was the food, but how did the food go down? They say "all things must pass," but not according to my peers. Once, we used to discuss acid, now it's acid reflux. I thought I could once again trot out that joke about "all the old hippies getting together now to drop antacid," but we're way beyond over-the-counter medication now. Even friends who once shunned drug use are now hooked on Senna.

Of course, the exercise gurus are right, you have to get up off of the couch, but football is just so colorful in Hi-Def. I still have several friends that walk, jog, or play tennis, but they're forever complaining about Bursitis and there's always medication and shots involved. My theory about vigorous exercise was always, "no pain; no pain." But of all the workouts of which I'm aware, there is no correct way to exercise the gall bladder. So, this wasn't a case of "use it or lose it," as the doctors advise. Years of expensive tests which failed to detect the problem have convinced me that I am another victim of the Medical/Pharmaceutical/Insurance Axis of Evil, and all the exercises in the weight room won't reimburse me what I've forfeited to the "procedure" industry. And make no mistake, the majority of doctors quietly bought into the insurance scam long ago because it made them rich. It's no accident that Germantown Parkway is dotted with private medical clinics. I think I might have built a wing on one of them. I've been told that there are exercises that I can do that thankfully don't strain stomach muscles, but my career as a promising cage fighter is over. My new motto is "Live healthy, eat right, die anyway."

To quote the great American poet Curtis Mayfield, "I know everybody whose heart is still thumping; is drinking, shooting, snorting, or smoking on something." If there were singles bars for the aging, instead of "What's your sign?" the main pick-up line would be, "What anti-depressant are you on?" We gather now in small groups and discuss the merits of Lexipro as opposed to Effexor; and is Abilify really worth the boost at over $400 dollars a month? When in a group of old friends, our discussions go straight from politics and protests to prostrates and our PSA's. With that particular gland, size does matter. And when you get past six decades, suddenly nobody can pee anymore. For that, the doctor prescribes Flomax, and for sinus congestion they prescribe Flonase, but I know a guy who confused the two, took out a handkerchief, and blew his penis. (Come on, it's original). And what's growing faster than the erection industry? Nowadays, guys without any erectile dysfunction whatsoever will take a Viagra just to make a point. It's enough to give a man restless leg syndrome.

I just figured that a year after invasive surgery, I should be feeling somewhat better, so after yet more tests, my doctor returned with a good news/bad news prognosis. My nerve was cut, so I can expect to live a life in a certain degree of pain, plus I will continue to have unpredictable and sudden gastric episodes, which will keep me closely tethered to my reading room. The good news is it's not going to kill me. How is one supposed to respond to that? "Great, I'll suffer from these maladies then die of something else?" I've been informed that there are preventative measures that will allow Melody and I to go out and socialize without me constantly worrying that I'll pull an Elvis and do a header into somebody's bathroom floor. Melody assures me, however, that she will not allow me to sit and vegetate, which reminds me, I need to eat more vegetables. One of my father's wiser sayings was, "It's better to be rich and healthy than poor and sick," only I never thought I'd have to put his theory to the test. So, I'm grateful to the Church Health Center for looking after me, and I'm going to try harder this year to become more active. But, if you younger folks should happen to see me around town and I have a cane by my side, take a look but don't stare too long, for I am you.

Thanks, Melody, for the title..

Please, Stop That

2012-01-02T00:24:00.001-06:00

I've always heard that if you get pooped on by a bird, it's supposed to be good luck, but the day before New Years, it looked like a scene from a Hitchcock movie at my house. Thousands of robins roosting in the trees bombed everything in sight, including the deck, the car, the dog, even the bird feeder. My father used to say, "It's a dirty bird that fouls its own nest," but if this is a portent of things to come, I should be having a shit-load of good luck this year. I sure hope so, because after 2011, this crappy year couldn't end soon enough for me. In this political climate of wasted opportunity and obdurate myopia, it wasn't the heat, it was the stupidity, and there was plenty of dumb to spread around. Between the reactionary Republicans and the docile Democrats, these annoyances plagued my existence, which is why, in this new year, I'd like to implore the perpetrators to, "Please, stop that." Beginning with:

Hand-held Devices- I don't "tweet" and I don't text for several reasons, the first being that texting has destroyed the public's ability to spell and has given birth to a hundred cutesy abbreviations and a moronic shorthand. If I want to type, I'll do it on a keyboard and not with my thumbs, and I will continue to try and express myself like a person instead of a robot. As for "tweeting," I don't care what you had for lunch. Since CNN has begun adding viewer "tweets" to their broadcasts, the full idiocy is on display for the world to see. I tuned in to see the news, not some hash-tag, half-wit's opinion of the news. For those permanently lost in their hand-held gadget worlds, walking the streets like zombies and altering what it means to be in a "community," please, stop.

Local News- If all you watched was local news, you'd never leave the house. I don't blame the "talent," since most are either established professionals or ambitious telejournalists on their way up. But, my God, if they can't find a gruesome enough murder or rape in Memphis, they will search the tri-state area for an event that's suitably heinous. I've heard the old saying, "If it bleeds, it leads," but local news broadcasts would have you believe that the streets of Memphis are running with blood. I blame the General Managers and News Directors that insist on following the "formula," that's the same in every major city in every state. It's not about news, it's about ratings, and crime does seem to pay after all. Only, don't say that you're "on our side" when your bread and butter is scaring people. No wonder Memphis has lost population in the past decade. Please, stop doing that.

The Tea Party- I suppose the game's about over for the radical right until they form their third party and guarantee Barack Obama's re-election. Then they'll be relegated to the ranks of other loser, fringe parties that peddled hate instead of hope. What a strategy! Oppose every initiative the president proposes, then blame the Democrats for a lack of accomplishment. I hope that when the people go to the polls to literally clean House, they only bounce the right people, the far-right people. Unfortunately, the Tea Party still rules supreme in most state legislatures, including Tennessee, where they demonstrate their dedication to limited government by proposing to drug-test welfare recipients. I say, "You first, Senator." And prescription meds count. After the revolting Curry Todd episode, perhaps we should drug test for gun ownership. A drunken legislator driving around with a loaded weapon in his car is a sufficient reason to say, "Please, stop that." Which brings me to;

Gun Carry Permits- We have hotheads in jail who shoot someone over parking disputes, yet the NRA has funded enough local politicians for them to continue their efforts to allow gun fanatics to carry their weapons anywhere at anytime. This includes public parks, bars and restaurants, even church. Say what you will about the "Occupy" protesters, at least they're not armed, unlike that other "grassroots" movement. And the carry-permit crowd are always "law abiding citizens," right up until the minute they blow someones brains out. I don't know who I fear more, street thugs, or the person driving in the lane next to me. Take Johnny Cash's advice and "don't take your guns to town." As for the NRA enriched "public servants" whose souls have been purchased, please, stop that.

Basketball Announcers- OK, I'm into the Grizzlies, but every time the arena announcer opens his mouth, my silver fillings begin to rattle. Enthusiasm is one thing, but this guttural hysteria and forced glee is so annoying, it detracts from the game. In the old days of AM rock radio, they called over-the-top, "personality" disc jockeys like this "pukers." You're not Michael Buffer, pal, and we already have cheerleaders, so could you take it down a notch? I guess I was spoiled by 40 years of the late Fred Cook in the Coliseum, but the Tiger's announcer is similarly afflicted. Also, I know Memphis is stuck in a mediocre conference, but is it too much to ask the CSS network to buy a decent camera? It's like watching Russian television. And if I have to hear "We Will Rock You" one more time, I'm going to stick railroad spikes in my ears. The Griz have the unique opportunity of playing music exclusive to Memphis at home games. If an opponent is called for travelling, Rufus Thomas could sing, "Walking the Dog." I'd offer to help, but I'm not much of a company man. Meanwhile, your recorded musical selections suck, so please, stop that. And while we're on the subject;

Pro Sports- Lockouts in football and basketball, juicing in baseball, billionaires fighting millionaires over that last slice of the pie- and there's something unseemly about Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones building a billion dollar gilded football palace in the middle of a depression. This is like ancient Rome, when gladiatorial contests distracted the populace from the decline of the empire. It's fitting that their quarterback's name is Romo. Despite my affection for my Texas kinfolk, the Cowboys now truly represent "America's Team,"- opulence and excess in the midst of a losing season. As for Dallas Mavericks' owner Mark Cuban, have a seat Sonny, you ain't on the team. You own Dirk Nowitzkli's contract, not Dirk. And in this era of the "foreclosure society," why are the California Angels paying a 32 year old man $260 million to play ten years of baseball? I believe it was Curt Flood who once said, "A well-paid slave is still a slave." For both arrogant owners and showboat athletes, please, stop that.

Fox News- Fox News is like poison. It won't kill you all at once, just a little at a time. The unapologetic propaganda arm of the Republican Party is the electronic equivalent of the Hearst newspapers of the late 1880s, for which the term "yellow journalism" was invented. At least in the 19th century, you had to be able to read to be affected by a newspaper. Fox viewers soak it up like Brawny absorbent tissue and repeat it as gospel. You hear it in their conversations and read it in online comments and letters to the editor. Unfortunately, it's the gospel according to Rupert Murdoch, the scandal-ridden, right-wing foreigner who fueled and funded the ridiculous "birther" nonsense about the president. Fox's disinformation campaign didn't keep them from firing Glen Beck, the false Messiah searching for a cult. A recent poll by Fairleigh Dickinson University found that, "Fox viewers know less than people who don't watch any news." Murdoch, like Hearst, is a provocateur that will print anything that sells. Hearst came to regret his journalistic sins. As for Murdoch and Fox News, please, stop that. Better yet, go away, and take that sumbitch Limbaugh whicha'. Then we can all have a happy new year.

The Greatest Guitarist You Never Heard

2011-12-18T08:33:00.000-06:00

This week, rather than rant, I'd prefer to rave, about the greatest guitarist you never heard. His name was Lyn Vernon. You'd be forgiven for not recognizing his name. This year marked the 40th year of his passing and no one outside of a few crusty musicians remembers who he was, yet his influence on this entity we call the Memphis Sound is so enormous that it would not be the same without him. Vernon made his living playing Big Band music and Jazz during the post-war era of live radio transmissions from the Peabody Skyway. For several years, he worked with veteran trombonist Louie Pierini in a jazz quartet, and doubled on guitar and vibraphone with pianist Irving Evans' orchestra at the exclusive Summit Club, five nights a week, for two decades. He was in such demand as a performer that young Memphians might never have seen him if not for his morning gig. "Good Morning From Memphis," on then WREC TV, was co-hosted by the erudite Fred Cook and Gordon Lawhead, with news, conversation, and a live band, featuring Vernon. Every morning the stocky man with the short, curly hair would offer a beaming smile for the camera while his fingers flew over the neck of his guitar, creating clean, clear notes that cascaded from the TV speaker like droplets of water from a rushing stream. He made it look fun and easy.

After Memphis got their first good look at Elvis in 1956, hundreds of local kids fanned out in search of guitars and someone to show them how to play. It so happened that Lyn's day job was teaching guitar in a cramped attic studio of a girls' dancing school at Summer and National. After a great deal of pleading, my parents agreed to let me take guitar lessons at $9.00 per week, only there was a waiting list. I finally took my first lesson from Mr. Vernon in the spring of my 11th year. The greasers who hung out next door at Geters Dollar Store, wearing blue jeans and white T-shirts with a pack of Lucky Strikes rolled up in the sleeve, would yell at me, "Hey Elvis, play us a song," to general laughter. A delinquent with greasy hair molded into a duck-tail sneered, "That gee-tar is bigger than he is," which would have been funny had it not been true. From there, I had to negotiate my way through a sea of tiny, giggling girls in pink tutus to a ladder that led to the attic. Halfway up, mounted on the wall, was an 8x10 glossy photo of a young Larry Raspberry dressed in a fringed cowboy shirt. Climbing back down the attic ladder after my time was up, I encountered Larry Raspberry himself, who had the lesson after me. Then, it was once again through the phalanx of ballerinas to face the waiting greasers. One day, my ride was late and I got the usual, "Hey, Elvis," jocularity. I put the case on the sidewalk and extracted my Sears guitar. Then, daringly putting one foot on their chrome bumper and placing the guitar on my knee, I sang Elvis' version of "Mean Woman Blues." When the song ended, just like a real Elvis movie, the heckling stopped. When I showed up the following week, they still yelled, "Hey Elvis," only this time with a tone of respect.

Another aspiring guitarist was a youngster named Sid Manker. By the mid-fifties Manker was an advanced student of Vernon's when he co-wrote and played the hypnotic guitar line of "Raunchy," by the Bill Justis Orchestra. Released by Sam Phillips on The Phillips International label, the record became the biggest instrumental hit of its time, selling over three million copies. Encouraged by his friend Manker, Sun session guitarist Roland Janes ran to Vernon and paid him for lessons in advance, "to learn more about chord theory." Janes' electrifying, fuzz-drenched guitar caught fire on records by Jerry Lee Lewis and Billy Lee Riley, and before Janes could take his lessons, he had become one of the nation's first guitar heroes. Roland claimed every time he ran into Vernon, he would try to give him his money back. But Janes insisted that he keep it as a down-payment for the lessons he planned to take as soon as he got a break from making hit records. Sid Manker used his royalties from "Raunchy" to support his own Memphis Jazz Quartet. There, he befriended a local jazz musician named Sidney Chilton, who convinced Manker to teach his young son, Alex, to play the guitar.

Charlie Freeman was a skinny kid from Messick High who would demonstrate what he had learned from Vernon to his high school pal, Steve Cropper. Cropper explained, "I would go to Charlie's house after school and wait for him to get home from his lesson. It worked out pretty good for both of us," Steve laughed, "I got a free lesson and Charlie got to practice what he had been taught." Cropper added, "Later, I saved up enough money to get lessons from Lyn myself." Wayne Thompson, lead guitarist for legendary garage band Tommy Burk and the Counts, claimed, "Cropper had the lesson just before mine." Charlie Freeman and Cropper formed a band that ultimately became the Mar-Keys, with Freeman continuing as lead session player for Chips Moman's American Studios and Atlantic Records' Criterion Studios in Miami. Cropper, of course, became one-fourth of Booker T. & the MGs, and as a musician, songwriter and producer, one of the pillars of the glorious Stax sound.

When garage rock emerged in the mid-sixties, performed entirely by high school students, many of Lyn Vernon's charges became successful musicians. Rick Ireland became so proficient that Vernon convinced him to help teach the overflow of young students before Ireland became the manager of Ardent Studios. Fellow students, Bob Simon and I, started the Casuals, then the Radiants, while Larry Raspberry formed the Gentrys with his classmates from Treadwell, and later the super-charged Highsteppers. B.B. Cunningham, Jr. recorded the "Summer of Love" smash hit, "Let It All Hang Out," with his band, the Hombres, and now works with Jerry Lee Lewis. Bobby Manuel became a session guitarist for Stax, working primarily with Isaac Hayes, before producing and engineering the immortal, platinum selling "Disco Duck," by local deejay Rick Dees. Jack Rowell, Jr. made his debut in the Debuts, with Jimi Jamison, and worked with Joyce Cobb before forming his current band, Triplthret. Allen Hester, founder of Natchez, claimed the lesson after Rowell. To sum up, Lyn Vernon taught the major session guitarists at Sun, Stax, and American Studios, and he was the Father of Garage Rock. Yet, despite the near reverence in which his students hold him, no one knows his name. Vernon died at age 49, after experiencing a heart attack in the studio preparing to go on morning television. He still had 41 students. Once, during a lesson, I played a difficult assigned song with gusto and found Mr. Vernon smiling broadly. "I can see it all now," he said. "In a few years, you're going to be riding around in the back of a limousine, I'll just be sitting there on the corner, and you won't even stop. You'll just speed by." I answered him earnestly, "No, Mr. Vernon. I'll always stop and pick you up. I promise." Perhaps, in a small way, I've finally succeeded.

Sexual Congress

2011-12-05T00:52:00.079-06:00

I've been enjoying the new reality show, "Sex Lives of the Rich and Heinous," starring the 2012 GOP presidential contenders, only now it's on every channel. In the latest episode, people everywhere held their breath as the fate of the free world fell into the hands of a single woman; Gloria Cain. Would she tell her husband that he was a scoundrel and philanderer and to get his hound-dog ass home? Or would she make a personal sacrifice for the greater good and not allow a bee-hive of scurrilous rumors to derail the "Cain Train," thus depriving a grateful nation of the entertaining pizza magnate who only last month was the Republican front-runner? After the Cain's "face-to-face," a press conference was held where it looked for all the world like Gloria was about to do her best Tammy Wynette impersonation and "Stand By Her Man," but alas, the Cain Train has pulled into the station and drawn its brakes. The press conference began with a prayer from Alveda King, the right-wing niece of Martin, and the La Toya of the King family, before the Cains entered hand-in-hand with the crowd chanting "Gloria," like it was a Van Morrison concert. But, Gloria just smiled and waved while Herman continued to deny a boatload of charges of sexual impropriety, blamed it all on the elitist media, and claimed that politics was "a dirty, dirty game." I suppose the devil made him grope those women. After all, "9-9-9" is just "6-6-6" upside-down.

Just before Cain returned to Georgia to face his wife, he claimed in a speech that, "Stupid people are ruining America." Here, I tend to agree with you, Bubba. Only a fool would launch a candidacy for president with a virtual harem of accusing women claiming sexual abuse just a tabloid's phone call away. Yet Cain seemed oblivious to mounting charges of inappropriate sexual conduct, harassment, assault, and finally, a 13-year long extra-marital affair. Who does this guy think he is, Bill Clinton? At least Clinton acknowledged his serial infidelities as "problems" in his marriage, but Cain insisted his 13 year fling with a Georgia woman was merely one of a generous businessman helping out a friend in need. I wanted to test that theory in real life, so I told my wife, Melody, that I've had this secret gal-pal for many years, and because times are tough, I've been paying her car note and utilities. Before I could scream that the friendship was strictly Platonic and it was only my compassionate nature speaking, Melody was headed for the knife drawer in the kitchen, muttering something about a Lorena Bobbitt. I explained that I only kept it quiet so as not to burden her with all those cancelled checks made out to "Gigi," but I guess my wife isn't as understanding as Mrs.Cain. One of Herman's accusers claimed that he reached under her dress and grabbed her inner-thigh, proving Cain to be the ultimate pizza man, always going for that extra slice. To translate the end of the Herman Cain presidential campaign into the language of the pizzeria; Gloria was the hot pepper and ground sausage. Herman was the barbequed chicken, deep-dish.

Michele Bachmann defended Cain saying, "(He) brought much energy and goodwill to the race." Of course Bachmann also said that a woman should bear her rapist's child, and that her religious belief requires her to be "submissive to her husband." The Stepford Candidate was in Iowa, stumping to overturn the state law recognizing same-sex marriage, when a student asked her why gay people shouldn't have the same rights to marry as heterosexual couples. Bachmann patiently explained that, according to her Oral Roberts University law degree, "All of us have the same civil rights, but we must follow the law." Ergo, gay men and lesbians do have the same rights as everyone else, only they must marry someone of the opposite sex. So, a gay man marrying a straight woman is completely acceptable in Bachmann world. In poker, they call that tipping your hand. Already going down in the polls like the Hindenburg, Bachmann expressed hope that true conservatives that had backed Cain would "return to her," after she lost her brief lead to Rick Perry. The Texas governor has had to confront rumors of infidelity for years in his home state. The issue probably hasn't arisen in the campaign because Perry is too busy stepping on his own dick.

No sooner had I washed the stench of the John Edwards affair from my nostrils, than here comes a resurgent Newt Gingrich. The ethically challenged Gingrich is being hailed as the "probable nominee" by many pundits, including Gingrich himself, who recently intimated that this just might be God's plan. Only, Cain and Bachmann said the same thing, so I think God is just messing with them. For those with a short memory, here's a brief, documented and sourced, highlight reel of the life of Newton Gingrich, defender of family values and the sanctity of marriage. Gingrich married his high school Geometry teacher, Jackie, when he was 19 and she was 26. Jackie paid Newt's way through college all the way to his PhD, and they had two daughters, while Gingrich conveniently avoided the Vietnam War, which he supported. When Newt acquired political ambition, he brought divorce papers to his wife's hospital room while she was recovering from uterine cancer. After being granted the divorce, Newt refused to pay alimony and child support until his hometown 1st Baptist Church had to take up a collection to support the deserted family. Regarding his wife, Gingrich was quoted as saying in an article featured in The New York Times; "She's not young enough or pretty enough to be the wife of a president. And besides, she has cancer."

Newt's second wife, Marianne, maintained a separate residence for six of their twenty-year marriage. Newt asked for a divorce from Marianne by phoning her on Mother's Day, 1999, after indulging in a six year affair with his current wife, Callista, she of the golden helmet of hair. During their clandestine assignations, Gingrich led the impeachment of Bill Clinton, and stacked up 84 charges of personal ethics violations resulting in a $300,000 fine and his ultimate resignation from office. Newt was also an enabler. If he had not led the government shut-down of 1995, Monica Lewinsky would never have delivered that pizza. Somehow, it all gets back to pizza. And if Callista has a half-million dollar a year jewelry habit, Newt might not be able to afford being president. I'm reminded of the line by comedian Stephen Wright, who said of a friend, "He's gotten himself a trophy wife, only I don't think it was for first place." Still, the rabid right-wing hails Gingrich as a man of "big ideas," like child labor and apprentice school janitors. Slavery was a big idea; it just wasn't a good idea. Gingrich bragged in an interview last week that he was among the primary architects of supply-side, trickle-down economics during the Reagan era. So the joke's on us. We're all Newt's bitches now. Shouldn't I at least get some Tiffany cuff-links, or something?

Freakin' Cops

2011-11-21T00:31:00.003-06:00

"And these children that you spit on
As they try to change their worlds,
Are immune to your consultations,
They're quite aware of what they're going through."

David Bowie; "Changes"

Back in the bad old days of the Nixon era when, like today, public unrest was reaching critical mass, I found myself involved in a campus demonstration at UT-Knoxville that began as a theatrical protest over the lack of a student voice in university affairs. A student group had petitioned, and was granted, a vote on the search committee to find a replacement for the beloved Andrew D. Holt, the retiring President of the University. Instead, the committee waited until Spring Break when the campus was vacant, and chose who they wanted. The local version of the SDS, called the BODS (Big Oranges for a Democratic Society), gathered a crowd on The Hill to object to the bureaucratic bait-and-switch with some street satire and guerrilla theatre, only not everyone got the joke. Several beefy-looking jock types confronted the hippies during a break in classes, the crowd swelled, and the mood grew ugly. Predictably, the university panicked and called the Knoxville city police, enraging the students, who began chanting, "Pigs off campus." When one of the protest leaders was arrested and thrown into a squad car, what had begun as fun and games turned deadly serious as the group of protesters turned into a crush of people who rushed the doors of the Administration Building, which were quickly locked by university employees.

I was trapped in the middle of a sea of rage and could see the police riot squad, now inside the building, assembling a flying wedge in preparation to disperse the crowd. You could feel the mentality of the mob take over, driving the protesters' anger. The fear was palpable. When the squad of baton-swinging riot police waded into the mob in a skull-cracking frenzy, beating students to the ground and spilling their blood onto the late spring snow, I turned and ran. Casualties began trickling into the Student Center, none worse than the wound to my own conscience. Because I ran, I considered myself a coward; and no rejection hurts quite like self-rejection. I vowed that the next time a situation arose where I could be in danger from the police, I was going to be prepared like the South Koreans and bring my own damn helmet and stick. The cops hated us; we hated the cops. Fortunately for my health, I never had to put my freshly-minted, false courage on the line. No other campus or anti-war demonstration in which I participated ever again turned violent. Although when I was pamphleteering Richard Nixon's crashing of a Billy Graham Crusade in Neyland Stadium, I was spat upon by a few of the more righteous attendees.

Ultimately, I reached an age when the World War II era cops were pretty much retired and a few of my oldest friends had even joined the force. I could no longer think of the "cops" as a monolithic thing as much as dedicated individuals doing a difficult job, no more than the police could classify any long-haired or black person as a revolutionary. With the exception of a few major cities where corruption was systematic, police forces became more professional, better trained, and increasingly attuned to the law. The end of the Vietnam War seemed to also bring an end to the venomous rancor among citizens, and the intimidating image of the helmeted riot cop was iconicized in the disco group, The Village People." Since we've been through all this generational nastiness before, it was with particular disgust to hear Newt Gingrich say to the "Occupy" protesters, "Go get a job after you take a bath." I thought I was having some hideous flashback of the worst of the Seventies. In any case, there are no jobs and all the bathtubs are in use by the Cialis Company. What could really use a thorough rinsing, however, is Gingrich's soul. He was among the architects of the very difficulties that are causing the street protests today. The return of police violence, however, was unexpected.

By now, everyone has seen the video of UC-Davis campus police Lieutenant John Pike using pepper-spray on a group of passive protesters, as if he were spraying the baseboard for termites. The repugnant casualness of his actions made my blood boil, as it did for one old friend whose daughter is a student at the university, and said, "It was like Kent State without the bullets." In other cities where the police have shown excessive force, particularly New York and Oakland, there is a chain of command in which to distribute the blame. Although Oakland's Mayor Jean Quan and New York City's Michael Bloomberg have become the modern equivalents of Richard J. Daley and Bull Connor, the police are there to insure public order and have no further responsibilities to the protesters. Not so with UC-Davis Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi, whose first concern should be the safety of the students in her charge. Katehi complained that students staying on the Quad overnight constituted an "encampment," something she had unilaterally banned for the weekend protests. It was her office that sent in the campus police. The two "officers" impersonating exterminators were put on "administrative leave" while Katehi forms a "task force" to study the incident. I'm sure in the eyes of my friend, whose daughter is now participating in the protests, Ms. Katehi is not someone you can entrust with the care of your child, and needs to resign immediately and hire a good civil attorney.

There's no question that the movement has been infiltrated by "agitators" who, in the case of the black-clad window breakers in Oakland, turned out to be undercover police. But for every cop like the ones at UC-Davis, there's Captain Ray Lewis, former Chief of the Philadelphia Police, whose arrest at the OWS protest for disorderly conduct while in full uniform was caught on a video that also went viral. Lewis, who had been retired for eight years and led a self-described "secluded life," with the Internet as his only source of information, felt inspired by protesters "who were doing this for all people suffering from injustice," and felt compelled to make the trip to "assist the movement." He understood that the protesters were there for the protection of policemen's rights too. Captain Lewis carried a sign encouraging the NYPD not to become "Wall Street's mercenaries." Lewis also demonstrated the power of the Internet at the very same time the police evicted all protesters from Zuccotti Park, proving that the "Occupy" movement needs no permanent encampment to continue, and that we've finally discovered a useful purpose for the "flashmob." Winter shouldn't bring on a self-inflicted Valley Forge. It's one thing to suffer for a cause, it's another to get pneumonia for it. And for the cops that don't yet get it, thanks to cell phone-cams, the whole world really is watching this time. You will not be allowed to beat these people, so you had better damn well join them.

The Elephant Walk

2011-11-07T00:19:00.061-06:00

Can you believe the presidential election is less than a year away? So, here's what's going to happen. After another dozen or so more debates, the Republican presidential candidates are going to loathe the sight of each other because there's no way to weed anyone out of the process before the primaries begin. The worthy Jon Huntsman will be first to go, followed rapidly by Bachmann, Gingrich, Santorum, Paul, Cain, and any other fringe candidates. Except, they're all fringe candidates. This will leave only Mitt Romney and the idiot Rick Perry standing, even after the stunningly ridiculous vaudeville routine the Texas governor delivered in New Hampshire that has become a viral video. By the time the GOP Convention begins in Tampa next August, the nominee designate will be Romney, because the Republicans always nominate the rugged looking guy who's turn has arrived, just like Bob Dole and John McCain. This will leave the Tea Party faction madder than Herman Cain's wife. They'll beg someone; anyone, to be the ABR (Anyone but Romney) candidate, up to and including Sarah Palin and Jeb Bush, and when rebuked they'll attempt a brokered convention or try to draft someone. But in the end, Romney will be the man and the Tea Party will go insane. They'll either attempt a third party run with God knows who, perhaps Glen Beck, or intentionally sabotage Romney's campaign. For the Tea Party crowd, the choice between a Muslim or a Mormon is too much to fathom.

I know this because I have (insert your own cliche here: read this book, seen this movie, trodden this path) before. The only variable is at which party's convention will the most protesters gather. And what happens in the streets could revive that whole "law and order" business the Republicans have run on so successfully before in times of civil disobedience. Already, they mock the "Occupy" movement as being populated by hippies and the homeless. It's unpredictable what will happen when the movement "occupies" Tampa because of Florida's irrational governor Rick Scott and the allegiance of the police. In 1968, when the Democrats nominated the moderate Hubert Humphrey, who was a defender of LBJ and the Vietnam War, street protests turned into bloody, skull-cracking melees after Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley unleashed his baton-swinging police on the protesters, in what an independent commission later determined a "police riot." The ugliness and brutality caused the populace to turn to Richard Nixon, our second worst president, to restore order in the land. The moderate Democrat lost because of discord within the party and the anger of the liberal left. Mitt Romney will lose because of the same anger on the rabid right. My hope is that voters are enlightened enough to see that the Tea Party Congress they put in power in 2010 has done nothing but harm, and they will just as assuredly vote them out. The right-wing's blitzkrieg on public employees and their unions should seal the deal.

Everyone seems to have gotten the message but the police. As public employees, their rights are under siege as surely as teachers, city service laborers, and nurses. The right's open war on collective bargaining includes police unions too, yet police forces in Oakland, New York, Chicago, Denver, Boston, Atlanta, and Nashville have attacked the "Occupy" camps with violence and arrests. If the police were not ensnared in an "us vs. them" scenario, they would join the protesters instead of beating them. But riot squads train for similar situations requiring crowd control, and when assembled to face a large group of disgruntled citizens, they will exercise that training. When the police are ordered by a municipal lackey to dismantle an assembly with nightsticks, helmets, Plexiglas shields, pepper spray, and all the toys, don't you think they're going to use them? If Memphis Mayor A C Wharton were wise, and I know he is, he would instruct the police to protect the protesters in the Civic Center Plaza against predators in their midst, and put up a dozen port-a-potties as a gesture of goodwill. If nothing else, the movement has Bank of America quaking in their jackboots. New York police arrested 24 people over the weekend who were attempting to remove their funds from Citibank.

The Democratic Convention, which usually attracts the most protesters, will be in Charlotte, N.C. in September. Depending on the state of the economy and the intransigence of the Republicans in office, President Obama will either be regaled as the guardian against the barbarians at the gate, or excoriated for granting the Tea Party Congress a foothold by trying to reason with them in the first place. Nonetheless, Democrats don't force their members to sign tax pledges or defend traditional marriage, like Kim Kardashian's, from the encroachment of the gay hoards wishing to live happy lives, so the convention should be less tumultuous. Despite the expected Obama anger outside, within the convention hall, Democratic unity has been strengthened by the irrationality of the opposing party. Regardless of the President's shortcomings as a political negotiator, none of the carnival barkers that pass for Republican candidates can match him for intelligence, judgement, or respect on the international stage. So, with zero precincts reporting, I can now predict the next president will be Barack Obama. The question is, what will happen with Congress?

The country desperately needs a jobs program for infrastructure repairs, educational improvements, and technological advances, but we'll never get there with the conservative logjam that blocks any and all progress. The House Republicans have wasted their opportunity to lead with a series of meaningless bills concerning social issues rather than addressing the real economic concerns that have made the U.S. a borrower nation. And the Senate has been paralyzed for years by the tyranny of the minority and their misuse of the filibuster. Early on, Senate Republican leader Mitch "Frogman" McConnell freely acknowledged the party's supreme goal was to unseat Obama, and their "just say no" tactics should be repugnant to anyone who values democracy. Yet, in spite of the GOP's obstruction, Obama brought the nation back from the brink of a second great depression, passed healthcare insurance reform, saved the American auto industry and accelerated the development of the electric car, killed Osama bin Laden, stopped a genocide in Libya (for which he was criticized as "leading from behind"), which enabled the Libyan people to kill a murderous dictator, and he ended the war in Iraq. Imagine what he might accomplish with legislators who actually had the best interests of the country at heart.

Fetus Envy

2011-10-23T07:20:00.013-05:00

Would you like to know my opinion about abortion? That's what I thought. I don't care what you think either. And that's the way it should be with an issue so personal. Unless it involves you or a loved one, it's none of your damn business what someone else chooses to do about an unwanted or unhealthy pregnancy. And it most assuredly is not the concern of the government. Yet the moronic Tea Party Republicans, who came into office with the promise to concentrate on "jobs, jobs, jobs" have so far focused their legislative efforts on "abortion, abortion, abortion." The "smaller, less intrusive government" conservatives want to keep Washington off of your back, but all up in your uterus. Anti-abortion crusaders refer to themselves as "Pro Life;" a misnomer for sure. If you're "pro-life," you don't sit in the audience at a Republican candidates' debate and cheer about state executions, or that the Republic of Texas has an express lane running through their death chamber. If you're pro-life you don't scream "let 'em die" when discussing a terminally ill patient without health insurance. The loudest people that claim to be "pro-life" aren't really that concerned about the already living. In reality, they are merely "pro-fetus." In a critical time of economic crises, the House Republicans' obsession with abortion is extending the jobless, homeless recession that has gripped the nation since the Bush regime, like horse manure, hit the dusty trail.

The GOP zealots believe that their electoral victories in 2010 gave them a mandate to pursue their social agenda, while neglecting the country's economic turmoil, lest it give Obama a political "victory." To date, the Republican controlled House has presented 44 bills concerning abortion and 71 others regarding family relationships. With unemployment topping 9 percent, the number of jobs programs offered by Republicans? Zero, with a zed. Their medical meddling proposals vary in outrage from preventing women from purchasing private insurance that includes abortion services, to jailing doctors who fail to notify the parents of a minor seeking an abortion. This month, the House, with unanimous Republican consent, passed the "Protect Life Act," a law that would make it legal for a hospital, as a matter of collective conscience, to deny an abortion to a pregnant women with life-threatening conditions, basically allowing her to die on the floor without legal consequence. The Republican presidential candidates fell all over themselves to out-radicalize each other. Michele Bachmann would force a woman to carry her rapist's child to term, and Rick "man on dog" Santorum even came out against contraception. And these are the people who want government out of your lives.

The most violent act against women by the Tea Party cretins is a bill sponsored by N.J. Rep. Chris Smith, called the "No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act." Since the Hyde Amendment, which has been in effect since 1976, does precisely that, Smith's bill would be merely redundant if not for its unfathomable cruelty. The Hyde Amendment bans all federal funding for abortion except in cases of rape or incest, or to save the mother's life. Smith's bill attempts to further constrict a woman's rights by redefining the definition of "rape" from any form of non-consensual sex, to "forcible rape." This would eliminate date rape, statutory rape, incest, or any other such incident in which the woman failed, for whatever reason, to resist. The bill should be renamed the "Your mouth says no, but your eyes say yes" act. The backlash against narrowing the meaning of rape was severe enough for Rep. Smith to remove the language from the bill, but not the bill itself. It sits in the stack with the other 43, including proposals to ban abortion in the District of Columbia by declaring it under federal jurisdiction, and forcing abortion providers to provide mandatory sonograms and anti-abortion counselling. These bills are frivolous, however, when compared to the GOP's all-out war against Planned Parenthood.

Long demonized by the right, a congressional committee has begun an investigation into Planned Parenthood to examine their compliance with the Hyde Amendment amid accusations of being a mismanaged abortion factory awash in dirty money. The cult of the fetus cheered lustily while the president of the pro-life Susan B. Anthony list said, "This is a critical step in holding accountable...a billion dollar business centered on abortion and an unapologetic partner of those who wish to exploit young girls." Meanwhile, on the Planned Parenthood website, the organization claims that last year they performed one million cervical cancer screenings, 800,000 breast exams, and 4 million STD tests and treatments. Abortion came to 3 percent of their combined services. Don't the cervix police understand that Planned Parenthood was there 100 years before Roe v. Wade? So now the battle to defund and marginalize Planned Parenthood has come to Memphis. The Republican dominated Shelby County Commission has voted to provide state funding for family planning to Christ Community Health Services, which does not perform abortions. I'm certain the Christ Community folks are compassionate and qualified professionals, and will refer a woman wishing to terminate a pregnancy after a bit of faith-based counselling, but they also do not provide emergency contraception, which is sort of like going to the Christian Science Reading Room to fill your prescriptions.

If the rabid pro-lifers had their wildest dreams realized and the practice of abortion was once again made illegal, do they suppose that it would stop? Isn't a woman's privacy and good health preferable to returning to a time of agony and secrecy? I don't know a soul who actually "favors" abortion, either in concept or procedure. No one wants to run out and get an abortion. But unexpected things always happen and criminalizing a bunch of doctors and stigmatizing vulnerable women is not the answer. The irony is that the things that could lessen the need for abortion: sex education, dissemination of contraceptives, abandoning the idiotic "abstinence only" school curriculum, are all opposed by the social conservatives. When I told my wife that I was discussing this subject, she suggested that a female viewpoint was imperative. Melody would like to say that if a man was the one that got pregnant, we would never be having this conversation in the first place. She also wishes to emphasize that no pencil-neck fertilizer salesman from West Texas should be making medical decisions about a family's most intimate concerns, and until a man develops the ability to birth a child, sit down and shut up, Sonny. The surest way to stop this nonsense is to abort this Congress.

In Dog We Trust

2011-10-10T01:40:00.054-05:00

George Carlin once said, "When you get a dog, you know in advance that it's going to end badly." That's because the average canine lifespan is a short 10-12 years, depending on the breed. But Carlin, an animal lover, explained that this allows you to have a whole bunch of doggies in a lifetime, and he was never without one. Then again, if Carlin believed the demise of a well-cared for family pet is a life ending "badly," he never visited Memphis Animal Services on Tchulahoma. Those folks can show you a thing or two about animals coming to a bad end. After the Sheriff's Department raid on the facility in October, 2009, resulting from accumulated evidence of animal mistreatment by the Shelter's staff, the employees were relieved of their duties pending an investigation. That left a public perception that the wrong-doers were all let go, but in fact, most were just on leave and only three people lost their jobs: a veterinarian, the Shelter supervisor, and former Shelter Director Ernest Alexander, who was indicted on charges of animal cruelty. Mayor Wharton said, "The only thing we can do from this point is improve."

Unfortunately for the Mayor, this whole matter landed on his desk on his first day in office. I think it's safe to say that Memphis Animal Services was not high on his priority list. The conditions at the Shelter, however, were so wretched that it made embarrasing national news and the mayor was forced to pay immediate attention. The raid produced evidence of starving, neglected animals, the absence of any record keeping, and a euthanasia rate approaching 80 percent. If dogs were people, we'd be Texas. Promising improvements and "transparency," Wharton delegated responsibility to Director of Public Services, Janet Hooks, who, in turn, promoted the same woman who was only recently very publicly fired and charged with animal cruelty after "Kapone," a pit bull who had escaped his yard, went missing while in her custody. The next day, a dog died from heat stroke in the woman's van while she attempted to avoid arrest. This sterling Animal Control Officer was a hiree from Memphis' Second Chance Program for convicted felons. Not that I'm against giving former felons a break, (after all, they rehabilitated Michael Vick), but guess who's also in charge of the Second Chance Program? Can you say Janet Hooks? Perhaps some felons just released from a cage lack sufficient compassion to care for a dumb animal who's still inside one. In fact, the first requirement of potential Shelter employees should be, "Must love dogs."

The replacement for fired Director Alexander was Matthew Pepper, who came to Memphis from Shreveport. Improvements were made. However, Pepper decided to restrict the public's access to the Shelter's entire inventory of dogs by housing only the most presentable in an "adoption area." He explained that seeing all the dogs would only overwhelm and confuse people. Consequently, the adoption rate was limited and behind a locked door marked "Strays," an animal holocaust continued unabated. The city accepted Pepper's "resignation," but unbelievably decided to keep his policies intact. Pepper was quoted as saying he received pushback from city government and received "no support" over his attempts to fire those city employees he believed to be not up to the job. The city has yet to find a replacement for Pepper while the situation has become a large headache for the mayor, and a stand-off with rescue groups and activists who wish to see the Shelter privatized as a not-for-profit organization and de-politicized as an entity competing over the city's scarce tax funding. Meanwhile, the Shelter is still 1300-1400 calls behind in field investigations, including bites, and charges of abuse and neglect. "Kapone" is still missing, and despite the pleas of several citizens, those ominous doors at the facility and the doomed inhabitants within stay locked away from public view.

The question I hear asked most often is, "Why can't the animal activists show the same concern for people that they do for dogs?" The answer is simple. Most people are born with a capacity to care for themselves, but since we have domesticated these former wolves, dogs are totally dependent on humans for their well-being. That's why half the blame of the Shelter's problems are shared by irresponsible pet owners and reckless dog breeders. Not everyone is capable of caring for a pet, but spay and neuter services are often offered at a discount. Bob Barker was right. The major reason that nearly two dozen dogs are killed daily is to make room for replacements that are coming in all the time from unwanted litters and abandoned pets. Through the Tennessee Open Records Act, animal activist Cindy Marx-Sanders found that two-thirds of the euthanized Shelter dogs were put down for "space;" nearly 12,000 animals last year. There are an unbelievable number of pit bulls on the list, indicating over-breeding by greedy amateurs. These strays come from our homes and yards, and are the result of human indifference to some of our finest companions, illustrating a need for the training of pet owners, as well as those employed by Memphis Animal Services.

To their credit, the Shelter is trying. They have instituted more aggressive adoption policies, and every Thursday, they waive their usual fees for a special $10.00 "Yappie Hour." They're supported by a Friends of Memphis Animal Services Facebook page that posts pictures of available pets. They also sponsor off-site adoption events in parks and shopping centers which have proven very successful. October is officially "Adopt a Shelter Dog Month," and if you're able, you should try it. I know the first thing I did after moving back to Memphis from Nashville in 1992 was to get a dog. I had turned into a taciturn loner and thought a pet might help to re-socialize me. Studies have shown that petting a dog lowers blood pressure and eases depression. I figured I could start with a dog and work my way back up to humans. Here it is, 19 years later, and I have a wonderful wife and two rescued pets in the yard. I credit the dog for my recovery. In mid-November, the Shelter will re-locate to a new $7.2 million, 35,000 square foot facility, including classrooms to train new employees. The problem is they're bringing the old Tchulahoma policies and staff with them. You can't teach an old dog new tricks or compassion either. You either have it or you don't. That's why the Shelter needs to work with those people who have only the animals' best interests at heart instead of locking them out. Before Memphis Animal Services moves to a clean house, they first need to clean house themselves.

A Slap in the Facebook

2011-09-26T02:24:00.033-05:00

Doggone that Mark Zuckerberg. He just can't stop himself from tinkering with the design of Facebook and now he's started an ugly backlash among users of the social network. They rail on the site about altering "interfaces," and "status reports," wholly resistant to the changes Zuckerberg hath wrought. I, however, am the only one that has suffered financially. Inspired by Facebook's suggestion, I began designing T-Shirts to sell in my Facebook "store." Now that Zuckerberg has unilaterally decided to remove the baffling "poke" feature, I have had to eliminate one of my top selling shirts which read, "I poked your Mom on Facebook." With 800 million users and growing, this guy is costing me money by declaring "no pokes." What's next to go, all the "Click 'like' if you love Jesus" posts? Don't force me to ditch another T-Shirt.

Now, a chain/spam letter is making the rounds warning users that Facebook is about to charge for usage, and if you copy the message to your wall, your profile picture will turn blue and protect you from the coming pogrom. If not, you must pay or have your account deleted. Of course, it's nonsense, but doesn't it seem to plagiarize the old Passover story when lambs blood smeared over the doorway saved the Jews in ancient Egypt from the angel of death? There are more fake messages posted by what the Huffington Post referred to as "clickjackers." Messages such as "click here to see who's looking at your profile," and seemingly harmless patriotic or spiritual posts that ask you to copy and paste to your wall if you agree, open your account information to clickjackers. Once infected with their code, the hackers are able to spam all your friends, which must be the reason I see so many posts with glittering photos of hi-heeled shoes from my male friends and track shoes from the women.

The fastest growing demographic among Facebook users is among the 60-90 age group, so scams even less sophisticated than these can nearly be predicted. Phishing attempts, phony sites designed to look like Facebook that ask for your password, and the infamous pleas for money transfers from frantic friends stuck in a terrible situation that need your immediate help. For the elderly or less experienced in navigating a computer, sites like Facebook can be a minefield of hucksterism. But for those merely approaching elderly, or upper middle-aged, like me, Facebook can be very gratifying, from connecting with old friends, to observing an old high-school crush age poorly. I located my 5th grade girlfriend and she turned out to be a lovely person. I had always believed that she had moved far away and never heard from her again, but to my surprise, her family had only moved as far as Whitehaven. She claimed "Facebook is a very pleasant way to waste time." It's for certain that hours can go by before you know it. That's Zuckerberg's master plan. Soon, everything you do on the internet will be offered within the confines of Facebook.

I was a reluctant participant for awhile, mainly because I'm not much of a joiner, and as a blogger, I figured I was receiving enough hate-mail, so why open myself up to further abuse? But I've very much enjoyed my Facebook experience once I learned how to use the "mute" function, or what is now referred to as, "Unsubscribe from (so-and-so's) comments." Because of my musical past, I began receiving "friend requests" from many people that I do not know, but I decided that if someone wanted to be my friend, it's OK with me as long as they don't become annoying. As a result, I only personally know about a quarter of my "friends," but I've gotten to know some strangers through conversations about music and politics whose posts I look forward to, while simultaneously "muting" a series of annoying posters without having to offend them with the ultimate penalty of "unfriending." And then there's always the "delete" button.

Currently, I have several types of offenders on "mute." I post, perhaps, twice a day, usually an obscure song from YouTube or an article that I find interesting, but I had to put all the serial posters in Facebook limbo. These are the people who post song after wretched song ad infinitum, and their evil twins, posters who constantly "share" other people's posts. This is the same guy who wanted to copy your test answers in high school. Then there are the self-promoters, which, I suppose, is the purpose of being on there in the first place. But there are shameless individuals, bloated with self importance, wanting you to be aware of their every movement. This excuses musicians who use Facebook to plug their gigs, because musicians do noble work and can do no wrong. It's no coincidence that half my "friends" are holding guitars in their profile pictures. A resurgence of "older" musicians working again has transpired because of Facebook. I've also noticed a surplus of people offering dogs for adoption, sloganeers, angry political advocates, and prayer requests. But, I believe I've found the way to make it pay. I joined a group of people with whom I used to attend junior high, and I have saved all those goofy school photos we used to exchange. I'm going to post one or two of the most awkward, then ask for "contributions" under the threat of publishing them all. Oh yeah, Zuckerberg made the photos much larger in the news feed.

Meeting of the Meatheads

2011-09-12T00:12:00.003-05:00

By now, Barack Obama has extended so many olive branches to the Republicans, they could plant their own vineyard and press up some pure virgin. Sometimes I wonder if he is a stealth Blue Dog Democrat, since he's more of a centrist than Bill Clinton, yet the right wingers continue to howl "socialist," and block his every attempt to drag the economy back from the precipice, at least before the election. More concessions were offered to placate the conservatives and get them on board with the president's jobs plan. Somehow, Obama is the last to realize that principled conservatives have lost control of the GOP to the rabid right and their single intent is to deprive him of any political victory that may lead to re-election, even if it means destroying what remains of the economy in the process. Yet Obama continues to refer to himself as an "eternal optimist." I'm reminded of the concerned parents who decided to cure their overly optimistic son's naivete at Christmastime by filling his stocking with horse manure. On Christmas morning, when the boy discovered his "present," he gushed, "Oh, thank you. You got me a pony but he must have gotten away."

School boards all over the country are passing stiff anti-bullying laws in their districts. Maybe we should enact anti-bullying legislation in Congress toward Obama. I'm not saying the President is compliant, but he gets pushed around more than Larry Flint; first by John Boehner and then by the NFL. He can't schedule a speech on the same night as the Republican debate because, God forbid, he should step on the official unleashing of Rick Perry into the fray. And he can't schedule opposite the grand opening of football season because it would cost him votes. I was going to rail about a game being more important than a major policy address on job creation, but right about now, even the most casual fan would prefer watching the Saints and Packers over yet another speech about unemployment. The president's speech to Congress was stirring, but the game was more exciting, partly because the House Republicans behaved liked teenagers forced to attend the opera. They chortled and snickered over suggestions to pass legislation extending unemployment benefits and squirmed about taxing the morbidly wealthy. Even the criminal Bush was never treated with such disrespect.

It occurred to me that Obama needs to spice up his joint congressional addresses NFL style. Instead of some dour schoolmarm intoning the president's name before he takes his handshaking stroll down the aisle, let Al Michaels bring on the major players to the musical accompaniment of Hank Williams, Jr. "Starting at State, from Wellesley, Hillary "The Crusher" Clinton; At Treasury, from Dartmouth, Tim "The Troublemaker" Geithner; and at Defensive Speaker, John "Big Orange" Boehner." Our team has the talent to win the next Superbowl, we just need to make a couple of substitutions. Joe Biden will never be elected president. He's only a few gaffes away from earning his union card. Hillary Clinton has announced she will be stepping down as Secretary of State at the conclusion of Obama's first term, so I say, "Clinton in for Biden." Hillary could spend the next four years preparing for a presidential run and Biden's long suit is foreign policy. It would be just like subbing Aaron Rodgers for Brett Favre. And Hillary can block for Obama, too.

Watching the president's address to Congress offered a stark contrast to the Republican presidential contenders who gathered the night before at the Reagan Library for another in a series of meaningless debates. I can sum up the Republican economic plan in three words; more tax cuts. The message came with many melodies, but everybody sang the same lyrics. The most sensible of the candidates is Jon Huntsman, which is like being the Lord of the Flies in this bunch. His rational approach automatically disqualifies him in this year of the irrational. Texas Governor Rick Perry's addition to the carnival, however, is most entertaining. Presenting himself as a virtual wild-west Nero, Perry questioned climate change science as "unsettled" while his state was being consumed by wildfires during the hottest August on record. A fiscal conservative, Perry had cut Texas Fire Department funding by 75 percent, including volunteer forces trained to fight just these types of fires. The pundits are already calling this a Perry-Romney contest, even though Perry makes the rigid Romney look like Socrates.

The most telling moment of the debate came not from a candidate's remarks, but from the audience's response to a question. When moderator Brian Williams pointed out that, at 234 and counting, Perry has executed more death row inmates than the next two states combined, the crowd broke into sustained and enthusiastic applause. In a previous life, this was the same mob that would gather to watch a public hanging and jeer at the condemned. Have we regressed to the point where our bloodlust and revenge fantasies cause us to cheer for more state executions? The West Memphis Three should be grateful they were in an enlightened state like Arkansas, or they'd be dead. Still, Rick Perry is the perfect Tea Party candidate. To him, Social Security is a "Ponzi scheme," and a "monstrous lie." The Lord told him to run and every word he speaks reminds voters of George W. Bush. Only, he's too extreme for even Karl Rove. When "Bush's Brain" thinks you're too radical, you've got to be pretty far out there. My conservative friends often ask me, "When are you going to stop blaming everything on Bush?" When you admit that this human wrecking ball was a tragic president whose wars of choice and reckless de-regulation of Wall Street brought this nation to the brink of economic calamity. Meanwhile, Rick Perry is exactly like Bush, minus the humility. Are you watching all this, Sarah? Always room for one more.

All Wet

2011-08-29T01:19:00.003-05:00

Hurricanes in New York; earthquakes in Virginia; drought in Texas; historic flooding on the Mississippi, and the tornadic destruction of Joplin Missouri and Tuscaloosa, Alabama. That's quite a summer. But climate change is a hoax, right? It's just another racket for Al Gore to cash in on, like he did with his invention of the internet. Every sensible person knows it's only the Earth's cyclical behavior and we're just at the metaphorical top of the Ferris Wheel. We'll come down someday. Meanwhile, floodwaters are raging through Vermont and it's still too early to calculate the damage caused by last weekend's Hurricane. But, go ahead and have another cocktail and try not to think about it too much. Historic, destructive weather events are the government's responsibility. Or, they were before the conservatives chimed in. Presidential candidate Ron Paul declared there should be no FEMA relief for the storm's victims, and that federal disaster relief is, "bad economics, bad morality, and bad constitutional law."

In any other time in our history, if there's one thing the populace could depend on, it is federal aid in a natural disaster. Even the criminal Bush got to New Orleans, eventually. But since the Tea Party is flexing its flaccid muscle and trying to abolish the federal government, this time there are strings attached. Even while the hurricane was bearing down on Majority Leader Eric Cantor's district, he was explaining that no federal relief would be forthcoming without equivalent cuts in other social programs. Arrogance like this can only come from a representative that doesn't fear for his re-election, but let a bridge collapse in Richmond and we'll see if he combs the budget for something to cut before requesting funds. Cantor, the only Jewish Republican, is what is known in Yiddish as a nar, or a fool. There's lots of them, but Cantor's the poster boy. He has many positions on social matters, but they're all heartless and contrary to the Judaic principles of social justice. If I weren't so concerned about ugly mail from my fellow tribesmen, I'd go so far as to say Cantor is a disgrace to the Jews. The really troubling fact is that not a single Republican disagreed with or disavowed Cantor's statement about holding emergency funds hostage to their asinine budget process.

The televangelical wing of the Republican Party was quick to blame the erratic weather on an angry and judgemental God who is displeased with us for not mentioning Him before the football game. Pat Robertson pointed out that the Virginia quake put a crack in the crown of the Washington Monument and immediately took it as a sign of impending national destruction. Franklin Graham has been saying the end times are at hand ever since the Japanese tsunami, and phony reverend Glen Beck stated that "The hurricane was a blessing," to remind us that mankind is not in charge. I suppose a hurricane's a "blessing" until it hits your house. And if corporate radio blatherer Rush Limbaugh hasn't found a way to say the hurricane was sent to postpone the opening of the Martin Luther King Memorial, he will. The current GOP has a faith-based emergency response where you love your neighbor, unless they're poor, black, brown, Mexican or Muslim, and any government assistance is viewed as creeping socialism. As a grateful beneficiary of a Christian charity, (The Church Health Center), I can testify to the great good they do both in a disaster and on a daily basis. Why is there always some hair-sprayed, half-bright rube explaining God's motivation for visiting destruction on humanity? I would never have known why Hurricane Katrina destroyed New Orleans if not for Jerry Falwell's explanation that it was divine retribution for a gay pride parade.

Leave it to the Tea Party to lose another argument. As soon as they begin chanting "Drill, baby, drill," there's an historic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. They scream for more nuclear energy and additional power plants right before Japan goes radioactive. Then here comes Rick Perry with a six-gun in one hand and a Bible in the other. Pridefully ignorant, Perry believes he was called by God to run for President. But, then so does Michele Bachmann. I guess it's true that many are called but few are chosen, but somebody's God is punking them. This perfectly illustrates the difference between progressive and conservative thought. Liberals come by their beliefs by reading and staying informed of the news. The evangelical right is indoctrinated in church. Progressives have opinions. Evangelical conservatives hold to their beliefs as acts of faith. The most recent poll shows that the Tea Party is the same old religious right that's been around since Richard Nixon recruited them to his cause. They're the Silent Majority, the Dixiecrats, the States Rights Party, The Moral Majority, and George Wallace's American Independent Party. Nothing new to see here, folks. Just move along.. My question is, how do you reason with someone who's convinced that their way is the only way?

Hurricane Irene could have been worse, but the damages will be substantial. With washed-out roads and damaged infrastructure, this could be a golden moment for the president. I expect Obama to seize this opportunity to introduce vast new employment programs to repair crumbling bridges and electrical grids, flooded tunnels and deteriorating highways. Give the old interstate system to the sixteen-wheelers and build a new one just for cars. Try some New Deal programs like the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps), which employed people to build public works and parks; or the WPA (Works Progress Administration), which involved millions in the construction of roads and buildings across the nation. Whatever Obama does, it may as well be something bold, because while the country is in need of a "new" New Deal, the GOP is still trying to repeal the last one. It's now clear that the time for negotiating with rigid ideologues is over. In the last presidential election, I had hoped to be voting for another FDR, not the next Gerald Ford. The Tea Party believes Obama re-regulated Wall Street because liberals hate capitalism. If the president would stop trying to appease those who only wish for his destruction, maybe we could make some progress on the nation's economic recovery and the emotional well-being of its people. To paraphrase Cee Lo Green, forget the Tea Party. They've become irrelevant. Yet again.

Overton Square Revisited

2011-08-15T01:23:00.005-05:00

WKNO's newest documentary in their "Memphis Memoirs" series; Overton Square: The Golden Age, premiered on the local public network last week, and it was just great. I don't say that merely because I am in it, although my inclusion enhances nearly every occasion, but because director Susie Howe captured the joyous spirit that came along with Memphis' continuing celebration surrounding the Square's development. Begun as the pipe dream of four young scions of prominent Memphis families: Jimmy "J-Rob" Robinson, Ben Woodson, Charlie Hull, and Frank "Bubba" Doggrell," along with prominent developer George Saig, Overton Square blossomed into Memphis' combined version of the French Quarter, Greenwich Village, and Ghirardelli Square in a few city blocks. The music, the food, the intoxicants of choice, the crowds, the events, and the fun have become legendary, and as evidenced by this film, those enterprising young men did this town a big favor by throwing a wild, decade-long party from which the participants are still hung-over forty years later.

Since we both worked there at various locations, Melody and I enjoyed sharing our experiences with the director. Melody lived just behind the Square for a time with a previous spouse and witnessed the mayhem from her front porch nightly. My first employment came as a singer at the Looking Glass, the predecessor to Bombay Bicycle Club. I sat on a high stool in a corner area decorated to look like a library with real bookshelves containing large, leather-bound tomes of ancient history, surrounded by customers sitting in overstuffed couches and puffy lounge chairs. I expanded the act to a duo with conga, then an acoustic trio, and finally a band. After being away from Memphis for a number of years, I was a workhorse for the Square and thrilled with the employment. My champion, more times than not, was Thomas Boggs, whom I had known since his days as drummer for Memphis' legendary garage band, Tommy Burk and the Counts. The Square management put Thomas in charge of the music since they figured he spoke the musicians' language, which was cash. Boggs moved us across the street to Lafayette's Music Room, and was so driven and dedicated in his new management career, that I couldn't help but enjoy being an occasional pain in the ass just to get a rise out of him. My affection for him was shared by many others and made obvious at the film's premier when Thomas' image on the screen was greeted with sustained applause.

Lafayette's Music Room was the gem of midtown. It didn't matter whose name was on the marquee, your friends were there and you were going to hear something new; even if it was Kiss, who got laughed out of town. The consensus was that these four guys couldn't hide their mediocre musicianship underneath a bunch of silly greasepaint. Kansas ("Dust In the Wind") was so loud, they cleared the house in ten minutes, while Minnie Ripperton was sublime. A friend once asked me to accompany her to hear an unknown "Korean jazz pianist," who turned out to be Chick Corea and his trio. From August, 1972- August, 1975, Lafayette's presented new artists to Memphis like Billy Joel, Leo Sayer, Pure Prairie League, Leon Russell, and Phoebe Snow. We rocked out to the Alex Taylor Band before we even realized he was James' brother. In the new film, George Saig said Lafayette's was hemorrhaging money and had to close. It's true that it was small and had to share a nasty kitchen with Friday's, but it was also the searchlight and draw for the entire area. With due respect to Playhouse on the Square, which replaced Lafayette's, the demise of the showcase club was, for me, the end of the Square. The Playhouse drew one audience per night, but Lafayette's turned the house every hour.

One tale left untold in the documentary was the night in Lafayette's when Mayor Wyeth Chandler got his ass kicked. The story has morphed into outlandish descriptions of parking lot stand-offs and fistfights between the Mayor and assorted waiters, but the true tale comes from bartender Joe Dougherty: Chandler, a Square regular, was in attendance with his entourage and was, in a phrase; "shit-faced." An unknown couple at the next table was being harassed by the Mayor, and when Chandler groped the young woman, her date cold-cocked him, knocking him to the floor and sending both the mayor's and Lafayette's staff into a frenzy. Into the breach leaped Thomas Boggs, who hoisted the stunned mayor to his feet and escorted him out a back entrance and into his limousine. Knowing the police were on the way, Thomas felt that the Mayor had it coming and was so fair-minded that he assuaged the offended couple and escorted them from the premises to avoid further questions from the authorities. The Mayor showed up for work the next day looking like he'd gone six rounds with Mike Tyson and was immortalized in a Bill Garner editorial cartoon which pictured him sitting at his desk with a black-eye and wearing boxing gloves. The identity of the man who smacked the mayor is still unknown.

Aside from the wonderful memories, our initial reaction to seeing our contemporaries on film was, "Do we look that old?" But I pushed up the nose-piece on my tri-focals, took Melody's trembling hand in mine, and said, "No Mother, we're still adorable." Thus assured, we enjoyed interviews with everyone from bartenders to bouncers and got to re-visit a time when Memphis experienced a minor cultural revolution on a corner. And it all began when Jimmy Robinson opened a beer joint called the Perception Lounge, because he wanted to "be cool and own his own bar." Isaac Tigrett readily credits Robinson as his role model for opening his own corner burger and beer emporium in London that he named the Hard Rock Cafe. Did we ever get the chance to say, "Thanks, guys.We had a great time?" Loeb Properties has big plans for the Square's location and I wish them well. An Overton Square comeback would be a grand boost for the city, although it will never be the same. Which is as it should be. The Square should be designed for a younger generation, keeping in mind the tradition of local merchants, live music, and the draw of a showcase music room. Then, if they have half the fun that we did, the new Overton Square is sure to be a success. And if you missed the spirited documentary on "The Golden Age," I'm sure WKNO will show it again, and again, and...

Henry Gross sings "Overton Square" with Memphis' Freeworld.

Tea Party Treason

2011-08-01T01:06:00.003-05:00

Let's begin at the beginning. Government is neither inherently good nor evil. In fact, government is one of the most noble institutions to come from the mind of man. Civilization exists because humankind created government. It's the government that insures you can sleep safely in your bed at night. This whole "government is bad" theory began in 1964 with Barry Goldwater and came to fruition with the ascendancy of Ronald Reagan. The nation has yet to recover from that failed experiment in less government, but the delusional Tea Party caucus keeps the Reagan myth alive with the help of a few reactionary Democrats who have accepted the Reagan lie as common wisdom. In reality, government is only as good or bad as the elected representatives that populate public offices. So, at this moment, I would have to agree that our government is pretty rotten. Blame it on the Tea Party zealots who went to Washington not to serve the people, but with an ideological axe to grind. Combine that with a Democratic party that can't seem to locate its' spine and we have the most dysfunctional Congress in modern history. The government only mirrors the electorate, however, so the voters who put the Tea Party in a position of power are pretty much getting exactly what they deserve. It's the rest of us that don't deserve the incompetence of the House Republicans and their reckless disregard for compromise or reason.

The Tea Party discusses debts and deficits as if they knew what they were talking about, but the unifying glue of its members is an irrational hatred of Barack Obama. The cretin wing of the GOP mistakenly believe that if they wreck the economy of the United States, the populace will somehow blame their extortion on the President. And their stated goal has always been to deprive Obama of a second term by using 1960s Black Panther tactics: By any means necessary. Like most people outside of the Beltway, I had never heard the phrase, "debt ceiling," before the raging mob made an issue of it. That's because it was never newsworthy before. It was bookkeeping and it always passed, regardless of symbolic opposition, because no sane legislator would dream of putting the nation's credit rating in jeopardy and risk an historic financial crisis for no good reason. But this Republican party turned a non-issue into an unprecedented partisan drama, causing a week-long drop in the stock market and provoking a warning from Moody's credit rating agency. The Tea Party cabal is on a mission of self-fulfilling prophesy; they tell you that the government is bad, and then go about proving it. This crowd came to Washington to "reform" government, but they operate like reverse Robin Hoods, stealing from the poor to give to the rich. Hey patriots, wanna' support the troops? Pay 'em!

The GOP/Frank Luntz mantra of the moment is, "We don't have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem," which proves they all got the same memo and can lie in unison. However, any independent study shows that after a decade of tax cuts for the obscenely wealthy and two wars on your dime, we actually do have a revenue problem. Yet the radical Republicans refuse to even consider allowing tax rates to return to Clinton era levels, before everything went to shit. They will protect the estates of their benefactors if it means gutting Social Security and public education to do so. The proper term for anyone who would take action to willfully damage the country is, "traitor," yet none dare call it treason. In the Democratic Party's darkest days of granting safe harbor to Southern racist senators and congressmen, the tobacco chewers never controlled the party, and civil rights legislation was passed despite them. In today's GOP, it's the bomb-throwers who are calling the shots. The Tea Party turned an ordinary procedural vote into a hostage situation, and you were the hostage.

The most macabre aspect of last week's congressional Circus of Horrors is that it never had to happen. With millions unemployed, struggling to hold on to their homes with decimated retirement accounts, people are frightened enough without the Tea Party renegades threatening to renege on Social Security and welfare payments. Technically, we may not be in a Depression, but tell that to the unemployed, single mother who is worried if her food stamps will arrive in time to feed her kids. Or the elderly retiree who depends on the government check he labored all his life to earn. Ironically, a recent Pew poll showed that evangelical Christians make up 57 percent of the Tea Party's membership. You might imagine that an enlightened and benevolent politics would follow the teachings of Jesus who said, "As ye have done it unto one of the least of these My brethren, ye have done it unto Me." As for Grover Norquist and the hammerlock pledge of "no-new-taxes-ever" that he demands be signed by all the Republican sheep, Jesus also said, "Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's, and unto God, the things that are God's." As a lay student of comparative religion, it sounds to me what Jesus was saying is to quit whining and pay your freaking taxes. In fact, merely allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire will make an enormous dent in the deficit.

Obama called for a "balanced approach" of spending cuts and revenue increases. The Tea Party only wanted to cut social programs. Among the right-wing's complaints about the president is that he comes straight out of Chicago, arm-twisting, machine politics. Yet, he appears to be one of the worst negotiators since Neville Chamberlain. Barack Obama was elected because he is obviously a man of great talent and ability. How disheartening it is to watch him forced by obstructionists to squander his limitless potential in petty political arguments and spend the greatest part of his first term swatting gnats. I voted for Obama, and likely will again, but sometimes his detached equanimity can be exasperating. As much as I admire the president, sometimes I'd like to see someone light a fire under his ass. If I could, I would like to say to him: Mr. President, there is no negotiating with the House Republicans. They hate your guts and want to sabotage your administration, yet you continue to offer concession after concession. No one is happy with these foolish "debt negotiations." We expect our elected officials to do their jobs, but they are wasting time better spent in job creation and recovery efforts. And one more thing, with all due respect, my dear professor, "It's the tax cuts, stupid."

Mirth Control

2011-07-18T00:18:00.000-05:00

Dr. Marcus and Congresswoman Michele Bachmann. See? I haven't even said anything yet and you're already smiling. That's because the visage of this couple brings mirth. It's like watching Rob and Laura Petrie run for president, only without the wisdom and good humor of the Dick Van Dyke Show. The Bachmanns have five children and have fostered twenty-three others, mostly troubled teens, and God bless them for it. In an age of hypocrisy, at least Michele Bachmann backs-up her virulent anti-abortion views by caring for children who have already been born. There is nothing less than admirable in being a foster parent. If having babies and rearing children were a major qualification for the presidency, however, the logical choice would be to vote for the Octomom. As for Bachmann, she signed a "pro-marriage pledge," last week, created by the Iowa nutbag organization, The Family Leader, that equated abortion, Sharia law, pornography, and gay marriage as evils, and insinuated that black children had it better under slavery. After an outcry of righteous disgust, the group decided to delete that particular paragraph. But not before Bachmann signed it. The only other signee to "the pledge" was Rick "man on dog" Santorum.

Dr. Marcus Bachmann, a self-described "Christian therapist," has come under public scrutiny when it was revealed that his federally funded counseling centers, Bachmann and Associates, offered religion-based, gay-to-straight, "reparative" therapy, a practice that has been derided as "dangerous" by respected psychological publications. The doctor claims that homosexuality is a choice and has advised the parents of potentially gay children that, "Barbarians need to be educated. They need to be disciplined. Just because someone feels it or thinks it doesn't mean that we are supposed to go down that road." Dr. Bachmann later said that he never meant to refer to gays as "barbarians," but instead was referring to children, as if that made it better. I can't help it, but every time I look at this guy, he reminds me of the illegitimate son of former Dallas Cowboys Coach Jimmy Johnson and Liberace. I confess to having zero gaydar, but watching Marcus Bachmann doing the "Bop" onstage at a Tea Party Rally, was like watching Kevin Bacon on estrogen. From a guy that sounds like Woody Woodpecker and looks like Gorgeous George, I deduce that he's contemplated "going down that road" before. Maybe he's fathered five children but, let's face it, Dr. Bachmann makes Adam Lambert look butch. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Current inquiries have also raised questions about the doctor's credentials. Bachmann claims a PhD in Clinical Psychology from Union Graduate College in Ohio, only no such program existed when he graduated. Unlicensed in Minnesota, "Dr." Bachmann's clinics, while offering counselling services for addiction and other real-world problems, rely on Evangelical teachings enough to question their eligibility for federal funding. The "pray away the gay" therapy only exacerbates the problem. Michele has recently said that she "loves the homosexuals," as much as you can love someone who is an abomination in the sight of the Lord, but this was to neutralize her previous remarks. In an interview, she said that (homosexuality), "leads to the personal enslavement of individuals. If you're involved in the gay and lesbian lifestyle, it's bondage." Is there a straight "lifestyle" that I don't know about? And why do Evangelicals evoke gay imagery to describe human sexuality? Bachmann's campaign for an anti-gay marriage amendment and the Tea Party's social agenda has propelled her past Mitt Romney as the front-runner for the Republican nomination. Now, if we could only change her mind about slavery, perhaps she wouldn't talk about "bondage" so much.

Even Rudy Giuliani has advised Republican candidates to leave the gay marriage issue alone, but Bachmann continues marching as to war with Marcus at her side. Despite tub-thumping for the right-wing sex police, Bachmann claims the election is about economics so she can tout her law degree from Oral Roberts University, now Regents College. May I show you my philosophy degree from Lenny's College? Just before the kick-off to Bachmann's presidential campaign, she and Dr. Bachmann conveniently resigned their long-time membership in the Salem Evangelical Lutheran Church, just because the church teaches that the Catholic Pope is the Anti-Christ. Michele has claimed she is running for president under God's instructions. Do you suppose God told her to leave her church in order to avoid a Jeremiah Wright moment, or was that her decision? Bachmann's supernatural ascension to the Queen of the Tea Party has usurped Sarah Palin's former place on the charts just as surely as Barry White overtook Isaac Hayes. And to imagine, the leading contender for the Republican nomination's greatest legislative achievement is the Light Bulb Freedom of Choice Act.

In any other year, views like these from a presidential contender would be alarming. But the Tea Party led Republican Party have shown themselves to be buffoons and paid corporate shills who would sacrifice the American economy before siding with Obama on anything. These people can no longer be taken seriously and must be steamrolled like California 405 before progress is possible. So, please, nominate Michele Bachmann for president; or any of the other Birthers, climate change deniers, anti-abortion zealots, gay bashers, sovereign citizens, or tax refuseniks. Maybe in Obama's second term we can get serious about some New Deal-like jobs programs and governmental infrastructure repair projects and put the country back to work. This requires dealing with labor unions and other socialist organizations that the right abhors. But then, what don't they abhor? Last week's news featured Michele Bachmann leading in the Iowa caucuses, the deposed Glenn Beck receiving rock star treatment by the right-wing Israeli Knesset, and Rupert Murdoch's media empire under siege. I thought I was dreaming. Members of my generation might remember that old song by Thunderclap Newman; "There's Something In The Air." Depending on which way the wind blows, this election year could be a toxic event for right-wing extremists.

The Trials of the Anthonys

2011-07-02T00:30:00.120-05:00

It's a bit early in the millennium for a "trial of the century," but here we go again. And just like the trial of O.J. Simpson in 1995, the nation is riveted by the live televised courtroom drama of the trial of Casey Anthony for the murder of her 2-year-old daughter, Caylee. A large coterie of commentators that analyze every word of testimony has become a nightly staple for trial-watchers, and a whole new lexicon of phrases has entered the national conversation: "Smell Test," "Chloroform Searches," "Hot Body Contests," "Shot Girls," and "Bella Vita." A cast of characters, in and out of court, complete the sideshow, including fistfights among queued citizens hoping for a seat, and the arrest of one spectator caught on camera giving the finger to the lead prosecutor. So far, he's the only one that's been sentenced to jail. The pundits also hail back to the O.J. trial. Marcia Clark showed up on CNN with Dan Abrams, while Fox News went with Mark Fuhrman. The network of record for the trial is Headline News, which features post-court analysis by Dr. Drew Pinsky, big-haired Jane Velez-Mitchell, Joy Behar, and the venomous Nancy Grace, inventor of the phrase, "Tot Mom." If the verdict depended on public opinion, Nancy Grace would be swabbing "Tot Mom's" arm right now.

The trial gives us the most intimate view since the Loud Family in the 1970s of the inner-dynamics of a dysfunctional household. This is also basically a story about mothers and their daughters. Ratings show the overwhelming number of trial viewers are women with young children. Like most sane people, they can't believe that any mother would murder her own child in order to "live the good life," as the prosecution charges. Since Caylee disappeared in June, 2008, we have come to know this family and their tortured story. Between George's cries, Cindy's lies, and Casey's sighs, we feel the grief of these parents torn between the death of a grandchild and the potential loss of a daughter as well. The courtroom demeanor of Casey Anthony, however, can only be described as chilling. While she scoffs at her fathers' tears and gazes at her mother with thinly disguised contempt, her stoic expression and hollow eyes are filled with a soullessness that no testimony could ever capture. Even an occasional viewer of Law and Order knows she's guilty as hell, but why does she need to drag her entire family down with her?

Everybody lies in court, from the attorneys to the police, but Casey Anthony is the Michelangelo of lying. She has more imaginary friends than I have real ones. Casey created "Zanny the Nanny" from a name on an apartment guest register. But she didn't just take the woman's name, she created a mother and sister for the phantom babysitter, supplied marital information and gave her a college education. Among the innocents victimized by this case, a real person named Zenaida Fernandez-Gonzales had her life ruined for sport. Casey thought the more elaborate the lie, the more believable, and thus walked the police all the way into Universal Studios before admitting she didn't work there, despite the fact she had been getting up and going to her fake job for two years. If she is such a nimble liar, my question is, did she believe she could remain free while they searched for the fabricated nanny forever? And if her child drowned, as the defense claims, how to explain the fresh tattoo she got the next day, or the month of hard-partying before admitting her daughter was missing? Casey suffers from the narcissism of the assumed pretty. Her pals were all hooking-up and her boyfriend du jour didn't want a child around. Hot bodies are fleeting.

Unlike the O.J. trial, defense attorney Jose Baez is no Johnny Cochran. His slogan should be, "If your lawyer gets licked, you must convict." Either Casey looked in the Yellow Pages for "Worst Attorneys in Orlando," or she hired him from "Lawyers R' Us." His fumfering, ill-prepared delivery makes him look particularly clumsy next to the professionalism of prosecutor Jeffrey Ashton. Baez' stunning opening statements about sexual abuse, incest, and the accusation that George Anthony covered up his granddaughter's drowning were left hanging in the air like the stench of death in a car trunk. Casey watched impassively while her counsel allowed Cindy to perjure herself in an effort to save her daughter's life. Not possessing any such motherly instincts, Casey is like a human wrecking ball, destroying everything in her path. The deleted computer searches sink both Casey and Cindy, who now faces charges of perjury. All the news-talkers expressed amazement at the ineptitude of Jose Baez but after his fourth rebuke from Judge Belvin Perry, I began to glimpse his genius strategy. He needs more time to develop his theory that the meter-reader did it, so regardless of the jury's verdict, an appeals court is bound to grant Casey a new trial on the grounds of incompetent counsel.

With the Florida death penalty at stake, this is truly reality television. Most likely, Casey will never reveal what actually happened to Caylee. Jose Baez conjured an image of George Anthony holding his drowned grandchild while plotting the disposal of her remains, then he never mentioned it to the jury again. My favorite new legal opiner, attorney Mark Eiglarsh, said "It's hard to prove murder without a cause of death." After 84 Google searches for "chloroform," and additional searches for "neck-breaking," and "internal bleeding," on the family computer, any reasonable juror might suspect pre-meditation, regardless of the cause of death. The emotionless Casey may finally show traces of humanity after she is convicted, but because of the overwhelming sympathy for Cindy and the wrecked Anthony family, she'll be spared the death penalty. Whatever the result of this sad episode, a child is dead and a family is ruined. A life sentence might allow Casey the time to train her hyper-imagination toward writing fiction. And if she still misses her party-girl life, I hear there's lots of sex in prison. Personally, I'd like to see "Tot Mom" put under house arrest. Only, it has to be in Nancy Grace's house.

Greatest Generation My Ass

2011-06-20T07:22:00.057-05:00

Can we stop all this "Greatest Generation" nonsense yet? It's indisputable that the fighting force that battled the Axis Powers in WWII showed incredible gallantry and sacrifice, as did the civilian population during wartime. The nation's war effort was a collective undertaking, combining soldiers' bravery and citizen resolve. Corporations transformed their factories into armories where women worked the assembly lines in the absence of men who were serving their country, and everyone supported the troops because the soldiers were us. After the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, men from every station rushed to enlist in the military. No American family was left untouched by the war, and the leadership of government, armed with a righteous cause, rose to the occasion. If there were ever a war worth fighting, this was it. The defeat of Fascism and Nazism by the U.S. military and our allies was among the noblest achievements of the 20th century, and for that, the generation that fought and sacrificed so much deserves to be called "the greatest." After the war was over? Maybe not so great.

The former mush-mouth anchorman, Tom Brokaw, has created a cottage industry celebrating our parents' and grandparents' exploits in war. I know I bought a copy of his "The Greatest Generation" to give to my dad one Fathers' Day. The book proved to be such a cash bonanza that Brokaw followed up with "The Greatest Generation Speaks," a series of letters and interviews with former soldiers. Brokaw's gravy train slowed when he discovered that his planned third book in the trilogy, "The War Lover," had already been written by John Hersey. But just when Brokaw was becoming the wrinkled equivalent of a teen-idol for the aged, the cause was joined by director Steven Spielberg and actor Tom Hanks. One WWII vet was quoted as saying that Tom Hanks has spent more time filming the war than the actual soldiers did fighting it. Suddenly, WWII movies were back in vogue, and Hanks and Spielberg became the John Wayne and John Ford of this generation, as if every conceivable battle were not already portrayed by a Hollywood movie. Post-war kids were fed a steady diet of films celebrating war; "30 Seconds Over Tokyo," "Back to Bataan," "To Hell and Back," "Flying Leathernecks," "Sands of Iwo Jima," and so on. War seemed so damned exciting, I could hardly wait until I was old enough to go kill somebody in battle and be a quiet hero about it when I got back.

War seemed a rite of passage for American men and we were certain that God was on our side. However, a golden opportunity was missed to remedy the societal inequities in this country that were magnified by the war. One million black men served in WWII with the hopes that their patriotic service would be rewarded, yet they were segregated into separate units in the Army, the Navy limited blacks to service roles like cooks and janitors, and the Marines excluded them altogether. Everyone knows about the internment camps where Japanese-Americans were stockpiled after Pearl Harbor. Less well-known are the first-hand accounts of black soldiers returning home from the war and being forced to sit in segregated sections of trains and buses, while Nazi prisoners of war received the accommodations and amenities reserved for whites. 400,000 German and Italian prisoners were transported to the U.S. during the war and confined to military bases, mainly in the South. While black soldiers were relegated to separate facilities, prisoners of war were permitted to dine with white officers and enlisted men. The war against the rabid racist Hitler was fought with the most segregated army in history. Although President Truman ordered the military desegregated in 1948, it wasn't accomplished until the sixties. The civil rights movement was the direct result of the unjust society left in place after the war.

The 1950s are often portrayed in fictions like "Grease," and "Happy Days," but the reality was far more grim. In prosperous, post-war America, with Ike on the golf course and the Korean conflict concluded, it may have seemed as if all was well with the world. But these were also the days of the Cold War, "duck and cover" drills, McCarthyism and red baiting, black-listing and Jim Crow. While white America embraced a corporate culture and a celebration of consumption, seeds of unrest were sown in those left out of the "American Dream," and their children. A new phrase entered the lexicon: "Juvenile Delinquent," and it was no coincidence that the boldest critique of society came from the movie "Rebel Without a Cause." A straight line can be drawn from this film about teenage alienation to Elvis Presley, and then the generational breach became irreparable. It might have been different, but the "Greatest Generation" had turned into the "Whiskey and War Generation" that instituted segregation, glorified war, and assumed an authoritarian puritanism that ultimately caused their children to erupt in social protest.

Such a mindset created the Vietnam War, the meat grinder which caused my generation to turn into schizoid Mouseketeers. Our patriotic parents could not understand why anyone would object to fighting in an ideological politicians' racist war. Add to that unrest a president who accrued votes by pitting the old against the young and a "Generation Gap" materialized. The so-called "counterculture" would never have happened without the Vietnam War. Say what you will about hippie excess, but the unifying message of non-exclusivity, and the belief that all people had value, was closer to Martin Luther King's vision of a "Beloved Society" than the "Love it or leave it" sentiment of the "Silent Majority" of militant patriots. My bi-polar generation is best represented by Bill Clinton on one hand, and George W. Bush on the other, dividing my age-group between those that dropped acid in the 60s and those that did not. People of all ages have fought the good fight, but the societal progress made since WWII in civil rights, women's equality, and human rights were accomplished in spite of the so-called "Greatest Generation." They were magnificent in wartime. Then they became Republicans.

Republican'ts

2011-06-06T02:08:00.050-05:00

If I were a Republican... Oops, pardon me; I just threw up in my mouth a little bit. Let me rephrase that. If I were a principled conservative concerned about my party, I believe I would stop fighting it and just hand the steering wheel over to the Tea Party for the coming elections. Perhaps a stunning political defeat, like the Democrats suffered in 1972, will finally force the Greedy Obsolete Party to divest itself of the right-wing fringe element whose borderline insanity is destroying the final vestiges of a once formidable organization. Only an electoral smack-upside-the-head can convince these zealots that their reactionary philosophy of gutting governmental social programs, taxes, public schools, and labor unions is unacceptable to a civil society. Their attempts to lower the deficit by slashing popular programs that benefit the elderly or less fortunate, while leaving the Bush tax cuts intact, is simply immoral. The oblivious Tea Party is unaware that Poppy Bush had to raise taxes in the wake of the deficits caused by Ronald Reagan's tax cuts, and still cling to the discredited, supply-side, "trickle down" theory that was the bedrock of Reaganomics. When Newt Gingrich criticized the Paul Ryan budget plan that all Republican office-seekers must embrace to win the support of the party, he was pilloried by the radical right as too liberal. This is the man who led the "Republican Revolution" of 1994.

That old George Santayana quote about those ignorant of history being condemned to repeat it has grown tired, so let's try another: "History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce." Groucho's cousin, Karl Marx, wrote that, and though I heard it long ago, I never really knew what it meant until I began watching it play out in front of my eyes. Now the meaning is unmistakable. The tragic backdrop for the unmaking and splintering of the Democratic Party in the sixties was the Vietnam War. In refusing to support the liberal Hubert Humphrey's candidacy for president because of his association with LBJ's disaster, the left-wing Democrats handed the presidency to Richard Nixon. After four more years of unrelenting horror, the Democratic Party was dominated by a radical, anti-war left whose tactics were repugnant to a great part of the electorate. Their nominating convention was a circus, yet they still managed to put forth a credible anti-war candidate in Senator George McGovern and a moderate running-mate in Missouri Senator Thomas Eagleton. I knew it was over the day I saw the newspaper headline, "Eagleton Admits to Past Shock Treatments." Electric shock therapy was the standard treatment for depression at the time, but still too shocking for voters to accept. Despite his broken promises, Nixon won 49 states.

The ongoing self-destruction of the GOP presents itself as farce this time, as the least qualified, most rabid anti-intellectuals of the Tea Party are calling the shots. Party members like Mike Huckabee, Haley Barbour, or Mitch Daniels, already see the writing on the wall and are sitting this one out, encouraging carnival freaks like Rick "Man on Dog" Santorum, and secessionist Texas Governor Rick Perry to consider a presidential run. Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, though not yet an official candidate, told Iowa Public Radio that she has received the "calling" from God to run for the nation's highest office and promptly called for the teaching of Creationism in public school science classes. The clueless Mitt Romney has had to run against his own record as Governor of Massachusetts in order to pander to the Republican pit bulls, and Tim Pawlenty is still groping for a message. The desperate, discredited neo-cons are courting Jeb Bush, while disillusioned party elders see a large prospect in high-flying New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. And then there's Sarah Palin.

Palin believes that running for president is like vying for Miss Wasilla, and that a lack of substance can always be overcome by a "cute" personality. Her patriotic bus tour of American historic sights has become the most hilarious rolling disaster since the last Cheech and Chong road movie. Her knife-and-fork pizza summit with Donald Trump in New York City, where she strapped on a gigantic, silver Star of David, was only trumped by her visit to the Old North Church in Boston, where she explained the midnight ride of Paul Revere. According to Palin, Revere "warned the British by ringing those bells and sending up those warning shots and bells that we were gonna' be secure and free." So much for that "One if by land, two if by sea" business. When Fox News pointed out that she blew the Paul Revere story, Palin blamed the media and said it was "a gotcha" question, then insisted that her interpretation was correct. "Part of (Revere's) ride was to warn the British that were already there that 'hey, you're not going to take American arms; you are not going to beat our own well-armed persons individual private militia that we have.'" And this genius is currently polling at the top of prospective Republican presidential wannabees. The Tea Party is correct in one of their notable rallying cries. We do think they're stupid.

By the time the Vietnam War tore the Democratic party apart, they had already lost a previously dependable voter base. They didn't call it the "Solid South" for nothing, but LBJ's fight for civil rights legislation caused him to remark that the south would be lost to the Democrats for a generation. The party's sin was not in alienating white southern voters, but for ever granting political cover to openly racist and segregationist politicians in the first place. Ultimately, the extremists founded aggrieved third parties and ran their belligerent candidates, from Strom Thurmond to George Wallace, who demonized the "gub'ment," and the "pointy-headed intellectuals." Republicans will learn the same hard lesson for ever harboring the Tea Party within their ranks. Should the Republicans nominate an unacceptable "moderate" like Mitt Romney, there is every chance that the Tea Party will morph into a radical third party as early as next year and run their own candidate. Whoever their frothing mouthpiece turns out to be, he or she will only help to re-elect Barack Obama, while simultaneously destroying what remains of the current, anti-government Republican Party. I call that a win-win.

Conan the Scumbag

2011-05-22T01:14:00.016-05:00

There's a reason men reach their sexual peak at 18 while woman don't get there until age 40. It gives men a quarter-century or so to calm down and take the edge off of their sexual frenzy, so that when the time comes for mature sexual activity, they will supposedly have enough self-control not to act like a Schitzu in heat. Comedian Eddie Griffin stated that a man's sexual organ is designed to last about as long as the speed limit, depending on where you live. It's a good thing Jimmy Carter's not still president or we'd all be driving 55. This bizarre rash of post-manopausal, paunchy, middle-agers, participating in sex scandals and fathering love-children well into their sixties, however, illustrates that certain types of men never outgrow their jackrabbit, youthful ways. And while the cornucopia of pills for erectile dysfunction is succeeding in making their penises harder, they are simultaneously making their brains softer. I usually try to abide by that "Judge not," admonition and avoid commenting on the private lives of celebrities. I've lived a rock and roll life, and while most people have a skeleton or two in the closet, I still have red meat hanging in there. But this latest rash of high profile sexual atrocities is giving all men a bad name, and in the words of Paul Newman as "Hud," "Don't go blaming all the dogs just cause one of 'em has fleas."

Last week's arrest of International Monetary Fund director Dominique Strauss-Kahn illustrates the audacity of certain powerful men who have become so used to abusing women with impunity, they feel entitled to act as they wish and the consequences be damned. Strauss-Kahn, or DSK, as the media has dubbed him, has allegedly committed sexual assault on a chambermaid in a pricey New York hotel with a recklessness and aggression too nasty to describe outside a court of law. His first defense was to say that the sex was consensual. The maid walked in while DSK was naked, so he had no choice but to assault the woman. In the hundreds of hotel rooms I have stayed in my life, I have never felt the desire to grope the maid who comes to clean the room. But, of course, DSK is French, and they don't look as unfavorably at sexual "dalliances" as we unsophisticated provincials in the USA. When an old, wrinkled, horny man forces himself upon a servant, we still tend to call it "rape." At first, they put DSK in Rikers Island and strapped him into an anti-suicide vest to keep him from harming himself. A man with an ego so large he thought he could take one to go and get away with it, is not about to kill the person he loves most; himself.

Strauss-Kahn made bail and received one of the sweetest house arrest deals ever. He's in a protected Manhattan high rise with an ankle bracelet while awaiting trial. However, he will be permitted to attend religious services and doctor's appointments, and in addition to family members, he is allowed up to four visitors at a time. He is also restricted from being out between 10pm and 6am. This is punishment? It sounds more like my everyday waking life, minus the ankle bracelet. DSK's lawyers insisted he was not a flight risk despite the fact that he was sitting on a plane when arrested. This is obviously a job for the Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. On television, at least, they aren't so lenient concerning rapists' accommodations. So while DSK sits in a penthouse professing his profound love for his wife, the tabloid media has staked out the residence of the maid and has kept her under virtual house arrest as well. A bidding war has started for photographs of the victim and her neighbors have been bombarded with questioning "journalists." Wasn't there a time when the identity of a rape victim was kept confidential? I suppose with TMZ, Access Hollywood, and other programs devoted to celebrity gossip, that has become a quaint notion from an unenlightened age.

TMZ went wild over the Schwarzenegger revelations that he fathered a child with the family maid and kept it quiet for his tenure as Governor of California. Even in a state accustomed to electing movie stars to public office, this was beyond the pale. TMZ accused the maid of "pursuing Arnold," as if she were just too alluring to resist, but the tawdriness of his "any port in a storm" mentality and the massive deception perpetrated on not only his wife and family, but the California electorate, is unbelievably repugnant. Arnold may have considered himself a Kennedy, but at least JFK had Marilyn Monroe and left the help alone. Schwarzenegger left office with a 20 percent approval rating, so it's a safe bet to say, "He won't be back." The outpouring of sympathy towards Maria Shriver, who had to live a decade with Arnold's love child hanging out at the governor's mansion while the maid continued to work 10-14 more years for the family, has caused Arnold to rethink his current plans. Confident he could return as the "Terminator: The Geriatric Years," all movie projects have been put on hold, including an animated series called "The Governator," in which Schwarzenegger was to be portrayed as a "Superhero living a double life." His partners at Archie Comics and Stan Lee Enterprises felt that this particular "double life" was too unbelievable even for a cartoon.

By now, the list of politicians from both parties involved in marital infidelities or reckless sexual conduct has become common knowledge. Beginning with Bill "Elvis" Clinton, the current list extends from whoremongers like David Vitter and Elliot Spitzer, to homewreckers like John Ensign and John Edwards. And let's not forget Governor Mark Sanford's stroll down the Old Appalachian Trail. My favorite excuse comes from serial philanderer Newt Gingrich, who said his love of country caused him to cheat on his wives. "Driven by how passionately I felt about this country..I worked far too hard and things happened in my life that were not appropriate." A statement that absurd gives me cause to worry about his "passion" for the country. Should he receive the Republican nomination for president, it sounds like he plans to screw us all. Henry Kissinger once said that, "Power was the ultimate aphrodisiac," while the aging professor squired movie starlets half his age about town. It was a ridiculous spectacle, but at least Kissinger wasn't married at the time, and without access to Viagra, the public was spared from imagining Kissinger and Jill St. John "en flagrante delicto." No more. Armed with Cialis, old men have set out like Don Quixote, lance in hand, to conquer the world. A brand new medical study just stated that Viagra can cause hearing loss. At least this gives women a "heads up." Watch out for the ones with the hearing aids.

Show Me the Mullah

2011-05-09T00:17:00.002-05:00

Ya'll know me. I'm usually the raging advocate for liberal causes. But every now and then, an issue arises that seems clear to me, but puts me in the opposite camp from my progressive friends. I vociferously disagree with the president's decision not to release the Osama bin Laden death photo, and I uncomfortably find myself on the same side as Alan Dershowitz, Sarah Palin, and a mess of right-wing Republicans. Conspiracy theories began to sprout the moment bin Laden's death was announced. CIA Director Leon Panetta initially announced that "ultimately, a (proof of death) photograph would be presented to the public," but someone quickly yanked his leash. The government needs to post the photo tomorrow, not for the prurient pleasure of revenge seekers or lovers of gore, but to send a message to jihadists, active or potential, that if you attack the United States, this is the fate that awaits you. Already, the Pakistani residents of Abbottabad are denying that the terror kingpin was ever among them. Even though Al Qaeda acknowledged bin Laden was killed, there are thousands of people who believe that Elvis faked his own death to escape the limelight and lives in Michigan. Hell, there are people that still think Hitler survived WWII and is spending his dotage in Paraguay. And Mr. President, 33% of Republicans think you're a foreigner, and 20% believe you're a Muslim. Why would you think they would take your word for it about bin Laden? These are the same people who believe John F. Kennedy was kept on life support at Bethesda Naval Hospital after his brain went missing.

Speaking of JFK, is there anyone left that has not yet seen the Zapruder film? If I can take watching President Kennedy getting his brains blown out ("back, and to the left"), I can stand a photo of bin Laden with a hole in his head. Yet, the president remains cautious, so as not to further inflame homicidal zealots that hate and want to kill us anyway. These are the savages that beheaded journalist Daniel Pearl and posted it on the internet. When the military caught up with the assassin, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Bush posse blew up the photo of his dead ass, poster size, for the world to see, and there was one less delusional killer making snuff videos in Iraq. We have lived with the horror of Al Qaeda for twenty years and three presidents now. Show them the photo and give them a taste, and if some naughty people want to make computer games and YouTube videos of the graphic image of a dead Osama; oh well. Freedom of the press gets messy sometimes. Were the decision mine, I'd drop copies of the photo from a helicopter over the Pakistanis that harbored him, and send a special 8x10 glossy to Ayman al-Zawahiri with the phrase "Sic Semper Tyrannis" engraved underneath.

The U.S. Navy granted bin Laden more respect in death than he gave to his thousands of victims, but the burial at sea better have been videotaped. When the Fascists were defeated in Italy, they hanged Mussolini, and his wife, upside down in the town square. When Nicolae Ceausescu lost his job as Butcher of Romania, the photo of his bloody corpse finally gave surcease to his suffering subjects. The president claims publishing a dead Osama picture will cause an "incitement to violence." Is he kidding? The Shia and Sunni in Iraq are killing each other for sport. If it's our troops Obama is concerned about, go ahead and bring them home. The drone strikes are effective and, despite their vow to avenge the death of bin Laden, Al Qaeda's collective sphincter just tightened several notches. The president says he doesn't want to give the terrorists an iconic image to exploit, but he's a bit late for that. Think of Osama and the turbaned image is already imprinted in your mind. The Bolivian Army was forced to publish pictures of the bullet-riddled body of Che Guevara on a slab to prove that he was dead, but that's not the iconic image people wear on their T-Shirts.

I was once a turn-the-other-cheek pacifist, until age and experience convinced me that some people are so obtuse, the only way to get your point across is with a smack upside the head. My Georgia in-laws will forgive me for referencing General William Tecumseh Sherman's quote; "Make war so terrible (and) make them so sick of war that generations would pass away before they would again appeal to it." President Truman followed the Sherman example to end the war against Japan. Despite the horror of war, no amount of diplomacy will dissuade a generation raised on the glory of the mujahedeen from ceasing their hostilities against the West. The U.S. created and armed this monster to fight the Russians during the Reagan era. It's only fitting that our soldiers should also destroy them and their charismatic leader. Thanks to the fresh efficiency of the CIA and military, Al Qaeda has been reduced to a bunch of bitter, womenless men, riding dirt bikes and playing guerrilla in the mountains of the Hindu Kush. Motor scooters can't cross an ocean. Unquestionably, some deranged individuals will try to commit some new atrocity on U.S. soil, but the threat of bin Laden's Al Qaeda is essentially over. We have their Rolodex. Since the "Arab Spring" is sweeping the Middle East, the U.S. has an opportunity to embrace a new generation, disenchanted with despots and jihad that offer only death and despair.

Nip these cancerous conspiracies in the bud by publishing the post-mortem photograph. Even then, some people will still believe it never happened, just as others won't accept Obama's birth certificate. If this drags on, Donald Trump will insist on seeing a "death certificate." Traditionally hawkish GOP legislators are suddenly questioning the legality of the targeted killing, and the sloppy way the administration rolled out the narrative only aided their cause. They raised the questions: did bin Laden hide behind his 18 year old wife? Was he holding something or reaching for a weapon? Personally, I don't care if he had the remote control or his dick in his hand - good shot guys. Maybe I've lived in Memphis so long, a bit of redneck has rubbed off on me, but I've come to agree with my Texas cousins' aphorism that "some people just need killin'." After the destruction of American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, plus hideous acts of terror in London, Madrid, Mumbai, and Indonesia, no one in the world had it coming more than bin Laden. And when they got him, he was planning a 9/11 tenth anniversary attack on U.S. railways. Fuck him, post the head shot. I trust and believe President Obama, but if my position is conservative, I may as well quote Ronald Reagan, who once famously said, "Trust, but verify."

Stalingrad on Lake Michigan

2011-04-25T03:12:00.002-05:00

"Benton Harbor, Michigan is like many rust-belt cities which have lost all of their manufacturing plants. Half the residents live below the poverty line and the town of 10,000 has lost population since that last census. Across Lake Michigan from Chicago, Benton Harbor is half of a "twin cities" combo with neighboring St. Joseph. The "twins" couldn't look more different, however. Benton Harbor is 92% African American and impoverished; St. Joseph is 90% white and affluent. While the nation's attention was on the war against public unions in Wisconsin, newly elected Michigan Republican Governor Rick Snyder has chosen Benton Harbor as the test case for his "financial martial law" bill. Snyder proposed that any municipality deemed economically unfit be taken over by a state appointed "emergency manager," with the power to dissolve contracts and replace or dismiss locally elected officials. The notion is laughably unconstitutional on its face, but the Michigan State Legislature passed the bill anyway and the Governor has already designated his first "manager," who has taken over the township of Benton Harbor. The decision-making power of the City Council has been suspended. Elected officials are allowed to hold meetings, only they are no longer allowed to govern. The state legislature cocked and loaded the gun and the governor pulled the trigger. He killed Democracy. If you thought the citizen protests in Wisconsin were impressive, wait until this load of neo-Republicanism hits the fan in Lansing.

Snyder is part of a cabal of new Republican governors, including Walker of Wisconsin, Kasich in Ohio, and Scott in Florida, who are waging war on the working class. Emboldened by a congressional majority and backed by the Tea Party, the neophyte governors entered political office with a greater desire to impose a political philosophy than to serve the people, and this bait and switch has caused their approval ratings to plummet. Yet they continue to serve their corporate masters and pass legislation punishing the poor. In the name of deficit reduction, Gov Snyder has proposed deep cuts in school funding and favors eliminating the state's $600 per child tax credit. At the same time, he has called for tax cuts of 1.73 billion dollars for business. In hapless Benton Harbor, meanwhile, the Whirlpool corporate headquarters still provides executive positions for the few while the people have lost their plant. With no powerful voices to oppose it, the public lakefront has been privatized as part of a luxury golf development, backed by Whirlpool. Since the Michigan jobless rate stands at 10.7%, I'm certain they'll need some caddies.

Governor Snyder's previous job was founder and CEO of an Ann Arbor venture capital fund, which made him very wealthy. His choice for Benton Harbor's "emergency manager," was Joseph Harris, formerly Chief Financial Officer for the city of Detroit, a dubious distinction. Harris' decree, stripping power from elected officials in favor of his fiat, were reminiscent of an old Commissar sending a politburo apparatchik to tend to a provincial problem. The township takeover has caused sufficient uproar for the ACLU to file several Freedom of Information Act requests over the legality of the act and the governor's alleged collusion with lobbyists. The Michigan ACLU stated that 100 local governments were in a state of "fiscal watch," which has not slowed "manager" Joe Harris, who has added the Detroit School District to the state's list of distressed assets, enabling the governor to appoint an additional manager with the power to void any and all union contracts. This is the antithesis of the smaller, less intrusive government favored by real conservatives, yet you don't see any Tea Party or Fox News rallies protesting the elimination of representative democracy.

Although Governor Snyder has stated his focus will be on budget issues, the state legislature has joined with new Republican super-majorities elsewhere in an effort to restrict women's reproductive rights. Michigan legislators have proposed 17 bills since January concerning abortion or public funding for organizations like Planned Parenthood. This perfectly mirrors the federal government. While creating all those new jobs, the Republican House of Representatives has still managed to introduce an astounding 916 bills over a woman's right to control her own uterus. Those bills are going nowhere, but the Michigan statehouse has a two-thirds majority of radical Republicans, giving them the power to put any issue of their choosing on the ballot. The National Organization of Women has mobilized, as well as a group called Michigan Citizens United, which has started a Facebook page in their efforts to collect the sufficient number of signatures to petition for a recall of the governor. Snyder responded by adding the cities of Pontiac and Ecorse to the list of distressed places in need of an "emergency manager."

Ordinarily, I would enjoy watching the Republican Party self-immolate. Hell, I'd even bring the marshmallows. But this drastic overreach by a handful of ideological power zombies is not just a danger to working people or distressed municipalities, it's corrosively un-American. And it is happening in state legislatures across the country and done in stealth, lest the constant news gaze upon Washington, D.C. be diverted by actions on the periphery. The GOP majority Tennessee General Assembly just passed a bill prohibiting the use of the words "gay" or "homosexual" in elementary schools, but if the new Governor should send his man to Memphis to dissolve our elected city government, I might have to be up in the capital building in Nashville creating a ruckus. In Michigan, the people voted for a CEO-led government and they got a centralized body to make decisions for the state, a totalitarian figure-head for a leader, corporate lobbyists, anti-union propaganda, and political coercion from a radical majority. Back in the thirties, we used to have a name for that kind of governing: Fascism. Our parents and grandparents fought a war against it. Remember?

Budgetary Buffoonery

2011-04-11T00:21:00.003-05:00

Does anyone believe that this latest political impasse that came within an hour of padlocking the government actually had anything to do with the budget? If so, I have some shares of National Public Radio that I'd like to sell you. I know, it's not a private company. Yet. Just give them time. It's typical for the Republicans to begin eviscerating social programs when they assume power, but this Tea Party uprising is starting to resemble The Lord of the Flies, when the bullies victimize the weak until the grown-ups arrive. How else to explain the willingness to hold our soldiers' paychecks hostage to the government funding of Planned Parenthood?

This supposed attempt at reducing the federal deficit was a congressional comedy from beginning to end, starring John Boehner as the substitute teacher in a juvenile corrections facility. The stated intent was to create jobs and strengthen the economy, but the Tea Party novices muscled away the wheel of the bus and turned the discussion into all abortion, all the time. The insane crusade against Planned Parenthood in the midst of a budget crisis revealed the Tea Party Republicans as the zealots for their social and moral agenda that they are. Civically challenged Indiana Rep. Mike Pence took to the House floor to declare that Republicans were willing to shut down the government if the Democrats didn't "respect our values," while outside, Tea Party activists chanted, "Cut it or shut it." Arizona Sen. John Kyl addressed the rally saying, "If you want an abortion, you go to Planned Parenthood, and that's well over 90% of what (they) do." In truth, 96% of the organizations' activities consist of cancer screenings, STD or STI testing, contraception, counselling, pregnancy testing and pre-natal care. Abortions are referred to medical professionals since the Hyde Amendment already forbids public funds for that purpose. Republicans lied, Democrats enabled them, and Margaret Sanger just rolled over in her grave.

It's difficult to imagine that a scant 11 years ago, the U.S. had a balanced budget and a federal surplus of $230 billion. "But 9/11 changed everything," the argument goes. It certainly did. 19 homicidal men, armed with nothing more than sharp objects and an audacious plan, attacked landmarks of finance and government with hi-jacked domestic airliners, and caused this nation to go berserk. The Pentagon budget soared, our military invaded and occupied two countries, and our president told the nation to go shopping while Wall Street looted the treasury. That's why we run a $12 trillion deficit for which China is holding the marker. I'm no economist, but it seems the logical thing to do is extract ourselves from the entire, misguided fiscal and military morass we find ourselves in and disassemble the failed Bush policies that put us there. And that first means ending the two shooting wars we are currently fighting and bringing home our troops, not just from Afghanistan and Iraq, but from Germany, Japan, and Korea as well. The U.S. spends as much on defense as the rest of the world combined. The Bipartisan Poling Center recommends the reduction of our armed forces by 275,000 troops, and a Barney Frank/Ron Paul led congressional committee found that reducing our military presence in Europe and Asia by 1/3, would save $347 billion. Currently, we spend seven times as much as China, which is in second place.

The budget battle was like a bantamweight preliminary to the main event; the next budget. Both parties are sniping over earmarks and government funding, while their proposed reductions to the deficit is the equivalent of removing two M&Ms from the deluxe-size bag. I would like to recommend some large cuts that no one has yet addressed, beginning with restoring the tax code to Clinton era levels when nobody was complaining. This includes closing the loopholes for American corporations who make their profits here and park their money in overseas tax havens like the Cayman Islands. Conglomerates like General Electric would no longer be able to pay zero taxes whatsoever, which just happened. And a company like Transocean, responsible for the BP Oil disaster, would pay more in taxes and less in bonuses to executives for the year's "outstanding safety performance." A non-partisan study estimated $1 trillion in annual revenue if the government taxed corporate earnings channelled overseas. So, what cuts do they want to make to balance out the absence of corporate funds; the Environmental Protection Agency, HUD, financing for high-speed rail, heating subsidies for the elderly, and school lunches for poor children. Why not dismantle the whole Bush-era, Germanic sounding, Department of Homeland Security, instead?

As for Medicare, anyone who watches TV sees fraud roll by everyday, especially in the ads for electric scooters for the elderly. Alongside the Hoveround and the Scooter Store, there are numerous companies offering their guarantees of mobility "at little or no cost to you." This means with the right doctor's note, you too could be doing wheelies on the lip of the Grand Canyon. I might enjoy a free scooter too, but I don't think the country can afford to give one to everybody. Maybe a wheelchair, but you would still have to push. It's a Medicare scam, pure and simple, and the doctors get a little taste too. Same with the automatic stairs, and specialty home medical equipment, and the excessive testing of well insured patients in clinics and hospitals. All you need to end it is honest oversight of the agency. And wouldn't it be an altruistic gesture if billionaires donated their Social Security checks to the truly needy? Before horse-whipping the poor, these blinkered budget hawks should remember that our Afghan adventure is costing us $10 billion a month, and the military budget is greater than federal spending on education, Medicare, or interest on the debt, combined. Without the expense of empire and a remade military for the 21st century, this nation can find the way to escape from this dark economic period in the same way we have time and again; prosper out of it.

Sputnik Soars Again

2011-03-27T06:41:00.002-05:00

Club Clearpool was the scene for the 1964 Les Debs dance, and the girls had hired Randy and the Radiants to supply the music. At evening's end, there was an argument between the club owner and the band over what time to stop. He had flipped the lights on fifteen minutes early and we were contracted to play to the hour. When all the party-goers were herded out, a tussle broke out between band members, the 40 year old owner, and his two greaser bouncers, one of whom followed me outside and punched me while my hands were filled with musical equipment. I was just 16, and when I entered my parents' home with a bloody shirt and a busted lip, my mother lost her mind and my father called the police. We went to court, where all three received stiff fines for assault and battery and malicious mischief, which would have been great were we not scheduled to appear at Club Clearpool again the next weekend. This time, I hired a security guard with a sidearm to join the band, but when we set up on the stage facing the concession stand on the opposite wall, the same three men were glaring at us with blood in their eyes.

Suddenly, the front door crashed open and hit the wall with a bang and in walked Sputnik Monroe, doing the Beale Street Strut, followed by our young, DJ manager, Johnny Dark. The entire room erupted and stopped the dance cold, while Monroe greeted a stream of teenagers before bounding onstage. When the cheering subsided, Sputnik took the microphone and said, "I'll tell you people what I said at the Tennessee State Prison last week. I couldn't say, 'ladies and gentlemen,' because there were no ladies, and if they were in there, they sure weren't gentlemen, so I'll just say, 'Damn, it's good to be here." Then like Babe Ruth at bat, he pointed directly at the concession stand saying, "And I want to tell everybody," he paused for dramatic effect and jerked a thumb back over his shoulder in the band's direction, "These boys are Sputnik's boys, and if you mess with them, you're messing with Sputnik." Thanks to Johnny Dark, Sputnik took a rare Saturday night off to attend a teenage party and put the fear of God into some bullies. The following morning, the club owner called and apologised for the entire mess, telling me that he had fired his two associates and we were always welcome to play at Clearpool. I have been one of "Sputnik's Boys," ever since.

Like others of the Mouseketeer Generation who grew up in Memphis, I was addicted to live, Saturday morning, television wrestling, and especially fascinated by the blood feud between good-guy Billy Wicks and the evil Sputnik. After one particularly violent encounter, Sputnik swore revenge at the Monday night matches at the downtown Ellis Auditorium. I had never been to the live matches before and I begged my father to take me. He said, "Call your grandfather. He loves wrestling," and my eyes widened. I couldn't believe my immigrant grandfather, with his continental manners and ever-present jacket and tie could be a closet wrestling fan. We drove downtown in a taxi and got ringside seats to view the mayhem. I watched fascinated as toothless men screamed epithets at Tojo Yamamoto and howled at the shoulder length hair of Mario Galento, but the main attraction was Wicks and Monroe. When Sputnik entered, the arena burst into open hostility with boos and calls of "Commie," and "Skunky," referring to the white streak in Sputnik's hair. Wicks arrived like the Golden Boy. It was a two-out-of-three fall marathon match which Sputnik won by cheating. He hit Wicks with a foreign object and held his trunks while applying the pin, but the referee raised his arm in victory anyway. I was aghast that he could get away with it, and it was left to my grandfather to explain to me that sometimes the good guys have to lose for the sake of the gate.

As a Billy Wicks fan, I could never have imagined myself 15 years later, hanging out at the Phillips Studios on Madison, sharing a joint with the evil Sputnik. He told me that if you wanted to smoke reefer in the 50s, you would ask someone to "come help me mow my yard," and they referred to marijuana cigarettes as "muggles," to the surprise of Harry Potter fans. It was the early 70s, and Sputnik was frustrated because he couldn't get the fans to hate him like before. I said that in these times, everything was upside down and what the fans truly despised were the hippies preaching peace and love. My friend Skip Ousley, a tall, black man, suggested that Sputnik find a black wrestler to tag-team with. The next Saturday on studio wrestling, Sputnik appeared with Norvell Austin, also with a white streak in his hair and calling himself "The Black Panther." Their hapless opponents were tangled in the ring ropes when Sputnik retrieved a bucket of black paint from ringside and poured it over their heads. Grabbing the announcers microphone, Sputnik declared, "Black is Beautiful." Norvell shouted, "White is beautiful," and linking arms they said in unison, "Black and white together is beautiful." The next time I saw Sputnik, he was a happy man and proclaimed, "They hate me again."

Last Thursday was declared Sputnik Monroe Day by the mayors of both Shelby County and the city of Memphis, and Representative Steve Cohen read a declaration into the Congressional Record commending the late professional wrestler for his role in desegregating public accomodations. The honor was to coincide with the premier of the new documentary, "Memphis Heat: The True Story of Memphis Wrasslin'," and it was such a success, I would like to offer a suggestion. Make Sputnik Monroe Day an annual event, and then the congressman can take it nationally. We need this, people. Directly on the heels of Valentines Day, where in order to express love, you are required to cough it up for cards, candy, and flowers, there needs to be a day when you're allowed to tell somebody to kiss your ass. (Not you, sweetheart. I'm talking about someone else). Then, every March 24th, in Sputnik's honor, you are entitled to go in and spill your boss' coffee in his lap and smash him over the head with a folding chair (what would pro wrestling be without the folding chair?). But listen and listen good, pally. Anyone who recalls a jam-packed Mid-South Coliseum with Jerry "The King" Lawler, Bill "Superstar" Dundee, "Handsome" Jimmy Valiant, or the infamous antics of Andy Kaufman on the bill, and doesn't go to see this film, is just another ignorant pencil-neck geek.

State of the Unions

2011-03-13T23:45:00.018-05:00

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Is it starting to become clear yet? The totally unnecessary chaos in Wisconsin should be a revelatory moment, for anyone who wishes to learn, that working people have no business in the Republican party. Rookie Governor Scott Walker's blitzkrieg against collective bargaining rights for public employees is just the sort of thing that happens when an ideologue is elected who serves a political philosophy rather than the people who placed him in power. It also reveals the Janus face of the Republican Party. One face is of the social conservatives, dominated by the Tea Party, whose pro-fetus, anti-tax sentiments are stoked and inflamed by the other face of the party; the corporate side that's in the pocket of Wall Street and beholden to their campaign financiers. Their marching orders include strip-mining a century's worth of progress in labor relations earned by the bloodshed and struggle of working people. And if you think that the freshman GOP governors are only concerned with public unions, think again. This new breed of radical, right-wing corporatists believe they've been given a mandate to repeal the New Deal.

Scott Walker exposed the whole scheme to a prank phone-caller identifying himself as oil billionaire and Republican donor David Koch. Walker blathered on for twenty minutes about his union-busting plans, hatched in closed-door secrecy with a loose cabal of freshly sworn GOP governors, including those in Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Florida, and New Jersey, who were prepared to follow Wisconsin's lead in stripping worker's rights under the guise of financial necessity. They used a budget crises to attack the unions just like George Bush used 9/11 to attack Iraq. The Democratic minority fled Madison for Chicago to deprive the union-busters of the quorum needed to ram their "budget repair bill" through the legislature. Soon they were joined by fugitive Democratic legislators from Indiana for exactly the same reason, causing Illinois to resemble Canada during the sixties as a refuge for conscientious objectors. Walker and the Wisconsin senate removed the pesky "budget" references from the bill and voted with one-party rule to strip public unions of the right to collectively bargain. The result? Four straight weeks of public protests, 100,000 people in the streets, and an active effort, already underway, to recall the perpetrators like rancid peanut butter.

The stealth campaign against unions, disregarding decades of progress, was done with such a cavalier attitude, it caused me to question the scholarship of Governor Scott Walker. He is a preacher's son, who attended Marquette University where he ran for Student Government president, but lost to a write-in candidate after being cited for violations of campaign rules. Walker attended college for four years, but dropped-out without earning a degree. His Milwaukee mentor, however, was Reince Priebus, current chairman of the Republican National Committee and the man credited with laying the groundwork for Walker's election. Priebus was the seed from which the anti-union crusade germinated and he promised Walker the complete support of the national organization. I realize making sport of someones name, like Hussein, is the cheapest of shots, but Preibus' parents set him up for this. He's like Johnny Cash's "Boy Named Sue," whose rogue father gave him the name to toughen him up. Reince Priebus sounds like a bulletin placed by management on the wall of a restaurant bathroom reminding employees what is required of them before returning to work. Since Priebus' elevation from Wisconsin Republican Chairman to national director, his old Milwaukee crony, Walker, is simply doing the bidding of the RNC.

When the Republicans came into power in the midterm elections, they promised their focus would be entirely on job creation and budget cuts. So, what has been on the agenda? In the House of Representatives, bills have been introduced to restrict abortion, curtail same-sex marriage, expand gun carry rights, including a proposal to allow firearms on the floor of Congress, reducing the corporate tax rate, and amending the National Labor Reform Act to get rid of the secret ballot. The focused attack on the Teacher's Union is meant to weaken a traditional Democratic voting bloc. By claiming that teachers' contracts are too generous, even after Wisconsin educators agreed to negotiate, Republicans have declared open warfare on funding the public school system. I used to believe these ideological slaves wanted to go back to the 1950s, but I was wrong. They want to return to the Nineteenth Century, when the gentry could afford to educate their children and the poor worked at manual labor for generation after generation, until unions insisted on child labor laws. Any job creation in there?

The Wisconsin union-busting bill will surely be overturned as a violation of open meeting statutes, as will the bill just passed in Michigan, giving their governor the right to declare martial law in a fiscal emergency, and the power to dismiss a town's democratically elected officials and appoint a "special manager" to right the municipality's imagined economic wrongs. Several Michigan cities were known as "company towns" before, but the corporations didn't get to own them outright. The fictional David Koch's easy access to Scott Walker proved the complicity between corporate America and the Republican governors. Only, it sounded more like Pinocchio reporting back to his puppet masters. While working-class, Republican foot-soldiers rail about taxes and immigration, men like the Kochs, Karl Rove, and Dick Armey move them around like rooks on a chess board, using and discarding them when necessary. This battle over public unions should have particular poignance for Memphians. It was 1968, when then Mayor Henry Loeb refused to negotiate with a public union he considered to be illegal, forcing a strike by the city's sanitation workers. I wonder if the GOP governors even realize that the right for public employees to unionize was the fight for which Dr. Martin Luther King gave his life.

Ka-Daffy

2011-02-27T01:18:00.062-06:00

His tribe has been in power for thirty years, with plans to transfer authority from father to son. Yet despite the public disfavor and condition of his country, he continues to make personal appearances. He is responsible for the deaths of thousands of his own people and countless others, including civilians, by bullets and bombs. He routinely used detention without charge or trial, and torture against his enemies. He ordered electronic surveillance and spying on his countrymen and hired mercenaries to fight his foes. Even after falling from favor, he still believes that he's some sort of religious mystic who was placed in power by God, from whom he receives personal instruction, and he speaks in gibberish that no one else can understand. He is delusional, militaristic, and totally out of touch with the people of his country. During his reign, the elite prospered while the poor starved and went homeless. Anyone with such a record must be called to account for his criminal behavior, and George W. Bush certainly has a lot to answer for.

Earlier this month, Bush cancelled a planned trip to Switzerland, where he was to make a speech, amid calls for protest and threats of arrest. In this country, while the Tea Party runs amok, making the most of their fifteen minutes in the spotlight with bizarre attacks on the current president's legitimacy, human rights groups around the world have stated that they plan to seek arrest warrants whenever and wherever Bush travels outside the United States. Since Bush admitted in his autobiography to the authorization of "waterboarding" detainees at Guantanamo, the respected organization Amnesty International has said enough evidence now exists to open a criminal investigation. Yet there he was, yukking it up with Jerry Jones in the owner's sky-box at the Super Bowl, munching hot dogs in a billion dollar football palace where millionaires play, while the rest of the populace struggles to recover from economic disaster. It was a portrait of the Bush years in a snapshot.

Speaking of war criminals, Dick Cheney was the surprise guest at this month's annual CPAC Convention in Washington, where he presented the conservative organization's coveted "Defender of the Constitution" award to his old foxhole buddy, Donald Rumsfeld. There was enough irony in the hall to build a bridge. Cheney entered the room to the blaring of Tina Turner's "Simply the Best," reminding music fans that Cheney is an abuser like Ike was. Jr.Walker & the All Stars' "Shotgun" would have been a better choice. The old-boy reunion was spoiled by a crowd of libertarian Rand Paul supporters who had just listened to the new senator from Kentucky call for cuts in the Defense budget to loud jeering from the crowd. Instead of welcoming Cheney like a returning hero, they shouted, "War criminal," and "Where's Bin Laden?" at him, while the true patriots reverted back to the imaginative chant of "USA," to drown out their opponents. Because of a new heart device that constantly pumps blood, Cheney technically no longer has a pulse. (Insert your own joke here.) The ultimate irony is that the former vice president may need a heart transplant, but may be too old to qualify. I wonder who appoints Dick Cheney's "Death Panel?"

Donald Rumsfeld emerged from relative seclusion to go on tour promoting his new memoir, "Known and Unknown." The man Salon.com dubbed the "Architect of Terror," has been met by protesters at every stop and has shown a predilection for musings about meeting Elvis rather than the falsifying of intelligence to sell a war. Rumsfeld's appearance in Orange County, California was planned around a special banquet costing $500 per person, or $1000 if you wanted to meet the secretary. The "Premium Seating Package," including two seats at the head table, an additional table for ten, and a "VIP reception" following the dinner, cost a meager $25,000; chump change to an O.C. Republican. Earlier, Rumsfeld had accepted the "Victory of Freedom" award from the Richard Nixon Foundation at a dinner at the Nixon library in Yorba Linda, California. Over 200 people payed "hundreds of dollars" for the privilege of breaking bread with the man called, "The worst Secretary of Defense in history." And that was by John McCain.

It's The Godfather's most dramatic scene. Michael Corleone arranges for the elimination of the heads of New York's five crime families while he is in a church, standing godfather to Connie and Carlo's baby. After the ceremony, he tells his brother-in-law, Carlo, to go back to the house and wait for his call. The unsuspecting sap is on the phone when Michael enters with the look of the Grand Inquisitor on his face. Michael explains that he has just "settled all family business," and utters the chilling words, "You have to answer for Santino, Carlo." Thus, forcing the unfortunate turncoat to pay a long-delayed price for his role in the assassination of Sonny Corleone, and proving that justice, though not always swift, is inevitable. The invasion and occupation of Iraq, and the subsequent horror that followed, was a war crime. If we are to continue as a nation of laws rather than men, it is essential that the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld troika be told, "You have to answer for Santino." The lives of 4,757 American soldiers and a half-million Iraqis demand it. Democracy may be sprouting in the Middle East, but only when the era of privatized privilege passes from this land can we look ourselves in the mirror and ask,"What have we done?"

Just Sing the Damn Song

2011-02-13T01:24:00.013-06:00

So what if Christina Aguilera botched the lyrics to the National Anthem before the Super Bowl. Sometimes, when it occurs to you that a billion or so people are scrutinizing your every breath, it can make you a mite nervous. I enjoyed the letter to the editor, however, from the Collierville woman who was so incensed, she wrote that Aguilera's error was "a spit in the eye to all I hold dear." I hope no one ever shows her a video of the performance by Rosanne Barr. What offended me was not her messing up the words (those are some tough lyrics to sing), but the tortured, moaning manner in which she chose to sing the song. As soon as she sang the first line, I told Melody, "Here we go again." The "Star-Spangled Banner" is just one of those songs that doesn't lend itself to a breathy, orgasmic, reading. It sounded like Christina and the flag needed to get a room. The lyrics seemed like an afterthought.

Not that I'm opposed to artistic interpretation of the National Anthem, mind you. Ever since Jose Feliciano drove the puritans insane at the 1968 World Series, artists have been putting their own touches to the anthem. Several inspiring versions have been performed since then, from Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock to Whitney Houston at the 1991 Super Bowl; or the greatest version OF ALL TIME; Marvin Gaye at the 1983 NBA All Star game. These artists had the one ingredient lacking in so many contemporary singers' anthem attempts; heart. As good a technical singer as Aguilera is, no amount of vocal pyrotechnics can overcome a soulless performance. Thanks to shows like American Idol, where Americans try to sound just like their idols, these wild exercises in vocal gymnastics are all we ever hear any more. I can still hear the echoes of my father saying, "You call that singing?" after hearing Elvis, but as an aspiring singer myself, I can say with some authority that note-scaling, over-singing has saturated the current music scene to an extent that it's become farcical. No one even needs to sing on key anymore. They have something called an auto-tuner that will make you sound like an emasculated Darth Vader, but it will be on pitch.

The musical term for this stylized vocalization is called "melisma." Simply put, it's singing a single syllable using multiple notes. It's beginnings go back to the madrigal, but in popular music, "melisma" originated in the black church. All the great, church-based, soul singers could manage it to an extent, but the master was Bobby "Blue" Bland. I used to study his records like a mathematics textbook to figure out how he sang like that. In the song, "I'll Take Care of You," he sings the single word, "I," with a five-note drop. I know, I counted. Listening to Bland's style taught me a variation of melisma that, although not authentic, is better than most white folks. Great singers also know when to leave it out, lest it become a distraction. There are many artists with melismatic abilities like Mavis Staples, Usher, even Justin Bieber. But no one really overdid it until Patti LaBelle, the Queen of Over-sing. Listening to Patti wears me out because she tries too hard to be over the top, all of the time. And she does this bird thing with flapping arms that's not nearly as entertaining as when Rufus Thomas did it. It proves that melisma is best applied with a fine brush, and not the paint roller that LaBelle uses.

Blame the neurotic, microphone hand-twitch on Whitney, but the current phase of female vocal abuse can be traced back to Mariah Carey. She is to contemporary women singers what Joni Mitchell was to the 70s- unavoidable. Mariah's pipes inspired a thousand imitators until a slew of top female singers all began sounding just the same. Which brings us to the 2011 Grammy Awards. This year's show began with a quintet of chanteuses paying tribute to the still-kicking Soul Queen, Aretha Franklin. Aside from the immensely talented Jennifer Hudson, the rest of the pack, including the caterwauling Ms. Aguilera, illustrated just how far we have fallen in our definition of "diva" from Aretha's gold standard. Lady GaGa arrived at the ceremonies inside of a turquoise, oblong pod carried by throne bearers, just daring critics to say that she laid an egg. But the harshest criticism for GaGa was reserved for the similarities between her new song, "Born This Way," and Madonna's "Express Yourself," from 1989. Having a longer memory, I can tell you both songs sound just like "I Got the Music In Me," from the Kiki Dee Band, 1974. You're welcome.

Aside from Justin Bieber being punished for his success and shut out of the awards, the most surprising Grammy moment was the upset win for Album of the Year, by Arcade Fire. I'll own up to being so unhip that this group wasn't even on my radar until their Grammy performance, but I always enjoy seeing a Yoko Ono tribute band get a break. As far as the ladies, it seemed like it was Rihanna's night, and she wasn't even up for an award. Leave it to Babs, though, to show that a great singer doesn't need to hit her highest note in every verse, and is able to thrill you with her tone, not how many notes she can cram into a measure of music. Younger singers would be wise to look to Streisand and realize that sometimes it's better to just sing the damn song. The two other most infectious performances of the evening came from Bob Dylan and a show-stopping Mick Jagger. Even with all the fresh, new interpreters of song, leave it to a trio of septuagenarians to show 'em how to rock the house. And poor Christina Aguilera needs to learn that after milking that final, excruciating, drop of melisma from a song's ending, try not to fall on your ass. That's what the audience is supposed to do.

Sarah and Michele's High School Reunion

2011-01-31T00:51:00.058-06:00

Many great representatives of American culture have come from Minnesota. They gave us Bob Dylan and Prince; Rod Carew and Fran Tarkenton; The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Minnesota Fats. Long a bastion of progressivism, great statesmen like Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale have been elected to congress by Minnesotans. Lately, however, things have taken a turn for the weird. In the "Land of 10,000 Lakes," citizens seemed immune to celebrity until they went a little crazy and elected Jesse "The Body" Ventura as governor. When that experiment was done, they elected comedian and former Saturday Night Live alumnus, Al Franken, to the Senate. In the case of the Harvard educated Franken, however, he proved to be a viable candidate because he was good enough, smart enough, and, doggone it, people liked him. I am at a loss, however, to explain how an electorate goes from Hubert Humphrey to Michele Bachmann, unless some outside, sinister force is at work.

In Don DeLillo's classic novel "White Noise," he describes an incident called the "Airborne Toxic Event," a chemical spill from a rail car that makes townspeople go insane. This fictional account is close to describing some of Minnesota's real-life disasters, like the I-35 bridge collapse into the Mississippi River in 2007; or the 57 separate oil pipeline spills since 2000; or even the severe storms and massive flooding that required the president to declare parts of the state a "disaster area," in 2010. Even Minnesota's loons were threatened by the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Whatever the cause, something has made these hardy Midwesterners turn to Michele Bachmann to represent them in congress, and she acts more like a contestant for Homecoming Queen than a legislator. It used to be said that politics was just show business for ugly people. In truth, congress is one big high school do-over, with the same adolescent jealousies and pettiness that we find in some pre-teens. Only now, their hissy fits are putting us all in jeopardy. The quote, "Carbon dioxide is portrayed as harmful, but there isn't even one study that can be produced that shows that carbon dioxide is a harmful gas," could have been straight from DeLillo, had Michele Bachmann not said it first.

A singular event in American history took place after the President's last State of the Union address. Michele Bachmann, the self-appointed Miss Tea Party, gave a rebuttal to the official Republican rebuttal to the president's speech. CNN was the only network to elevate this to news, and thank goodness. Bachmann stared into a computer camera for an online response seen by a few thousand people, while the rest of us got to watch her gaze off, slightly to the left, and appear as if she were waiting for Peter Pan to return and whisk her off to Neverland. With charts and graphs, Bachmann told of the 16,500 IRS officers being prepared to enforce Obamacare and claimed that what was really needed is medical malpractice reform, something Obama had announced only an hour before. More astounding was the footage of Bachmann addressing Iowans for Tax Relief only the night before. Speaking with hushed reverence about the founding fathers, Bachmann claimed, "(They) worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States." No they didn't. Half were slave owners, and anyone who ever took a history course knows that. She lauded John Quincy Adams, who was not a founder, but proves, at least, that she saw "Amistad."

Among Bachmann's other lies; she has accused the census of being a government plot to round up dissidents, like her, and put them into internment camps, and she began the canard that Obama was "spending over $200 million a day," on a state visit to India. She advocated eliminating the minimum wage and suggested $400 billion in cuts for veterans' benefits as an austerity measure. Michele was a backbencher until Sarah Palin proved that venomous rhetoric and a pretty smile will get you noticed, even if the professional pundits refer to you as a "Bubblehead." Despite having called for an investigation into Democratic congressmen to see which ones were "anti-American," John Boehner appointed Bachmann to the National Intelligence Committee, and she has already visited Iowa to explore the possibility of a presidential run in 2012. A pretty face and nice smile may win you "most popular" in junior high, but when you get to congress, it's time to put away the pageant sash and work to serve others. Instead, she has said that Obama is turning us "into a nation of slaves," and called health insurance reform, "The crown jewel of socialism,"

Watching all the media attention Bachmann was receiving, Sarah Palin got "all wee-weed up," and leaped into the fray. In an interview on Fox News, Palin claimed that the launching of Sputnik in 1957 was the ultimate cause for the Soviet Union's downfall in 1991, and that the Russians "won the space race." More ghastly, she noticed that Obama's phrase from his State of the Union, "Win the Future," could be abbreviated WTF, which fits well into her Twitter mindset, but not for a serious candidate for high office. Yet she continued to repeat it several more times, including on her Facebook page, oblivious to the 90% of Americans who approved of the president's speech. Between Michele and Sarah, we could be headed for a loser-leaves-town cage match to determine who will be the undisputed Tea Party Princess. Meanwhile, when did stupidity become a virtue in public life? Before a law school graduate becomes an attorney, he must pass the bar exam. Shouldn't we at least have an elementary civics exam for all potential legislators? That might weed out half the know-nothing, yet ambitious politicians of today, including "Dumb and Dumber."

Second Amendment Remedies

2011-01-16T07:15:00.023-06:00

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. Second Amendment

This nation's founding father's were wise, but they weren't clairvoyant. A "well regulated Militia" in 1787, had more to do with keeping the old musket cleaned in case the Minutemen needed reassembly, than an individuals right to possess more firepower than a standing army. The framers' intention was to assure the rural populace that, in league with a regulated militia, they had the power to beat back an insurrection or invasion by force of arms. Not even Ben Franklin, however, could have foreseen a semi-automatic assault rifle in every closet, or statewide militia organizations that serve more to intimidate citizens than protect them. Certainly, the founders did not wish for a paranoid "Wild West" mentality to grip the entire country with regular occurrences of indiscriminate gun violence and murder. Yet, the Second Amendment has become the Rosetta Stone for conservatives, untouchable to modern interpretation, exploited by the NRA, and used as a shield for the explosion of gun sales during the past two years of the Obama presidency.

That's why the obscene violence visited upon the citizens of Tucson in recent days was a shock, but not a surprise. This country has become so accustomed to spree killings, the only news value is the body count, or, as in Arizona, the prominence of the victims. The documented mental condition of the Tuscon shooter demonstrated that lethal weapons are as easy to obtain as a Happy Meal, and if one Walmart won't sell you enough ammunition to fight off an army of Huns, just drive over to the next one and load up. We lurch from Columbine, to Virginia Tech, to Tucson without batting an eye, because the battle for reasonable gun regulation has been forfeited in the face of the firearms lobby. The National Rifle Association, by heavily "contributing" to the campaigns of sympathetic state and local officials, has successfully initiated a stealth campaign to eliminate any restrictions on where a gun can be taken. Consequently, the guy sitting next to you at Happy Hour, or in the public library, could be concealing a firearm. And there was hardly a scintilla of public debate before these insane notions were codified into law.

It can be expected for a goober like Texas Rep. Louis Gohmert to advocate carrying a weapon into a legislative chamber like the House of Representatives, but when Congressman Steve "Quick Draw" Cohen announces he'll start packing heat, it's a cause for concern. Not because Cohen is a bad shot or a pacifist with an occasional temper, but because we have come to this as a society. Who could blame Cohen after a major party's senatorial candidate suggests "second amendment remedies" to reign in government and some zipperhead in dysfunctional Arizona declares open-season on congressmen and their constituents? At Rep. Cohen's own Town Hall meeting during the Tea Party's "Summer of Hate," a few local zealots chose to wear holstered weapons like trendy fashion accessories and suddenly, there's a rash of nationwide amateur constitutionalists strapping on sidearms at public events as some sort of political statement. The romanticized gun culture reinforces their fantasies of repelling a home invasion or taking up arms against a tyrannical government and the Glock has become the most coveted household possession since the Salad Shooter.

The debate over regulating the sale of guns is over. The remaining question is how to keep weapons out of the hands of homicidal lunatics. For all the conservatives have done to champion gun rights, they certainly have liberal attitudes about who can obtain them. The GOP brags of being the party of "God, guns, and guts," only lately, it's other people's guts that are involved. One of the questions in a recent forum for candidates for Chairman of the Republican National Committee was, "How many guns do you own?" The greater the number of firearms claimed, the louder the applause from the audience. One candidate bragged of owning every manner of weapon except a surface-to-air missile. In this case, Michael Steele got out-gunned, while the Republican Party is just a few warlords short of resembling Afghanistan..

Politicians and pundits are quick to assign blame, but who can say what motivates these murderous freaks? A brutal popular culture that glorifies violence has surely contributed to our annual national gun carnage, but Canada has as many guns per capita as the U.S., and they watch the same movies and listen to the same music as we do. If their country-wide gun murders in a year equate to Chicago's in a month, it must be an issue of mental health, and we seem to be in the middle of a national nervous breakdown. Our political discourse may be vulgar and ballistic, but the Tucson shooter seems just another in an endless parade of the viciously insane. John Hinckley shot Ronald Reagan to impress Jodie Foster. Squeaky Fromme took a shot at Gerald Ford in order to be incarcerated with Charlie and the Mansons. These potential assassins cared more about fame than politics, yet they were able to wipe the drool off their chins just long enough to purchase a firearm. Who doesn't believe that another incident like the massacre in Tucson isn't looming somewhere already? This country's deranged individual arms race has made us one nation under the gun, and the casual, vending-machine nature of weapons sales has turned us into the land of the free to carry, and the home of the artificially brave. I don't think this is what the framers intended.

Ten Most Annoying in 2010

2011-01-03T00:12:00.003-06:00

I have never compiled an end of the year Top 10 list, mainly because no one ever asked me. Nothing has changed in that regard, but since I wrote about this wretched 365 days past, I feel qualified to enumerate my ten most annoying people/events of the year. Since this was an election cycle, I could have filled the list with nothing but goofy senatorial candidates like Sharron Angle or the world's worst loser, Alaska's Joe Miller, but I tried to spread the scorn around a little. There were many deserving and hideous annoyances, but I've attempted to incorporate a wide range of the aggravating, beginning with:

10. Dick Clark. Although he only shows up once annually, it's enough horror to last all year long. When he first appeared several years ago on "Dick Clark's Rockin' New Years Eve" after a debilitating stroke, it seemed shocking but courageous for him to go on the air in a semi-incapacitated state. Now, after several years, it's purely for self-aggrandizement. Only there's no one around him to tell him to hang it up. Clark increasingly looks like the Cryptkeeper and speaks in brief, indecipherable mutterings that only Ryan Seacrest can understand. Seacrest calls him "The Master," while eyeballing that cozy, indoor desk-set he will inherit one day, maybe even on the air. It's a shame that Dick Clark began his career entertaining children and ends it by frightening them.

9. Willie Herenton. The former Memphis mayor did not go silently into that good night, but mounted one more vanity run for representative of the 9th Congressional district with the slogan "Just One." Had that meant there's just one Willie Herenton, it might have been effective, but the slogan and the Herenton campaign drew national media attention by consistently stating that the district could only be fairly represented by a black man. This racist strategy drew a rare congressional endorsement from President Obama for Herenton's opponent, Rep. Steve Cohen. Herenton cancelled a debate because he didn't approve of the questioners and even after Cohen beat him like a dusty floor rug, Herenton railed at the media, County Mayor A C Wharton, white voters, the president, and anyone else he considered responsible for his last hurrah. At least we can hope it was.

8. BP CEO Tony Hayward. After the catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Hayward began a campaign of serial lying to stall for time. He intentionally misrepresented the size of the spill, the estimated damage to the Gulf, the mechanical safeguards that failed, and BP's grotesque record for safety. When appearing before Congress, Hayward said "I don't remember," more times than John Gotti at trial. His treatment of the victims of the spill was reminiscent of an English Viceroy in India during the days of the Raj, and his famous remark, "I want my life back," drew enough anger for BP to recall him to Great Britain. His replacement tried to tamp down the public relations damage while Hayward rushed off to the yacht races.

7. Cialis Commercials. Cialis is an erectile dysfunction medication made by GlaxoSmithKline, a public corporation. Since the Supreme Court determined in the Citizens United decision that corporations are now considered people, Cialis is one annoying sumbitch. Two aging yuppies are gardening or painting a house and exchange a randy glance, and suddenly waterfalls appear and thick plots of green grass grow where the horny couple appropriately pitch a tent. Next thing you know, they're reclining naked in the woods or on the beach in separate, antique bathtubs, implying that they did their dirty business thanks to Cialis. When's the last time you hit on someone and ended up nude, lying outside in a dry tub? I thought only tequila could do that.

6. Snooki. I allowed my wife to talk me into watching The Jersey Shore, with its cast of hedonists, and it happened to be the episode where Snooki gets cold-cocked by some beefy drunk in a bar. Intrigued, I watched for a couple of weeks until I realized that this show is about a group of aimless, clueless, functioning morons whose sole purpose in life is getting drunk, fighting, boasting of their "hotness" or manliness, and picking up strangers with whom to "hook up." I used to have a redneck friend who would get mean drunk and say, "I want to fuck or fight, and I don't much care which." This sums up the entire premise of Jersey Shore, and the result is that Snooki and her "poof" are international celebrities. Lord knows why.

5. Bank of America. The second largest non-oil company in the nation (after WalMart), BOA received $45 billion in government money through TARP, with the instructions to ease credit restrictions and work through their mortgage division to assist financially troubled homeowners in restructuring their loans. They responded by raising interest rates on credit cards by 28%. Only last week, the bank was accused of institutional fraud, where people applying for loan modifications found their paperwork "lost" within the system, until default. The bank's employees advised some homeowners to intentionally miss payments to illustrate the urgency of their need, only to have BOA speed up foreclosure on those in arrears. When the foreclosure horror stories emerged, BOA suspended, then resumed foreclosures in 23 states. The institution is so steeped in fraud, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has said the next batch of leaks will succeed in taking down the bank and its officers.

4. Mel Gibson. It was bad enough to read Gibson's anti-Semitic screeds second-hand, but to actually hear his insane ravings on his former girlfriend's phone tapes proved that he's a regular, foaming-at-the-mouth, psychopath. His vile, name-calling obscenities and threats of violence were enough to make the worst misogynist wince. I, for one, am no longer capable of watching a Mel Gibson movie. And here I thought it was just the Jews that he hated.

3. The Republican Congressional Leadership. They devised a strategy of depriving the president of a single legislative victory through the tyranny of the minority, then pointed at him at election time and accused him of accomplishing nothing. And it worked. That is, until Obama steamrolled them during the lame duck session. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has admitted that the Senate Republicans' top priority is to deprive Obama of a second term, and new House Speaker John Boehner aims to "repeal and replace" the Obama health insurance reforms. It's not just that I think these men are working against the best interests of the country, and it may be superficial, but how do you take someone seriously when one of them looks like Mr. Toad from Alice in Wonderland, and the other looks like an Oompa Loompa?

2. My Neighbor. I make a point of knowing my next-door neighbors, but this is a family across the back fence and it's probably just as well I don't know their name. The wife and four kids have spent the last eight years in their back yard screaming. The children were infants when we moved in, and although I wondered aloud whether they shouldn't be in college by now, they're all still back there screaming. The husband owns every gas powered lawn device on the market, including a riding mower with a headlight so he can cut his postage-stamp sized yard at night. Between the leaf blower and the weed wacker, some deafening motor is always running. I had to wake Melody early one morning, however, to tell her that the neighbors now had chickens. She gazed in disbelief at the grown birds clucking away across the fence. Now, our dogs have gone insane and we've inquired about the legality of keeping barnyard animals in east Memphis. But the wife found a way to grandfather in the chickens before some new ordinance takes effect. They say strong fences make good neighbors, but, in this case, only when they're soundproofed.

1. Sarah Palin. I try to ignore her, but they won't let me. From the book deals, the speaking engagements, the Fox News commentary gig, and her inane "tweets," Palin has made a vast fortune from non-public service, or, as we used to call it, "self-service." And yet, a large segment of the population just loves her and can't get enough of her cruel sarcasm. The final outrage came during the reality show, Sarah Palin's Alaska, when she traveled to some remote hunting area and murdered a young, female elk. Sure, she justified it by claiming they planned to eat the animal, but I'll bet the response to the dining experience won't match the orgasmic breathlessness exhibited by the bystanders when she killed that majestic creature. If this weekly Palin infomercial is intended to boost her chances for higher office, it has, so far, only exhibited her vapidity. I'm convinced that this woman is a complete idiot, and if you think she's qualified to be the president, then so are you. And that's deeply annoying.

Representation Without Taxation

2010-12-20T07:19:00.003-06:00

I'll own up to being a yellow dog, liberal Democrat, and I generally support what the president is attempting to do to rescue this country from becoming a wholly owned subsidiary of the Peoples Republic of China. After the great Christmas tax compromise/giveaway, however, the thought crossed my mind that maybe I should have voted for Hillary Clinton. At least I know she's got a pair. As for the president, he's participated in more cave-ins than a Chilean miner. I understand that Bo the dog is following Barack around so he can learn how to roll over. After all 42 Republican senators signed a letter saying that they would allow no other legislation to be considered until the Bush tax cuts were extended, I just knew the President would call their bluff and force them to, literally, filibuster against jobless benefits at Christmas. Instead, he quit in his corner without throwing a punch. Obama claimed the Republicans were "holding the American people hostage," and their demands amounted to "blackmail," yet he paid the entire ransom and even more that the kidnappers didn't even ask for. Doesn't he watch crime dramas on television? Even when you've paid them off, blackmailers will continue to blackmail. I want my president to be a fighter, but not one that says, "No mas," and surrenders when he's behind on points.

The GOP merely threatens filibuster, and the Democrats flip like fish. But the closest resemblance to an actual filibuster was Rep. Bernie Sanders' 8 1/2 hour marathon speech in objection to the tax bill. Most folks' only notion of a "filibuster" was given by Jimmy Stewart in "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington." It would be a terrific civics lesson for the American people to see the real deal. I can't remember the last time they dragged in the cots and forced senators to attend in shifts. Perhaps the sight of Mitch "The Amphibian" McConnell reading Bible passages on C-Span while attempting to block veterans' benefits might have changed a few hearts and minds. It's too late for that now. The minority party played "chicken" with Obama over the people's welfare, and Barack blinked. The president claimed this was the best deal he could get before the new congress convenes in January, and that it was a good compromise. When the playground bully pushes you to the ground and demands your lunch money, and you give it to him, it is not a compromise, it's capitulation.

I understand that the tax fight is only over a 5 percent increase at the highest income levels, but the Republicans were willing to stop all government functions rather than compromise. Obama campaigned on the promise to allow the Bush tax cuts to expire for those making more than $250,000 annually, and though some of my best friends are rich people, does the same group that prospered the most during the past decade deserve a fresh pile of free money? My dad had a saying; "This is a great country, but the dues are expensive." There seems to be a growing number of people who believe they should somehow be exempt, agreeing with Leona Helmsley that, "Only the little people pay taxes." It's astounding that the Republicans would engage in a petty tax revolt when the nation is still in financial crisis and fighting two wars. In better days, paying taxes was often considered the height of patriotism. In the televised, Senate-Mafia hearings of 1952, when New York mob boss Frank Costello was asked by the committee to name one thing he had ever done to benefit his country, he said, "I paid my tax." Even gangsters understood how the roads get paved.

The conservatives claim tax cuts for the wealthy will help stimulate business and create jobs in the private sector, but we all know what happens to that money. It's invested in various markets, making large portfolios even larger, and allowing the super-rich to live off of their dividends and interest. While the Bush tax cuts have been in place for a decade, all the action switched over to Wall Street, creating a class of obscenely wealthy money-managers while our manufacturing base hemorrhaged jobs. Republicans have warned that unemployment compensation and welfare assistance for the poor are destroying the work ethic, but the new tax giveaway is simply welfare for the wealthy. Who needs to work hard at a stressful job when your money will work for you? The old Reagan, supply-side, trickle-down theory of economics functions most efficiently in single family estates where the natural instinct is to care for your own. Now that Obama has waved a white flag on any inheritance taxes up to five million dollars, the money no longer trickles down; it gushes like a waterfall. The deficit hawks won't fund medical assistance for 9/11 first responders because they claim it's not paid for, yet they are practically giddy to put nearly a trillion additional dollars on the tab for this tax scam.

Ever since Obama took office, his opponents have questioned his legitimacy to be president. They have called him an illegal alien, a socialist, a Marxist, a Kenyan, and a secret Muslim. But I'm beginning to think the truth may be far more frightening. I believe that Barack did not learn "anti-colonialism" from his father, like the right-wing radio blatherers say, but instead was invested with Kansas Republican values from his mother. After all, Kansas is the home of Alf Landon and Bob Dole, and that brand of conservatism must have affected Barack's single mom and grandparents. Somewhere, he was instructed to grow an Afro and assume the guise of a liberal, which facilitated his admission to Harvard and the bar, and his subsequent hiring by the University of Chicago. His work as a community organizer cemented his liberal street cred, and his "palling around with domestic terrorist" William Ayers, gave Obama a Che Guevara-like mystique. Only now, I'm beginning to see the pattern of deception in all this, and I suspect that Barack may be the most frightening type of politician of all; a stealth Republican. Dreams from his father; politics from his mother. The president promised change, yet the Bush tax cuts are about to be engraved in stone, Guantanamo is still operating, illegal wiretaps are still functioning and Bin Laden is still alive. Would an explanation be out of order, or must we read it on WikiLeaks? Obama has spent over half his life learning how to "fight the power." It's past time he learned how the power fights back.

Tigers' TV Trauma

2010-12-06T01:21:00.029-06:00

Let national magazines call Memphians poor, fat, and ugly. You can go to the mall and see that for yourself. But there are still things unique to Memphis that we all enjoy. Sure, we have the river, rock and soul music, and the world's best bar-b-que, but we also have the Memphis Tigers. Every basketball season, all of West Tennessee become riveted to their televisions on game nights. For most people, TV is their only access to the team, and the better the season, the higher the spirits of the citizenry. Until recently, the TV coverage was excellent and brought the game to thousands who would otherwise have to depend on the radio and their imaginations. As a result, few cities share a bond with their local university's athletic teams quite like Memphis loves their basketball Tigers.

Memphis' love affair with the Tigers really began in 1957, when tiny Memphis State College lost the National Invitation Tournament to Bradley on national television by just one point. The Commercial Appeal reported on March 25, 1957, that a huge crowd showed up at the airport to greet the returning team, including Elvis Presley, who had a pretty decent year himself. My Tiger loyalties are generational. My dad had season tickets back in the Field House days and I was that little kid under the bucket shagging errant jump shots for the team's pre-game and half-time warm-ups. Suffice it to say that I saw the entire Wilfong family wear the Tiger uniform and I was in attendance at the NCAA finals in St. Louis in 1973. I suffered through the Moe Iba years and celebrated Dana Kirk and the formation of the Metro Conference, the best collection of unaffiliated schools in the nation. Along with that came a hatred of all things Louisville. I hated their team, their fans, their coach, their school, and the color red. But the memorable games at the Mid-South Coliseum were annual gatherings of the rabid faithful to hopefully witness the Cardinals defeated and humbled, and they were as loud as any rock concert.

I had season tickets in the Coliseum and showed up in snow, rain, or iced parking lots, while the team's following throughout the city boomed. When the Coliseum restricted smoking to the concourses, it was necessary to breast-stroke through a fog of grey plumes to get to the concession stand. And the team had so many Jewish supporters, that half-time looked like Rosh Hashanah at the Temple. Almost all the games were televised on local channels, with WKNO offering a replay of every home game at 10:00 PM. I used to drive home from the games and watch Channel 10 to see if I'd missed anything. The team outgrew the Coliseum, but season ticket-holders were assured of preferential seating in the new Pyramid to reward their loyalty. I wasn't among those who got to choose their seats, but I was certain my assigned tickets would be satisfactory. Imagine my surprise when I found myself sitting parallel to Larry Finch's jersey hanging from the rafters. When I appealed to the university's ticket office, I was told that it would be no problem to improve my seats, only it required an additional $2000 "contribution" to the Athletic Department. I didn't want to pay the extortion, so I gave up my nose-bleed section tickets.

With the move to the FedEx Forum, with its corporate suites and blaring techno-music, I decided the best place to watch a Tiger game was in my living room. Four seasons ago, I invested in the 42 inch, flat-screen television specifically for basketball season and scored extra points by telling my wife that it was a present for her. Say what you will about the Calipari era, but the Memphis games were all televised, either on local or cable networks, and we made an evening of it. Select friends and former disenfranchised season ticket holders came to my house for the games, and Melody put out hors' dourves in our Tiger serving dishes, alongside the Tiger napkins. It's become a tradition. On game night, we all wear Tiger gear and erect a small shrine around the TV with our blue and white pom poms, the stuffed tiger's claw, and the tiger-striped footstool with the tail that I got at Walgreen's. Only now, if it's not a nationally televised game, we're in trouble. While I love everything about the current team and their coach, somebody made a lousy TV deal for the fans that not even High Definition can fix.

The games on the CSS Network come through clearly enough, but in the last game, some computer whiz forgot to throw a switch, and the graphic that shows the score didn't come up until five minutes into the telecast. In addition, the picture distorted and froze throughout the game, although it was not shown in High Def. When a game is scheduled to be shown on the Sports South Network, however, it's a true reason for despair. It's a lucky thing that Greg Gaston and Hank McDowell are great announcers, because you can barely see the action they are describing. For the second straight season, the network is using some antique camera that would be better suited for a high school game. The resulting picture is so dark that the players' faces are indistinguishable, white boys included, and the jersey numbers are a blur. It appears as if the arena is experiencing a brown-out. When a recent game was televised on a delayed basis, an announcer said, "Because of time constraints, we are moving ahead in the action," and they cut out ten minutes. I understand that Memphis is mired in a mediocre conference with no visible way out, but do you suppose the league could afford to buy a digital camera for its damn network? Or is it possible the Athletic Department that remains solvent only because of the basketball team, might negotiate a better TV package for the fans? Both the team and their loyal supporters deserve better than this. Besides, I really need to see this group of Tigers play, especially since I bet a Barcalounger that they make it to the Elite Eight.

Patted Down or Felt Up?

2010-11-22T00:18:00.003-06:00

First came the "Shoe Bomber," so the Transportation Security Administration forced all airline passengers to remove their footwear. Then, the "Underwear Bomber" led to full body scans and invasive, personal searches. I shudder to think of the TSA's response when someone invents the exploding suppository, and they will. Then, perhaps when MeeMaw gets anally probed before her turkey-day flight by a guy that, only last week, worked at the post office, this nation will get serious about rapid rail transit. If the additional charges for baggage and the insipid rules concerning carry-on luggage were not infuriating enough, these new "pat down" procedures have already sparked a citizen's revolt, begun by the passenger who threatened a TSA agent with arrest if, "(you) touch my junk." The viral effect has been similar to the "Don't taze me, Bro" protester's anthem for police restraint.

Already, the TSA has responded to the public push-back by modifying some of their more grotesque practices. Thanks to a Memphis-based pilot who filed a lawsuit, the agency has halted the practice of molesting uniformed pilots before a flight, instead referring to them as "trusted partners." I guess if a pilot can be trusted to fly the plane, he can also be trusted to land it at the scheduled destination. Scanning a pilot for explosives or a nail file seems redundant if he intends to put it down in a shopping mall. Passengers are not so fortunate. The New York Times editorialized, "There are far too many reports of TSA agents groping passengers, using male agents to search female passengers, mocking passengers and disdaining complaints." While women who "opted-out" of the full naked body scanning complained of near sexual assault by zealous civil servants, right-wing religious leaders have raised the alarm about gay agents administering the enhanced frisking. I heard a rumor that if you declare a gender preference at the rubdown checkpoint, you may be given a masseuse consistent with your sexual leanings, i.e., a female agent would be assigned to pat-down a gay man. So, what would I have to lose by claiming to be homosexual? If somebody's going to squeeze my lemon, I would prefer it be by a woman. When she's done, I could ask for a "happy landing."

We have been reassured that the new porno scanners are designed to delete images as soon as they are examined, yet hundreds of leaked body scans have already been circulated on the internet. Women have reason to be squeamish ever since embattled TSA head John S. Pistole told The New York Times that the scanners can detect tampons and sanitary napkins, which may cause the need for further, personal interaction with agents. Another recent complainant was a women who, after undergoing a mastectomy, had her prosthetic breast squeezed and manipulated by a clueless examiner. News footage of the aggressive handling of a sobbing, three-year-old girl whose teddy bear triggered an alarm helped to solidify public opinion that this entire TSA operation is a mindless, time-wasting, charade designed to give the illusion of security while trampling constitutional protections, including that one about "unreasonable searches and seizures." There is nothing in the "enhanced" version of airport security any more effective than the old metal detector, wand, and baggage exam, which served as deterrents instead of a choking and degrading spectacle. What's needed are computerized file sharing techniques between competing airlines for the "No-fly lists," and "Watch lists." Had these been in place, the Underpants Bomber would never have made it onto a plane to begin with and we wouldn't be dealing with strange men gliding their hands up our inner thighs. At least the TSA is consistent. They are always prepared to respond to yesterday's threat.

It's not like there aren't other experts to consult. I once flew El Al Airlines from New York to Israel and was subjected to their thorough but non-intrusive security examination. All passengers were required to be in a sequestered airline waiting room several hours in advance where their luggage was screened and checked. Each passenger was then required to sit across the table from an airline security specialist that looked like an ex-Mossad agent and answer questions. When the agent asked why I was travelling to Israel, my inner imp wanted to say, "Because the Lord has called me back to the Holy Land to redeem my people," but he looked like someone who didn't appreciate airport levity. Although merely a tourist with nothing to hide, my inquisitor's pointed questions and piercing gaze were so unnerving, by the end of the interview I was ready to confess to masterminding the Entebbe hijacking. The Israeli government has found that a direct look in the eye is better than a ham-handed body search. To those who say, "Israel is a tiny country with only one airline," I suggest each domestic carrier hire one trained profiler for each of the TSA rent-a-cops that will become unnecessary.

A passenger uprising has already begun with internet pages ranging from horror stories in the grope line to the laments of TSA agents who don't wish to spend every day feeling the butt-cheeks of disgruntled, same-sex airline patrons. One activist group declared Nov. 24 as "Opt-Out Day," where participants refuse the naked scan in order to overwhelm the touchy-feely committee. Other air passengers plan a post-Thanksgiving, silent protest. With security agents at waist-level pawing at private parts, bloated travellers will seek revenge by unleashing a massive, low-lying fog of residual green beans and candied yams. It will be sort of like Saddam and the Kurds. With all concerned equally revulsed, it can truly be a Black Friday for everybody, and we can try to bring some reason back into the process. Everyone wants to be assured of their safety, but these absurd intrusions only show that nine years after the attacks on the Twin Towers, we are still being held hostage by the 9/11 hijackers. On the other hand, given the history of the pilgrims, what could be more American than to have a smiling stranger say, "Happy Thanksgiving. Now assume the position."

Burning Down The House

2010-11-08T01:30:00.007-06:00

Back in the 90s, I bought my first house. It was in a shady section of east Memphis called Normandy Meadows, a nicely kept neighborhood consisting mainly of modest but well-constructed homes built in the 50s. I was fortunate to find a house owned by a single family who had collected forty years worth of receipts, proving the house was well maintained. After years of semi-reclusive apartment dwelling, I was so delighted with my backyard that I got a boxer dog and named him Floyd. My expectations for my new home were so high, I figured that if I began with a puppy, I could ultimately work my way up to having interactions with human beings once again; and if so, they could have a place to come and hang out. I looked forward to the joys and responsibilities of home ownership despite the retro kitchen, unchanged since the Elvis era.

It seemed no sooner had I taken occupancy, however, before I began having plumbing problems, like bathroom flooding and eternally dripping faucets. The plumber said the water pipes were rigged in a way that condensation from the air conditioner drained from the attic into the back of the porcelain throne. He used plastic piping to reroute the water across the attic floor and down the side of the house and installed a drip pan that needed periodic attention. A week later, I saw water spots and cracks in the living room ceiling and called an air-conditioning company to make an estimate on a home visit. The AC repairman couldn't believe that the unit was installed in the attic and imagined it had been like that for forty years. He placed plastic sheets beneath the pipes and informed me that soon, I was going to have to replace the entire system. My dreams of domestic tranquility were further shaken when a crack in the ceiling opened up as I scrambled for a bucket to contain the steady leak. It was early morning when Floyd and I awoke to a sudden crash from the other room that sounded like a meteor hit the roof. The entire ceiling in the living room had caved in covering the floor with soggy sheet rock and a substance that resembled oatmeal. The repairman just shook his head and said it probably took years for the ceiling to become so saturated.

I now had a new home that needed major repairs, so I became enraged at the house and decided to punish it. I called an air conditioning company whose main business was selling screen doors, and they didn't even believe in AC. I told them the stupid thing was broken and to go up there and do whatever it took to fix it, sort of like going to an auto mechanic and saying, "I'm not sure what the problem is, but spare no expense correcting it." Then I found the most fly-by-night contractors possible and they set about the business of disassembling my home to clear the attic of heavy equipment. When everyone was finished, the heat and air didn't work, holes in the ceiling revealed waterlogged crossbeams, and all the floors were warped from standing water. But I taught that damn house a lesson never to disappoint me again. When my anger had been sated, however, it was unlivable and I had to torch the place. As an American major said after the burning of a Vietnamese hamlet; "We had to destroy the village in order to save it."

Of course, I'm lying about that last paragraph. I did what any sensible homeowner would; I put the place in order and sold it. My point is, intentionally damaging the house you live in over some repairable internal defects, is the same logic voters just used in attempting to put our other house in order: the House of Representatives. It was a creaking machine before, but rather than oil the wheels of government to turn smoothly, the American people chose to throw a whole bunch of monkey-wrenches, collectively known as the Tea Party, into the gears. If the electorate's intention was to slow the Obama agenda, they may have succeeded in bringing it to a screeching halt. Future Speaker, Orange John Boehner has already announced his first legislative priority is to repeal Obamacare. Big mistake. Not only would the Senate refuse to consider such a measure, the president would veto it if they did. The electoral red sea of 2010 was about jobs and unemployment. Everyone has a friend or family member who has been dismissed, downsized, cut back, or cut loose, and people are fearful. If the new congress decides to waste time re-hashing a year's worth of jabbering over health insurance reform instead of instituting a jobs program, they will face a blow-back that would give Newt Gingrich whiplash.

It will be interesting to see how the Tea Party newcomers get along with established Republicans. The country is still in a time of crisis and in desperate need of legislative compromise, but the Tea Party enters Congress with a mission; destroy Obama. If they could only snap out of it and see that Obama is more like Eisenhower than FDR, they might try to work with him for the common good. But don't expect any New Deal programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps, which built public works and parks, or the Works Progress Administration, which hired the unemployed to build roads and bridges, (literally paving the way for the Eisenhower interstate system), coming out of this Congress. Their job is to slow down the workings of government and create enough political potholes for Obama to be defeated in 2012. The president either has a strategy, or he's a slow learner. He continues to extend an olive branch to the opposition and they continue to beat him with it. Speaker-elect Boehner often refers to himself as a "Reagan Republican." Unfortunately, he no longer means the former president, but his wife, Nancy, whose simple philosophy has encapsulated an entire political movement into three words; "Just Say No."

John Robert's America

2010-10-27T02:05:00.019-05:00

Frank Zappa performs "I'm the Slime" on SNL

So, how are you enjoying the continuous outflow of noxious political ads coming non-stop from every broadcast channel on television? You say you're sick of it? Maybe even disgusted? Well, you ain't seen nothin' yet. Welcome to John Roberts' America. Thanks to the Supreme Court's 5-4 partisan ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, corporations were granted individual citizenship, including all First Amendment rights to speech. The majority's decision said that limiting corporate spending in an election is "governmental regulation of political speech." It's a reach rivaling that of Nixon's secretary Rosemary Woods to equate "political speech" with giant wads of cash. In 2009, The Federal Campaign Finance Law restricted an individual's political contributions to $2,400 per federal candidate, and $30,400 annually to a party's national committee. By what logic, legal or otherwise, is it suddenly permissible for international conglomerates to pump billions of dollars into TV advertising to influence our elections, while a typical citizen is legally forbidden to exceed a gift of two large to his congressman? What makes the decision reek even more of plutocracy and cronyism is that the producers of these televised grotesqueries, which look like Halloween Spooktaculars, don't even have to disclose where the money comes from. If you watch these ads with the sound off, you couldn't be blamed for believing that we were being invaded by space aliens.

The Roberts' court decision overturned the McCain-Feingold Campaign Reform Act, which was about the last piece of useful bi-partisan legislation we've seen lately. But acting to make the system better is not the court's agenda, and they have started a financial hurricane that has topped our nation's faulty levees and flooded the landscape with bilge water masquerading as political speech. Any group, from the Klan to the Heaven's Gate Cult, could be paying for these spots, or stains, and the Court says you are no longer entitled to know that information. How did this happen? When George W. Bush had to withdraw the name of his hausfrau Harriet Miers from consideration, he cast his myopic eye on Sam Alito. But when Justice William Rehnquist suddenly died, Bush hastily elevated Rehnquist law clerk, John Roberts, to the position of Chief Justice. His cherubic look and photogenic family can't hide an ugly agenda. Roberts is a corporatist, and every court decision concerning business regulation or tax relief has gone the way of the company store, just as the Bush neocons intended. This nastiest of elections is but a harbinger of things to come. The stakes in 2012 will be much higher.

Conservatives counter that the Democrats brag about their record fundraising efforts during the Obama presidential campaign and that billionaire donors like George Soros regularly finance progressive causes and campaigns. The flaw in the logic is that Obama raised a huge war chest from online donors giving an average of $35 per individual. He had plenty of corporate help as well, but this was before the Citizens United ruling, and thus within established law. Credit Obama's fundraising success to a savvy tech crew who tapped the Internet's potential for seeking individual contributors, especially young voters. While the Republicans' big benefactors are readily identifiable; Murdoch, Koch, Coors, Forbes, Bechtel, and others whose splinter groups have financed the Tea Party movement, the conservatives always point to George Soros as if he were a sinister operative from the Elders of Zion. In actuality, most of the people who throw around Soros' name as some sort of international puppeteer wouldn't recognize him if he walked into the room, and before 2004, they never even heard of him. Soros was involved in currency speculation and philanthropic projects until he entered politics in 2004, with the specific intention of denying George W. Bush a second term. If the Hungarian Holocaust survivor has such Machiavellian influence, how come he couldn't pull that one off? Now you hear conservatives drop Soros' name like Karl Marx and the Rothschild's. Saul Alinsky is another right-wing whipping boy constantly on the lips of the propagandized, though I'd bet my house that the majority of Fox viewers who consider Alinsky a modern socialist menace don't even know that he's been dead for 38 years. And Soros just donated $1 million to California's Proposition 19 to legalise marijuana.

In Memphis, we have to be getting the worst of it. Wait, I take it back. The ad that scrapes the very bottom is Nevada's Sharron Angle accusing Harry Reid of helping sex offenders and child molesters get free government Viagra. But in Memphis, we get the ads from North Mississippi and Eastern Arkansas as well. Our Senate seats aren't in play, but the Tennessee Governor's race has become such a joke that I plan to abstain from voting for either man. If you believed the allegations made about candidates in the surrounding counties, you'd insist that they be immediately arrested. And the Mississippi Republicans, through their anonymous surrogates, make an issue of running against Nancy Pelosi. As many problems as our neighbors currently face, I doubt that Nancy Pelosi is high on anyone's list of concerns in the Magnolia State other than possibly Haley Barbour. One bluedog Mississippi Democrat runs ads boasting of the over 260 times he voted against Pelosi. If people hated politicians before, this relentless barrage of putrid visuals will create disgust and loathing beyond measure. People watch TV to relax, not to be repulsed. The only people pleased about this money tsunami are the ad agencies and your local TV station. They are "On your side."

The Guardian UK reports that over $3.7 billion dollars will be spent in this election, the country's most expensive ever. What's frightening is that the political parties and special interest cabals are just testing the water on the Roberts ruling. With only a short time left in this election cycle, the mega-corporations have to be high-fiving each other in their disbelief that the referees have really left the field. They not only escaped accountability, something that companies like Target had to face in the recent past for their funding of anti-gay candidates, they don't even have to prove what their ads say is true. The Supreme Court has granted them anonymity and the big corporations have reacted like every kid who grew up in the 50s just had his fondest dream come true; They're like Superman now, they're invisible. It's a short step from running greasy ads smearing a rural candidate's character to hiring Hollywood directors to film cinema verite tearjerkers for some corporation's choice for public office in 2012. The flip side, however, is the Tarantino-like expose of a candidate's secret perversions with soundtrack from the 1970s. 2012 looks to be the Superbowl of elections. People who don't care about the game will tune in just for the commercials and the halftime pop stars like Jon Voight and Lady GaGa. With unlimited corporate funds to spend, it could get spectacularly ugly, maybe even in 3-D. Just like they got Al Capone for income tax evasion, maybe we could temper corporate expenses for political advertising with fines for air pollution. The Supreme Court, with the most overt political act since Bush v. Gore, has succeeded in polluting the airwaves as surely as BP bespoiled the Gulf of Mexico.

Tea Party Animals

2010-10-23T01:43:00.012-05:00

I just can't get overly concerned about the 138 or so candidates running for Congress under the auspices of the various Tea Parties. I understand the electorate is mad, but it's not insane. I'm sure the pundits are correct that Democrats will lose seats in the upcoming election, but this plethora of extremists running as Republicans are the true inheritors of the nativist "Know Nothing Party" of the 1850s. Like the Tea Party, the Know Nothings exploited the fear of immigrants, only Catholics instead of Latinos, to fuel the resentment of white, male, Protestants. In fact, that was a qualifier for joining the party. They had minor success, especially surrounding locales in Maryland and Massachusetts that had once held witch trials, but their base of wealthy, white guys was not sufficient to compete with the Democrats and they were eclipsed by the anti-slavery Republican Party before the Civil War. Their national agenda, however, sounds eerily familiar to the corporate-sponsored, grass-roots confederacy of pissed-off white people that intend to "take our country back" in the coming days. Formerly the American Party, the Know Nothings earned their nickname after being instructed to reply, "I know nothing," when asked about the party's platform. With good reason, since it consisted of restricting immigration, especially from Catholic countries, demanding all public office holders to be American-born Protestants, mandating daily Bible readings in public schools, and requiring immigrants already in the country to wait 21 years before applying for citizenship. Arizona Republican Governor, Jan "headless bodies in the desert" Brewer, would have fit right in were it not for her disqualifying genitalia.

Observing Tea Party candidates in action, from Kentucky's Dr. Rand Paul, whose libertarian philosophy is so inflexible as to be closer to anarchy than democracy, to Colorado Gubernatorial candidate Dan Maes, who called the Denver bike-sharing program a "socialist plot organized by the United Nations," is like watching a series of sideshow oddities while strolling down an old-time carnival midway. "Step right up and see the Mama Grizzly bare her manicured claws." Add Delaware's non-masturbating witch, Christine O'Donnell; Alaska's man with the handcuffs and a 10 o'clock shadow, Joe Miller, and a few more, and you could film a remake of Tod Browning's 1932 horror classic, "Freaks." The single difference is that in the original movie, the pinheads, Zip and Pip, were far more lovable than microcephalics like Carl Paladino or W.Va. senate candidate John Raese, who advocates abolishing the minimum wage while his wife lives in Palm Beach, Florida. Electoral victories by these corporate shills would be disastrous, yet some secret part of me harbors a perverse desire for a few of them to win, just for entertainment's sake and to watch them join in the tired denunciation of our illegal alien, Marxist, Muslim, president. I have a personal confession to make. When the redundant office of Shelby County Mayor was first created, I voted for Prince Mongo.

On the other side of the demilitarized zone known as the aisle, the spineless Democrats are acting like the Mugwumps. They were "progressive" Republicans who fled their party in revolt against the corruption surrounding their presidential nominee in 1884. They threw their support to Democratic reformer Grover Cleveland and swung the election in his favor. Today's Democrats are much like those extinct moderate Republicans who formed the Mugwumps, now a term for a party-swapper like Arlen Specter. Still, the group opposed cronyism during the Gilded Age despite criticism that they were "members of an insecure elite." Historian David Tucker wrote, "The Mugwumps embodied the liberalism of the 19th century," and their writings are "testament to a high-minded civic morality." The problem was their grievances lasted only as long as Cleveland's campaign when most were absorbed into the Democratic Party. That's why the term "mugwump" has also come to mean a fence-sitter, like the passive, timid Democrats who can't even manage a counter-attack in the face of the ugliest campaign in modern history. The responsibility has fallen upon everyday citizens, who dread a return to the Bush era, to save the Democrats from themselves.

Analysts have compared this year's election to Clinton's 1994 disastrous mid-terms and to the Reagan Revolution of 1980, but I have yet to hear anyone correlate the correct period, so once again, allow me. When the Democrats imploded after the 1968 bloody convention in Chicago, voters were horrified by what seemed to be a takeover of the party by leftist radicals. During the 1972 Convention, which nominated anti-war hope George McGovern, the televised images proved it. Party discipline had acquiesced to the demands of political activists for every imaginable cause. Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem bitterly clashed over the feminist agenda and the first African-American woman, Rep. Shirley Chisholm, was nominated for president. Abortion rights and gay rights were not just discussed openly from the podium for the first time, there were floor fights over whether the issues should be included in the party platform. (They compromised with a "right to be different" clause). Party sessions began in the evening and lasted all night and when McGovern was finally nominated, his acceptance speech came so early in the morning, most viewers had gone to bed. What my young eyes witnessed was contentious progress for civil rights. What the American people saw was chaos mixed with a small group of fire-breathing, radical extremists carrying the party over a cliff. The revelations about Vice Presidential nominee Thomas Eagleton's electric shock therapy for a depressive illness merely sealed the deal and Nixon won re-election by a landslide.

What happened on the left in1972, is happening to the right in 2010. History is repeating, but in mirror image. The rhetoric is just as inflammatory and the loudest voices are those on the fringes, purging Republican establishment candidates and replacing them with the wildest bunch of rabid ideologues since the days of the Yippies, only with Sarah Palin playing the role of Abbie Hoffman. The Tea Party folks say they're mad? Well, now I'm mad too. I'm mad about candidates for office referring to the president as a "committed socialist" or a "secret Muslim." I'm angry that so many people's minds have been twisted by right-wing broadcast propaganda that they somehow believe Obama is actively working against the interests of this country. I'm sick of GOP lackeys blaming Obama for Bush's disaster while simultaneously refusing to work with him on anything and everything, because, in the words of Rush Limbaugh, they "want him to fail." And I'm particularly weary of the Tea Party "patriots" who have yelled and screamed and threatened and disrupted for two years without managing to form a coherent argument about just exactly what is their message, other than antipathy toward Obama. I believe sanity will win out on election day, but only if Democratic voters are motivated to protect what gains they have made. And if the threat of a Congress full of Tea Party mini-despots with subpoena power isn't enough motivation to go out and vote, nothing is.

Thanks to Bill Day. Click on cartoon to enlarge.

In the Belly of the Beast

2010-10-11T01:41:00.061-05:00

A funny thing happened when I was checking my mother into the hospital in the middle of the night for emergency surgery a fortnight ago. When she was settled into a room and I went home to rest, they had to come back and get me too. I was sure the pain in my side was from the stress of the occasion, but my gall bladder had exploded and Melody had to call back the bus. The same two paramedics who had looked after Mom hauled me out as well. When I got the 2am call from my mother, I could barely understand her and I entered her apartment to find her bug-eyed and howling in pain, making such theatrical faces that I thought no one could hurt so without tears. Mom later accepted my apologies for having ever doubted her. She had suffered a perforated ulcer which needed immediate attention. After our respective surgeries, we were even assigned to the same floor for recovery. We're both recuperating at home now and I don't think Mom would object if I said she is 89 and healing more rapidly than I. In the family tally, however, I have the larger scar. I've been told I'm lucky to have my mother's genes. I hope they start kicking in soon.

In my eight days in the belly of the beast, I learned that the hospital consists of two sections, like halves of the same heart, only working at cross purposes. The medical services side, the human side, offers care generously and with compassion. The administrative half - breathing icons of big insurance -gives care miserly and begrudgingly. There is the edifice, and then those that work within. The caregivers are the most wonderful people on earth, but the Hospital stands as a monument to the fraud and greed of the Health Insurance industry and their gangland, bureaucratic tentacles. American health care is run sort of like New York's five Mafia families. They muscled their way into a field they had never traversed before and forced people to buy their protection or face the consequences, only they call it, "You bet your life." Their loyal foot soldiers enforce "policy" in every major hospital in the nation, and are in the business of business, skimming profits from Medicare and deciding who gets preferential treatment according to who paid the extortion. After all, this is the world of the five dollar band-aid and the twenty dollar aspirin and a corporation's got to make a buck. The first line of the physicians' Hippocratic Oath is, "First, do no harm." The insurance industry's motto is, "Do harm first." Fortunately, my mother has, and deserves, the coverage by Blue Cross and Medicare known as the "Cadillac Plan." I, in turn, have the "barefoot pedestrian plan," which means I have been unable to purchase health insurance in over a decade because of the notorious "pre-existing condition," perhaps, the very condition that landed me in the hospital. Thus, when I checked into the same emergency room 12 hours after my mother, began a tale of two health cares.

Mom came in at an odd time and when her insurance was verified, the tests began. Within an hour a doctor was called, a CT scan performed, and immediate surgery recommended. Mom went directly from the emergency room, to surgery, and then the ICU where within three hours, thank God, she was resting comfortably after a successful procedure. My ambulance arrived during afternoon drive time and I was placed in a line of stretchers waiting to be registered. I was assigned an alcove, despite my "self-pay" status, and later found I was lucky enough to have hit the "early-bird special," and had only just preceded a rash of car crashes. I alternately hyperventilated into an oxygen mask or winced in agony for an hour before receiving an inoculation for pain, but the dosage wasn't sufficient and I swore they had given me a placebo. After several more hours, a sympathetic nurse who expressed her disdain for their allowing me to lie there in such a state, finally injected me with enough morphine to manage the pain in my stomach, but also give me a blinding narcotic headache. I was denied the two Tylenol I requested. In my delirium, a Physician's Assistant saw me and recommended a scan which produced the results requiring me to be admitted. When I was finally delivered to a private room close to 2am, I had already been in the ER for nine hours, during which time, I never saw a doctor.

Once delivered from the cash-register side to the human side, I received the same excellent care as did my mother. By sheer fortune, the doctor on rounds was ordinarily an oncological surgeon, and in one of those "only in Memphis" moments, I found he was a fellow "Brothers' Boy," from CBHS. He informed me that nine out of ten people now have their gall bladders removed laparoscopically, through the navel, and the procedure is so non-intrusive, they go home and walk it off. I was to be that tenth person. But first, I was to receive a regimen of antibiotics, which allowed me to lie there for several days and observe health care in action. The main thing I learned was that the doctors get all the credit, while the nurses do all the work. They are the front line in the battle against infirmity, they do all the procedures, they offer comfort to the concerned, and personal attention to the afflicted. Doctors pass through on rounds, making pronouncements from on high while the staff strews rose petals in their path, but the nurses are the hands-on face of health care. At the same time, they are bound by hospital "policy" and are at the center of the crossfire between insurance companies, doctors, patients and administrators. They have so many regulations to follow and record, it's like going to work and wearing a wet, wool cloak during your daily labors.

After my blood pressure scaled higher than a Sherpa's yak, my doctor decided it could no longer wait and informed me that only after waking up in recovery would I know if I had surgery or laparoscopy. While I was greeting the same anaesthetist that knocked out Mom the day before, my pressure was putting up numbers like Barry Bonds. I woke up with the pain of a gored matador, but thanks to the wonderful people on post-op floor 5-N, from Bessie the singing housekeeper, to dedicated professionals like Kayola Brown, who is bright and passionate and listened to several "mini-rants" that didn't make the paper, my healing has begun. I am indebted to these people, especially the nurses who should be making some of that doctor money instead of being unable to afford health insurance from the very place they work. Mom's bill is covered; mine would make Warren Buffett gag, reminding me of something wise my father once told me; "It's better to be rich and healthy than poor and sick." We're working it out. They're used to it now. The human side of health care is the best in the world, but the commerce side, the health-for-profit racket, is worse than wasteful and corrupt; it's immoral. We live with a medical system locked within some nightmarish Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde duality which severely limits the greatest good. If we could only do something to rid ourselves of that evil Mr. Hyde. Oh yeah, I voted for Barack Obama. Sock 'em, Rocky.

Do The Math

2010-09-12T01:06:00.208-05:00

cartoon by Bill Day; click to enlarge

Math was never my best subject, but this is one calculation that's not difficult to understand; If George W. Bush dug us into an eight year hole, how is Barack Obama supposed to dig us out in two? To expand the equation, Obama would have to dig at a 75% faster pace than Bush just to get us back to level, and nobody could shovel it like Dubya. Lest we forget, the Toxic Asset Relief Program (TARP) that the Republicans now refer to as a "government bailout," originated with Bush's Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson, and a majority of non-partisan economists agree that had it not been for swift governmental stimuli during the recent financial nuclear winter, the country would have slipped into a Second Great Depression. The conservatives scream, "No more government spending," when that is exactly what saved the economy from the abyss. It's said that "When the U.S. sneezes, the world catches cold," but during this cataclysmic close-call, it was more like almost infecting the globe with Ebola. If Obama did nothing else in his first two years, he brought us back from the brink of financial collapse. The GOP accuses the Dems of "blaming it all on Bush," but if you believe the times are difficult now, be grateful they aren't horrible. One more basic mathematical formula applies to the previous administration from which they cannot escape accountability: (Two wars) + (Massive tax-cuts) = Economic Catastrophe.

I had written previously that it would take most of Obama's first term to unravel Bush's political dingleberries, but I underestimated the vehemence of the opposition. I imagined that Obama had the mandate to govern like FDR in crisis mode with a Brand New Deal, that included public works initiatives and employment projects to modernize interstates and establish the foundations for high-speed rail. The fact that Obama first chose to tackle health-care reform dispersed much of his political capital, only he got it done. He accomplished what no previous president could, faced with a unanimous resistance from the opposition. What's disturbing is that the divisiveness of the issue created a network of disinformation to abet the Republican Party's strategy of refusing to cooperate with this president on anything whatsoever. While justifiably disillusioned working people drift toward the Tea Party to express their frustration, their counterparts in Congress stonewall everything from financial reform to extending unemployment benefits. In their lust to recapture political power, the Republicans made the conscious decision to sacrifice the common good and delay the nation's economic recovery, and for this they expect to be rewarded?

On Sunday, 9/12, there were more Tea Party rallies all over the country, financed by Dick Armey's FreedomWorks and other corporate interests. What was initially billed as a time of reflection over 9/11 turned into a pep rally for the right, as angry white people marched from Sacramento to St. Louis. Thousands marched in Washington, D.C., but the main event was in Anchorage, featuring America's sweetheart, Glenn Beck, and the quitter Governor Sarah Palin, proving there is nothing, from her family to 9/11, that she will not exploit for political gain. The poster-children for insurrection were going to discuss how unified the nation felt after the New York attacks, but the best tickets went for $200 bucks a pop. Throughout the entire Bush era, 9/11 was a day reserved for national remembrance, devoid of the usual political acrimony. Not anymore. The obstructionist Republicans smell victory and if the attacks on this country can be recast to suit their cause, they'll wave the bloody flag again.

Now every pundit on every news network is talking about a "Republican Tsunami" in November that will wash away the Obama reforms in a wave of righteous anger. The pundits have not gotten anything right since they declared the presidency for Al Gore, so since I'm not easily propagandized, let me clue you in. It ain't gonna' happen. And these Tea Party rallies all over the country? No big deal. The GOP is doing everything but publicly salivating over the thought of regaining Congress, and they actually believe the Tea Party is representational of the American voter. They do so at the risk of forgetting that everybody hates Congress, but no one really objects to their congressman. The election is still seven weeks away, and the more the public sees of the fringe-right candidates, the less they seem to want them in office. Harry Reid must be one of the most despised men in Nevada, but every time Sharron Angle opens her mouth, his poll numbers go up. I'm aware that the Democrats are fools and cowards, but the Republicans are liars and whores, and that's just the men. It's beyond question that the reactionary wing of the Republican party is angry and motivated to vote against something, but some of these Tea Party candidates remind me of Jack Nicholson as The Joker, looking in the mirror and saying, "Wait 'til they get a load of me."

The thought of Speaker John Boehner and Leader Mitch McConnell should be enough to snap anyone from the hum of the right-wing fog and obfuscation machine, but they always seem to come up with that wedge issue, like gay marriage, that drives conservative voters. I can just see some young operative doing opposition research and discovering with delight that a long-planned Islamic Center in lower Manhattan was just two blocks from the site of the Twin Towers, and thus was born, "The Ground-Zero Mosque." The President, already facing hysterical accusations of being a "secret Muslim," is bound by oath to defend the Constitution, and thus protect the freedom of all religions, even Islam. It was a brilliant tactic and it worked, but it's a bogus issue and harmful to the country. The example of Pastor Steve Stone, of Cordova's Heartsong Church, in not just welcoming the neighboring Islamic Center, but offering the church's facilities to the Muslim community for prayer during Ramadan, is reverberating across the nation simply because it was an act of love, rather than one of hate. Which gives me cause to believe that people may be growing weary of the manufactured rage of the right. When you spend two years blocking the schoolhouse door and only offer more of the same, it equates to another mathematical certainty, which happens to be the title of an old Billy Preston song; "Nothing from Nothing leaves Nothing."

The Beck Brigade

2010-08-29T02:39:00.033-05:00

It's been over twenty years since I visited Israel as part of a statewide delegation led by then Senator Al Gore, Jr. It was a multi-religious group, which was great for me as a product of a Jewish home and a Catholic education. I saw the tourist sights, but I was inclined to break away from the group, particularly at night, and stroll the streets where people gathered in order to get a personal feel for the place. Chance encounters, in combination with walking in ancient footprints, soon had me believing that I was a part of some larger scheme. An old rabbi physically stopped me in the street and pulled me into his classroom for a lecture on goodness, and when he had finished, he invited me to join his communal group and promised to find me a wife.

My last night in Jerusalem, I hailed a cab driven by a young Palestinian who offered to be my guide. When I told him I was leaving for New York the next day, he proudly displayed a business card from his brother's sandwich shop inside a midtown office building. He had me memorize the address since it was his only card. I glanced at it and told him I'd look up his sibling if I was in the neighborhood, then forgot about it. The next day, after an endless flight and morning hotel check-in, I was feeling jet-lagged and walked through a side door into the afternoon sun. Directly in front of me, not thirty feet away, was the office building whose address I had seen on the cabbie's card. I crossed the street, entered the building, navigated a corridor, and walked up to the lunchroom counter where a gentleman identified himself as the owner. I told him, "I was with your brother in Jerusalem yesterday. He sends his love and wants you to call him." Lunch was on the house as the proprietor explained that he had married a Jewish girl in Israel and they had come to the U.S. to escape the hostility of their respective families and communities. We agreed that the intolerance between the peoples of the holy land was regrettable and when I left him and again walked into the sun, I looked up and said, and I paraphrase myself, "Lord, You're messing with me."

Most of the Lord's messengers have beatific news to deliver, but if I was only supposed to convey a shout-out between brothers, that was cool. Afterward, I walked around for several months searching for signs and wonders, believing the Lord was personally leading me by the hand, until reality returned and I discovered that I had neither been called nor chosen, but had an ailment common to unseasoned tourists known as "Jerusalem Fever." It's the inclination for first-time visitors to the holy land to believe they are personally interwoven with the ongoing religious narrative and are receiving instructions directly from the Deity. Some believe they have been called to play great roles in the events of mankind. Such a pilgrim is Glenn Beck, who claimed his "Restoring Honor" rally in Washington D.C. landed on the anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech because of "divine providence," and only "wrote out a few bullet points so as not to interfere in case the Spirit wanted to talk." He professed an "American miracle" was going to occur and attendees would be present "at the awakening." I might pay money to ride a bus to D.C. to see Jeff Beck, but Glenn Beck? Nahh.

Beck's not that difficult to analyze. A self-confessed "hard-drinking, hard-living ignoramus," gets sober, reads some books, and begins to see patterns. By espousing his conspiratorial views, he is first promoted from talk-radio to back-bencher on the Headline News Channel, then on to the big leagues, where he becomes the most controversial, "entertainer" on Fox News; no easy feat. Soon his every utterance is dissected by other teleditorialists and his ratings and self-importance grow until he perceives himself as the leader of an earth-changing, transcendent movement on the march. His grandiose scheme drew a quarter million people to the National Mall, but Beck's gathering was more of a religious revival than a societal shift, and if he was trying to channel Dr. King, he came off sounding more like Elmer Gantry. At his "Million White Man March," Glenn spoke of returning to God, supporting the military, and the importance of family. Who could argue with that? The firebrand Beck was entirely inoffensive, unless you object to receiving religious instruction from a shill for Rupert Murdoch. The big crowd seemed pleased, but I thought it was like going to a Kiss concert and having the band come out in street clothes playing acoustic guitars.

Unquestionably, Beck possesses accumulated knowledge, but he consistently misinterprets it and ends up connecting the wrong dots. He praises the "Chosen People" but rails against "social justice," which is the cornerstone of the faith. He speaks of "restoring honor," yet refers to the president as "a person with a deep-seated hatred for white people," and "a racist." Personally, I thought the nation's honor was restored the moment George W. Bush left the White House, and although a short film was shown to commemorate Dr. King's historic 1963 march, there were more blacks on stage as speakers and singers than in the audience. Beck's restraint was the result of his promise to keep the event non-political, but the location, the date, and the name, "Restoring Honor to America," by implication, made it so. To his credit, Beck waited until three hours into the pageant before succumbing to his patented sobbing. He even read the Gettysburg Address. Mostly, he did no harm, which I suppose is a good thing until his next outrageous on-air outburst. But, his stature has been diminished. Beck demonstrated that he's not a transformational figure and he certainly is no Martin Luther King. Forty-seven years ago, Dr. King had a dream; Glenn Beck just has a delusion.

No, Canada!

2010-08-15T02:47:00.129-05:00

When the seasons turn, imagine hordes of illegal aliens streaming across the U.S. border dressed in their bizarre native garb and speaking in a foreign tongue, straining our social services and imposing their criminal ethic on sovereign citizens legally in this country. It wouldn't be the first time illegal drugs and contraband flowed undetected over that border and into the lives of everyday Americans, along with the accompanying violence that's always part of the deal. It's a frightening thought to envision roving gangs of disaffected Quebecois, crossing the Canadian border on snowshoes and wearing toques, speaking crude French slang and overwhelming border towns like Buffalo and Rochester, hanging out in the parking lots of the Home Depots with huge snow shovels looking to clear someone's driveway and take a job from an American. And who can stand that whining music they listen to...Celine Dion and Bryan Adams? During prohibition, our porous northern border was the gateway for Canadian hooch from the forerunners of the soul-stealing Seagram's empire, just as today it is the entry way for the demonic "B.C. Bud," and the Manitoba drug cartels. Their entertainers, from Alex Trebek to Howie Mandel have taken over youth culture and television, while alien seductresses like Pamela Anderson have corrupted the internets.

No wonder our economy is in the crapper when Canadians can smuggle their cheap, socialized, pharmaceuticals into our country and sell it for half the cost of the identical product here. Busloads of Canadians are trying to escape their evil, Marxist health care system to come over here and have lots of unnecessary tests performed in substandard hospital emergency rooms that serve the uninsured. There are even cabals of subversive comedians, led by Martin Short and Jim Carrey, that try to set the American standard for what's funny. Seeing Mr. Short in a fat suit playing a character named Jiminy Glick may have been humorous to some, but what of the family of 9/11, Flight #93 hero Jeremy Glick, whom Short was clearly mocking. Or, how about a Canuck, ex-con, beatnik like Tommy Chong, who has been attempting to pervert our youth for over 40 years. This Canadian invasion has reached a tipping point and true patriots want immediate governmental action to end this outrage. I demand that the fortifications protecting us from Canadian women sneaking into Detroit to have American babies become the President's top priority. I mean, isn't that why we built Fort Ticonderoga? The only good to come out of this breach in our northern border is the proliferation of Canadian restaurants and re-fried cuisine. And their work ethic, of course.

But when these illegals come into this country and take these rare jobs, what do they do? They don't spend it here. They send their money back home to support their families. This underage, risque singer, Justin Beiber, comes to this country unchaperoned, makes a fortune, and sends it right back to his people in some province called Ontario. If he gets sick on tour, he's got the best medical care the government can offer, and he doesn't even pay taxes in this country. Same thing with this hippie surfer Keanu Reeves, who portrayed an average American teen in the Bill & Ted movies, but then I discovered he was not only born in Lebanon, he starred as Prince Siddhartha/Lord Buddha in 1992's "Little Buddha." At least this Beatleboy Beiber pays taxes somewhere. For all we know, this "transplanted" Lebanese Canadian Reeves could be funding Al Qaeda with his Hollywood money. Plus, I heard he's part Hawaiian, so there's got to be something up with his birth certificate. Is it difficult to draw the conclusion that Reeves and rock-star sex therapist Pam Anderson will settle in California with the intention of raising "terror babies" that will automatically be American citizens, but grow up to be suicide bombers as Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert has suggested? Is it just a coincidence that suspect leftist superstar moms are already raising North Vietnamese children? And why isn't Glen Beck on top of this?

That's why I'm so grateful to the group of Republican senators who so revere our Constitution, that they are always prepared to change it in order to stop what S.C. Sen. Lindsey Graham calls the policy of "Drop and Leave." These Canadian women will squat in the bushes like Sacajawea just to have an "anchor baby" that leads them onto the fast track for welfare. Senators Kyl of Texas, Kentucky's McConnell, Iowa's Grassley, and since it's an election year, John McCain, have all called for a "review" and potential revocation of the 14th Amendment which grants American citizenship to those born within our borders, including all those rosy-cheeked offspring of Canadian skaters who have come to dominate the National Hockey League and take jobs away from thousands of aspiring American hockey legends. The tough thing about repealing the 14th Amendment, is that it also deals with that "equal protection under the law" business. In these turbulent times, however, perhaps "equal" protection is a little too much for the Mexicans and Muslims to expect. It takes a trained eye to spot a Canadian. The best way is to drop a hockey puck in a crowd and see who dives for it.

Ginning up bloodlust, immigrant xenophobia failed to work for the Republicans the last election cycle, and it will fail again this time. There are better ways to solve our border issues than savage demagoguery about beheadings and kidnappings when the non-partisan Pew Research Center reports an all time high in arrests and deportation of undocumented workers. Right-wing candidates for office have offered solutions as varied as internment camps to mass deportation, while most people still come here illegally because they know there are employers who will hire them for more than they can make at home, be it in Alberta or Mazatlan. Americans have forgotten the struggles of Cesar Chavez and his United Farm Workers, or politicians like Bobby Kennedy who championed not only their cause, but their dignity. It's easier to call them all drug mules or arms smugglers than people just trying to scrape by on this earth with their hands. Wouldn't it be weird if one day we found out that God was really on Mexico's side all along and that the theory of "Manifest Destiny" actually pertained to them, and that's why they are this nation's fastest growing demographic? When Latinos become the country's majority, we'll let them deal with this encroaching Canadianization of the good old U.S.of A.

A Haspel Hat Tip to Kennedy Award Winner Bill Day for his cartoon.

Tempest In A Tea Party

2010-08-01T02:32:00.002-05:00

Mark Williams, the Chairman of the Tea Party Express, got booted from the Confederacy of Dunces last month because, in response to an NAACP suggestion that the group repudiate racial elements within the movement, he wrote and published an "Open letter to President Lincoln" from the emancipated slaves, something he referred to as "satire." The full text of the knee-slapping missive is worthy of examination, because it reveals more about the writer than the subject, and shows something about the common beliefs of a great many Americans. In his "satire," all Williams did was put down in words what many Tea Party types refuse to say out loud.

Dear Mr. Lincoln

We Coloreds have taken a vote and decided that we don’t cotton to that whole emancipation thing. Freedom means having to work for real, think for ourselves, and take consequences along with the rewards. That is just far too much to ask of us Colored People and we demand that it stop.
In fact we held a big meeting and took a vote in Kansas City this week. We voted to condemn a political revival of that old abolitionist spirit called the ‘tea party movement’.
The tea party position to “end the bailouts” for example is just silly. Bailouts are just big money welfare and isn’t that what we want all Coloreds to strive for? What kind of racist would want to end big money welfare? What they need to do is start handing the bail outs directly to us coloreds! Of course, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is the only responsible party that should be granted the right to disperse the funds.
And the ridiculous idea of “reduce[ing] the size and intrusiveness of government.” What kind of massa would ever not want to control my life? As Coloreds we must have somebody care for us otherwise we would be on our own, have to think for ourselves and make decisions!
The racist tea parties also demand that the government “stop the out of control spending.” Again, they directly target coloreds. That means we Coloreds would have to compete for jobs like everybody else and that is just not right.
Perhaps the most racist point of all in the tea parties is their demand that government “stop raising our taxes.” That is outrageous! How will we coloreds ever get a wide screen TV in every room if non-coloreds get to keep what they earn? Totally racist! The tea party expects coloreds to be productive members of society?
Mr. Lincoln, you were the greatest racist ever. We had a great gig. Three squares, room and board, all our decisions made by the massa in the house. Please repeal the 13th and 14th Amendments and let us get back to where we belong.
Sincerely
Precious Ben Jealous, Tom’s Nephew NAACP Head Colored Person

Laugh? I thought I'd never start! How can you convince someone there is racism in their midst when it runs in their blood and they don't even know what it looks like? A week later, Williams was still on cable news defending his remarks by saying the NAACP was guilty of reverse racism, which appears to be the Tea Party's prime rebuttal for all the "patriotic Americans'" outrageous behavior at the various kleagle rallies around the nation. These "concerned citizens" don't like it when their ultra-rightist movement is called "racist." They defy you to prove any member of their group called Rep. John Lewis a "nigger" while simultaneously gutting ACORN with false propaganda. Their new hero, Kentucky senatorial candidate Rand Paul, can't deviate from his Libertarian philosophy enough to agree that segregated lunch counters in the Fifties were a bad thing. He expressed the still burning racist ember that private businesses should be able to choose who they serve. Not if they serve the public, they don't. If someone wishes to start a private club that caters exclusively to Caucasian, dwarf albinos, that is their right, but if you are serving the public, that means all the public. And I don't believe for a second that Paul is a racist. However, when I grew out my beard and started hanging around with people with long hair, they called me a hippie. So, if the sheet fits...

The term "yellow journalism" was created in the late 1800's to describe the sensationalist rhetoric and fabricated stories of newspapers owned by William Randolph Hearst, particularly the New York Journal. As influential as newspapers were in the last century, not even Hearst could have imagined a 24-hour "news" network continually pumping out anti-government propaganda for the benefit of a particular political party, or entire radio empires built on hatred and fear-mongering. The Hearst of the 21st century, Rupert Murdoch, became a naturalized U.S. citizen in order to own multiple media outlets in the same market, like the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal. His brand of contemporary "yellow journalism" is far more insidious than the sabre rattling of a few newspapers, and makes the "Remember the Maine," jingoism of the Hearst era seem almost quaint. With Fox News acting as a running-dog for right-wing extremism, pseudo-smart "entertainers" like Glen Beck get free reign to espouse their inflammatory "theories." So, when a real journalist, like the Washington Post's Dana Milbank, calls Beck out for his serial use of Nazi references to describe the Obama administration, the right's reaction is to claim that the country is experiencing a phase of "political correctness," in which their freedom of speech is under attack. They have become oblivious to the difference between "free speech" and "hate speech," and the saddest and most alarming statement of all about Fox News is their massive ratings success and rabid, "true-believer" folllowing.

A typical Fox "story" comes from out-of-the-mainstream, internet sources, like the ACORN "prostitution sting," or the most recent running expose' about the "New Black Panther Party." Fox flogged the story for weeks and Bill O'Reilly pondered aloud why the other news organizations were "avoiding" the issue. Then it turned out that the "Party" consisted of two, baton-wielding wannabe radicals hanging around an overwhelmingly African-American polling station "intimidating voters" into casting their ballots for Obama. When that poisoned well ran dry, Fox virtually leaped on blogger and Tea Party apologist Andrew Breitbart's odious contention that reverse racism existed at the Department of Agriculture in the person of one Shirley Sherrod. By slicing and dicing Sherrod's speech before the NAACP, he made a convincing argument that she was discriminating against white people out of what was actually a story of redemption. Had anyone been paying attention, WorldNetDaily had reported on a July 16th appearance at a Fargo, N.D. talk radio program where Breitbart said, "Let me say something a tad newsworthy to the president of the NAACP. You can go to hell." He then bragged, "I have tapes, a tape, of racism, and it's an NAACP dinner. You want to play with fire? I have evidence of racism and it's coming from the NAACP." The law states that if you defame a person's reputation with feckless accusations with the intention of smearing them, it's called "libel," and it's a prosecutable offense. I only hope that after Ms. Sherrod sues Breitbart's ass off, she goes after Fox News.

I confess that I was fooled too. When I saw the initial reports and video of Sherrod on Fox News, I thought that she must certainly resign, and the outrage of the Obama administration and the NAACP was justified. They made the same mistake that I did by assuming that Fox was a semi-responsible news organization that abides by the rules of journalism. How foolish of me. Fox News President Roger Ailes knows what his boss wants as surely as if he were William Randolph Hearst. This current Fox "reverse racism" crusade is in keeping with Ailes past deeds like advising Richard Nixon on appealing to southern, white voters, and orchestrating "Poppy" Bush's presidential campaign against Michael Dukakis by tying the Massachusetts Governor to paroled rapist, Willie Horton, in a famous negative political ad. When questioned about the propriety of the controversial commercial, Ailes said his only hesitation was whether to picture Horton with or without a knife. Why should I have assumed Fox News vetted the Breitbart piece when he was the one behind the story and video of ACORN's adventures with the now felonious, fake pimp, and then spent six months lying about it? And all in the cause of proving Mark Williams' supposed point in his "satirical" letter to Lincoln, that honest, hard-working citizens' tax money goes directly to the support of shiftless layabouts who prefer "big-money welfare" to a job; the raison d'etre of the Tea Party movement. Former representative and Tea Party darling Tom Tancredo has announced his candidacy for governor of Colorado, only months after waxing nostalgic about literacy tests at the polls during the Jim Crow era. Since good test results are a pre-requisite for entering a respected college, isn't there some way we could institute civics literacy exams for potential candidates for public office? At least check their SAT scores.

Reefer Madness Redux

2010-07-18T02:34:00.020-05:00

Since the initial wave of the hippie movement travelled from west to east, it didn't reach Knoxville until well after the 1967 "Summer of Love." We had more of a "Springtime of Love" in 1968. Toward the end of the school year, rumors reached our Tennessee tribe that there was marijuana growing wild in the state of Kansas, right in the interstate median. Just like the Gold Rush of '49, van loads of denim-wearing, entrepreneurial hippies raced to the great plains and, sure enough, returned with garbage bags filled with something looking identical to cannabis. It was the remnants of a WWII era government program that grew the plants for their hemp value, and all these years later, the crop had survived. The problem was, the wild plants lacked the psychoactive ingredient that caused the euphoric effect in pot and were pretty much useless for anything other than weaving into handbags or sandals.

Personally, I never tried to sell pot because I lacked the ruthlessness required to profit from your friends, but even I got caught up in this deal. Since it was over 40 years ago, I trust the statute of limitations has expired. We tried to doctor this cabbage in every way possible, including baking it, but only ended up with brittle leaves of the worst pot anyone had ever tried. It wouldn't even give you a headache. I finally locked it all up in a Styrofoam chest filled with dry ice overnight and by the next day, the gas from the CO2 made you mildly dizzy. We drove it to Nashville, where a new breed of songwriters had settled and distributed all of it without complaint, and soon afterward, there was a Renaissance in country music. OK, that last part was a lie, but we did unload all the Kansas weed on Music Row.

Just recently, I was reminiscing with an old friend about that particular escapade and we couldn't help but agree what a dumbass, reckless college-boy thing that was to do, like trying to smoke the inner skin of a banana peel because we had heard Donovan singing "Mellow Yellow." We also agreed what a shame it would have been to have been arrested over such hideous weed during an age when people were going to jail for seeds in an ashtray. The irresistible lure was that it was just growing wild, but by picking it and carrying it in a sack, we were guilty of the crime of possession, and when we crossed state lines, our crime became federal. Kansas ultimately eradicated all the interstate pot because Hefty-Bag toting hippies kept popping up on the highways like penal farm work crews. It did occur to me, however, that if this weed could grow wild on a Kansas blacktop, it could pretty much grow anywhere, and people being who and what they are, it was only a matter of time before the prohibition of pot would be tossed aside just like the prohibition of whiskey. But, that was eight presidents ago. What has prevented even the discussion of decriminalization until relatively recently, has been the same old-boy deal that has always muzzled debate on the issue; political influence. In this case, the beer, spirits, and alcohol lobby, who are still smarting from having their seductive and subliminal liquor ads removed from television. The pot industry doesn't have any lobbyists. Plenty of advocates, but no lobbyists.

Local news reported that a man was arrested in Memphis last week after a DEA task force raid with more than 1,200 pounds of baled marijuana in his humble Orange Mound home, and was being held in city jail under a bond of one penny less than ten million dollars. A somewhat saner judge reduced the bail to a quarter mil, but you'd have thought these guys caught Scarface. Rapists and murderers are given more consideration and less harsh treatment than a pot dealer, and they do less time. Though the bust warranted a scant five paragraphs in The Commercial Appeal, it was eye-popping news to pot aficionados who are experiencing the annual Memphis summer marijuana drought, or so I'm told. The DEA agents testified that after jack-booting the doors, they found large bales of a "green, leafy substance." Can you imagine the number of police and the manpower used to haul away a half a ton of leaves? In the end, they'll burned it all which was exactly what was going to happen to it in the first place. And this all-purpose panacea had a street value of over a half-million dollars. The zeal in which the pot dealers were captured and jailed was exceeded only last month by the Las Vegas police, who killed a 21 year old man while serving a marijuana search warrant. And this was in a state where citizens voted to decriminalize possession. The late outlaw's bride-to-be told local TV that her intended was "a recreational smoker. He smoked weed, marijuana, that's what he did." The police recovered "an unspecified amount of marijuana and some digital scales." A regular Al Capone, this kid.

In the Memphis bust, there will now be a trial or two and long incarcerations, costing the city and state and ultimately you. And because the profit motive is so high, (you know; Capitalism), someone else will take these guys' place and the criminality will continue. In fact, author Eric Schlosser writes, "There are more people in prison today for violating marijuana laws than at any time in American history." And that population will only grow as long as police forces around the country maintain the marijuana home-invasion mentality. Imagine if the ban on the plant was lifted for adults, and regulated and taxed by the government for the benefit of society. How many more policemen or teachers would that revenue hire? How much gang violence would be diffused by removing the profit from illegal pot sales? How would our problems on the Mexican border be affected if the demand for marijuana smuggling were eliminated? I'm not naive enough to believe that there won't always be a demand for illegal narcotics, but hard drugs that do emotional and physical damage are another matter entirely, and if we are being honest, we'll admit our major national drug problem is with good old home-made American pharmaceuticals. I'd prefer to be able to take advantage of that "pursuit of happiness" thing. All these people who are running around screaming that their freedoms are under siege and they want their country back; well, so do I. No federal agency forbids you from growing poppies on the veranda. Give me the freedom to determine what grows in my own backyard. I want the government out of my bedroom and the police out of my garden. This is an issue worthy of a tea party.

Gluttons For Punishment

2010-07-05T00:31:00.004-05:00

I enjoy celebrating Independence Day much the same way as I do New Year's Eve; I stay off the streets. The nation's birthday has become an annual orgy of mattress and auto sales, not to mention the charcoal and lighter fluid. Aside from visiting with family and friends, there's really no good reason to leave the air conditioning for outdoor activities now that the downtown fireworks display over the Mississippi River has been cancelled due to budget cuts. However, the amateur fireworks were so loud on my block that we had to sedate the dogs. After viewing the July 4th hot dog eating contest at Coney Island, live on ESPN, I thought I would need sedation myself.

This has got to be the only country in the world where some people go hungry, while others are "professional" eaters. But, who could object to a good old fashioned sausage eating contest that's been going on at Nathan's Famous Hot Dog Stand since 1916? I can. The once good-time event has now gone big-time with the formation of the Major League Eating organization. They are the governing body that oversees all professional eating contests in the nation, under the auspices of the International Federation of Competitive Eating (IFOC). The MLE is looking towards global expansion, but they are constrained to places where they actually have food. Other than the U.S. and Japan, I think the International League is having trouble fielding a team in countries like Haiti or Bulgaria. And it's no longer merely hot dogs. In a year, there are over 80 major scheduled events, like the Krystal Square-Off and the Pizza Hut P'Zone Chow-lenge, with corporate sponsors as varied as Smirnoff Vodka and Netflix. The Coney Island competition was co-sponsored, appropriately, by Pepto Bismol. I like a Nathan's hot dog myself, just not 50 at once.

This years' contest was engulfed in controversy when former champion and world renowned eater Takeru Kobayashi refused to participate because of an "impasse" with Major League Eating. The Japanese challenger left the Mustard Belt up for the taking since the MLE wanted to bar him from participating in "outside competitions." This meant clear sailing for defending champ, Joey Chestnut, who out-gorged the rest of the field, winning by nine dogs plus buns. Without Kobayashi to spur him on, along with the 95 degree temperature, Chestnut fell far short of his own record of 68 dogs in ten minutes, devouring a mere 54 red- hots and half a bottle of Pepto. The real drama came after the event had ended, when Kobayashi, wearing a green "Free Kobi" T-Shirt, attempted to storm the stage during the award ceremony and was arrested and carted off by the police. The huge crowd of spectators chanted, "Let him eat" in unison, while The Who's "Teenage Wasteland" blared over the loud speakers. Just like professional wrestling, allow a league to take monopolistic control, bring in the corporate sponsors, and there goes your "sport."

In the end, the event looked more like the marathon dancers of the thirties; doing something unnatural and demeaning for the entertainment of the mob in the hope of winning the $10,000 grand prize. The "color commentators," who kept referring to the bingers as "athletes," reported that Joey Chestnut consumed 20,166 calories in 10 minutes while perfecting his technique of shoving two dogs in his mouth at once while doing a little jig to stretch his stomach lining. In his career as a professional eater, Chestnut has won over $200,000, three cars and a motorcycle. He's also eaten 10.5 pounds of macaroni and cheese in seven minutes, and 56 matzoh balls in one sitting, even though he didn't know what a matzoh was before the competition. While the other contestants looked for buckets, Chestnut waved the Mustard Belt aloft while drooling hot dog juice down the front of a T-Shirt covered in corporate logos like a race car driver. I couldn't decide which was more offensive; the mindless inhalation of massive amounts of food, or the corporate takeover of "the sport of competitive eating."

This Super Bowl of gluttony is a typically American spectacle that would be an occasion for mirth were it not for the fact that the gulf between the haves and the have-nots has never been greater since the Gilded Age of Robber Barons. But even then, the "in-your-face" attitude was subdued, lest the proletariat rise up and storm the suburbs. Major League Eating does nothing to help the nation's obesity epidemic, especially now that Tennessee has been ranked second in the country, only behind Mississippi, as the fattest state in the Union. There are many issues to blame, but there is no worse perpetrator in the enlarging of America than the fast-food restaurant chains. I sympathize with people who struggle with their weight, but lately it seems as if most have simply stopped the struggle. Exhibit A is the sandwich sold by KFC consisting of two fried chicken breasts filled with bacon and cheese, a heart attack available in the drive-thru, while products like the Triple Whopper are directly marketed to the poorest among us. Morbid obesity is so common here, the front pew in church looks like the Pittsburgh Steelers offensive line. Major League Eating seems sort of incongruous while the Memphis Food Bank is feeding over 186,000 people per year that otherwise would not have nourishing meals. Other than gluttony and sloth, there is a word that describes this big-money, "professional," eating circuit; disgusting.

The Duke of Oil

2010-06-26T02:33:00.037-05:00

Rahm Emanuel said that it looks like BP CEO Tony Hayward finally got his life back. There are millions of people who live along the Gulf Coast that wish they could say the same. Before Hayward's appearance in front of Congress, no one had said, "I don't remember" that many times since Alberto Gonzalez. It bought him his ticket back to England, however, and the torch was passed to another corporate shill. However, was it necessary for him to go directly to a yacht race? BP gave the job of Face Man, to Bob Dudley, a Mississippi boy. At least he can speak Southern and he did a good job as director of the Liberty Bowl. And Hayward was forgiven and absolved of his sins by Rep. Joe Barton of Texas, who personally apologised for the "shakedown" by the White House that holds BP accountable for the disaster. Simultaneously, the twin conservative calender girls, Palin and Bachmann, came to BP's defense. Bachmann, who needs to be in the witless protection program, claimed the escrow account was "extortion," while the original "Drill Baby Drill" gal said on Fox "News," that BP was being "demonized." All this, while oil continues to gush into the Gulf and BP and their affiliates have been caught in a pattern of deliberate lies.

A book was published in 1958 called "The Ugly American," by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer. It was actually an espionage novel that was made into a movie starring Marlon Brando, and the title referred to the arrogant American diplomats serving in Indochina. But it has since come to represent the loud and obnoxious American tourist abroad, oblivious to the sensitivities and customs of their hosts. Tony Hayward was the flip side of that coin. Every time he made another public statement, the victims of this outrage grew angrier and more frustrated with the state of BP's clean-up effort. All except the region's fish and wildlife, the true victims of this atrocity, who have no voice to express their rage and become collateral damage to the oil industry and their congressional lackeys like Barton. When you add the remarks of Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg, a vocal double for Arnold Schwarzenegger, that BP cares "about the small people," to the grossly inappropriate, "I want my life back," from Haywood, you've got a couple of clueless, wild-and-crazy-guys who just can't quite seem to master that corporate sincerity thing. Even Hayward saying he was "deeply sorry," only served to remind that BP does everything deeply.

The latest outrage comes from British retirees who are heavily invested in BP. The June 17 headline of London's' Daily Mail read: "Obama Bullies BP Into Fund for Oil Spill Victims, but British Pensioners will Pick Up the Bill." I wonder who could be stoking these anti-Obama passions in Great Britain. Could it be..."SATAN?" No, it's his brother, Rupert Murdoch, who owns the paper. So, allow me to say to the elderly English investors who got their dividends postponed, with all due respect, "Shut the fuck up." This isn't about you. If Exxon or DuPont came over and bespoiled the white cliffs of Dover, your reaction would be much the same. This is about a heartless international conglomerate that has been gouging the earth for over a hundred years and leaving wreckage in their global wake, that happens to be named British Petroleum. Oh, I'm sorry. I forgot they changed the name to Beyond Principles or Bloated Profits, or whatever the hell it is now. A tarball by any other name would smell as foul. The good people of the UK are up in arms with Obama and the Congress over what they perceive to be a growing anti-British sentiment. There's no greater Anglophile than me, but if we wanted to be upset with you, it would have been over Tony Blair's enabling of Dubya to wage war. We eagerly look to your current inquiry into the Iraqi war to produce justice, just as our inquiry into the Gulf disaster should do the same.

The problems with BP are legion; from their cozy relations with government, massive violations and fines, the 2005 explosion at a Texas City, TX refinery that killed fifteen people, and for which BP was charged with criminal environmental violations. The list is easily researched. But let's go back and pick up a golden oldie, all the way from 1953, when the Korean War was in a stalemate, a commie scare had infected Congress, and Ike was on the golf course. The Iranian people had democratically elected a president named Mohammad Mosaddeq, who took a look around at the British owned Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which had been extracting Iranian oil since 1908, and decided to nationalize the oil fields. The CIA, with assistance from their British counterparts, began a smear campaign, calling Mosaddeq a Communist, and organized a military coup that toppled the president and replaced him with Shah Reza Pahlavi, whose U.S. trained secret police, SAVAK, terrorized the populace for the next 25 years. Mosadeqq spent the rest of his life under house arrest. The next year, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, fresh oil leases in hand, changed their name to British Petroleum. Consequently, in a circular way, BP shares responsibility for the Iranian Revolution.

We're currently getting fishing boats trying to lift oil from the surface of the water when what we really need is a Marshall Plan for the Gulf. Where are all these massive oil skimmers that BP keeps referring to, and now that a homeboy is the spokesman, can he see the ecological tragedy that has been unleashed by his corporate masters? And still, Governor Bobby Jindal and his GOP "free marketeers" protest a moratorium on further drilling until this case can be investigated. The latest conservative talking point is that this disaster is the fault of the effete environmentalists whose limitations on shallow water drilling forced the oil companies to go deeper. They went where no man has gone before because that's where the damn oil is, bubba. The only thing as atrocious as this continuing oil hell has been the Republicans defense of the industry. In order to try and damage Obama, they are willing to put our very habitat at risk for political power. It has been widely reported that Joe Barton would become head of the House Energy and Commerce Committee should the GOP magically regain a legislative majority in the forthcoming election, so it would be wise to remember the words of early American financier Simon Cameron: "An honest politician is one who, when he is bought, will stay bought."

A Haspel hat tip to Bill Day.

The Ugly Audience

2010-06-21T02:49:00.005-05:00

For as long as I can remember, I've been reading music reviews in Memphis' various newspapers. Perhaps it's time for someone to review the audience. I pick and choose my concerts carefully ever since I realized that people don't know how to act in public anymore. I stopped going to Tunica when a Santana concert turned into a drunken frat party and some button-downed buzz-cut sloshed a beer down my back. I no longer go to Mud Island concerts for the same reason. I passed up tickets for Steely Dan because the show was on Mud Island. Afterwards, a friend told me tales of shouting drunks, screaming their conversations over the band's music, and wanting to fight when asked to keep it down. Where we once went to concerts to get high and listen to the music, now it's to get drunk and party. You can do that to the stereo. For me to attend a show these days, the artist has to be unique and I need a reserved seat and an unobstructed view of the stage.

When I bought tickets to see Nancy Wilson with Arturo Sandoval, I expected an older, more sophisticated crowd to attend. I imagined that the rarely seen Ms. Wilson would surely draw a more musically knowledgeable audience that showed up to appreciate the two jazz legends. Not a chance. The event quickly descended into another Memphis embarrassment, complete with heckling, crowd misconduct, and admonishments from the promoter. Ms. Wilson was booked for a similar engagement two years ago but had to cancel because of family concerns. The promoter was forced to refund a near sell-out show, and in the fickle concert business, this performance drew only a half-filled house. Yet still the people came late. I mean, thirty and forty minutes into the concert, ushers with flashlights were still making rows of people stand to accommodate the tardy arrivals who seemed oblivious to their distractions. Maybe some of the attendees thought they were going to see one of those guitar-playing sisters in the band, Heart. At some point, "fashionably late" becomes unreasonably rude. After all, this was Nancy Wilson at the Cannon Center, not Meat Loaf at the Coliseum.

The opening act was world-class Cuban trumpeter Arturo Sandoval. The Grammy-winning artist and his quartet had played four polished jazz instrumentals when some boorish lout yelled, "We want Nancy." Sandoval replied, "I want her too, and she'll be here soon," but after the next song, the shouts rang out again. The now aggravated Sandoval said, "We're contracted to play here for a certain period of time," before his words were drowned out by applause from the supportive crowd. An uneasiness fell over the room as the flustered musician continued, "I've never had anybody shout out at me like this before. I hope this won't be our special memory of Memphis." Voices of protest and encouragement and a smattering of applause erupted in the darkness. The Latin jazz virtuoso added, "In fifty years, no one has ever shouted at me like this." I wanted to sink down in my seat and cover my head while the injured Sandoval played a blistering trumpet solo, seemingly to spite his detractors, and then stalked off stage, pausing only momentarily to acknowledge the standing crowd.

After intermission, the concert promoter and head of Cultural Arts For Everyone (CAFE), Rebecca Edwards, interrupted her welcoming remarks and the announcement of the non-profit organization's tenth anniversary to assist some patrons in locating their seats. A passionate, one woman company, Ms. Edwards scolded the crowd that Arturo Sandoval would return to the stage later and was deserving of a standing ovation. When the house lights dimmed and Nancy Wilson appeared in a stunning red dress and a boot on her broken ankle, little white rectangles began to light up all over the hall. It's no longer sufficient to merely attend and enjoy a concert anymore. Now, everyone has to record it on their cell phone and maybe get some hits on YouTube later. Ms. Wilson responded positively to the obligatory audience shouts of, "We love you," until one woman began a personal dialogue with the artist about how much the songs meant to her and her husband. During a dramatic pause at the end of the showcase song, "Guess Who I Saw Today," a man yelled something unintelligible. Before the return of Sandoval and the unspontaneous love-fest that was to come, Melody and I left the building wondering exactly when decorum died.

I've seen recent concerts in Nashville, including Van Morrison at the Ryman Auditorium and Steely Dan at Starwood Amphitheatre, that were memorable. Maybe because Nashville has so many residents that are musicians or friends of musicians, they show a little more reverence for the music. But obnoxious audiences spring up in every part of Memphis, in all types of venues. This is why I haven't performed in a club in five years. I finally grew weary of being background noise for diners and drunks and I thought there must be something else I can do. That's why you're reading me instead of hearing me. We don't need to personally interact this way, and I can read your comments at my leisure. I admire the persistence of Rebecca Edwards in her continuing quest to bring cultural experiences to Memphis. I would have thrown up my hands long ago since I subscribe to the adage, "You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think." After an endless caravan of yesterday's country stars and geriatric rock bands, perhaps jaded Memphis audiences take live music too much for granted. I believe, however, that an artist with the stature of Nancy Wilson deserves better. And at these ticket prices, so do I.

The Reagan Delusion

2010-06-06T03:26:00.007-05:00

"As Democracy is perfected, the office (of president) represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their hearts' desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron." HL Mencken, 1920

Former Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford once referred to Ronald Reagan as an "amiable dunce," but Reagan's not the "downright moron" I was referring to. At least Reagan had principles. But there is a direct line leading from Ronald Reagan, to George W. Bush, to Sarah Palin. His "Trickle Down" economic theory was mocked by his then political rival and future Vice President. G.H.W. Bush, as "Voodoo Economics." But his most glaring error, the "Big Lie," was his pronouncement that, "Government is not the solution to the problem, government is the problem." Thus began the era of public distrust of government to solve problems, and the embryonic stages of what is now the Tea Party movement.

I was astonished that Reagan was ever elected in the first place. After a career in "B" movies and a stint as a shill for General Electric and Chesterfield cigarettes, he was elected president of the Screen Actors Guild, where his impact was felt during the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee witch-hunts of the fifties. Appearing before the committee, Reagan blamed labor unions for "Communist infiltration of Hollywood," and this was when he was still a Democrat. He switched parties in 1962, arguing that the "Democrats had left him." Conveniently, this was in the heart of the Civil Rights era and Reagan had political ambitions to follow his fellow "hoofer" and Republican, George Murphy, into the California Governor's office. Having never held political office before, Reagan won the Governor's race on a "Law and Order" platform in 1966, just in time to preside over the worst period of social unrest since the Civil War.

Reagan assumed state office with all the paternalistic and patronizing attitudes of the "War and Whiskey Generation" concerning the impertinent hippie protesters. After an anti-war demonstration at Berkeley where police used deadly force to suppress the protesters, Reagan said this about restoring order on California college campuses: "If it takes a blood bath, let's get it over with now." He later attempted to explain that he was only using a "figure of speech," but consider that Reagan's daughter, Patti, was an anti-war activist and quasi-hippie. Would he wish for a "blood bath" if it included his own child? As a Vietnam War objector, I was revulsed by the blind ignorance that prevented the rabid right from understanding that these young people protesting in the street were not "Communist agitators," but their own children. Reagan parlayed his bellicosity into a commodity and was marketed and sold by the GOP as the old cold-warrior who could restore our tough guy image in the world after the impotent Jimmy Carter refused to turn Iran into a nuclear, glassine sandbox.

It was no accident that Reagan began his presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the location of one of the civil rights era's most gruesome and murderous crimes. It sent a message about which side of the racial divide he was on and further capitalized on Nixon's "Southern strategy" of 1968, where the GOP actively courted white southerners disaffected by the civil rights legislation of the Johnson years. It was a foreshadowing of the heartless budget cuts the Reagan administration would make in social programs, and the mindless, unlimited cash machine they would offer to the military. "Government is the problem" is a good campaign slogan if you intend to be a reformer, but Reagan ran up the highest deficits in history, ramped up the arms race, and secretly sold weapons to the very regime that had held our diplomats hostage, in order to arm anti-government rebels in Nicaragua. Does that sound like less government to you?

Even Reagan's "aw shucks" speeches for which he was best known were a construction to burnish his uber-patriot image. The "Shining city on a hill," and "It's morning in America," weren't Reagan's words, they were Peggy Noonan's. Yet despite the sunny rhetoric, there were consequences to the abandonment of the poor and helpless. It was during Reagan's term that the rise of inner-city and ghetto gang membership exploded and began to establish franchises in other major cities. Reagan's term saw the creation of violent rap music and the spread of gun violence. And it was in Reagan's term, during his "Just Say No" campaign against drug use, that crack cocaine first hit the streets of California and spread into a nationwide scourge. There is now no question that the CIA planes that delivered arms to the Nicaraguan Contras, returned home filled with cocaine. The San Jose Mercury newspaper first reported that crack cocaine was invented, manufactured and distributed in urban areas by the CIA, but they were forced to print a retraction when their sources recanted.

The conservative "Just Say No" policy on drugs during the Reagan era is their same policy on nearly everything today, especially when it comes to "family values." In fact, Reagan was the first to recruit right-wing activist Christian leaders like Jerry Falwell as presidential advisers, a post previously held exclusively by Billy Graham. And the eternal Republican talking point that Reagan "ended the cold war" is like crediting Pat Boone with the invention of Rock n' Roll. He deserves credit for his consistent anti-Communist stance, as do Lech Walesa, and Vlaclav Havel, and many others, but since the Wall fell on his watch, he gets bragging rights. He also deserves credit for being a much better actor than I thought. He nearly fooled all of the people all of the time, and left it to his successor to accept the consequences for raising taxes. Nonetheless, he succeeded in convincing an entire generation of the false notion that government is an intrinsic evil that must be restricted. The result is the GOP of today. They want smaller government and less governmental intrusion until a BP oil rig blows up in the Gulf of Mexico. Then, all the former proponents of "small government" find themselves standing on a metaphorical rooftop, holding on to a big sign that says, "Help Us!"

The Oily Bird Special

2010-05-24T02:29:00.008-05:00

The most moving song I know about the Gulf Coast is "Biloxi" by Memphian Jesse Winchester. (Click on post title to hear "Biloxi"). When he resided here, Jesse went by the name of Jimmy Winchester and fronted a great garage band called the Church Keys. I was a freshman at Christian Brothers High School when he was a senior and a member of the National Honor Society. With a limitless future, Jesse was instead forced to flee this country and accept refuge in Canada rather than participate in the Vietnam War. It was while living as an expatriate that he wrote the wistful "Biloxi;" an evocative childhood memory of frolicking in the salty sea water of the Gulf, made more poignant by Winchester's circumstances. When a potential draftee sought sanctuary from Vietnam in a foreign land, he became a man without a country and was unable to return to the United States without the threat of arrest and imprisonment. So Jesse Winchester wrote "Biloxi" as someone who never expected to see the Gulf again. The song takes on weighty new meaning today, since none of us may ever see the Gulf Coast again; at least as we remember it.

After Jimmy Carter pardoned hundreds of thousands of draft resistors living abroad, Winchester was able to sing "Biloxi," at the Ritz Theatre on Madison Ave. It was the same year that Jimmy Carter tried to warn us about the dire consequences of our dependence on foreign oil. Regardless of your opinion of Carter as president, he was the first visionary to advocate for wind and solar energy. Had we heeded that advice thirty-five years ago, or learned from the Exxon Valdez disaster twenty years ago, we wouldn't be facing the most massive man-made catastrophe since the New Orleans levees broke five years ago. Even then, floodwater eventually recedes; a tsunami of oil is a bit more tenacious. With this ecological 9/11 looming, it seems as if even the local politicians still don't grasp the scope of the danger. Like myopic bureaucrats in a bad disaster movie, Senator Mary Landrieu and Governor Bobby Jindal see no reason to suspend permits for future off-shore oil exploration even while the Louisiana marshes are dying. Landrieu is so deep in the pockets of Big Oil, her campaign contributions are greasy, and "Drill Baby Drill," has reverted to the original "Burn Baby Burn."

BP has become the villain of this piece, although they are as beholden to the petrol cartels as any other major oil trust. What's astonishing is their admitted cluelessness over what to do about it. Too bad we don't have an underwater equivalent to Red Adair. When alleged "experts" in their field begin asking the public for suggestions on how to plug a leak, you know we're in big trouble. And they continue to refer to it as a "spill." A spill is what happens to a glass of wine. Two million gallons of oil gushing into the Gulf every day is not a spill, it's an underwater volcano, and BP's attempt to insert tubing into the shattered pipes to capture the oil is like siphoning water from the Mississippi with a garden hose. Now a month after the explosion and fire, and we have only seen their faulty caps and cement doghouses fail to stop it. The company's latest plan is to bombard the area with tires, ropes and golf balls. Wasn't that the premise of a Seinfeld episode? Rush Limbaugh removed an obstruction from his blowhole to blame the Sierra Club for the leak, by forcing the oil syndicates to drill further offshore with their pesky regulations. Come to think of it, old Rush might be the perfect fit to plug that thing.

This atrocity's origins can be found in the era of lax regulation by government, and corner-cutting by ruthless profiteers. Since Dick Cheney allowed industry insiders to write this country's energy policy behind closed doors, we have lurched from one Enron rolling blackout to the next, driven by unfettered corporate greed. No company in US history has benefited more from friends in high places than Halliburton. Yet from the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Mexico, they have been the very model of incompetence. It was Halliburton's responsibility to properly seal this well, but they used seaweed instead of cement. The only thing more disastrous than Cheney's oil war has been his corporate crony energy policies. Has there ever been a Vice President who has done more personal damage to his country than Dick Cheney? I think there's finally enough accumulated evidence to charge him with international racketeering under the RICO statutes. Hey, they finally got Al Capone for income tax evasion.

Cheney's been eerily silent about this mess, but he's gone back into hibernation now. This bomb went off on Obama's watch and it's past time for him to get his wingtips dirty and get his ass to New Orleans. If we learned nothing from Hurricane Katrina, it's that the perception of leadership in a crisis is as important as the methods used to alleviate the problem. The government claims to have its "boot on the neck of BP." Well, time to take the boots off of BP and get down there in the muck with them. Assigning blame is no longer sufficient. There is an urgency now and action needs to be taken or else those white sand beaches that Jesse Winchester sang about, and all that "fun among the sea oats" enjoyed by thousands of Memphians and millions of Southerners will be lost for a century. The "Redneck Riviera" may seem remote to our distant countrymen, but let that crude get into the loop current and start landing on the beaches of Miami and Florida's Gold Coast and we may yet see some outrage. Five states are facing an environmental and economic apocalypse while sea and land creatures face extinction, yet Tony Hayward, CEO of BP, told Sky News, "I think the environmental impact of this disaster is likely to be very, very modest." My father used to say, "It's a dirty bird that fouls his own nest." Heads up to the human race: we just peed in the gene pool.

Thanks to Bill Day for the magnificant illustration.

The Late, Great Johnny Ace

2010-05-20T02:45:00.014-05:00

In my boyhood room on the night table next to my bed there was a plastic, box radio with a large moon dial with the word
“Philco” engraved in a semi-circle across the top. If you turned the dial all the way to the right, you could sometimes hear Wolfman Jack howling out of Mexico. The middle of the dial brought you WLS in Chicago with Dick Bionde, or KXOK in St. Louis and Johnny Rabbitt. All the way to the left of the dial was channel 56 and Daddio Dewey Phillips with “The hottest cottin’ picking show in the country, 'Red, Hot, and Blue,’ coming to you from WHBQ, on the ‘magazine’ floor of the Hotel Chisca in downtown Memphis.” Dewey would say that he was “downtown about as far as you can get.” Phillip's radio show was on late when I was supposed to be asleep. But every night, right after Gene Autry’s Melody Ranch, I turned down the volume and leaned in close to the radio to get the greatest lesson in Rhythm & Blues on the air. Dewey had such a thick southern drawl and was so frenetic, he probably should never have been on the air in the first place. He was the complete opposite of what a radio announcer was supposed to sound like in the fifties. WHBQ only hired him because of the business being generated by WDIA, the first Negro station in the nation. The commercial potential for Memphis’ African-American community could no longer be ignored and WDIA proved that. Except WDIA went off the air at sunset, leaving fans of "race music" with nowhere to turn. Enter Dewey Mills Phillips.

If Rufus Thomas was the strong, steady presence on Memphis radio, Dewey Phillips was its’ shooting star. He shined brightly for a while and then burned out. However, during his command of the airwaves, he held the listening public in thrall for most of the fifties with his outrageous jabber and his taste for hot music. Dewey was not merely the first man to play an Elvis record on the radio; he was the first white disc jockey in the Mid-South to play black music, laying the groundwork for Elvis to emerge. Dewey’s voice; nasal, country, and rapid-fire, was more suited for a Southern auctioneer or a carnival barker. But his experience as a salesman in the record department of W.T. Grant’s on Main Street gave him an expanse of knowledge about Rhythm and Blues music and a proximity to Beale Street enjoyed by only a very few white men. He was also close to the Hotel Chisca where the WHBQ studios were located. Dewey somehow convinced the station manager that he was the man for the nine to midnight shift after WDIA, "the black spot on your dial,” went off the air, and he was right. Every night, WDIA’s massive audience switched the dial to Dewey along with growing numbers of white children discovering the music for the first time. All through the segregated 1950s, Dewey Phillips offered up a sampling of juke, jive, and jump, along with a healthy selection of black gospel music, to an ever-growing audience that was anything but segregated, and all right in the heart of Dixie.

My memories of Dewey begin in adolescence. Although I do not recall exactly when I began to listen, I know it was as early as age seven in 1954, because my paternal grandmother died that year. My sister and I returned from school to find our house filled with weeping relatives. Susan burst into tears, but I was uncertain how to react, so I put on a grim face and pondered it. My grandmother was only in her mid 50s, but she had seemed older to me. All day and night, the house filled with mourners and well-wishers until it was my bedtime. I lay in the dark pondering death until it was time for Dewey's program when I again leaned in close to the radio. I was delighted by his deranged ramblings but felt that I should not be having this much fun when everyone else was so sad. In the rest of the house, people were crying or talking in hushed tones. But in my bedroom, Dewey was playing Louis Jordan singing, "Dadgum your hide, boy/Dadgum your dirty hide/ Dadgum your hide, boy/ I gave you a pig but you wanted a sow,” and I had to laugh. I was transported to a world that the adults knew nothing about. Still, it felt odd that while the grown-ups were in the living room grieving, I was in my bedroom, grooving.

In that same year, on the night of my Davy Crockett Christmas, I wore my brand new coonskin cap to bed and tuned in again to Dewey, expecting some yuletide revelry. It was only a week after my eighth birthday, and I was still supposed to be sleeping. So, once again, with the volume low, I leaned in to listen. Dewey had the unusual practice of yammering right over the record; or if a lyric made a statement or asked a question, Dewey would answer it. Sometimes he even sang along, which made it tough for music lovers, but delighted Dewey's fans. It often seemed that the music was merely the background soundtrack for Dewey’s manic patter, but his listeners kept growing. On that Christmas night, he was as zany as ever until suddenly something unprecedented happened; Dewey stopped being funny. The first sign was he allowed an entire song to play without interruption. When he returned to the air, Phillips was serious and somber. He said that he had just gotten off the phone, long-distance from Houston, and was sorry to announce that Johnny Ace was dead. Even as a child, I knew who Johnny Ace was, if for no other reason than every time Dewey played one of his records, he introduced it as “Memphis’ own Johnny Ace.” I listened wide-awake while Dewey described the scene in Houston. Ace was in his dressing room between Christmas shows at the Houston Civic Auditorium with a group of fans and friends when he put a pistol to his head as some sort of game and pulled the trigger. The gun went off and Ace fell over dead. It was chilling news, made more so by Dewey’s introduction to the next song. For the very first time, Dewey uttered the phrase that would become famous in popular music history. He introduced "Pledging My Love," the brand new record by, "the late, great Johnny Ace.” Then a slow ballad with a tinkling vibraphone began and the echo-drenched baritone voice of Johnny Ace sounded like it was coming from the grave itself. "Forever my darling, my love will be true,” the chimes rang like chapel bells. "I’ll forever love you, the rest of my days/ I’ll never part from you, and your loving ways.” Johnny sang as if he knew his fate in advance. I remembered that earlier night when my grandmother had died, and I was stunned to realize that I had just been listening to a voice from the beyond. At song's end, Dewey said once again, “the late, great Johnny Ace, dead at age twenty-six.”

The next morning, I asked my father what Russian Roulette was and he asked where I possibly could have heard that. I told him about Johnny Ace, but he said there was nothing about it in the newspaper. The death of Johnny Ace did not command the attention of white Memphis, but the hometown Tri-State Defender reported that an overflow crowd of five thousand people jammed the two thousand-seat Clayborn AME Temple, the same site of Martin Luther King’s final speech, for the funeral, while near hysterical mourners poured into the street. It was Memphis’ largest funeral gathering since the death of E.H. “Boss” Crump, but neither the morning paper, The Commercial Appeal, nor the afternoon Memphis Press Scimitar printed a word about it. It became underground news for the city’s white teenagers because in attendance at the obsequies was Dewey Phillips. His words, “The late, great Johnny Ace,” would enter the lexicon of pop music, both as the title of a Paul Simon song, and as the description of the first shocking casualty of rock and roll. Whenever I hear the plaintive opening notes of "Pledging My Love," chiming like heavenly harps, I get the same unearthly feeling as when Dewey first played the record on the very night that Johnny Ace ended his life.

(Click on title to hear "Pledging My Love.")
an excerpt from the memoir "Can a White Boy Sing the Blues," by Randy Haspel

Hell Week

2010-05-10T02:43:00.001-05:00

That was one helluva fortnight we just experienced. There were volcanic eruptions and ash clouds in Iceland, earthquakes in Chile and Indonesia, a slick, slow-motion, Katrina headed for the Gulf Coast, an attempted terrorist car bombing in Times Square, and Nashville drowned. And I was upset because my garage flooded. Millington and Dyersburg got waterlogged too, not to mention the hapless Beale Street Music Festival. The festival organizers have begun including the annual rainfall in the event's promotion. They have attempted to tie in the "Old Faithful" downpour with the folklore of the festival, and the mud is now supposed to be just part of the adventure. Bullshit. No one but a toddler enjoys slopping around in the mud and the veterans of Woodstock are lying about it. This year, the torrential rains had to compete with the wailing of tornado sirens and park evacuations. The Memphis in May folks need to stop pretending this filth-fest will one day turn out all right and go ahead and change the damn dates. Here's a thought; schedule it the last weekend in May. Of course, the portent of international events made the music festival the least of our worries. It seemed as if every type of disaster occurred except a bomb detonating in the Capitol. Oh, I forgot Jay Leno's routine at the White House Correspondent's Dinner.

While the country's mass media was fixated on the Texas League car bomb that some traitorous swine planted in Gotham's theatre district, and dumb-ass politicians and their rabid, radio masters speculated that Obama sabotaged the BP Oil rig to prevent further offshore drilling, Nashville went snorkeling. I remember Hank Williams used to say that he'd see you, "If the good Lord's willing and the creeks don't rise," but who ever believed that they would actually rise? My Music City pals inform me the flooding was devastating, including the suburb of Bellevue where no sane resident would have ever dreamed of wasting money on flood insurance before now. The downtown area and the Country Music Hall of Fame were under water, with several top musical acts, including Keith Urban, Vince Gill, and Rascal Flatts, reporting the total loss of their gear in a rehearsal facility. The human and financial loss has yet to be totalled, but should you wish to help our sister city in her hour of need, a good link is here. The storm that rolled through Memphis emptying Tom Lee Park, stopped rolling in Middle Tennessee, producing what government officials called a 500 year storm, and it will take years for the city to recover. The river bluffs saved Memphis from the worst again. And, by the way, "Yo Kanye," Taylor Swift donated a half-million dollars to flood relief. Let's see you match that.

Meanwhile, a man-made disaster is oozing its way toward our friends on the Gulf Coast, like they need more problems in their lives. Perhaps it's time to ask Governor Bobby "Sox" Jindal, "How's that 'Drill Baby Drill' thingy workin' out for ya'?" Everyone is hating on BP, but if it wasn't them, it would be another amoral conglomerate. Remember the scenes in all those western movies where the wildcatter strikes oil? The reason we call them "gushers" is the same reason it's not wise to drill offshore for oil . This baby is now going to gush for an estimated three additional months before BP can cap it, and just when I was beginning to trust Gulf shrimp again. This immeasurable tragedy will only get worse every day that thousands of gallons of crude oil still spill into the Gulf, and the LA Times reported allegations of negligence by, guess who, Halliburton! Cheney's old firm was in charge of cementing the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, and their work was as professional as the electric showers they installed in Iraq. In remote Alaska, the effects of the Exxon Valdez spill continue to be felt twenty years later. In Louisiana, all the people that used to shuck oysters can now get jobs washing grease off of water fowl. The National Wildlife Federation is on the ground already, and is a worthy organization for bleeding-heart environmentalists to donate money.

It took NYC's finest and the FBI only 2 1/2 days to catch the unibrow bomber. A half hour later, however, and the guy would have been on the way to Dubai. With all this nightmarish airport "security" that we have endured since 9/11, the culprit managed to purchase a one-way ticket, in cash, to the United Arab Emirates, and had his seat back forward, taxiing toward take-off when the plane was halted and he was taken into custody. His first words to arresting officers were, "I've been expecting you," leading some to speculate that this entire escapade was a scheme to test federal officials. If the "No Fly" list proved to be ineffectual, consider that the homegrown malcontent only recently returned from five months in Pakistan, bought a gun in Connecticut last month, and was videotaped stocking up on fireworks in Pennsylvania. Though the bomber's ineptitude has been ridiculed by the cable news stations, this country was only a few I.Q. points short of another major terrorist attack, proving our vulnerability despite the draconian Bush/Cheney policies. Is it difficult to connect those dots between a Pakistani vacation, gun and fireworks purchases, cash for propane tanks and containers of gasoline, and a whole shitload of fertilizer?

On a positive note, many people are now converts to health care reform after a rash of nationwide cardiac infarctions broke out last Thursday after the Dow dropped 1000 points. Now, the SEC is looking for a fat-fingered trader whose decimal point mistake nearly crashed the market. When I was first learning about the stock market from my father, I asked him what was to prevent another crash like the one in 1929? He told me that after the crash, regulations were put in place governing esoteric practices like margin stock purchases, insuring that what had happened leading up to the Great Depression could never reoccur. Satisfied, I rolled over in my crib and finished my nap. Of course, that was before Ronald Reagan was elected president and the era of irresponsible de-regulation began in earnest. I'm still waiting for an entire generation to wake up to Reagan's bogus claim that government is somehow the enemy. The government exists to protect you from your enemies, and right now it looks as if those might be domestic terrorists and unbridled, bare-knuckled, unregulated American corporate interests. My sympathies go out to our neighbors inundated by oil, fire, and floodwater. With stateside friends like these, who needs Al Qaeda?

Thanks to Bill Day for the use of his cartoon.

Gay Caballeros

2010-04-25T00:17:00.018-05:00

It would only figure that being gay would also make you bi-partisan. Or so says a trough of bilge named William Gheen, (pronounced like the serial killer), who is the head of the South Carolina branch of Americans for Legal Immigration PAC (ALIPAC). This "Up is Down" method of reverse labelling used to be called "Orwellian" until the Michael Jordan of bizzarro sloganeering, Frank Luntz, emerged to advise the GOP. So, ALIPAC is merely Luntzian for "Round 'em up, load 'em up, and move 'em out." Even professional xenophobe Lou Dobbs was offended by Gheen's jaw-dropping speech to a Greenville, S.C. Tea Party rally, demanding that Senator Lindsey Graham, "Come out of that log cabin closet," and, "tell people about your alternative lifestyle and your homosexuality." If that weren't sufficient nastiness for one speech, the Gheen slime creature continued, "I need to figure out why you're trying to sell-out your own countrymen, and I need to be sure you being gay isn't it." In a state famous for political luminaries like Strom "Jungle Fever" Thurmond, and Governor Mark "The Gaucho" Sanford, this money-changer Gheen has publicly accused the senator of being manipulated by blackmail to maintain "his secret." The days of blackmailing a public official over their sexuality have pretty much ended in this country, all except for one place; the Republican party.

There's a documentary film worth seeing, readily available on cable TV, called, "Outrage", which proves it's hard out there for a closeted, gay Republican. Gay activists weary of legislators living one way and voting another, gathered witnesses to provide anecdotal evidence that some of the GOP's fiercest opponents of same-sex marriage and gay rights are themselves, closeted gays. Rumors about the bachelor Sen. Graham's sexuality are common D.C. gossip fodder, but this unprovoked and cruel public attack occurred not because ALIPAC is so concerned about Graham's conduct in the bed chamber, as in the senate chamber. Not that I savor defending a red-state conservative who called the health care reform bill, "A ponzi scheme," but Graham is one of the few remaining Republicans who, on occasion, will work with members of the opposite party for the benefit of the country. This dying breed was known in a previous century as a "moderate." The mean Mr. Gheen must think that "reaching across the aisle" means something else.

The right's outrage over Lindsey Graham results from his co-sponsorship of an immigration reform bill with N.Y. liberal Democrat Chuck Schumer. Queerbaiting is merely the surest and fastest way to rile up the rubes into indignant opposition, and the insinuation that Graham is somehow being coerced into working with the Democrats sounds like the plot from a cold-war espionage movie. Judging from the roaring response from the Tea Party crowd, however, it seems gays are among the last groups that it is still safe to publicly demonize. Curiously, the anti-gay sentiment currently afoot is very much in tune with this camouflage fashion phase among Tea Party males. The most vocal homophobes are middle-aged men that don't seem to have the same problem with lesbianism. Some of them probably spent hard-earned cash watching women touch one another in one of Washington's wicked flesh parlors as soon as the rally was over. See, they're not really anti-gay; they're anti-sodomy. A good old boy dreads the prostate exam and doesn't go fishing in the Erie Canal. Consequently, a former Senator like Wyoming's Larry Craig can deny his homosexuality because, like a teenage girl, he believes that if there's no penetration, it's not really sex.

Openly gay Congressman Barney Frank has endured all the slings and arrows from his critics, yet remains an effective Democratic advocate, while Republican Governor Charlie Crist of Florida, outed as a closeted gay in the aforementioned documentary, is about to be hounded from the party. The Tea Party has declared jihad on those Republicans they determine to be insufficiently conservative and there's an ethnic-cleansing taking place to purge the ranks of the weakhearted. But, screaming "homo" at Lindsey Graham wasn't really about sexuality, it was about immigration. I guess if you can get mud on several groups at once with just one swipe of the brush, all the better. Nothing gets the Tea Party mob's blood up faster than a hot-tempered tub-thumper railing against illegal immigrants or homosexuals, and if you're a gay Mexican, God help you. The true outrage is that confessed whoremongers like David Vitter and John Ensign remain in Congress, unscathed by the censure of their colleagues, while honorable men like Sen. Graham, who served six years in the Air Force and in the JAG Corps during the Gulf War, are smeared by the "new right."

This sort of open ugliness is part of the reason why sane people question the Tea Party's motives. They call for less intrusive federal government, but demand an unconditional ban on abortion; They want a smaller government while we fight two wars with an economy on life support, but without touching Social Security, Medicare, or the military budget; They believe in the principle of state's rights, yet favor a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. And when a state grants powers to the police to detain and demand identification from anyone, at any time, and for any reason, that is called "Fascism." It's what the "Greatest Generation" sacrificed nearly 300,000 men to fight against in WWII. But then again, Arizona produced Barry Goldwater and was the last state to acknowledge a holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King; and a war hero like John McCain has to re-animate his Frankenstein monster, Sarah Palin, to help him win a Republican primary. There is an angry, anti-incumbent mood in the air and the Democrats will undoubtedly lose seats in 2010. But should the Tea Party confuse that for a personal victory and continue polluting the air with their public vitriol, they will share the same destiny as the Dixiecrats in 1948. Or as their candidate, old Strom Thurmond, used to call them between visits to his sweet thang, "real Americans."

The Zombie Holiday

2010-04-19T00:27:00.002-05:00

If there were to be an officially declared National Day of Dread, it would be today. Not 12/7/41, or 11/22/63, or even 9/11/01; but today. Skinheads and Neo-Nazis observe the birthday of Adolph Hitler each April 19th, and have been noted to celebrate with the occasional mini-pogrom. For anti-government "patriots" and defenders-of-the-faith militia groups, 4/19 is Easter for paranoid conspiracy theorists. On this date in 1993, the apocalyptic conflagration at the Branch Davidian compound at Waco occurred, proving to many that the end times are near and the government's out to snuff you, rather than a bungling ATF and a new Attorney General trying to flex her muscles allowing an already tragic situation to escalate into a catastrophe.

Domestic terrorist Tim McVeigh watched the Waco fiasco unfold while sitting outside the compound on the hood of his car and used the date two years later to bomb the federal building in Oklahoma City in retaliation. And two zit-faced, Hitler Facebook fans commemorated the date by acting out their sociopathic,"Terminator" fantasies and killing a lot of other people's children while trying to blow up their high school. April 19 has become a touchstone for the disgruntled and delusional, like a psychotic Halloween run amok, and every year since Waco, plots and plans for copycat carnage have been uncovered and the criminals incarcerated. This year, however, presents a clear and present danger. Anti-government hysteria is at its highest levels since the Great Depression and the Southern Poverty Law Center estimates that militia activity has risen 244% since the last presidential election. The arrest of members of the Hutaree militia in Michigan faded from the news before group associates in Ohio and Indiana were likewise arrested for conspiracy to murder a police officer and slaughter the mourners at the funeral.

What makes this year different is that a mainstream media outlet is actively promulgating confrontation with the government. Fox News' ratings soar on false tales of FEMA detention camps, jail cells for health care scofflaws, census takers compiling enemies lists, and a president with a secret agenda to surreptitiously damage the nation. Stories of gun confiscation and clandestine planning for a socialist takeover of government are fomented every day on the airwaves by corporate media interests, and even the fabricated Tea Party movement has been co-opted by Republican operatives and right-wing PACs. Image and semantic consultants on the Tea Party Express magical mystery tour have tried to clean up the overt insanity at their rallies like Brian Epstein cleaned up the Beatles, but didn't we only just have a dust-up over lipstick, pigs, and hockey moms? And now we see that many of the Teabaggers are sensitive and distressed about being called angry bigots and racists. They claim legitimate concerns over fiscal policy and say if reporters would only talk to a cross-section of supporters, they would understand the libertarian concerns through all the hand-made signs with Obama and Hitler references. Well, the jig is up.

POLITICO.com reports memos showing the Tea Party Express is a creation of the California public relations firm Russo, Marsh + Rogers, doing business as the "Our Country Deserves Better" PAC, and tripling their donations since the wingnut tour hit the road. The latest New York Times/CBS poll says that of the 18% of Americans who identify with the Tea Party movement, the majority are older, more educated, and affluent white men who feel that their rights are under siege. Living in the South, I know 100 guys just like that. They used to be hippies until the styles changed, so they went into business and began paying taxes, and that altered everything. A generation that used sharing as a guiding principle, strapped on their neckties, went to work, and got saddled in debt. Now they believe that Obama wants to take something from them that they have worked for, and give it to someone who has not. Nothing is sadder than watching an intelligent, idealistic young person transform themselves into another border-line alcoholic Republican with issues about welfare. My Dad used to say, "This is a great country, but the dues are expensive." Today, spurred on by profit-gobbling, exhibitionistic, media fools, wanton criminals who fly their private planes into IRS headquarters, killing a bunch of mommies and daddies in the process, are defended by elected officials.

I would suggest that if you don't wish to be falsely labelled as racist, then don't be on the same side as the authentic ones. If you lie down with those possessed of incoherent hatred, you rise up with the potential for deadly violence. Which is why Fox News, fringe PACS run by people like Dick Armey, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, and new Virginia Governor Robert McDonnell, should be aware of their public responsibilities during this volatile time and temper their fatalistic rhetoric, lest they end up with blood on their hands. If overly ambitious politicians and professional media agitators realized that words have real world consequences, today might just be another Spring day. As it is, it's a time for particular vigilance, extremely so for all those "real Americans" who also happen to work for the government, and shame on any official who squeezes lighter fluid on this burning fire on this day. In the current climate of the armed and paranoid, the threat to the country is not so much from terrorists outside of our borders, as from those within. As for me, I've made my plans for the day. I'll be right here if you need me.