Bruce VanWyngarden, Memphis Flyer

The absurdity of calling Kamala Harris a commie

Look, comrades, I grew up at a time in this country when the thing we kids were taught to fear more than anything else in our little Midwestern lives was COMMUNISM!

Communist Russia — the USSR — was the big, scary enemy, a country led by authoritarian leaders like Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev, who were attempting to take over the world and destroy democracy and the American way of life. They were the commies, the pinkos, the red menace — a nuclear-armed adversary who was also our rival in space, with their cursed Sputnik satellites. The Russians were so bold they even propped up Fidel Castro in a communist state 90 miles away from Miami. Russia, we were told by our teachers and parents, was determined to force everyone in the world to live in a commune and toil under communism, a fate presumably worse than death.

In our schools, we had two kinds of drills: fire drills, in which at the sound of a long bell, every student high-tailed it “single file” down the stairs and out the doors onto the schoolyard lawn, goose-assing and laughing all the way. (If you were lucky, you attended a school that had one of those cool fire-escape slides out a third-story window, which livened up the process.) But the real serious stuff took place during the air-raid drills, where, at the sound of a keening siren, we had to “duck and cover” under our desks, which, as everyone knows, will protect you against nuclear holocaust. Mainly, of course, it just scared the crap out of us and traumatized a couple generations.

This went on through the 1980s, at which point, President Reagan had turned standing up to Russia into performance art (“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”). It turned out to be a surprisingly effective gambit, or at the worst, Reagan’s timing was spot-on. The Soviet Union’s economy was collapsing during the 1980s, leading to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and lending a measure of stature to Reagan’s latter years in office.

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If there was one benefit of this strange, decades-long international game of Russian roulette, it was the fact that we were actually taught what communism is. We learned most of Karl Marx’s greatest one-liners, including the scariest one: “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs,” which we Americans were taught to see as the mantra of a system that destroyed ambition and the drive to succeed that American capitalism was built upon. I think that’s simplistic, but it’s also mostly true. Living on the dole is living on the dole. All communism does is narrow economic opportunity to oligarchs. Everyone else? Pass the beans and borscht and keep your head down, comrade.

The fact is that communism has proven to be a horrible system of government, one that concentrates power under an authoritarian rule, censors books and newspapers, offers only rudimentary education for the poor, discriminates on the basis of gender and race, and controls healthcare. In communist countries, posters of the authoritarian Dear Leader are plastered on every open space. Flags with his image are flown in every public square.

That’s why it seems so absurd to me to hear MAGA types — and Donald Trump himself — call Kamala Harris and Democrats “communists.” It sounds like you’re being tough when you call someone a communist, but they literally appear to have no idea what a communist is.

Think of the two major American political parties: When it comes to a cult of personality, one that features posters of Dear Leader, flags, religious iconography, clothes, and even tattoos, which party comes to mind? Which party has come out in support of banning books? Which party wants to give public tax dollars to private schools? Which party openly demonizes LGBTQ Americans and people of color? Which party wants to centralize power and give it to an authoritarian who will “be a dictator on day one”? Which party wants to control the healthcare decisions of the country’s females? Which party literally rejected democracy in 2020?

If your answer to those questions is anything other than the Republican Party, you’ve gone down into a scary rabbit hole, a place where the light of the obvious won’t penetrate. It’s like you’re in a permanent duck-and-cover drill.

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Sleazy grifts, crappy steaks and comb-overs: Donald Trump is the perfect fiction anti-hero

He could hear it coming up from behind him, maybe a block away, the basso thump of hip-hop. As the car pulled level on his left, he didn’t look, just stood at the light, waiting for the change. Damn, it was loud.

“F--- Donald Trump, F--- Donald Trump, F--- Donald Trump” — loud enough to melt asphalt, loud enough to rattle window glass. Was he hearing that right? Yes, he was. He turned and looked at the driver, a Black guy in a black beret who looked back at him. He stuck up his thumb and nodded. The Black guy laughed and pulled off, nodding, “F--- Donald Trump” fading in the afternoon glare. A Black guy, a white guy, a bonding moment. America the beautiful.

At home, he googled “hip hop song F--- Donald Trump” and found it on Wiki: “‘FDT’ (‘F--- Donald Trump’) is a protest song by YG featuring Nipsey Hussle, and is the second single from the album Still Brazy. The song is a criticism of the policies of the Republican candidate in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.”

A criticism? No kidding.

The white guy was semi-retired, a former editor who still wrote a column for a local rag. The incident at the light at Belvedere and Peabody stayed with him, the sequence of his reactions — his irritation at the throbbing beat, his nervousness when the car pulled up and stopped, the aha moment when he got the lyrics, felt sympatico, turned, and smiled. Maybe the dude was hoping to piss him off? If so, it backfired. Or maybe he was conducting a survey, taking the pulse of Memphis. He got one old white guy to give a thumbs-up to “F--- Donald Trump,” if so. Or maybe he just hates Donald Trump and doesn’t care what anybody thinks.

Who knows? Didn’t really matter. The editor had been reading a lot of crime fiction by Elmore Leonard, the “Dickens of Detroit,” who wrote about loan sharks, bad cops, hustlers, strippers, blackmailers, bookies, debt collectors, and other assorted American lowlifes in such novels as Get Shorty, Maximum Bob, Road Dogs, Hombre, Out of Sight, and Killshot. The guy knew how people talked, how to tell a story with dialogue without a lot of writerly “hooptedoodle.” That’s what Leonard called it in an interview. “Just try to keep it moving without showing off,” he said.

Other Leonardisms: “Never open a book with weather; never use a word other than ‘said’ to carry dialogue; avoid detailed descriptions of characters; try to leave out the parts that readers skip.” In other words, cut to the action and the dialogue, which Leonard did, and which is why so many of his books got made into movies.

He really only had one plot: A bunch of money exists somewhere and various characters fight to get it, overcoming conscience if they have any, cutting straight to the chase if not. Death steps in, takes out a character now and then, disappears, returns. Life is a hustle. There are no heroes or villains, just some people you might like better than others.

How would Leonard have written about the encounter at at that Midtown corner? Hard to say, but for one thing, his character wouldn’t have been an editor; he’d have been a sleazeball bail bondsman or some such and would have gotten into the car, fired up a joint and ridden off into a novel called FDT.

And now that he thought about it, there has never been a more perfect Elmore Leonard character than Donald Trump, a man with the soul of motel furniture: the orange makeup, the absurd comb-over, the sleazy grifts, shady lawyers, porn stars, foreign nationals, crappy steaks, real estate cons, the fake university, the phony charity — all pieces of an amoral, lifelong quest for money and power. And imagine what Leonard could do with Rudy Giuliani, Roger Stone, Ivanka and Jared, Melania Trump, Walt Nauta. Subplots galore! The dialogue? Done and done. FDT writes itself.

“He could hear it coming up from behind him, maybe a block away, the basso thump of hip-hop. As the car pulled level on his left, he didn’t look, just stood at the light, waiting for the change. Damn, it was loud. He turned finally and gazed into the car, the driver motioning for him to get in. ‘What the hell does Rudy want?’ he thought.”

Look away, Dixieland: On the long, slow murder of the American South

Here’s something of an ode to the South, my home for 30 years now. It’s called “Red States.” Enjoy.

Red States, where the state amphibian is the gerrymander; where the GOP supermajorities rule with a closed fist and minorities have no voice; where legislators are mostly rural, ignorant, and mean; where the governors are small men with small intellects and smaller hearts.

Red States, where Confederate flags still fly; where racism — subtle and blatant — still lives; and where its long, ugly history isn’t allowed to be taught in school.

Red States, where LGBTQ rights are threatened; where drag queens are vilified; where you can’t say gay (or gender) in school; where hateful ignorance (and lustful hypocrisy) comes dressed in the cheap suit of a rural preacher.

Red States, where books are banned; where libraries get unfunded; where public schools are starved and tax dollars go to private academies; where college students are urged to report their professors for thought crimes.

Red States, where abortion is murder; where forced pregnancy is the law; where doctors, hospitals, insurance companies, and pharmacies must conform to a religious doctrine; where 10-year-old rape victims must carry their rapist’s baby to term.

Red States, where more people live in poverty; where salaries are lower; where hunger is more common; where more housing is substandard; where homelessness is rampant.

Red States, where voting is harder; where precincts are fewer in poor neighborhoods; where students have to jump through hoops to register; where you can’t offer rides to the polls or a cup of water to those waiting in line.

Red States, where hospitals are dying from a lack of funds because Obamacare was named for a Black man; where health insurance isn’t for everyone; where alcohol, drugs, and cigarettes kill more people; where the infant mortality rate is high and getting higher; where life expectancy is low and getting lower.

Red States, where guns are sacred totems untouchable by the laws of man; where you can buy a pistol in 10 minutes and walk out with it strapped to your body; where innocent people are slaughtered; where the shrieks from grieving families go unheard; where mass shootings by disturbed humans carrying weapons of war are a necessary sacrifice, an offering that must be made to the Holy Church of the NRA, blessed be thy name. …

Oh Lord. Amen.

I’m so sick of this shit, so sick to death of what is happening in our so-called red states. And I’m particularly angry — and sad — about how this hateful cabal is slow-murdering the American South, turning it into a one-party banana republic and rolling back the calendar to the 1950s for all who dare to color outside the lines.

Not all red states are Southern, but all Southern states are red (with the possible shaky exception of Georgia). And those of us living here are experiencing what the entire U.S. would look like under unbridled GOP rule. Yes, I reside in a “blue” city, but you have only to look 180 miles to the east, to Nashville, where now-unchecked GOP legislators are trying to take over the airport authority, and where they attempted to reduce the number of members of the Nashville Metro Council because it voted to reject holding the Republican National Convention there. And if these bozos are jacking with Nashville, just imagine what mischief they could do in Memphis — a city they already hate because we have the nerve to be majority Black. (Not to mention, that uppity Justin Pearson comes from here.)

So is there any hope of changing any of this? Yes. Tennessee, for example, was a blue state until a decade or so ago. We can hope that the gun-reform furor that erupted in the wake of The Covenant School shootings will sustain, here and elsewhere. We can hope the pro-choice vote that has swung elections around the country in the past few months will turn out in 2024. And we can hope that at some point the South will rise again. Only better.

I’m reminded of a closing line from Abraham Lincoln’s second Inaugural speech, given as the bloody Civil War was staggering to a finish. It summed up his hopes for his divided country: “With malice toward none,” he urged, “with charity for all.” Amen to that. Amen, amen.

Bruce VanWyngarden is a senior editor at the Memphis Flyer, where this commentary first appeared.