Kenneth Neill

When the color of your skin finally counts less than how many bullets can twist and turn inside the body of your child

I should have known from the get-go that this would be a different kind of April Thursday here in Tennessee...

After all, Martin Luther King was murdered here in Memphis, on a Thursday, on a balcony at The Lorraine Hotel, on April 4, 1968. I probably should have stayed in bed yesterday, fearing, inevitably, that there would be too much bad juju in the air on yet another single-digit April Thursday in Tennessee.

I turned on MSNBC, however, and was surprised to see, so early in the day, the wall-to-wall crowds gathered inside and outside the State Capitol in Nashville. Indeed, I jumped quickly into the shower, needing a few moments to get my bearings. WTF was going on?

Two twenty-something African-American state representatives, one from Nashville and one from Memphis, the state's two largest cities, were in the process of being expelled from the Tennessee House of Representatives. Both happen to share the same first name Justin (Jones from Nashville, Pearson from Memphis). They were being exiled on account of their activist protests against gun violence in the aftermath of the Covenant School shooting in suburban Nashville, where three adults and three nine-year-olds were murdered on March 27th.

(A third representative, Gloria Johnson, good friends with both Justins, later came within one vote of being expelled; when asked why and how she had kept her seat, Ms. Johnson coyly answered: "Do you think it might be because I am white?")

Now that I'm old enough to claim civil rights and anti-Vietnam-War props, I was thunderstruck while watching what was playing out inside the Tennessee Capitol. But not near as stunned as I was by what I saw when the TV cameras panned the grounds around the Capitol building and inside the hallways.

I was dumbfounded: a crowd in the thousands protesting the six gun deaths at the Covenant School shooting a week earlier. It was not the crowd one might expect, all while the two African-American Justins about to be expelled. No, the Nashville protesters, everywhere one looked, were overwhelmingly white!

I was also stunned. This was nothing like our 1960s protest gatherings. Given the overwhelming Republican majority in the Tennessee House -- 75 Republicans alongside just 24 Democrats -- I quickly figured out what was really going on in Nashville. And except for the Republican block-heads huffing and pontificating, I figured out there were two plays going on simultaneously.

Perhaps as much as any other place in the USA, the Tennessee gun lobby rules the roost in the Volunteer State. Indeed, last January, the state Senate and state House, overwhelmingly Republican, eliminated virtually all state gun control measures. Nada.

Early this year, our recently re-elected governor, Bill Lee -- as right-wing an American fascist that exists in these 50 states -- celebrated Tennessee's gun insanity by going 35 miles up the road from Nashville to Gallatin, Tennessee, so he could formally sign this no-holds-barred gun legislation in person, where it should be signed: at the headquarters of the Beretta USA Tennessee Campus!

(I don't know about the rest of you, but isn't it more than a little odd that Beretta USA uses the word "campus" to describe its precision-production weapons facility? In these times, maybe they should showcase their products this way: "From Campus to Campus: Beretta Gets the Job Done!")

No wonder so many white Tennesseans crashed the House party in Nashville this week! Perhaps we have reached some kind of tipping point, a place where the color of someone's skin finally counts less than how many bullets can twist and turn inside the body of your ten-year-old daughter or son. I, for one, will take that swap in a heartbeat, every hour, every day.

Kenneth Neill was publisher of Memphis Magazine for more than 35 years and founded The Memphis Flyer in 1989.

Requiem for a Senator: How Lamar Alexander maneuvered himself into the dustbin of history

I first met Lamar Alexander almost exactly forty years ago, when i was a cub reporter for Memphis magazine, and he was but one year into his first term as Governor of Tennessee. He served one more, then became president of the University of Tennessee, after which he served as Secretary of Education under George H.W. Bush, before moving on to three terms in the Senate. He is retiring at the end of this year.

If there is a more popular politician in the Volunteer State, I know not who it would be. When I wrote him a note a couple weeks ago, urging him to vote for documents and testimony in the Trump impeachment trial, I reminded him that, while I was a lifelong Democrat, I had voted for "Alexander" more often than not when his name was on the ballot.

It was difficult for me, however, to watch the contortions the Senator went through last week as the impeachment trial was winding down. For a few hours there, it appeared that Alexander was leaning towards voting "yes" for testimony and witnesses. But by Thursday that particular coach had turned into a pumpkin, as word trickled out that Lamar had decided to vote "no" on any kind of evidence.

When Senator Alexander finally released his statement, I was reminded of the wisdom of Solomon. While conceding that Trump's behavior regarding aid to Ukraine was "inappropriate," Alexander cut the baby neatly in half, asserting there was no need to punish the President so late in his first term. "Let the people decide," Alexander pronounced, in effect ending the chances of new evidence being introduced into the Senate trial.

Let the people decide, Lamar said. That thought kept running through my mind while I listened to Trump's bizarre "victory speech" earlier today at the White House. Evidently, only some people will decide. The President launched a celebration of sorts, uplifting his friends and supporters, of course, but demeaning his political enemies, named and unnamed, in a fashion never before seen inside that two-century-old building.

It seemed just the right time to send my senior Senator a follow-up letter, and so, having grown tired of listening to Trump howling at the moon in broad daylight, I did just that:

Dear Senator Alexander:

I do hope you are part and parcel of this disgusting spectacle now going on at the White House. Perhaps you're seated there and watching helplessly, as Donald Trump launches one despicable rant after another, perhaps the single most egotistic and delusional speech ever given by an American president within those walls.

Hang your head in shame, sir, while you're listening...

I have to say that, while typing and watching this speech on television, I can't keep up with the sheer volume of nonsense flowing effortlessly out of this self-centered egomaniac's mouth, each snippet full of equal measures of delusion, distortion and hate.

The bombast echoes off the walls: "If we didn't win, the market would have crashed." "We did nothing wrong!" and "We were treated unbelievably unfairly. It was all bullshit..."

Yes, I guess even "big winners" sometimes need good-old-fashioned profanity to deliver their messages. On and on Trump goes, where he stops nobody surely knows. He is truly a law unto himself.

I do hope you saw the letter I sent you about ten days ago, suggesting that you keep an open mind about whether or not to impeach Mr. Trump. I included this observation: "Our current President seems less a Republican than a South American demagogue."

I don't about you, Senator, but right now I know I am watching a genuine demagogue in action, one born in Queens, not Paraguay. What a great pity for you, for me and for all Americans of good will.

I can't watch anymore, sir, so I'll stop right now, long before he does. I do hope you're there, Senator, with your mouth shut, silently endorsing this madman's rant. You surely deserve to sit through all this claptrap, given that it was your vote, more than anyone else's, that betrayed your state, your Senate and your country.

Kenneth Neill was publisher of Memphis magazine for over 35 years, and founded The Memphis Flyer in 1989.