I've been driving around in Memphis today, having made it across Mississippi and all those other states, listening to the all-blues WEVL, which has some great sounds.
If you'd like to hear it, too, you don't have to drive 10 hours the way I did. Just click on the link here, and choose an application to play the live link (I'm using RealPlayer.)
Enjoy.
And people think we have problems with our troopers. I happened to be driving across Mississippi yesterday, on Hwy 78 between Tupelo and Memphis.
I was just tooling along, getting in touch with my essential Elvisness, and the road between those two foci of the Elvis universe is a perfect place to do it. Hwy 78 is now an interstate-like four-lane with a huge median, rolling across the Delta with almost no traffic, unlike, say, I-20.
So I'm cooling it, with the cruise set exactly to the speed limit (don't tell Samuel), when suddenly "Whoa, Daddy! It's the Man!" -- a Mississippi state trooper blows past me like I'm standing still.
He was not in what one would call "hot pursuit." No lights, no siren. He was just moving from point A to point B at a high velocity.
OK, fine. Stuff happens. But about 20 minutes later, another Mississippi state trooper flies past me going just as fast.
But get this: This one finds himself blocked by a superannuated RV in the left lane doing about 60, about a quarter-mile ahead of me. So does he sweep around it on the right, seeing as there was no traffic in that lane? No. He tailgates for a seconds, as I start catching up.
When the RV doesn't immediately pull over, he turns on the blue light. The guy in the RV doesn't see him right away, and I pass the two of them on the right, still on cruise.
The trooper edges over into the left shoulder just as I'm passing, so the guy can't possibly miss him. Shortly thereafter, I see the RV pull over in my rearview.
Did the trooper continue on after some felon? No. He turns off his light, engages the afterburner, and zooms past me doing about 90.
He disappears off ahead of me, apparently in a hurry for a donut.
Yeah, we've all seen cops in S.C. seeming to use their de facto immunity to speed needlessly. But in Mississippi, such heedless arrogance seems to be Standard Operating Procedure.
While Gov. Mark Sanford and other opponents of Big Gummint are busily fighting that hyper-scary Threat to All We Hold Sacred, the Real ID program, Big Brother's turning to the private sector to get the dirty deed done.
The Financial Times reports that, under a program (that's "programme" to you Brits) run by Homeland Security, air travelers are voluntarily turning their most intimate identifying info over to private contractors:
Until recently the only thing apart from love that money could not buy was a guaranteed place at the front of an airport security queue. That is changing, as an additional 500 US air passengers a day agree to hand over a $100 (£50) annual fee, plus their fingerprints and iris scans, for the right to become “registered travellers” in private programmes supervised by the Department of Homeland Security.
Once the authorities have run an applicant’s background checks to ensure he or she is not a threat to airline security, the successful RT receives a credit card-style pass containing biometric information and the privilege of joining specially designated fast lanes at a growing number of US airports. The market leader, Verified Identity Pass (VIP), has received about 100,000 applications, of which 75,000 have been approved.
I suppose the reader reaction to this news will serve as a sort of litmus test: Libertarians will say, "See? Told you the private sector can get the job done better than gummint!"
Others among us would far rather give up such information only to Uncle Sam, who is constrained by laws written by the representives we elect, than to someone with a profit motive, who might choose to do whatever he pleases with it. Different strokes.
First we outsource warfighting. Now this.
Taking off on the subject of this recent post, I thought I'd hark back to a column I wrote in 1998, way before this blog was ever thought of. In it, I set forth my vision of what it might be like if the Midlands had the mass transit amenities of New York or Washington or even Atlanta:
Imagine: Say it's a few years from now, and you live in Lexington and work in Columbia. You drive the mile or so to the station and leave your car in a parking lot. You take your seat and ride the old Southern line that parallels Highway 1 into the city. Call it the A line.
Despite all the stops, you get downtown in less time than it takes to drive, while getting ahead on work or (better yet) reading the paper. You change trains at the Vista Center station near the new arena and conference center.
Say you work where I do, near Williams-Brice Stadium (and why wouldn't you; this is my dream, after all). You take the C line down one of the very tracks that used to frustrate you in your driving days (if you can't beat the trains, join them). You get off within a block of work.
A few hours later, when you have a lunch appointment in Five Points, you take a quick ride back up to Vista Center, then through the underground stretch beneath the State House complex and the USC campus on the eastern reach of the A line.
Need to shop after work? Take the C all the way out to Columbiana, or the D along Two-Notch to Columbia Mall. (Where does the B line go? Out toward Lake Murray, which means it runs between 378 and the Saluda River, right by my house.)
Now that there's so much more growth out to the northeast I suppose we could extend the D farther out. The C would be longer, too. And the A might need a spur that would run out Garners Ferry. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Yeah, I was dreaming then and I'm dreaming now -- like the guy in that movie "Singles," who kept talking about his mass transit dream (in Seattle, I think it was), and anyone he told it to would say, "Yeah, but I love my car."
But it's a nice dream. Here's the rest of that column, by the way -- but I already gave you the relevant part.
My question about the movie theme music was answered promptly, for which I am grateful. Now, let me ask another question that maybe some of y'all can answer: Why don't we get the option of train travel in this country?
Yeah, I know there's Amtrak (which I wrote about not long ago), and if I don't mind going to the station in the wee hours of the morning, I will have the privilege of going one of a number of places along a corridor that runs along the Eastern seaboard. But I'd better want to go one of the few places the train goes, because outside of a few urban areas far to the north of us, there are no connecting locals to take us anywhere else.
In Europe, train travel is fast replacing airlines as the way to go. They even have supersleek, luxury bullet trains that go 200 miles per hour. Companies that provide service (remember when you got service from airlines) find they can make a competitive go of this, according to the piece in today's Wall Street Journal headlined "Touring Europe at 200 Miles an Hour":
High-speed rail operators in Europe are ambitiously adding routes and cutting travel times, looking to snatch customers from the short-haul airline market. They are also adding perks, such as DVD and movie rentals and free newspapers. Plush high-speed trains are luring customers weary of the bare-bones service offered on the many discount airlines that have proliferated throughout Europe: Eurostar Group Ltd. trains (which run in the United Kingdom, France and Belgium) have 33 inches of leg room in coach, for example. Discount airline Ryanair has 30 inches of leg room -- and the seats don't recline.
Spain, which is at the forefront of the rail boom, got high-speed service connecting Madrid and Barcelona last month. The journey was slashed by two hours: Now it takes just two hours, 35 minutes. Switzerland in January saw the opening of a $3.5 billion, 22-mile tunnel that passes through the Alps, cutting travel time by 45 to 75 minutes within the country and between Switzerland and Italy.
I'm still wiped out from the trip I took over the weekend -- driving all day Friday to central Pennsylvania in the rain, driving to northern New Jersey Saturday, driving back to central PA Sunday, driving back to Columbia on Monday. On Sunday, I did get to ride trains -- from Isalen, NJ, on New Jersey Transit, then zipping around Manhattan on the subway. I dig that so much -- just go down some steps, step on a train and find yourself in another world in minutes -- that I go places I don't have to go, just to ride the subway: We've got an hour! Let's zip down to Little Italy and back! I'll get you a cannoli!
Of course, the NJT and the subway are both ancient -- I found myself at one point under New York looking at a off-painted girder and wondering just how long it had been holding up the skyscrapers above -- and the scenery through the Newark area is even more grittily decayed looking in real life than it is in the opening credits of The Sopranos. But at least I get where I'm going without having to drive.
Several years ago, I would have flown this trip -- the part to PA, at least. Nowadays, air travel can take more time, and more hassle, than driving. Literally.
If luxury train travel can be economically competitive over there, why not over here? Is it the regulatory environment, or what?
Miss me? Well, the last few days (starting with Friday) I was on the move too much to set up my laptop, beyond a few minutes late Friday and early Saturday morning -- when I sat down to leave a comment or two.
We drove up to Pennsylvania under cover of the rain Friday, slipping across the Mason-Dixon Line in the darkness. Why? To check up on what's happening as we lead up to the primary there on April 22. Also for personal reasons. Drove over to northern New Jersey Saturday night; spent all day Sunday in Manhattan.
Yesterday morning, I started a post at a coffeeshop back in PA, but my wife came back to pick me up before I could finish (after I was a couple of hundred miles away, I realized I only shut down the browser; I didn't log off -- I wonder what the security implications of that might be?)
We drove home yesterday -- the weather was much nicer this time -- arriving after 9:30 last night.
Today, we interview the last two at-large candidates for Columbia City Council. Between that and catching up, today will probably be a pretty thin day, too, blogwise. But I'll see what I can do. I've been saving stuff up -- including stuff from three city council interview from last week.
I'll be around.
On Thanksgiving, after the turkey, I accompanied my family -- or the portion able to join us to visit my youngest up in Pennsylvania -- to see "Fred Claus." (Vince Vaughan cracks me up, OK?) Anyway, we enjoyed it for the light entertainment it was.
The next day, we bopped up to NYC because my youngest had never been there. Yes, we visited the shopping capital of the world on the busiest shopping day of the year. We weren't buying; looking was overwhelming enough. And it turns out that, while "Fred Claus" exposed certain problems with Santa's toy production process, it failed to reflect the deep unrest among some of the elves -- or at least, the elves we found on the sidewalk outside Macy's. (Like an explorer drawn into the heart of darkness, I couldn't resist leading the kids that way in awe and fascination, after we got off the New Jersey Transit train across the street at Penn Station.)
They were very angry -- and unexpectedly tall, I found. Maybe they were Middle Earth elves, rather than the kind from the North Pole. In any case, they didn't seem to have the ol' Santa spirit.
In case you went shopping on Friday and think it was hectic, I share with you this video, which still doesn't quite show what it was really like to be in that bedlam. As one of my daughters said looking over my shoulder at the portion of the video inside Macy's (the part right after the angry elves), "You had to be there." A very different scene from during the parade the day before, but just about as crowded.
I really spoiled the hectic effect by throwing in some restful parts -- the skaters at Rockefeller Center, for instance -- because I'm a big believer in giving The Full Picture.
This is just to let y'all know I'm still out here somewhere in the temperate zone of the northern hemisphere, and while I MAY post before the weekend is over, don't hold your breath.
I hope all of you had a blessed Thanksgiving.
By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
THE TIME of the week has arrived at which I look at some problem or other and confidently pronounce, as though I knew, just what we should do about it. But I have no solutions today.
Today, I’m just sad, and solutions seem scarce. Part of it is personal. I just returned a few days ago from Pennsylvania, where my youngest daughter’s closest friend had died after a traffic accident. But there are other causes.
As I write, my wife is on her way back from Memphis, where she had been, tending to family business, when the awful news came about David. She had to fly back there after the funeral to get her car, and drive it home.
A few minutes ago, I checked on her by cell phone. I told her I was groping about for a column idea, and she said I should write about how lucky we were to be living in South Carolina rather than Memphis. She cited what she described as the painfully divisive victory speech Mayor Willie Herenton had delivered after his re-election a few days ago.
I just saw the video, and she’s right. Lord knows we have our own demons here in the state that was first to secede, and would do it again if some had their way. But there is a rawness to racial tension in Memphis that is hard to describe if you haven’t been there.
There was a time — 16 years ago, when he became the first black mayor of that city — when Willie Herenton was a sign of hope: a black man elected with both black and white support.
It was the sort of thing we had wanted and expected to see for a long time. Back in 1974, when we were students at Memphis State, Harold Ford — senior, not the one who ran for the U.S. Senate last year — ran for Congress against incumbent Republican Dan Kuykendall. My wife and I were totally for Ford, even though Rep. Kuykendall was her Dad’s friend and business partner. He had been all very well and good for the folks his age, but our generation was going to change things. And that race thing? Our kids would only know about that from history books.
So it was sad, here in the next century, to hear Mayor Herenton tell his supporters in his hour of victory that “I now know who is for me, and I also know who is against me,” and the overwhelmingly black crowd applauds, because they know just what he means.
For a man just re-elected to an unprecedented fifth term, Mr. Herenton had a huge chip on his shoulder. “There are some mean, mean-spirited people in Memphis,” he said to much cheering. “There are some haters.... I know about haters, and I know about shaking ’em off.”
He went on to tell about “two sad occasions” from the campaign. “I’m gonna let you know about the sickness in Memphis.”
He spoke of a basketball game at which he had presented the key to the city during halftime, and “the fans showed so much disdain and hatred... and that place was full, 90 percent white.”
Another time, while appearing live from Memphis on “Good Morning America” along with Justin Timberlake, “I get up on the stage, and it was 95 percent young white kids, they booed me on national television.”
“But what they want to say is, can Willie Herenton bring us together? I didn’t separate us.”
“Memphis got a lot of healing to do. But see, I don’t have that problem. They’ve got a problem.”
We’ve all got a problem, and not just in Memphis. What is Memphis but a great, big Jena, Lousiana? Another town where there are no heroes, just a place full of people, black and white, all messed up over race.
Mayor Herenton isn’t just some isolated megalomaniac. Judging by the reaction, every person in that room saw what he saw, just the way he saw it. And whites, watching on TV, saw a guy who was calling them racists.
The Commercial Appeal, the newspaper the mayor dismisses as the voice of the white establishment, harrumphed that “contrary to the innuendoes he made during his speech, the 58 percent of voting population who opposed him can’t all simply be dismissed as racists.” No, they can’t, especially since one of the two candidates who split the anti-Herenton vote was also black. But Herenton supporters can stew over the fact that in the whitest precincts, his support was in single digits.
It’s this cognitive divide between what white folks and black folks perceive, when both are looking at the very same thing, that keeps us from putting this mess behind us. And I didn’t just arrive at this conclusion.
Somewhere — maybe in a box in my attic — is a manila folder containing a printout of a column I wrote in 1995, but never ran in the paper. I wrote it in a state of bewilderment on the day O.J. Simpson was acquitted. I hadn’t followed the trial and didn’t care much about it one way or the other, but I had found myself in a room with a television when the verdict came in, and a crowd had gathered to hear it. You know what happened next: The black folks watching cheered; the whites stared in silence. To me, another rich guy’s lawyers had gotten him off; big deal. But that wasn’t the way my black friends in the room saw it at all, and I was shocked at the contrast. But because I had no solution to offer, because the column just chronicled my shock, I didn’t deem it worthy of publication. I’d hold it until I could come up with an answer.
I’m still holding it. And now, here we are. What’s my point? I don’t have one. I just think it’s sad. Don’t you?
When I first visited the small towns of central Pennsylvania a couple of years back -- about the same time I was starting this blog, as it happens -- I was struck by a number of things, which I chronicled at the time.
A couple of them have stuck with me, and were reinforced when I was there a few days ago. First, the South certainly doesn't cornered the market in preserving the past. Most of the houses
in the central parts of Shippensburg, Carlisle and many hamlets scattered across the countryside compete well with Charleston and Beaufort in terms of age and states of preservation. There are also in regular use, and not as museums or second homes for rich folks from elsewhere. They are still in use as businesses, or as housing for folks of all income levels.
Second, there is a communal effort, beyond the pride of individual property owners, to spruce up the common spaces. One of most noticeable things is the huge, lush baskets of flowers hanging from streetlamps in the center of downtown. On this latest trip, I saw some men going around watering the plants Sunday morning, and I learned that the local Rotary Club puts up and maintains the flowers as a service project.
I thought that was pretty cool. I think I'll mention it to my own Rotary compadres. In the meantime, I share it with you.
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