So we are settling in for an invasion: a real old-fashioned invasion with boots on the ground, rifles at the ready, heavy weapons, barricades in the streets, all of that. Courtesy of both the state and the feds, and the main qualifiers are — what?
That we are a crime-ridden city — as declared by whom and how? There is a well-known dichotomy on the matter, reminiscent of the one that prevailed in the nation last year, regarding inflation. Various officialdoms provide us with stats that show reassuring rates of decline in major crimes, while the streets themselves, stoked with both urban legends and outright horrors, still seethe with fear and foreboding.
That we are a “blue” city in a “red” state and ripe for picking thereby? Just how does this work when Mayor Paul Young, like Mayor Jim Strickland before him, like Mayor AC Wharton before him — minimal Democrats at best — earned their offices with across-the-board constituencies in nonpartisan elections?
(That issue, to be sure, is complicated by the fact of Shelby County’s dual governmental system, which these days has generated partisan elections and produces overtly Democratic county mayors, Lee Harris being the current one.)
Whatever. Trump and the state GOP majority are undeterred by nuance. There’s enough of a red-versus-blue scenario here to suit the president’s Memphis Justice Task Force. Just dandy. The president will get his show of virtue, the governor will get his vengeance against local-option scofflaws, and state Senator Brent Taylor will get one more opportunity to beat on the bass drum of his Make Memphis Matter project. Maybe this time in tandem with Marsha, Marsha, his new comrade-at-arms.
The other guys should be mentioned, too: Memphis Mayor Young, who keeps looking, in his well-intentioned way, for a policy balance that may not be there, and County Mayor Harris, who is building on the earlier bold bids of his second term to organize resistance to what he and others see as a brazen occupation and a potentially lethal challenge to home rule.
Justin J. Pearson, he of the golden tongue, is in that choir, as are county mayor candidate JB Smiley Jr. and Councilwoman/Tennessee gubernatorial candidate Jerri Green, and many more are tuning up for a resistance chorus, even as we speak.
Others, like city council chair Ford Canale and the venerable Congressman Steve Cohen are looking, not passively but cautiously, into their crystal balls and envisioning more Gandhi-like strategies that can generate unexpected outcomes, more of use to the occupied than to the occupier.
And me, too.
I am just now undergoing a term in the hospital which, all evidence suggests, will reach its conclusion at just about the time that things come to a head out there in greater Mempho. And I, too, am trying to anticipate the particulars and guess at the various outcomes.
Foot patrols on Beale Street? Reveille at Tom Lee? Hikes down Union Avenue? Anything happening at the Liberty Bowl? And what’s the plan for that sprawling collective of underserved neighborhoods all around and about us that we call the ’Hood?
Francis Scott Key wants to know. And, if it comes down to bombs bursting in air, God help us.