December 18, 2004
Day 3
I love Bill Clinton. I consider myself a modern, rational Democrat in his mold, sans the scores of mini-initiatives on things like the V-Chip and school uniforms. He survived over eight years with an antagonistic Congress for six and billionaire crazies throwing millions of dollars to shady private investigators and partisan hatchet men using political jujitsu and a cool, non-defensive demeanor that neither belittled like Donald Rumsfeld nor gave off an aloofness to the world like George W. Bush.
But this museum was just too much for me. It’s on a beautiful campus across a highway from the Rivermarket, at the end of a dead-end railroad bridge. Depending on your (physical) perspective, the building itself looks either like a trailer or a futuristic bridge reaching out across the river. Inside, Clinton gets a Reaganesqe hagiography treatment, some of which is narrated by Mr. Slick himself. It’s a shame that historians didn’t get full run of the place, but in this day and age, the ridiculously positive treatment Clinton essentially gave himself is a defense mechanism. If Reagan smashed communism and made America believe in itself, Bill Clinton can transform the economy, heal racial tensions and play a pitch-perfect sax all while fending off Richard Mellon Scaife, Newt Gingrich and the rest of the mouth-breathers.
If you’re in Little Rock (not likely, I know), plunk down $5 to see the museum. Walk around the “policy alcoves,” watch the orientation movie, read eight years of half-redacted daily schedules, gawk at the expensive gifts Bill and Hill got from world leaders. It’s worth your time – and a critical eye.
Next up was Central High School, site of the 1957 desegregation battle that required the use of the military to enforce the law of the land. The building itself is still an operating school that looks just like it does in historical photos; tourists visit a former gas station across the street, which is a National Park Service visitor center with a small exhibit.
All told, I think we did a fairly good job with Little Rock – any more time and we may have started to get bored. That being said, if you find yourself in Memphis or on your way to points south or west, a day in Little Rock is worth your time and money.
By about 2 p.m., we left for Memphis. It’s about two and a half hours’ distance, but we managed to stretch it out to three and a half by detouring into Mississippi to say we’d visited and getting caught in Memphis’ tangled highway system. Whereas Kentucky’s state-designated parkways were clean, clear and easy to navigate with the map provided at rest stops, Tennessee roads have narrow and tight onramps in the middle of empty fields, lanes that end in the middle of cloverleaf interchanges. The people who planned the construction at the intersection of Interstates 40 and 240 have a special level of hell designed for them to share with those responsible for the 395-495-95 Mixing Bowl, Seven Corners in Falls Church and pedestrian access around Union Station.
Memphis itself is a big, mostly-empty tourist trap. Its downtown streets are plied by three trolley lines stocked with restored old trolley cars that have drivers who stop to chat with cops and other trolley drivers. The downtown destinations, mainly Peabody Place (a mall) and Beale Street (supposedly a blues haven) were nearly empty on a Thursday night. The people who did make it out to the juke joints were all out-of-towners escaping conventions and corporate meetings. The bands, helpfully pumped out into the street from every empty bar, played soul, blues and R&B standards to pasty white folks from New Jersey and Denver.
In search of something exciting, I searched the Memphis Flyer (helpfully identified as an alternative weekly by the photo of John Waters on the cover) for the places that real Memphibians hang out.
Major lesson for the day: When you see addresses on a street and a streetcar going down that street, it is not enough to assume that the line will go down that street all the way to the addresses you’re looking for. The conductor announced the end of the line at an empty and vaguely menacing corner in what he insisted was Midtown, despite being about 10 blocks from the Midtown bars the Flyer listed.
It looked like a set designed for COPS.
Not wanting to stray too far from the train tracks and their guarantee of a safe ride home, we walked up a block toward a neon sign that turned out to belong to a laundry and then turned back to the trolley, which we shared with a passed-out homeless man and two drunks who wanted to sing "Time is on my side" but only knew one line. They addressed the conductor as "ma'am" when "sir" would have been more appropriate and then staggered off to the minor league baseball stadium for some reason.
So Memphis is a bust. They have so "renewed" their downtown that there is very little left for people who want a good time and don’t have to wake up for the 9 a.m. sales meeting.
Posted by rj3 at December 18, 2004 12:13 PM
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Comments
I wish I had warned you properly against downtown Memphis, which, as you now know, is a desolate shithole unless it happens to be a holiday. Poplar Avenue, for any future visits, is a good place to be, if for no other reason than it has a profusion of old-style gay discos and drag bars. They're also, um, very flexible on the whole underage drinking thing, so while I loved Memphis when I was old enough to drive but not to drink, it does get a little irritating to see forty high school seniors sipping wine coolers in your strip club parking lot.
Beale was deserted? That's sad to hear, it can be a seriously riotous place to be when the climate is right. Damn the cold weather for sending sweaterless southerners in to bed early.
Posted by: JK at December 18, 2004 10:59 PM