We're feeling good about February

Smackdown in the Macktown: Ellis vs. Reichert

Give him credit. If former mayor C Jack Ellis didn’t accomplish anything else in his eight years, he did one thing extremely well: he turned the ordinary and boring aspects of everyday politic processes into prime-time local drama. Case in point, Ellis threatens a lawsuit against mayor Robert Reichert. Why? By dismissing four nominees for appointment, Reichert ended a lawsuit that Ellis filed against the city’s housing authority. The sticking point between Ellis and the housing authority has only been whether or not the mayor had the power to nominate folks without prior approval from city council. The fact that Ellis always wanted to avoid going to city council for anything doesn’t apply to Reichert, who seems pretty friendly with this new city council still. So this seems like an ego thing on Ellis’s part. All’s I know is that his stand against the housing authority has cost city taxpayers a whopping $250,000. Whether Reichert did the nice thing by telling Al Tilman, Henry Ficklin, Shirley Hunt and Ronnie Milley they were de-appointed, it seems he did the right thing.

Oh when the saints go marching again…

I think MLK Day is a cruel joke on poor people because it only offers them the illusion of having a voice without the punch of actually having a voice. Whereas Dr. King first focused on civil rights for marginalized black people, he soon was shouting out for the civil rights of all marginalized people, both here and abroad. In fact, one of his most powerful speeches was an angry anti-war rant.

Read: "…don't let anybody make you think that God chose America as his divine, messianic force to be, a sort of policeman of the whole world. God has a way of standing before the nations with judgment, and it seems that I can hear God saying to America: ‘You are too arrogant! If you don't change your ways, I will rise up and break the backbone of your power, and I will place it in the hands of a nation that doesn't even know my name. Be still and know that I am God.’"

That’s hardcore stuff, right? Yet it seems like all that power and courage has been co-opted until hardly a phantom of it remains visible. We know he was a strong and bold soul, but we can’t really see it because politicians and other butt-kissers stand in the way. They want you to believe they’d be Dr. King’s best friend if only he were alive today.

See, that’s the problem. He’s dead. Can you imagine someone like George W. Bush actually trying to deal with Dr. King? Can you imagine what he’d be saying to us today? And no, not every politician and community leaders is just trying to look good. This is really a problem with The People (i.e. – us). Instead of singing “We Shall Overcome”, our anthem has become “We Shall Not Be Bothered”. If that weren’t true then things like the MLK Day March wouldn’t look so much like a historical reenactment instead of an effort to keep forging ahead for justice.

A one-in-three chance at greatness!

Macon was recently named one of “100 Best Communities for Young People” by America’s Promise Alliance. The group touts their “Five Promises”—getting four means a child has a good shot at being happy, they say—and accepted applications from 300 communities. The distinction, while not something to be embarrassed about, isn’t an overwhelmingly amazing thing just because they were one of a hundred to win. The honor is even further diluted by the fact that everyone who applied is eligible to apply for $300,000 in grants from the APA. Though it’d be natural to assume that winners would have a better shot at the grants, you’ve got to figure that it’d kind of be counter-productive since each of those 100 communities is already one of the BEST for kids. It’d almost make more sense to only award the grants to the 200 losers so they can work on catching up. Not that I’m rooting against Macon, okay. Just saying. As far as being a winner goes, the APA has hooked up with KABOOM! to give away a brand new community-built playground (value: $70,000). The catch is that the community has to be named a 2008 Playful City as a part of a KABOOM! Campaign. Oh well.

You didn't get to see all this in the paper...

Let me clear our throat
In a letter to the editor, Josh Rogers, the Director of the College Hill Corridor Commission, reminded The 11^th Hour that the Commission is NOT a NewTown Macon project as was stated in the Jan 3^rd article “Artist’s Guide to Downtown Revitalization”. Though written by Mercer students, editor Chris Horne failed to get the facts straight, and for that, he is sincerely apologetic. He, in fact, wants me to stress how dumb and absent-minded he can be. (If you’ve ever read the paper with a red ink pen, you already know this.) The Commission is, as Rogers states, “a joint project between Mercer University and the City of Macon” which is “informed by a broad range of local stakeholders.” In specific, the Commission is the brainchild of Mercer President Bill Underwood, who believes that recreating the area between Mercer and Downtown Macon is a vital part of reviving our urban core. Personally, I think this is one of the best and most overlooked on-going efforts in the city. Wanna know more? Go to collegehillcorridor.com/

Fighting stereotypes from his pigeonhole
Al Tillman has proved impressively resilient against our local media’s pigeonholing. His name has repeatedly been prefaced with “entertainment promoter”, which is a clever way to dismiss a person who is trying to make a difference. Well, he’ll be harder to ignore now because Tillman is taking over as the new local NAACP President. On the agenda? Eliminating racism and becoming more pro-active in the community, which would sound empty coming from most people. With his Unity-N-Community group, Tillman has pulled together city leaders from various racial, religious and ethnic backgrounds because he understands that the fabric of our community is diverse and interwoven… like plaid. Seriously though, Tillman knows the rights of disenfranchised populations matter to the health of the whole, whether or not the whole likes that. And he’s bold enough to believe that being an entertainment promoter can be a position of social importance. He seems to understand that, sometimes, our social ills are best remedied in social settings.

Good to see our city leaders have such spirit
Our second annual Readers’ Choice Awards Show was, again, a blast. Surprisingly (to me, at least), there were several city council members in attendance: Rick Hutto, Nancy White, Rabbi Larry Schlesinger, and new council president Miriam Paris. They not only attended, but they mingled. Paris got up and danced to Da Clay, one of the live performances, and Rabbi Schlesinger stayed all the way through the end. It was not just neat having them there; it provides evidence that this new guard is seriously interested in building community, which is what The 11^th Hour is all about.

Don’t Rock the jukebox
There’s a connection between Roger Clemens and John Rocker. Yes, John Rocker was implicated as a HGH user in the Mitchell Report. The other connection? Both Clemens and Rocker were recently interviewed by reporters who lobbed softballs at them. No hard questions. In Rocker’s case, there were no questions at all, or at least that’s how it looks when Joe Kovac does one of those “life lesson” features. All we get is a bunch of random quotes and nothing that seems to relate to his involvement with the biggest scandal in baseball since the White Sox threw the 1919 World Series. Instead, we get his insights on Ted Nugget, anti-Liberal quips that Rush Limbaugh did ten years ago (and better), and of course, making fun of Ellis’s name change despite the fact that Ellis was the only public figure to stand up for him when the whole world wanted his head.

Let’s get literal, literal! I wanna get literal!
Hey there, Coley Harvey, I know you’re upset that an announcer (and reported friend) said the only way for the new crop of golfers to stop Tiger Woods would be with a lynching, but do you seriously believe that announcer was suggesting that they actually lynch him? If the greatest golfer in the world was white, do you think she necessarily would’ve said something else, and if so, and if it ended in death, as you point out lynching does, would that have been okay? Is it wrong to mockingly wish death on someone or just on members of a minority… or just in a manner historically tied to racial minorities? We all say things like “Ooo, I could kill you!”—it’s part of our vernacular. If Tiger says it’s no sweat off his sack, why are you upset? Are you trying to use a celebrity athlete to take up the cause of young, black men, or worse, waiting on one to fight for you? You’re absolutely right that this is a scary time in America when more young black men are incarcerated than college-educated, but you make that injustice look ridiculous by trying to pair it with this.

Picture Pages
Did Ellis steal City Hall’s portrait of Otis Redding? Was it an honest mistake? Who cares? I want to know why city employees were doing Ellis’s moving for him. Actually, I want to know how to get city employees to move my stuff for me.

Hank Vegas gets sticky with Paste
Big props to local rockers Hank Vegas, who were voted Best Overall Band in 2007. They are on the new Paste Sampler CD with the likes of Radiohead, Bright Eyes, The Whigs and the Blind Boys of Alabama. It’s a big step up for our local music scene for one of our own to get that kind of national attention. Oh, and they’re on tour for the next month too!

Happy New Year!

Fly Like an Eagle... twice daily to Atlanta

Kudos to the Telegraph who put Travis Fain’s well researched and informative story on the Middle Georgia Regional Airport at the top of the Sunday, December 30^th edition. They avoided the temptation to obliterate the front page with their list of top ten news stories from the past year. If you haven’t read it yet, Mr. Fain says the airport is still in a pickle. Delta and ASA want out but can’t go because the Feds won’t let them. The grant Ellis secured in an effort to bring a new route to D.C. can’t be used because it’d create competition for the Delta/ASA partnership that already wants to leave. More interestingly, Fain says the airport has averaged about 40 passengers a day this year, down from a high of 100 a day just a couple years ago. Meanwhile, the company the city hired to take care of the airport, TBI Airport Management, remains very optimistic that there is a solid market for the airport in Macon despite all the signs that point to the contrary. They claim to have done amazing work in Orlando so it’s hard to completely dismiss them. Either way, this should be an interesting year for our little airport.

Telegraph publisher PJ Browning is leaving

A while back, someone pointed out that one reason the news here so often sucks is that reporters, television and print, use Macon as a stepping stone. The size of the “metropolitan” area is large enough to look good—demographics wise—to potential future employers and so our city makes for a good middle stage for enterprising journalists. It hurts in a couple ways. One: some of the journalists never become really engaged in the community, already having their eye on a bigger position elsewhere, and two: the folks who do get involved and then leave are sorely missed. The Telegraph’s latest publisher, PJ Browning, is one of the latter. She was on several major boards and, from all appearances, had really put herself to good use in Macon. She’s going to Myrtle Beach, and she will be missed, no doubt. The next publisher will have big shoes to fill… if they want to. If they don’t want to, they’ll probably still move on to a bigger paper somewhere else in a couple years.

Random rant…
Macon has always looked like a mostly blank canvas to me. Instead of painting on it, folks just bitch and moan that there’s nothing much on the canvas. That’s a point that this paper has harped on for a while, but I want to start harping on a new one in the same vein. I see plenty of people using Macon for their own gain and then leaving, but I also see plenty who use it for their own advantage because so few are getting involved. They don’t often actually add much to the community as a whole, but they’re all over the place on boards and at non-profits. It just looks good on their resume, and that’s why they do it. Yeah, it bugs me that those people do it, but it bugs me more that we let them. How easy is it to really get involved? Very! There have been several seats on City Council in the past couple cycles that people just walked up and put their names on without having to actually run against anyone. (Note: I’m not suggesting that the individuals who did are abusing anything for their own gain, just making a point about how easily someone can get involved at even that high a level.) Seriously, it’s so much easier to jump into something here than it is almost anywhere else because most of us are content to wait on someone else to do the work. Think about that next time you’re getting ready to complain. Remember, you’re a part of Macon, not apart from it.