Branding the Public

It's official. The Commercial Appeal's Chris Peck has called the public a "herd".

He tells us what he really thinks in Sunday's editorial that functions as part of the local building industry's marketing campaign.

The public, of course, often operates in a herd mentality, thundering to the worst-case scenario because everyone else is going there.

Herd, hear this. There is a plausible alternative.

Not just operates, but "of course" operates in a herd mentality. Well, at least it explains the many apologies and advertorials that Peck has made for Memphis' rich and powerful.

I think Peck might be the AntiWells.

Season's Greetings from Chinatown!

A couple of weeks ago, I was up on my roof taking down my Christmas lights¹. I was almost finished when I noticed this blemish in the relatively new shingles.


I thought at first that it was some kind of fastener that the roofers had put in. But it was pretty wide and pretty exposed and definitely unlike anything else I could see on the roof. So I got a knife to inspect it and it came out pretty easy. And as I had begun to suspect, it was a bullet.


I'm pretty sure it wasn't there when I put the lights up in early December. So my guess is it landed on my roof on New Year's Eve. Shot by one of the idiots you hear firing bursts in the remote distance.

Which brings me to the title of my post. For a number of years, I've heard those bursts but never done anything about it. It made me mad but figured if I called the police, I would get a "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown." response, phrased by a bureaucrat in blue rather than Robert Towne. That was my fault. By doing nothing, I said it, not the imagined police officer. I should have given the police a chance to do something, which I didn't.

But isn't it Chinatown?

Hell no, it's not Chinatown! We're a major city in a major nation in the early 21st century. And as a collateral effect of our nation's spending so much on the military, we now have all these technologies in the public sphere that developed first in the military. One such is gunshot location -- a way to pinpoint the location of gunshot.

Before I start sounding like I know what I'm talking about, let me say that I didn't know that such technologies even existed when I dug the bullet out. I could have imagined, but didn't know. 'til then I thought police would just have to wait around and listen real good to catch the idiots. Luckily I had a friend who had heard about London using gunshot location.

Anyway, maybe this technology is the kind of thing that MATAlac was referring to:

...I think the root problem is that Memphis doesn't realize that all of these ills have been vaccinated in other places. Our leaders attend these national conferences and meet with people who have solved these problems, yet they don't apply them here.

I'm not such an idiot that I believe gunshot location technology will cure our crime problems. But, it could be part of a crime-fighting cocktail.

Therefore my 2007 New Year's Eve (or before) Resolutions:

1. I'm going to send a letter, complete with pictures, to my Mayors plus my City Council Person, Carol Chumney, and ask that they consider this technology.
2. Next time I hear celebratory gunfire I'm going to call the police and leave Chinatown behind.

¹Yes, it reads pretty bad that I was taking down my Christmas lights in early February. It is. But that very same day, I saw 2 Christmas trees lying curbside outside 2 different houses. I swear!