Memphis

Memphis is totally different in both look and feel to Nashville.  Again, it’s that horizontal rather than vertical thing.  It’s lively in a different way too: here it’s all blues clubs and street performance; Nashville was all saloons and C&W. 

   

We stayed at the Peabody Hotel which is famous for having ducks that live in a ‘palace’ on the roof but come down in the lift to live in the foyer fountain during the day before marching back up via the lift again in the evening. There’s a big parade and everything. I suppose in an infinite universe everything happens at least once.

 

It is obligatory that one visit Graceland when in the area.  The house and grounds are interesting; everything else about the experience is hateful.  The shops, food court and rapacious ticket prices are to be expected; the slow and terminally indifferent staff were not.  Every other attraction or museum we’ve visited has been staffed by keen and knowledgeable staff.  This place is staffed by morlocks.

Negativity thrown hastily to one side, Elvis had quite the setup.  Utterly tasteless, but cool all the same.

If I had a smoke house, I like to think I’d have the vision to turn it into a shooting range

Just to maintain the light-hearted, upbeat tone I’m setting, we also visited the Civil Rights museum.  It’s partially constructed out of the motel where Martin Luther King was shot and also the boarding house across the road where he was shot from. I dunno if that’s ghoulish or exploitative, but I could make a spirited argument that it was as appropriate a place as any.

The museum documents the great American hobby of being awful to humans with a higher level of melanin than themselves.  They really dedicated themselves to it, too.  At least in the age of slavery (stretching generosity and decency to breaking point) you could fathom the economic argument to the South’s dehumanisation of their fellow man.  After that, wow.

 

Again, we had and have bigotry in the UK which was broadly acceptable even at an institutional level until relatively recently.  We’re all working our way through it. 

That said, I don’t know when it was last acceptable to blow up a church full of kids during Sunday school, but some states in the US were cool with it in my parents’ lifetime.  I’m not really trying to be all self-righteous and I would sooner keep the tone of the blog on the fun side, but I guess I just found it all a bit jarring.  One benefit to our travelling the way we have, with the historical insight it lends, is you can sagely point out with 20/20 hindsight the ways it could have all been nipped in the bud after the civil war. The efforts toward reunification took priority and the Federal government didn’t bother too hard to enforce those newly-found civil rights for freed blacks.  The subsequent implementation of Jim Crow laws and the Supreme court rulings supporting them as constitutional also betray the sympathies or ambivalence of the Northerners.    Funfax: there are twice as many toilets as needed in the Pentagon because Woodrow Wilson instigated racial segregation for federal employees fifty years after the civil war ended.  Dickhead.

2015 New York, illustrated by most prevalent race in each area.

An interesting political aside was how, during the Cold war, the racial struggle was utilised by the Soviets to undermine the US in the eyes of those nations that both superpowers were trying to influence, by painting the Americans as fascists.  It was probably the institutional persecution of minorities as subhuman that sold it.  Accordingly, the racial segregationists in the South then accused civil rights campaigners of being in league with the communists.

 
Pictured: irony

So, yeah, today was not light entertainment, but it was an enlightening and –on a certain level- optimistic visit.

I’m aware that this post is a bit of a brevity rollercoaster, so I’ll maintain that pattern with a picture of a fried peanut butter and banana sandwich.  The King would approve.

Kurzfassung auf Deutsch:  Wir haben Graceland, das Haus von Elvis Presley besucht. Das Haus ist wirklich cool, aber das Personal sind schrecklich. Wir sind auch zu dem Civil Rights Museum gegangen. Es war erschütternd, aber auch hoffnungsvoll.