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U.S. Rep. Duncan of Knoxville
A good Republican with a maverick streak
John J. Duncan Jr., the 2nd District congressman in his ninth term of office, hasn’t gone along with the war in Iraq or the threats he sees to personal freedoms as those threats are embodied in the Patriot Act. A majority of the American public is coming around to agreement with his position on the war and may well one day perceive the Patriot Act the way he has. He shrugs off the assertion that his congressional work demonstrates a degree of personal independence. “Sometimes I’m too independent for my own good,” he says. The following is the way he expresses his feelings on the subject:
“With July 4 almost here, Metro Pulse asked me to express some of my thoughts on the meaning of independence to me, as this Independence Day approaches. I was told that some of my votes in Congress over the years have shown a somewhat independent streak.
“If that is true, I suppose it may come from the slightly stubborn, contrary streak found in many lifelong East Tennesseans, possibly inherited from Scots-Irish ancestors.
“When I cast votes in the House, I always try to vote for what I believe to be right and the way I think the great majority of my constituents would vote if they had the same information I had. I have never claimed to be right all the time. No one is. But I certainly try.
“I believe I am a very loyal Republican. However, I realize that a few of our leaders sometimes feel I am a little too independent.
“The problem for me is that on several key votes, Republican members of Congress are now being asked to vote in ways that go against traditional Republican philosophy.
“Even though I have great respect for President Bush and strongly support him for re-election, I cannot vote for huge deficit spending or great expansion of federal power just because he is in the White House instead of some liberal Democrat.
“A recent Doonesbury cartoon showed a radio announcer saying that he was going to interview GOP operative Frank Bingleman about why Republicans, after many years of fighting huge deficit spending, were now in favor of it. The cartoon had the Republican saying: ‘OK, first of all, it turns out the Pope’s not really Catholic.’
“I would have been happy to write a traditional, patriotic July 4 column, but I was asked to explain my independent nature because of votes I have cast against some White House positions on Iraq, the Patriot Act, and a few big ticket Defense items.
My votes on all of these issues have been more in line with traditional conservative principles then if I had voted the opposite way. Space will not allow me to explain all these votes, however, or the many, many votes on which I have supported the president.
Suffice it to say that I frequently read some words from a 1930 novel entitled The Lion’s Den, by Janet Ayer Fairbank.
“She wrote: ‘No matter how the espousal of a lost cause might hurt his prestige in the House, Zimmer had never hesitated to identify himself with it if it seemed to him to be right. He knew only two ways: the right one and the wrong, and if he made a mistake, it was never one of honor: He voted as he believed he should, and although sometimes his voice was raised alone on one side of a question, it was never stifled.’
“I love this country. I hope my work in the House will help in some small way to insure that it always remains free and independent and sovereign. I do not favor one-world solutions to our problems, in part, because I hope this world never becomes a dull, bland, homogenized place where everyone has to be and think and act alike.
“One of the worst arguments in favor of any legislation to me is that we have to do it because all or most other countries have done it.
I hope Americans never fear being a little different, a little special, a little unique.
“I read recently that half the people in this world do not even have a second pair of shoes. We are blessed beyond belief to live in this country. And I believe we have this great life in the greatest nation in this world because of our freedom and our independence, both as individuals and as a nation.”
Follow Your Own Thoughts...
..and blog your way to fame
Glenn Reynolds is one of the best-known Knoxvillians in the world. You won’t see him on TV, or in the movies. He’s not an actor or musician or politician. But the UT law professor runs the web log (blog) site known as Instapundit.com, which weighs in daily on nearly every subject known to man. Or, at least, to Glenn. With tens of thousands of hits a day, it has been described as the most-visited blog site in the world.
Reynolds is known for his own way of thinking about things, which tends not to align with any particular political party. He supported the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq last year, and still supports the occupation. In other ways, he seems liberal, or perhaps libertarian.
Typically, we were able to reach him only by e-mail.
“I think independence means following your own thoughts and opinions, whether or not they agree with others’,” he writes. “It’s not being contrary for contrariness’ sake, but just thinking your own thoughts.”
Asked if there’s a name for his particular political point of view, he admits that he doesn’t know, but conjures a phrase from the brief administration of John F. Kennedy. “I’m probably really a New Frontier liberal,” Reynolds says, explaining: “supporting strong defense, a vigorous space and science program, and civil rights, but not Big Government in general. I don’t know what that makes me today.”
His position as a pro-war pundit contrasts sharply with his last name, which is familiar to people who were reading the Knoxville papers about 35 years ago. His father, Charles Reynolds, a religion prof at UT during the Vietnam era, was one of the strongest antiwar voices on campus, back when those holding such views were a distinct minority. Glenn Reynolds doesn’t see himself as a rebellious youth.
“Back when I was a kid I agreed with some of what he did (the civil rights protesting) and was ambivalent about other stuff (the Vietnam War protests),” he says. “I admired him for standing up to people when he was prosecuted for protesting.”
Today, Reynolds says he and his father “get along quite well. We know how to disagree without being disagreeable.”
His own website seems to revel in independent thought, but he says the web in general has been a mixed blessing. “It makes it easy to put your thoughts out,” he says, “but it also makes it easy to avoid opinions with which you disagree.”
Still, he doesn’t see Americans losing their talent at independent thinking. “People seem plenty ornery to me,” he says. “Americans celebrate independence in a way that’s hard for people from many other cultures to comprehend. Those ‘different is better’ commercials would seem nonsensical in a lot of places. But I think we’re better for it.”
Alonzo Montgomery’s Own Line
He walks the walk when he talks the talk
Plainspoken East Knoxvillian Alonzo Montgomery doesn’t have many friends in local politics, even among fellow African Americans traditionally looked upon as the standard-bearers for the black community.
“I’m pissed off at every one of them,” Montgomery says of local black office-holders such as Sam Anderson, Diane Jordan and Joe Armstrong. “I respect them; I call ‘em ‘Ms. Jordan’ and ‘Mr. Anderson.’ But we’re not friends.
“The problem with all of our elected black officials is that they have their hands in the wrong pockets,” Montgomery continues, on a break from a brisk morning run through East Knoxville and downtown, a regular routine when he’s not suffering a flare-up of an ongoing orthopedic ailment.
“They do what they do for personal gain, not for the good of the black community. One day, the black community is going to wake up and get rid of every one of them.”
A diminutive, clean-shorn gentleman of 47, Montgomery is well recognized hereabouts for his fiery soliloquies in front of both City Council and Knox County Commission—passionate, populist defenses of black community interests and spirited assaults on cronyism and pork-barrel politics. And while he doesn’t speak out at every meeting, it often seems that way, especially to the local pols to whom he is a persistent irritation.
A child of Knoxville’s old Walter P. Taylor Homes housing project, Montgomery enlisted as a paratrooper in the U.S. Army in 1975, at age 18. He spent the better part of his 20 years in the service overseas in places like Central America and Europe and the Middle East, seeing combat in the first Gulf War and witnessing the fall of communism in Berlin. “I was there in Germany when President Reagan told Mr. Gorbachev to tear down the wall,” Montgomery relates. “We (the troops) were all standing there, staring the East Germans right in the face.”
But it wasn’t until his homecoming in the mid-1990s that Montgomery found his own voice in the public arena, when county officials were preparing to shut down the old Eastport Elementary School near Walter P. Taylor in 1996.
On returning stateside, Montgomery had taken a job at the City County Building in the department of a local elected official. Incensed by what he perceived as a cavalier attitude toward the predominantly black students who attended Eastport, he made arrangements with the News Sentinel to write a handful of editorial page opinion pieces in opposition to its closing. His outspokenness didn’t sit well with his new employers.
“They came to me at work one day and said, ‘Alonzo, we don’t want you to publish these things,’” Montgomery remembers. “Then at the end of the day, they let me go, because I wasn’t going to tear up what I had written. That just put the fire in me more. I wasn’t going to be owned by anybody. Hey, I figure you’ve got to be a martyr for something.”
Since then, Montgomery has discoursed stridently and publicly on any number of issues, from the city’s aborted Universe Knoxville plan to build a downtown planetarium in 2002 (“That was nothing but a good-old-boy thing; they were going to line their pockets at the taxpayers’ expense”) to the Knoxville Police Department’s shooting of East Knoxville resident Juan Daniels in the late ‘90s (“I really broke out at City Council; after I finished speaking, I got a standing ovation”).
“I only go out when it’s time to speak,” he says. “But when I go, I try to make an impact. I feel like I have to speak out, because God gave me that gift. I’m the last thing they want to hear up there—a black man with knowledge who isn’t afraid to speak up.”
More recently, Montgomery vented his spleen on Commission’s proposed $30 increase of the county wheel tax. Prior to an initial vote (the first of two required for passage), commissioner Craig Leuthold proposed adding yet another $5 to that $30 hike to help pay for a new West Knox high school, a response to student overflow at Farragut and Bearden.
Montgomery’s ensuing rant drew one of the few laughs of a long and contentious meeting (even wheel tax supporters had to chuckle) when he concluded by chiding Leuthold and his constituents that “I didn’t tell you all to pick up and move out to Farragut... why should East Knoxville have to pay because you chose to live out there?”
Whether his diatribe had any effect on the first-reading vote (commissioners approved the $30 increase, but voted against the additional $5 hike) is uncertain. But Montgomery believes it did. “They were ready to give Leuthold that increase,” he says. “I feel like they might have done it if I hadn’t spoken up.”
Some people—especially office-holders—see Montgomery as little more than a crank and a rabble rouser; when he speaks, the people who disagree with him invariably wince, fidget, grimace, roll their eyes and twist in their seats. But they listen.
They listen perhaps because they sense that, underneath the bluster, Montgomery is deceptively shrewd, and a keen observer. When he discusses local politics, he makes the hidden connections, and can talk at length on the specifics of who knows whom, who worked for whom, and who’s scratching whose back.
He’s also a man of character; he’s a devoted father, a divorcee who raised his youngest daughter Ruth alone after he and his former wife parted company (Montgomery’s two older children, Wachovia and Alonzo Jr., were already of age at the time of the split).
“That’s not known a lot in the black community, a man having primary custody of his child,” Montgomery allows. “But I accept my responsibilities; I take care of what’s mine. I keep in touch with all my kids now; we’re very tight.”
If he has his way, Montgomery will eventually be an office-holder himself. He’s already run for City Council twice, in 1998 and 2003, garnering nearly 2,000 votes in the last election, he says, despite running without major party affiliation (It’s a nominally non-partisan Council) or a significant source of funding. “I didn’t raise any money; all I did was hand out fliers and speak out.
“One day, I’m going to hold office, and when I do, I ain’t going to take money from no one. Most of these politicians take money from some organization, then that organization owns them. They say something wrong, and they get cut off. Well, I ain’t going to be owned by anyone. I’d rather stay broke.”
The Route to Independence
The teacher turns to learning on her own
Sometimes being an independent thinker can save your life.
When Toni McSorley was in her early 30s, she was raising two daughters, going through a divorce and getting a degree in theatrical light design at the University of Tennessee. She worked a stressful schedule of 78 hours at a time with 15-minute breaks if she was lucky. “I was living on Snickers bars and Cokes,” she recalls.
Then she was diagnosed with lupus. For about a year she followed her doctor’s regimen, what she calls “the standard pharmaceutical approach”—steroids, bronchial dilators, anything the doctor prescribed. “I was taking tons of medications,” she says.
At one point she was diagnosed as terminal. “I was just not well. My kids were trying to figure out what they would do when I was gone.”
It was then, watching her children trying to accept her imminent death, that she knew something had to change. She asked her doctor, whom she thinks upon now with a kind of pity, if her diet could have any impact—positive or negative—on her progress. His answer was no. Somehow she didn’t quite believe him.
“I ended up literally tossing it all down the drain,” she says—her medicines and a certain trust of Western medicine. “There had to be a different way to go.”
She ended up at Nature’s Pantry, a source of supplements, vitamins, literature and, most importantly, a community of people who were interested in other paths to physical and mental health.
She adopted a strict ayurvedic diet of ghee, rice, mung beans, lean meat, vegetables, herbal teas and supplements. “And vitamins!” she exclaims, chuckling at what a revolutionary idea that seemed at the time.
“At the end of two months, I felt better. At the end of six months I felt like a human being again.” And after two years, she tested negative for lupus. The disease wasn’t in remission, it was just gone.
“They ran the test three times because they didn’t believe it,” she recalls. The doctors attributed her recovery to an original misdiagnosis, but McSorley didn’t. She knew that she had changed her life.
After recovering from the worst, McSorley returned to teaching, a calling she’s heeded for 38 years, mostly as a martial arts sensei.
McSorley got involved in martial arts when she was a 13-year-old growing up in Cheyenne, Wyo. She moved to Knoxville when she was 25, following her grad student husband to UT.
After 20 years teaching in her home, McSorley opened the Arts of the Samurai studio in Cedar Bluff, teaching Agedo Karate to children and adults, plus weapons classes in Kendo and Naginata and self-defense courses for women and children.
She says that martial arts teach strength, which is integral to independence.
“You can’t be independent if you’re not strong,” she asserts. “Strong people can make good decisions at a drop of a hat.”
She teaches kids as young as 3 years old to have physical strength, self-confidence, social skills and discipline. She says she teaches people all the time who are afraid—of change, of taking risks. But she believes that’s what life is about.
“If you don’t just believe in yourself and what you’ve done enough to be willing to take the step forward, then you’re just stuck. And who wants to live their lives stuck?”
Certainly not McSorley, who at 45 entered the World Games in Waikiki and won three gold medals and has since taken her school’s teams to two consecutive World Games competitions and brought home a record number of medals. “It’s been a fantastic journey,” she says.
An Indie Mentality
For this businessman, independence works
When the Disc Exchange opened more than 16 years ago, owner Allan Miller had little inkling that it would evolve into the successful venture that it is today. Miller began the business initially as a service to university students. Canvassing the campus with flyers promoting his alternative to shopping at big box retailers like Wal-Mart or the leading chain Cat’s Records, he ran its first incarnation from a house and met students between classes with their music buying requests. The company flourished and necessitated its relocation to a shop just off Chapman Highway behind Shoney’s, before moving again to its current location on the opposite side of Chapman Highway and, eventually, opening a second store in the retail mecca of West Knoxville on Kingston Pike.
In addition to his business model, Miller bucks local industry trends promoting artists unique to Knoxville. “We do everything possible to help out local artists,” Miller says. “We generally set them up listening posts in the store and order artboards (4’ x 4’ posters) for them.... We report to Soundscan, and hopefully record labels will notice. Sometimes the labels will call to try and get in touch with them, and go and see them play, if [they’re ranked] on the charts....
“[Local artists] also get listed on our e-letter, and, if they have display materials, we’ll set something up for them. A lot of times we’ll have an in-store performance, or go out and support them when they play locally. When artists do something at local clubs, we’ll sell CDs for them. We try to help them out as much as we can.”
And Miller also makes it a point to support other independent business owners by reciprocating patronage to frequent Disc Exchange shoppers. “I do, if at all possible, trade with people who trade with me, but you can’t avoid some [national chain] stores. I think that most people try to support local businesses, and I try to go there first.
“It’s tough to have a chain [business in Knoxville], because it just doesn’t stand out.”
July 1, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 27
© 2004 Metro Pulse
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