Last I week I included on a post about the xenophobia and paranoia behind anti-Hispanic immigration mania an image of Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn and her “list” of what immigrants from south of the border will "contribute" to the country. I don’t give a damn if there are some people who gaslight society over what happened in the past, but the past is present and it isn’t about them anymore. People like Blackburn and Laura Ingraham are today the Julius Streichers of yesteryear, but this time it isn't Jews who are their targets in a public forum seemingly without fear of being contradicted…
…they are demonizing and dehumanizing here today Hispanics, which is something the media doesn't have the time to examine. It does of course have time to examine "structural racism" against blacks in regard to medical care in a current series by the Associated Press, but all those tiny coffins I saw being flown to Mexico when I worked at the airport did not contain black infants (or white infants, for that matter).
Blackburn has been a racist since at least her “birther” days, and this isn’t anything new. What is “new” is that people who once thought of the state of Tennessee as a more “moderate” southern state definitely need to be disabused of that view. Jonathan Tobin of the far-right Jewish News Syndicate opined in Newsweek (it’s apparently trying to attract more “business” this way) that the black state legislatures who were expelled for protesting too much about the now ruby-red state’s Republicans refusal to act in the aftermath of the Nashville mass shooting were guilty of “anti-democratic hypocrisy.”
Really? Only six of the 33 state senators are Democrats, and three-quarters of the state House is Republican. We can surmise the “interest” in “democracy” that Republicans have after their redistricting plan carved-up Nashville from a reliable Democratic seat in the House of Representatives into parts of three reliable Republican seats, so that only one majority Democratic district remains in the delegation, the Ninth which includes Memphis. That sounds real “pro-democracy,” doesn’t it? How about this as “pro-democracy,” from a local Nashville television station as reported by The New Republic, which by the way is an “old school” conservative publication:
An investigation conducted before last week’s drama from Nashville-based NewsChannel5 revealed how Tennessee Republicans have introduced legislation with no notice to the public, denied roll call votes on bills, and killed bills on the basis that their side apparently sounded louder in voice votes.“You have committee chairs single-handedly deciding whether bills live or die. Is that democracy?” NewsChannel 5’s Phill Williams asked Republican House Speaker Cameron Sexton, who responded by insisting that there’s no problem.
Yet a problem there is. On the
college student ID bill, pushed by the now-expelled Representative Jones,
Republican Elections and Campaign Finance Subcommittee chair Tim Rudd gavelled
the vote as a “No” before the voice vote was even finished. Such brazenness
certainly cuts against the already condescending charges made by some
Republicans last week that members like Jones and Pearson were complainers and
not legislation pursuers. NewsChannel5
gave Rudd the opportunity to explain why he killed the bill before even hearing
the vote. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Rudd said twice, with not
an ounce of shame of what was clearly seen on camera.
Another bill, advanced by local students, that would’ve directed high schools to guide students on how they could register to vote, was denied a roll call vote by Republican Local Government chair John Crawford on the basis that the committee had already voted on an amendment to the bill. House rules explicitly state that “a roll call vote shall be taken at the request of the sponsor of the bill or resolution under consideration.” On the voice vote, it sounded to many in the room like the “Aye’s” had won. Crawford, however, deemed that the “No’s had it.”
“Democracy is dead here in
Tennessee as it stands right now,” said House Democratic Caucus Chair Vincent Dixie,
who sponsored the bill. Tori Venable, from the libertarian group Americans for
Prosperity, told NewsChannel5 how, with the House voice votes, a vote having
“sounded one way, [can go] another way,” all by the unchecked discretion of the
Republican majority.
Sure sounds like “democracy” is dead in Tennessee to me. Of course if you swing far-right like family members (I use that term with some irony) who live there, “democracy” is only supposed to work for “us,” not for “them.” Politico points out that
Tennessee represents the grim culmination of the forces corroding state politics: the nationalization of elections and governance, the tribalism between the two parties, the collapse of local media and internet-accelerated siloing of news and the incentive structure wrought by extreme gerrymandering. Also, if we’re being honest, the transition from pragmatists anchored in their communities to partisans more fixated on what’s said online than at their local Rotary Club.
Now, I occasionally can be seen walking about Seattle with a backpack which I purchased online with a small “birthday” discount from the gift and collectable section of the store of the university I am an alumnus of. The backpack has the school logo, seen here at Pier 66:
Not that it means that much; I suspect that most people here don't see the state as anything more than a country music Hicksville. Not that I knew much more about it myself, spending my time in the bubble atmosphere of college life. I took summer semester courses that allowed me to graduate a year earlier than the people I started out with, which meant that I didn’t take the summers off to get to know the “culture” better.
To be honest, going to that school didn’t seem to impress anyone on my job searches out here, maybe because they didn’t think I would “fit in” with this “culture”—either that or people had a hard time believing that someone who looked like me could have a college degree at all. Maybe—probably—it was the latter.
Still, I like to wear the backpack as a kind of –in-your-face thing: yeah, Maybe I’m not from around here, but not from where you think, or you people are bigger hypocrites than the people from the place I came from, or simply I’m not like you and can you guess what I think about you ignorant assumptions.
That’s how I feel about these superstars-in-their-own-minds around here whose degrees only got them data entry or phone answering jobs. I actually think about things; these other people mark their ballots next to correct ovals so they don’t have to bother with what is happening in this world themselves. But on the other hand, it is fair to say that the right-wingers here are just fakers and wannabes; I’ve seen the “real deal” close up.
The problem is that the states of Washington and Tennessee probably had a lot in common back in the day, but have gone in two completely opposite directions, so it isn’t fair to assert that I would feel any better being there than here. If there were people would elect a neo-Nazi like Blackburn to the U.S. Senate, then count me out of there.
Now you may wonder how someone like me wound up spending any time in a state like that to begin with, although the real mystery is how I managed to make it to college at all, since my life—at least until the time I enlisted in the Army—was destined to nowhere. It was a complicated story which I won’t get into here, although I will say that it left me which a blasé attitude about familial connections, or personal connections at all—none more important than the fact that in their eyes I am a radical socialist who created his own problems, and in my eyes they are simply in denial and out of touch with reality.
I was born in Cleveland, grew-up in Wisconsin before enlisting—more out of “force,” but I didn’t resist; any place had to be better than where I was at. I suppose that the military was looked upon as a kind of “reform school” for me, although the fact was that I never drank, never did drugs, and never hanged out with "bad" people; when I heard Johnny Depp describe his life as a child, I could "relate" to that, except in some ways it was worse. My half-siblings who were clearly less "ethnic" than I was got all the perks and privileges, and I had to do the "dirty work." They got allowances, but I dare not ask for a quarter. On the rare occasion my mother was in the mood to treat me with a little kindness, it evaporated the moment I asked for something, because I was taking "advantage" of her. Fear made me do things on the “sly,” and my mother never could come to grips with why I was they way I was.
But in the Army, we were all one big “happy” family, regardless of background or social status, at least on the enlisted side. It was a job, most of time monotonous, sometimes not so, and you learned how to keep things neat and tidy, and you did what you were told to do. In return, you got your “three hots and a cot” with a little pocket change thrown in.
I was always a book reader, and I had a lot of books that were not taken away from me as "punishment" or feelings of malice when I was in the service; I liked movies, and when the Laserdisc format came out, I thought it was “cool” enough to start building my own movie collection. But there had to be something more to life, and as they say the best place to be in the Army is between the place you are leaving and the place you are going.
One day a new platoon leader arrived, a second lieutenant fresh out of ROTC. I was a sergeant by then and I had all this “book learning” but not that piece of parchment to prove it like this novice did. So I decided that I was going to go to college and get that piece of parchment, like Jack Thompson’s electrician in the Australian film Petersen; those other “educated” snobs weren’t “better” than he was, and he was going to prove it (or at least fake it as long as he could).
The question was where. My parents had by then moved out of Wisconsin after Caterpillar laid-off a bunch of people, and Dad found a new job near Knoxville, so I could get into the university there as an “in-state” student. I was also fortunate that the school liked to show its “appreciation” for one’s “service” to the country; I asked for an application while I was stationed in Augsburg, a Bavarian city which liked to brag about its Roman “heritage” with this statue of Augustus:
Although my academic “credentials” were not exactly stellar, I was surprised by how quickly I received a letter of acceptance. By the time I showed up “home” to a place I knew nothing about except that people talked “different,” I was completely over my previous fear. I think that my parents didn’t know what to make of this person who now did as he pleased and who wasn’t on his way to jail or an early grave after all. I recall showing Dad my first college report card; I couldn’t tell if his look of “disappointment” was because I didn’t get straight-As—or because I actually passed all my classes (one “A,” two “B+s” and a “C+”).
As noted I was in a kind of bubble world in school; I didn’t get a “sense” of what the “culture” or politics was, save for that white female student who befuddled people by saying out loud in class that just because she wouldn’t date a black man didn’t mean she was “racist”; nobody could figure out what was being discussed that motivated her to blurt that out.
I also remember a Japanese-American student making a racially-insensitive observation that didn’t sit well even with the white students; after all, that was their prerogative. While I notice that the University of Washington is pretty much taken over by Asian students, both legal residents and foreign nationals, no southern university like UTK would ever allow that to happen at their school.
Just in case someone gets the wrong "idea" about me, before I started working for the campus paper I submitted a letter to the editor condemning what I regarded as an antisemitic op-ed written by another student; when it was published, all the "j"s were in lower case, making me look like an idiot. I confronted the "managing editor" who admitted that he was in a "rush" typing it in and expected the copy editor to "fix" his mistakes; he allowed the printing of a follow-up letter to make sure people knew who was at fault. Why didn't the copy editor correct this obvious mistake? But then again, the paper allowed to pass an editorial cartoon by a student depicting an Israeli soldier mass shooting the members of the Nativity Scene.
Besides, Knoxville is not really a “college town,” and Knox County voted for Trump both times. Although I never got the impression I didn’t “belong”—after all, there was room especially made for “nontraditional” student like me—I tended to get the idea that I was a bit of “curiosity” to people, but at least I wasn’t made to feel like a criminal which is the impression I get from many people here.
But that doesn’t mean I never encountered people who had an “opinion” about me that wasn’t favorable. I worked for a semester as a “paid” reporter for the campus newspaper, and another semester as an unpaid op-ed writer, with vaguely disturbing left-wing leanings. I knew this because one day I wandered into the editing room and observed that someone had disfigured my photo in a caricature of Satan. I remember being on a bus and some old guy was reading one of my commentaries; you could almost literally see the steam coming out of his ears.
There were also the odd incidents of people making inferences as to my “ethnicity”—someone once yelled out to me “Go back to Iran,” another guy wanted to know if anyone spoke “Spanish” to tell me to hurry up with the copy machine, and when I wrote about how when I was walking down the side of a road without a sidewalk that morning and a white woman deliberately tried to clip me with her car (she was close enough to mangle the umbrella I was carrying) someone thought that was “funny.” Still, I did manage to get out of there alright with a degree in Communications, and there were a few people I still have fond memories of. From there it was on` to the “left coast.”
I’ve never been to Tennessee since, but my former care-givers still live there. For a few years I exchanged letters with Dad, and it was always the same: he tried to convince me why the stuff he was seeing on Fox News was the truth, and I responded by telling him why what he was being fed was bullshit—over and over again for years. You can see what I mean here:
https://todarethegods.blogspot.com/2021/03/its-no-good-trying-to-talk-sense-to-fox.html
and here
https://todarethegods.blogspot.com/search?q=fox+news+addict
It got to the point where I knew what was going to be in the next letter, so when one arrived I set it aside until I had nothing else to do but read and answer it. When I told him that was the reason I had delayed writing him for a couple months, he quit writing, which was just as well. That was end of any communications I have had with “family.”
My folks came
from “butternut” western Pennsylvania, although even in “blue” states, all
“rural” counties vote Republican. I don’t think they were any more prejudiced
than the people generally of that “culture,” but I think it informed their
“parenting” of me (Dad wasn’t my natural father, and I was a constant source of
obviously misplaced “disappointment” for my mother, who once told me that she wished she “never let
you be born”).
To be perfectly honest, they were a natural fit in their new
surroundings in Tennessee, and represent the “typical” political and social culture in control there, which
I want nothing to do with and despise. Of course they assume I am just naturally “angry” about life, as if that “explains”
anything. I am angry about a lot of things, but not about "life."
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