Over at Bloomberg, Mary Ellen Klas has a really good opinion piece on all the alarming ways democracy has broken down in Tennessee. The headline, however, reads “What’s Happening in Tennessee Isn’t Funny.”
Y’all. I would like to argue that it is.
Late last week, The Tennessean reported that Tennessee's education commissioner Lizzette Reynolds — you may remember her from previous scandals, such as the revelation that her main residence was still in Texas, or when we learned that she didn’t meet the state’s qualifications to hold her position — signed forms that certified that she met the residential qualifications to get a tuition waiver on the classwork she’s doing to try to meet the qualifications she doesn’t have for the job she holds in a state she doesn’t seem fully committed to.
‘Commissioner Reynolds is legally unqualified and she must resign’
Bless. This is hilarious.
Fox 17 got the Tennessee Department of Education to explain this, and “they claim it was an administrative error.” I should say so! An administrative error by the chief administrative officer of the Department of Education, Lizzette Reynolds. But no, I get it. They’re trying to blame some subordinate, who presumably assumed that surely the head of the Department of Education had spent a great amount of time in the state before taking the position.
And this is even better! The state’s excuse for this screw-up boils down to: “Come on, it was an honest mistake. Any reasonable person would assume that the Tennessee Education Commissioner was a Tennessean, right?” Yes, Tennessee, yes! Any reasonable person would assume that, and yet, here we are.
I’ve been thinking a lot about comedy because of my book. And listen, are you going to be subjected to musings about my book from now until it’s released? I hope not. At this point, I’m sick of hearing me talk about it. Even so, I open my mouth and stuff about the book just comes pouring out. Please cut me some slack. If you worked in a bakery and we were out having dinner and the topic of yeast came up, I would understand if you needed to talk about sourdough for a half an hour or so. So it's safe to assume that every time ridiculous but alarming things happen in Tennessee, I’m going to have some fitting anecdote from the 1950s I feel compelled to share with y’all.
This one involves racist human corn dog John Kasper deciding to have his own Unite the Right rally in Centennial Park back in early August 1957. The city didn’t want a bunch of racist yahoos from this Klan and that renegade Klan and the Parents’ Preference Committee and the Pro-Southerners and the proto-neo-Nazis and all the people on John Kasper’s mailing list milling around in Centennial Park getting riled up while John Kasper gave racist speeches. So the city passed a rule that you had to have a permit to give a speech in Centennial Park.
John Kasper and his mob show up at the park only to be met by the park commissioner, who’s all, “You can’t give a speech here without a permit.” And John Kasper turns around and starts telling his mob, “I thought this was America! First Amendment. Blah blah blah,” and so on. The Park commissioner is all, “I just told you you can’t give a speech without a permit, and now here you are giving a speech.”
Author Betsy Phillips’ Dynamite Nashville: The KKK, the FBI, and the Bombers Beyond Their Control is scheduled for release via Third Man Books…
That is funny.
Or like after the Hattie Cotton School bombing, a car full of Klansmen was pulled over in Carthage, and their car was stuffed with them and alarm clocks. The police were all, “What are you doing with all these alarm clocks?” And the driver is like, “I collect them, I’m going to put them in my garage.” Then, after a few more minutes of questioning, the driver admitted he didn’t have a garage.
Every time I think of that, I laugh trying to imagine the cop’s face — first when he sees a car full of people and alarm clocks. Then, the look when he hears that he’s supposed to believe that these clocks are for someone’s garage clock collection. And then finally, his face when the dude’s all like, “Aw, man, OK, I don’t even have a garage.”
If you can picture that and not laugh, well, I don’t even know how to relate to you. And yet — AND YET — these utter clowns were extremely dangerous. A month after John Kasper tried to give a speech about how he couldn’t give a speech, he was running around town with a box of explosives trying to find some place to stash it until it was needed. If members of the Klan from Nashville were over in Carthage buying alarm clocks, it’s reasonable to suspect they wanted those clocks as timers for bombs and they knew buying a bunch of alarm clocks in Nashville might have raised suspicions.
As a society, we treat joking around like it’s some kind of facade you put over serious things so that people can be playful with each other in ways that, if played straight, might erupt into violence.
If you say to your friend, “Jesus, your mom is really gross looking,” everyone would understand why he’s pissed at you, and they would think you’re a jerk. But, if you say “Your momma’s so fat that when she sits around the house, she really sits around the house,” that’s supposed to be funny. Now, if your friend gets pissed, he’s the jerk for not being able to take a joke. We treat joking as a way of signaling that you feel like you should not be subjected to the consequences that these sentiments would bring you if said seriously.
But I think laughter can also indicate that things are unsettled and we don’t know what they mean; that the tension between what we’re being told and what we know is true is so tight that, if we don’t relieve it in some way — through laughter and joking — it might break us.
I don’t know about you, but I’m assuming most of us can’t really do much about the state of Tennessee. I vote, and I state my opinions, and that’s about all I can do. I understand that I’m supposed to accept that things in this state are the way most people (or at least most voters) in the state want them to be. But I see examples everywhere of Tennesseans who ostensibly voted for this mess also wondering what the fuck is happening here.
The state's education chief is facing calls to resign over her lack of qualifications
Even in that Fox 17 story I linked to a few paragraphs ago, they had a quote from Steve Gill saying that he found the situation with Reynolds strange. And we know how many Republican women want gun reform and are finding that their support for these politicians has not resulted in these politicians representing their positions.
The choice is laid out like: “You’re either with us or against us. If you’re with us, you show it by conforming to our version of reality, even if it contradicts what you know to be true. If you’re against us, go cry in your liberal commie LGBTQIA mimosas at your drag-queen-less brunches.” But there is a third option: to laugh.
And I think that, when shit is funny — even if it’s also deadly serious — it’s OK to laugh at it. In fact, it’s the way to keep your soul buoyed in hard, scary times. Like these.
