Here’s an easily observable thing about country superstar Morgan Wallen: When he does some dumbass thing, just look at the calendar. During the height of the COVID pandemic, Wallen is spotted ignoring protocols and partying in Alabama. What’s upcoming? Oh, his Saturday Night Live appearance. He gets drunk and shouts racial slurs. What’s he in the middle of? Promoting his brand-new double album. Wallen gets drunk and throws a chair off the roof of a busy Lower Broad building? Yep, he’s about to head out on his biggest tour yet. Plus, what led up to the chair-toss? His ex got married to someone else.
You don’t have to be an armchair psychologist to see that Wallen self-sabotages. And really, just from observation and experience, people self-sabotage because they feel like fuck-ups who don’t deserve success — so better to cause the crash-and-burn early, before you're successful, than to risk getting what you want and then screwing it up. I know I’m a broken record on this, but you could always, instead, go to therapy.
The country singer was arrested on three felony charges for throwing a chair from the roof of Eric Church's honky-tonk
When people are messed-up and they go to therapy, they tend to find a lot of sympathy because they are trying to get their shit together. When people are messed-up and they throw a chair off the roof of a building and almost hit people on the street below, they tend to find that the rest of us think they’re an asshole.
There’s always been a kind of Americanness that revels in having enough power that you can be an asshole and people still have to treat you well. And I would argue that this approach to life has gotten even more popular since the start of the pandemic. But last week, the Metro Council decided they didn’t want to extend more courtesy and respect to Morgan Wallen than he has shown the city, so they declined to let the sign on his bar go up.Â
In her latest recap, @startleseasily reports on procedural frustrations and the Metro Council voting down signage for Morgan Wallen’s This Bar and Tennessee Kitchen
Will this withstand a First Amendment challenge? It shouldn’t. The council has set the precedent that bar signs can hang out over the sidewalk (see: almost all downtown bars), and that offensive doofuses with a history of using racial slurs can have their bar signs hanging downtown. The government can’t just decide it doesn’t like a person and then limit their ability to express themselves in the same way others do. But on the other hand, if the city just wants to be a thorn in Wallen’s side for a while, I’ll laugh about it until any legal challenge is settled. Hell, if anyone wants to propose just adding a line to the city budget for “pissing off Morgan Wallen,” I’ll support it.
Who I’m fascinated by is everyone running to Wallen's defense. I saw people on Twitter going after Councilmember At-Large Delishia Porterfield, saying things like, “Oh, but you’ll take the money his bar generates from taxes.” Um, his not-yet-open bar? The one that reportedly isn’t even fully permitted yet? Some people also posted sarcastically about how Porterfield must be perfect, while everyone else makes mistakes. I have made plenty of mistakes in my life. None of them has involved throwing a chair off a building or shouting racial slurs in a residential neighborhood. Are these the kinds of things Morgan Wallen fans often find themselves doing by mistake?
But mostly I’m fascinated by the threats people are making that, if Nashville doesn’t just let Morgan Wallen do whatever he wants when he’s in town, then tourists will just stop coming here. First, don’t threaten me with a good time. But second, if tourists won’t come to Nashville because locals don’t like it when assholes act like assholes in our streets, then what is it they think they’re coming to Nashville to do? Are people coming to Nashville for the thrill of being able to treat us like shit, and we just smile and take it?
White supremacists continue to show up in Tennessee. Perhaps because they identify with our state leaders' politics.
I’ve been wondering about this since the tampon Nazis were here. I talked to a couple of folks I know who are pretty closely observing the far right, because I wanted to know why Nashville is such a popular place for white supremacists to rally. I was assuming it might be because we’re so close to Pulaski, where the Klan was founded, or maybe because our politicians rally with Proud Boys, or ... I don’t know. But the experts’ feelings were that they come here because we’re an easy flight/drive from most of the country, and our entertainment district is heavily white. So after a hard day of dressing up like wankers and alarming locals, they can just put on their regular clothes and hit the bars, and they perceive Nashville to be a place where they’re then surrounded by people like them.
I thought this meant “surrounded by other racist white people.” But I think it’s deeper than that. I think it means “surrounded by a bunch of other people who think they should get to treat people however they want, and because they’re throwing money around, those people should have to take it.”
We have become a tourist destination for racists because we’re a tourist destination for assholes.
Did you know that “guest” and “host” share an origin? The word for one was also the word for the other. The concept being conveyed was something like “a person who encounters strangers.” Obviously, that might be the person who stays home and provides hospitality to a stranger, or it might be the person who goes out into the world and relies on the hospitality of strangers. (Sadly, even though “ghost” looks like it should be the third sibling in that word family, it has a completely different etymology.)Â
I think a problem we have as a city is that, in reducing “host” down to “the person who takes your money and gives you stuff,” we have lost any expectations of our guests beyond them giving us money for our stuff. The problem with this is that, stuffed into our sense of “guest” and “host” having to do with encountering strangers, is that sometimes the strangers are bad people. Anatoly Liberman, in the blog post I linked to above, points out that the Latin form, hostis, means “enemy.” (Hence “hostile,” “host” and “guest” all sharing a root.)
So our attitude as hosts — “whatever, as long as you keep paying” — gives permission to our guests to, indeed, do whatever, as long as they keep paying. But we’ve failed to account for the fact that strangers doing whatever makes them feel like enemies. There have to be ways to give our guests a sense that they have more responsibilities than just opening their wallets. But until we find a way to repair our host/guest relationships, nobody should be surprised that our willingness to overlook our guests’ shenanigans is fizzling.
That means you, Morgan Wallen.
