My power stayed on long enough last Sunday that I thought I was going to get lucky. But alas, midmorning the lights flickered a couple times and that was it. I sat around for a while waiting to see if it would come back on. Then I realized that my choice was either to make my way to Hermitage — where my parents had heat and electricity — right then while it was daylight, or be stuck until Monday.
I threw my dog and my dirty clothes in the car and made my way across Briley Parkway. Everywhere I looked, trees were down. Between the broken limbs and the ice, there were points on Briley where only one lane was open. I decided when I got there to take Lebanon Pike east, because I thought that if I got in a wreck, there’d be someplace to walk to.
And then I holed up for a week in my parents’ spare room. The thing about that Sunday drive, though, was that it gave me a first-hand look at just how wide-spread the damage was. Everywhere I looked, trees and branches were down, cars had slid off the road, and the world looked brittle and dangerous. Beautiful too, like we lived in a crystal chandelier.
But there was no edge of the damage. It wasn’t like a tornado, where you can follow a path of destruction. It wasn’t like a flood, where people on higher ground were unaffected. Everyone feels this. Everyone is affected.
And I guess, when you see it first hand, when you’re living it, you do wonder: Where is all the help? Why are volunteers going door to door checking on people? Why isn’t FEMA checking in? Where are the feds? I mean, you all know I won’t pass a chance to run down Gov. Bill Lee, but this weather literally affected the whole state. He can’t ask people from East Tennessee to come over and help, because they need help themselves.
The National Guard has shown up to help. But the scale is so massive, we need serious federal aid. And yeah, I know that the only way we’re going to get real help from the federal government is if we have effective advocates capable of feeling empathy for those in trouble.
And we have Marsha Blackburn.
Blackburn did, eventually, send a letter to President Trump urging for disaster relief. But what was she doing while we were all trying to not freeze to death?
Hanging out with Nicki Minaj. On Jan. 28, the senator posted on social media: “It was a pleasure to meet a fierce America-loving patriot, Nicki Minaj!” If between the sounds of trees exploding, daggers of icicles hitting the ground and distant sirens you heard a faint disdainful cackle on Wednesday, that was me, reading that and laughing as loud as humanly possible.
Blackburn has been touting herself as some kind of champion for all the Epstein victims. WKRN has a good compilation of all her anti-Epstein rhetoric, but I’d like to focus on this tweet from July, in which she says:
For years, I have fought to expose the business associates of Jeffrey Epstein and those who were bankrolling his trafficking ring. This has never been about celebrity — it has always been about achieving justice for the young women and girls who have been trafficked and abused. Human trafficking generates more than $150 billion a year in profits, and I remain committed to breaking apart the human trafficking rings that ensnare innocent victims in modern-day slavery.
Achieving justice for young women and girls who have been trafficked and abused by helping launder the reputation of a person who has supported a lot of abusers of young women and girls? Is that how this works?
Nicki Minaj married a convicted attempted rapist. She then, allegedly, pressured the victim to recant. She’s twice worked with Tekashi 6ix9ine, a rapper who was charged with making child sexual abuse material and who allegedly beat his girlfriend. She paid bail for her brother when he was arrested for raping a child.
U.S. House, U.S. Senate and governor’s races loom
And this is who Marsha Blackburn — grand champion of women who have been trafficked and abused — thinks is a great patriot. Is there no one on Blackburn's staff who likes her enough to tell her that posing with Minaj and speaking highly of her is pretty dumb?
It’s bad enough that we’re here suffering a major natural disaster and Blackburn’s showing off how she’s in a warm room with electricity. It’s worse that she’s busy bragging about meeting celebrities. But it is so awful that it turns a corner into funny that she’s hyping up this particular celebrity.
Marie Antoinette still takes a lot of grief for allegedly responding “Let them eat cake” after being told her subjects had no bread. (Historians think she almost certainly didn't say that, by the way.) But I think you could make an argument that our alleged pro-victim, anti-sexual-exploitation senator ditching out on dealing with a historic ice storm in order to meet with Nicki Minaj may top "Let them eat cake" in terms of being out of touch with the people who need her help.
Still, I did need a good laugh this week, and I did laugh at Blackburn, so maybe we could say that she is facilitating some storm relief. Not as much as you might hope, but some.
