Listen, I’m not going to rehash everything Scene managing editor Alejandro Ramirez wrote last week about Sen. Marsha Blackburn’s anti-China ad. The commercial is so racist that watching it feels like a blast furnace on your soul, and I can’t analyze it better than Alex did. I’ve already seen five different TikTok videos of blond women or women in blond wigs pretending to be Blackburn and crushing various food items while threatening various imaginary enemies. Even Mayor Freddie O'Connell got in on the action with a new campaign spot taking aim at Blackburn's ad. I guess you have to be pretty sure of the inevitability of your win to make an ad so ripe for parody. But it also means many of the best jokes about the ad are already taken.
The Tennessee senator’s fortune cookie ad is the latest in her storied career of anti-Chinese bigotry
Y’all remember a couple of years ago when I wrote about the small Chinese community that formed here in Nashville in the 1870s? There were laundries, a dead body, a retaliatory hat theft and a handsome baby? Sadly, no one in Nashville’s media today is brave enough to devote whole unrelated paragraphs of their stories to the handsomeness of our babies. And so — even two years after I brought it to the city’s attention that we need more hard-hitting coverage of our babies — we remain uninformed about who is the cutest of the cutie-patooties. Cowards! Even the Tennessee Lookout, which promises in its very name to tell us what to look out for has no random thoughts on baby attractiveness.
Anyway. My point is that Chinese people first came to Tennessee in the 1870s. Marsha Blackburn didn’t get here until a century later. So she has no more or less inherent claim on being a Tennessean than a Chinese person does. She also just happened to move here to try to make a better life for herself. We would all be better off if she stopped being a bigot, and if she just welcomed everyone here as she was welcomed.
But this segues nicely into my question. Is Blackburn running on a platform of being a terrible person? Set aside the racism for a second. Just think about this ad at the most primitive level. There’s a pile of cookies. Cookies taste good. You get them as treats from people who love you and take care of you. This is a lesson most of us learn as children. Who would show you a cookie and then crush it into crumbs in front of you? A bad person! The bad guy! A 3-year-old could tell you that the person who destroys cookies is a villain.
Taking a deep dive on Chang Ze Yow, the first Chinese person to die in Nashville, who was buried at Mount Ararat
There are men — one’s sitting in the White House right now — whose implicit promise to voters is that they will be just the biggest assholes you’ve ever seen to all the people you hate. This has not been a lane that women have ever successfully occupied. I recently overheard a Republican operative refer to state Sen. Charlane Oliver (D-Nashville) as “that bitch” with a level of vitriol that shocked me — and all she did was stand on a desk holding a sign. If Republicans don’t like a woman who’s justifiably angry, you’d think a woman who gets people fired and gleefully ruins cookies would be causing them to make a run on fainting couches.
I think Blackburn’s candidacy for governor has such an air of inevitability that she can do whatever pleases her. She can just run around being all, “I have the power!” and reveling in it. Usually, that would derail a woman’s political career, but she has a great deal of wiggle room here. She can literally make an ad in which she’s mean and racist and sour-looking, and apparently it won’t affect her popularity among conservatives at all.
But I think she’s showing us exactly who she is. And that person does not appear to be pleasant to be around, to put it mildly.
The Republican establishment will tolerate that while she’s running for governor, but I have a hard time imagining they’ll tolerate it when she is governor. Personally, I hope she makes them miserable every day.
And those of us who immediately ran to our kitchens to see what foodstuffs we had that would easily crush in our hands will work on making fun of their situation.
