Earlier this month, MMA fighter Josh Hokit got on camera and spit up on himself at the Lincoln Memorial, like a giant baby with colic. The next day, he stood on camera again and trolled Michelle Obama from the South Lawn of the White House. There is an obvious connection to be made between those two acts, symbolically. A person desecrates a monument to the Great Emancipator, and then disparages the Black former first lady?
These are the acts of an overtly racist person. Normally I’d be writing about how racist this is and how gross. Not today.
Here’s another factual thing that happened this month. A highly respected member of the commentariat class, who is a Middle Tennessee resident, saw that part of Vietnam Veterans Boulevard has been renamed for Charlie Kirk, and she tweeted: “The highway in my hometown has officially been dedicated as the Charlie Kirk Memorial Highway. I drive this stretch almost every day. Beautiful tribute that the entire North Nashville community will see for years to come.”
Y’all know me. You know I could spill out a thousand words in about 20 minutes on how the area Riley Gaines is calling "North Nashville" is so not North Nashville that it’s funny, and how no one in actual North Nashville would give two shits about any tribute to the racist Charlie Kirk, if they even know who he was. Then I’d probably go off on some tangent talking about how this effort to rebrand Goodlettsville as “North Nashville” is just Republicans trying to get some of the cultural cachet of North Nashville without having to know any Black people.
But I have to tell you the truth: I don’t think these people say or do this sort of thing to be racist. They might or might not be racist. But I also think they’re something worse and more dangerous. I think they’re meaningless.
That isn't to say that they, themselves, don’t have meaning, but I don’t think anything really means anything to them. Josh Hokit could have just as easily been pretending to puke at an Aldi. Or in his grandma’s kitchen. It’s all the same to him, and who cares what these symbols mean to other people? Riley Gaines says she lives in North Nashville, because it’s just a direction in a city to her. “North Nashville” doesn’t mean anything to her.
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My whole life, I’ve been told I'm a person who's “thinking too much about this,” who doesn't understand that “it’s just not that deep.” I’ve always thought that was bullshit. One of the best parts about being alive and conscious is that it is all that deep. Everywhere you look, there’s some hidden thing to be understood.
Like, for instance: Do you think much about hackberries? I usually don’t. My opinion is “trash tree.” But people don’t really intentionally plant hackberries. You see them all over because they grow along old fence lines, where birds sat on said fences and pooped out the hackberry seeds. And once you know that hackberries grow along old fence lines, you start to see them lined up all over Davidson County like ghost sentinels guarding long-vanished fields. The old rural landscape pokes through into our urban one. That’s cool. It changed how I look at hackberries. Sure it's just a tree, but also it’s a little deeper than that.
There’s always more to things. We might not know what the “more” is, but someone either does know or is trying to figure it out. How great is that?!
So I think that when I’m confronted with the likes of Josh Hokit or Riley Gaines, I jump to attributing malice or stupidity to them, because I can’t understand moving through a world where nothing means much. Just the luxury of not ever giving a shit, not even realizing that there are shits to be given, blows my mind. I mean, this isn’t even nihilism — nihilism is when you’ve taken a look at what different people think different things mean, and decide it’s all bullshit and life is fundamentally meaningless. But this is a worldview that doesn’t construct meaning in the first place.
And how do you fight that? How can you even have a fight, or hell, a meaningful discussion with someone who is just saying stuff to say it, and who doesn’t mean any of it in any deep way?
