Kevin Stitt's Claims About Sending Troops to the Southern Border Make No Sense

When I saw Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt claiming that his state, Florida and our state would be willing to send our National Guard troops to the Texas border in order to stick their thumbs in the eye of the federal government ... oh, I’m sorry, I mean “help secure the border,” I laughed so hard. Screw the federal government, am I right? How are our troops going to get to Texas again? Using the federal interstate system? Oops, maybe we’d better wait until we’ve made it to Texas before we rebel against the feds.

And as dumb as we can be here in Tennessee, do they not teach even basic history in Oklahoma? Because Tennessee has never been good to Oklahoma. We’re constantly looking around being all, “Who can we absolutely not get along with? Send them to Oklahoma.” If Oklahoma hears that we’re willing to get in on a plan with them, Oklahoma should assume that we’re about to make their lives difficult. Best-case scenario? Oklahoma gets stuck with a drunken, disgraced Tennessee governor barfing all over the place. Worst-case scenario? Oklahoma has to deal with the generations of trauma caused by our cowardly attempts at genocide. And yet here’s Kevin Stitt, bragging about Oklahoma, Tennessee and Florida being ready to go together to Texas. 

As if this doesn’t end up with Florida smoking meth and pissing on the Alamo while a drunk Tennessee gives swirlies to that square — OK, that square with a panhandle — Oklahoma in the gift shop bathroom, as Texas tries to explain that there’s still quite a bit of Texas south of San Antonio, so please keep driving.

But sure, let’s game it out. Tennessee full-on rebels against the federal government, again, and sends our national guard to get into some kind of stand-off with federal agents. And again, I know we’re not supposed to study history or learn from it, but Bill Lee is my age. He lived through Waco and Ruby Ridge, so he should know the federal government doesn’t have any qualms about killing U.S. citizens it’s mad at. If we go down to the border to piss off the feds, thinking we can do this because they wouldn’t dare shoot at citizens, we are in for a big surprise.

So let’s say this goes where it would inevitably go if we’re stupid enough to do this. How long until Tennessee surrenders to the United States? I mean, I’m not a military strategist, but I have read The Art of War a couple of times and so I do know that when your opponent is on all sides of you, that’s called “being surrounded,” and armies that are surrounded by a superior force lose. The way I figure it, if Tennessee seceded, the federal government's first goal would be to secure Memphis. Much of the country depends on river commerce, and the U.S. would not stand for it to be threatened. Memphis would welcome this intervention because, obviously, a majority Black city in the South is not going to want to be stuck in Break-Away-Tennessee. Day one, I’m guessing, Memphis “surrenders” to a Girl Scout visiting from St. Louis, and they are back in the Union by supper.

Here in Nashville, Republican state legislators will make a big show of adopting a new flag for the nation of Tennessee, which they will fly at the Capitol and, maybe, the Cordell Hull building. I don’t think they’ll go straight Confederacy for the new flag, but I have to imagine it will be something nearly as stupid as adopting a mostly white flag as one’s national flag during a war when a white flag is a universal sign of surrender. My guess? The Tennessee national flag will be five equally sized horizontal lines, the top and bottom being royal blue, the middle being white, and the two lines between the blue and the white being red. As it fades, we will snicker, but become more accepting of it.

I’m assuming it will take us longer to get back in than Memphis because we’ll have to take a couple of days to argue about whether we will accept ever being out. But by day four, we’re back, though pundits will continue to argue that we never left in the first place.

My guess is Tullahoma will try to take the Air Force base, with insurgents led by Sons of Confederate veterans. This will be a high-casualty event — numerous heart attacks, broken bones and insurgents shooting each other accidentally — but it will be days before Arnold Air Force Base notices. Once they step in, Tullahoma is back in. The rest of south-central Tennessee immediately crumbles. The 50 people who live in rural West Tennessee surrender as soon as they realize that crossing a national border to go to the hospital would suck.

East Tennessee isn’t willingly coming back to the Union. But they also don’t think they would be well-served by being in the country of Tennessee. They try to set up their own nation/state, but they are stymied by their inability to get along with anyone. At one point, there are six presidents of East Tennessee, three chancellors, a queen, a tsarina and an antipope, all ordering people around. The U.S. has to send Dolly Parton in as our ambassador to smooth the situation over. She negotiates, and anyone who wants to can call themselves the King of East Tennessee, but they’re back in the Union by the end of week three. 

So what are we even worried about? There’s not going to be any more of a civil war than there is right now because the United States has the largest army in the world, and anyone who openly rebelled against it would fail. Believing otherwise is believing a fairy tale.

But man, that fairy tale is fascinating. We’re all human. We all organize and understand our lives through narrative. But the point of the stories we tell ourselves about who we are is to make it easier for us to understand our situation and to survive it. At a basic level, this is easy to understand. If you have a simple narrative that says, “I might get eaten by a bear if I’m not careful,” then you carefully avoid bears, and your life is better because you are not eaten. But, say, you live in downtown Nashville and you refuse to leave your apartment because you might get eaten by a bear? Then your helpful story isn’t helpful anymore. It’s actually harming you by curtailing your life.

This, I think, also kind of explains the Lost Cause narrative. White Southerners tell a story in which the Civil War was some beautiful tragedy for white people, marking the passing of a genteel peaceful time. They do this because that’s just a lot easier to live with than, “My relatives threw themselves and their neighbors into a meat grinder of a war they could not win because they refused to give up the possibility of being able to legally rape, torture, kill and sell other people, including their own family members.” 

Do you want the story where your beloved grandfather was an eccentric but honorable fool, or do you want the story where your grandfather was a sadist whose whole life increased suffering in the world? Obviously, if you have a society where there really are only two groups of people — those who can inflict pain and suffering and those who have to endure it — it is important to constantly posture and behave as one who can inflict suffering, because you don’t want to be put in the other group. For me, that’s a lot easier to understand than a whole region filled with Don Quixotes, but it’s not my family.

But if you wed yourself to the myth of the Lost Cause, then you truly cannot understand very basic things. Things like, why was there a civil rights movement? Why did people like Preston Taylor and J.C. Napier set up Black institutions for banking and going to the park and getting medical care and educating children and so on? Why are Black people in North Nashville still pissed about the interstate? 

The story that is helping protect your heart from some dark shit has curtailed your ability to understand reality.

And so here we are, yet again, being seduced by the idea that this time nonwhite people in the South really are an invasive force of rapists and murderers and criminals, and this time white Southerners do know the proper thing to do about it, and this time they truly have the moral high ground. This time the federal government does need to be thwarted — through violence, if necessary. This time we can do all the things we did before that never turned us into heroes in the eyes of the nation, but this time it will work.

That, ultimately, is the tragedy of the Lost Cause — that we, as a state, will continue to do the things that mean we needed a myth we could live with because our reality was so evil and stupid, because we’d rather have the myth than fix our reality, even as we continue to suffer.