Memphis Tells Tennessee Lege To Fuck Off In Most DELIGHTFUL Way
The moment Nathan Bedford Forrest was lifted from his place of honor in Memphis, and then removed from it.
Oh boy, we sure do love our hometown sometimes. Memphians are a spunky and disrespectful lot, and we relish our status as the city the rest of the state loves to hate. We just wish they'd kiss our ass and stay the fuck out of our business a little bit more. They're free, of course, to keep coming to our delightful city and giving us their tourism $$$ and paying us for the BBQ they couldn't fix if their lives depended on it, but as far as our laws? PfffffffffffffffffFUCKOFF.
You see, Tennessee is a very very very very white state, whereas Memphis is a majority black city. They fuckin' BREED white people out there in the Tennessee hinterlands, specifically the type of white people who leave comments in Memphis newspaper comments sections about how they're so glad they don't live in a dangerous hellhole such as ours, and what they actually mean by that is that last time they came to Memphis for a honeymoon trip with their first cousin Betsy, their trip was ruined because they saw a black person walking around, so they tried to grab their gun because they were scared of the black person, but unfortunately it's real hard to grab a gun off yer gun rack while you're driving your Rebel flag-draped Silverado down I-40, so unfortunately they ended up shooting their dick off and their first cousin wife wouldn't hump them the whole rest of the honeymoon because, and we are quoting here, "Bubba, how you expect me to fuck that stump where your dick used to be?" This is like the Official State Story of Tennessee, trust us.
(Nashville, we are not talking about you, and you know it. You are the other exception, along with the cooler areas of Knoxville and Chattanaooga, so get out of our comments section and leave us alone to start a #MemphisFight, please thanks, etc.)
[wonkbar]<a href="http: //89.223.24.149/627280/something-delightful-happened-in-memphis-last-night"></a>[/wonkbar]But back to Memphis's utterly disrespectful attitude! You might remember a few months back, Memphis told the state of Tennessee to get fucked and beheaded all our Confederate Loser Traitor statues. This offended many people who do not live in Memphis, just like New Orleans pissed off half of southern Mississippi when it did the same. To remove these monuments to mediocrity (who lost the war? oh yeah) and racism, Memphis had to find a way to work around a stupid racist law written by stupid racists in the Tennessee legislature, which removed from cities the power to make decisions on deleting historical monuments like Confederate Loser Traitor statues. It was about heritage, not hate! History gon' be erased forever! Small gub'mint, unless local gub'mint does something black folks like! White power! (They did not usually scream "White power!" but it was VERY implied.)
So Memphis said fine, we will sell the parks where these Confederate Loser Traitor Statues reside, for a thousand bucks a-piece, to a nonprofit founded specifically for the effort, which just HAPPENED to be ready and willing to open its checkbook. Now on private property, the new owners could do what they wanted with the ugly loser statues, and strangely, they wanted to "OFF WITH THEIR HEADS!" the statues! Goodbye, Nathan Bedford Forrest! Looks like you've lost yet another war!
Well, the Tennessee lege was SO MAD, Y'ALL. From the very beginning, elected Republican white racists from such Tennessee metropolises as "Dresden" and "Jonesborough" and "Hog Romance" (we maybe made up that last one) started making threats to deny Memphis, which struggles with awful poverty, much-needed funding, to punish us for chopping down their precious racism statues. And the Tennessee House of Representatives has made good on that threat!
As the New York Times reports, the House successfully stuck an amendment on an appropriations bill to steal $250,000 from Memphis, which was supposed to be used for next year's bicentennial celebration. One Tennessee Republican said Memphis acted like a common ISIS when we beheaded those statues! Another said he just wished they could have stolen MORE money from us, for being bad people who destroy their loser statues, and probably also because we call them names, such as "livestock fondler" and "you fucking racist shitheel."
Now, of course, it would have to be passed by the (Republican) Senate and the (Republican) governor to become law, but ... yeah let's just assume we're fucked out of this funding!
Memphis is taking this in stride, though. First of all, the city had a little bit o' fun editing the Tennessee House's Wikipedia page, to more accurately reflect reality:
Try not to focus on the on-the-fly grammatical errors and focus on the "We got tricked by a city we hate and now we're MAD" part, because that is just about the purest distillation of this story we can imagine. Shame Wikipedia deleted those edits. Memphis oughta accuse Wikipedia of ERASING OUR HISTORY.
But wait there's more! An enterprising Memphian named Brittney Block has started a GoFundMe to replenish the potentially lost funds, and also just to stick our Memphis dick in the legislature's eye. In a matter of 24 hours, it's raised $46,135 of its $250,000 goal, and people are jumping on, like chef Kelly English, a James Beard semifinalist who makes Memphis his home:
And lest you worry about the money not ending up in the right place, the mayor is getting involved, and Block reports they're meeting on Friday:
You know, people ask us sometimes why we've stayed in this city so long.
This is why.
Throw that GoFundMe a few bucks and help make it go viral, if you're willin'! Memphis loves you and would love to see your beautiful faces on your next vacation in our Confederate Loser Traitor statue-free city.
Follow Evan Hurst on Twitter RIGHT HERE.
[ New York Times / GoFundMe ]
I love this bit. I don't even have to hit "play" to start laughing because I know what's coming. Eventually he'll say "dessert" and I shall lose it.
True fact: the Ashokan Farewell isn't even an authentic Civil War song; it was written in the 1980s for an upstate New York folk festival (in Ashokan of all places). In that fashion it's a terrific metaphor for "The Civil War", which was Ken Burns' effort to educate people just enough with details about the Civil War while in reality being a 1980s revisionist version of the whole shooting match. Burns's main crime against education was trying to downplay how the South's entire motivation was slavery. Sure he mentions it as a factor, but the single issue upon which secession hung ... ? Oh that's a fact he tries very hard to avoid. In fact his tone about the Civil War is that it was a period of unpleasantness among brothers who really shouldn't have fought, and when peace finally became possible they mended fences and all was well. (Damn little mention of the Jim Crow that was necessary for white people to start getting along again.)
The clearest example of what I'm talking about, perhaps, is that Burns managed to find the Sullivan Ballou letter, yet he never mentioned the Declarations of Causes of Secession that several states drafted -- which made it 100% clear it was all about slavery. Or when Burns talked about the differences between the Confederate Constitution and the United States Constitution, and never mentioned all the elements that were added to preserve the institution of slavery in perpetuity. Damn peculiar oversight, that he left out the most significant changes in favor of mentioning the Confederate president's line-item veto.
Frankly I can't watch "The Civil War" any longer because I start yelling at my screen. Burns was that oily sort of historical presenter who had an agenda that he was clever enough to conceal from superficial scrutiny -- which tells me he knew the agenda was there.