Knoxvillains who wish to eat out have a whole host of different options from which to choose from.  But Tennesseans who want equal representation and rights have only one legislature to look to.  While there are many representatives, theirs, Stacey Campfield has made it a mission in his life to make life harder for those who don’t fit his own personal view of ‘normal’.

It’s hard, when society is set up to make it s easy to just ignore that you are benefiting from bigots–and thus reaffirming to them that their ideas are “normal” and “mainstream”–and to just let a politician like Campfield eat in your restaurant. In a way, it reminds me of the stand Nirvana took–”if any of you in any way hate homosexuals, people of different color, or women, please do this one favor for us-leave us the fuck alone! Don’t come to our shows and don’t buy our records.”

And people were kind of pissed that some group would be hostile to their liking them, just because they “had different views.” After all, where was this famous liberal tolerance? But tolerance that means letting Campfield glide through life while the people he hurts just shut up and take it isn’t really tolerance. Like Braisted is getting at–tolerance is what two people of equal social stature do when they have opposing views that can’t be reconciled. If you have to keep your head down to keep the bully from picking on you, that’s not tolerating the bully. That’s staying off his radar.

But so often, “tolerate” and “stay off his radar” are treated like the same thing.

1. If you’re ever wondering if there’s anything about Nashville I don’t like, it’s these people, who permeate a whole strata of Nashville society and are recognizable by their accents which are all the same, but unlike anyone else’s who live here and the way they smile with terrified eyes, as if they are not, at any moment, sure why anyone else is smiling, but are faking it until they make it, hoping no one important will ask them what they’re smiling about. The thing I like best about Nashville is that it takes no effort to organize your life to hardly ever run into folks like this.

2. Why is “let’s make your house look like a hotel” a design strategy? I could even understand it in terms of furniture, but I would stab a person who wanted to put art on my walls that had no personal meaning to me. Ha, obviously, I have strong feelings about interior design. Who knew?

Okay, now on to the observation I have upon watching LeAnn Rimes for 22 minutes. And I want to make this observation in a way that isn’t body-snarking or, well, only body snarking. But LeAnn Rimes looks terrible. It’s not how skinny she is, though I guess that’s a concern people have. It’s that her face looks like a mask.

It’s like this. You know when you see an actor in a fat suit and you see a fat person and you can see, in their faces, that one person is actually in that face and the other person is somehow behind their face? Like you can just see that it’s not their real face, no matter how good the makeup is, because they just look like they’re wearing a mask, somehow.

That is what LeAnn Rimes looks like–like she’s wearing a mask, except that it obviously looks like it’s made out of skin, so the effect is that she looks like she’s wearing a mask made from the corpse face of LeAnn Rimes. And it’s not just her. There’s a whole group of Hollywood women with so much plastic surgery that they appear to me to be more wearing flesh masks instead of their actual faces. But usually, like Joan Rivers, they all kind of start to look the same, that weird old cat-person look. But Rimes’s face looks fine, except for something I can’t quite put my finger on.

I mean, yes, I know I said it looks terrible, and now I’m saying that it looks fine, but I think, weirdly, that it is sliding into the uncanny valley for me. It’s not that she doesn’t look human. She does. But her face does not give my brain the visual cues I need to recognize her as alive.

And that got me thinking about this bizarre beauty standard our society has. I was telling the Professor this afternoon that I feel like we’ve gotten pretty good at recognizing that fat people are supposed to be thin, but not too thin, but “too thin” isn’t a health-judgment but a value-judgment made by other people (so you can be in this fucked up space where you are too thin for your health, but not thin enough to suit other people). And we do an okay job of talking about how thin women feel pressure to be thin in the right ways–still have boobs, have a butt, don’t be too muscular, etc.

But hiding behind “for your health” and “look like the women in the magazines” (even though they don’t look like that in real life) is this emerging, weird “look like you are not really alive” standard. I’m sure we’re supposed to be striving to look like dolls, but honestly, to me, it’s like we’re being encouraged to look like corpses. You know what I mean? When someone dies, you stand there at their casket loking at them and you know whatever animating force that was them is gone. Something in their face just looks not quite right, not quite human any more. And what worries me about the current Hollywood fashion for these mostly frozen faces, is that it seems to mask their animating force as well.

Maybe that’s the point, though.

I don’t know.

My favorite part is when he is preparing you for reading “The Undying Head” and describes it thusly, “‘The Undying Head’ is a rather long tale, but it makes up in weird conceits, fairy-tale prodigies, variety of incident, and energy of movement, for what it lacks in brevity.” Weird conceits, fairy-tale prodigies, variety of incident, and energy of movement are my favorite things in a story.

But my second favorite part is where the Indian maiden–and I think to really get how funny this is you have to understand that you literally cannot take five steps in the Midwest without encountering a spot where an Indian maiden supposedly committed suicide. Honestly, the suicide rate of ancient Indian maidens is such in Midwestern lore that it’s a wonder there were any Indians left there when our great-grandparents emerged out of the earth, wholly formed. Possibly this is why no Illinoisan asks where the Illini went. Obviously, the maidens all committed suicide and the men died of broken hearts and old age. Possibly this is also why Michiganders are so surprised when one of the local tribes wants to put up a casino. “Oh, you’re still here? Really? But I thought…”–anyway, the Indian maiden is distraught about having to marry a guy other than the one she loves so she goes up to the top of the highest rock, casts herself down and lands on her parents, killing them, and thus, after she recovers from the fall, goes on to marry her beloved.

Twain says, “there is a startling kind of dramatic surprise about it which I was not looking for. It is a distinct improvement upon the threadbare form of Indian legend. There are fifty Lover’s Leaps along the Mississippi from whose summit disappointed Indian girls have jumped, but this is the only jump in the lot that turned out in the right and satisfactory way.”

I am not embarrassed to admit that I howled when I read that. And then he goes on to complain about a blanket. Well, about a story about a blanket.

Honestly writers in the United States. What are we aiming for when we sit down to write that Twain hasn’t already hit?

I think this is my favorite book, ever. Ever, ever. I love it so much.

Last night they had a case down in Key West where a guy had been tarred and feathered by the Klan for having a mixed-race girlfriend and he then shot and killed the leader of the Klan in retaliation and then was lynched by the Klan. His girlfriend then put a voodoo curse on all of the Klan and the police officers involved and they all died mysterious, gruesome deaths.

You can see why I like the stories.

Two things bugged me. One is that the medium was all like “I sense there was a gang of all same raced people wearing weird, funny hats, somehow part of a larger organization a long time ago” but she never came up with the Klan. Was she born yesterday? I mean, even if she’d said something like “they were either in the Klan or a group like it” it would have been a bet-hedging I could have accepted. But any adult who can say “a bunch of same-raced people” “gang” and “funny hats” and not come up with “Klan”? I don’t believe it.

The other is that the medium had this kind of “oh, she shouldn’t have been doing that” look on her face both about the chick laying voodoo curses and the chick who owned the house who was a reiki practitioner who helped dying cancer kids, because, I guess, both things can “open a door to the other side.” And I guess, unless you’re someone who’s taken on the special mantle of “medium,” you should never open a door to the other side.

I call bullshit. On so many levels.

One, someone who is as an accomplished a voodoo practitioner as you’d have to be to lay a curse that kills multiple people doesn’t need your concern trolling about the dangers of opening a door to the other side. To me, it smacks almost of religious bigotry. Would you talk smack about the dangers of praying the rosary because it puts Catholics in touch with mysterious powers they barely comprehend? Not on national television, because you’d look like an ignorant asshole, judging the religious practices and the spiritual capability of someone based on that religion.

They do this crap on Ghost Adventures all the time–everything that’s not straight-up recognizable bland Christianity is treated like it’s Satanic. Travel Channel, two shows makes it start to look like a habit.

But second, I don’t for a second buy that doing healing energy work on dying children (which, regardless of whether we think it’s valid or not, I think we can all say comes from a place of intense well-meaning) is opening yourself up to negative energy in your own home that you otherwise might not have attracted. What a shitty thing to say.

If mediumship and interactions with “the other side” are real, they are incredibly common. Just at the level of “have you ever felt like a dead person was present and interacting with you and/or the environment you were in.” Not necessarily “I see dead people” but just “do you sometimes think you can tell the soul of a dead person is hanging around?” For as long as there have been human beings, we have tended our dead, venerated our ancestors, and accounted in some way for the feeling that the dead are with us (even if that accounting is that “no, there’s no such thing as ghosts, that’s a jinn or your imagination or whatever.”).

Just as some members of your family are more people-persons than others, I don’t think it’d be weird if other members of your family were more dead-people-persons. Which is not to say that any member of your family couldn’t, you know, go out and make a friend.

But something about the vibe of this medium just seems repeatedly to be “these idiots have done something stupid to open themselves up to stuff they have no business being open to, because that’s my business.”

It’s like saying no one can paint there own room because there are such a thing as house painters.

There are lots of reasons, in a lot of religious and philosophical traditions, about why you might not want to mess around with the dead or whatever else is lingering.

But frankly, “you don’t know what you’re doing” just isn’t a good enough one.

How do you learn what to do if you never start out a fool?

Campfield said Friday that his point in the radio show is valid in that, within the United States, heterosexual encounters almost never result in AIDs “unless you’re having sex with someone from Africa or an IV drug user.”

“The odds of men catching it from women are very, very, very low,” he said.

To quote myself when I was providing a statistic Rachel helped me with this morning, “In the United States, heterosexual transmission accounts for how 65 percent of white women and 74 percent of black women acquired the infection. “

I can’t help but wonder if this is Campfield’s mistake or Humphrey’s. But seriously. The only way heterosexual encounters “almost never result” in HIV/AIDS is if women don’t count.

And, frankly, though Humphrey is not the only one to do this, he’s drawing my ire because I’m linking to him, this is something that can easily be fact-checked. It is a provable matter of fact. Do straight people having sex “almost never” get HIV/AIDS unless they’re fucking Africans or IV drug users? Any reporter can do five seconds of internet research or call the health department. It’s not a matter of “some experts say” and “other experts say.” There isn’t unsettled territory.

So, why can’t reporters report the facts? This is a matter of people’s health. Don’t they have the right to know the truth?

I’m just at the point where he admits to being born in the South (and has been making fun of Southern male authors for being too prone to flowerly language when women are nearby), but I must say that I’ve always thought of Twain as a Midwestern writer. And nothing about the section in which he says he was born in the South makes me feel otherwise, because the national pastime of the Midwest after not telling each other things and then being mad or hurt when we don’t know them and having potlucks in our church basements is indeed wondering what the hell is up with Southerners. If you could combine all those things–a bunch of passive aggressive Midwesterners eating casseroles while talking hilarious smack about their Southern cousins (or the Southern cousins of their friends)–you’d have the quintessential Midwestern experience.

Twain doesn’t mention eating casseroles, but I think we have to assume he was. Ha ha ha.

I’ve been trying to decide what it is about him that makes me lump him more into “Midwestern” than “Southern.” But I don’t know if those are legitimate differences or just based on stereotypes I have. I think Midwestern literature is more prone to a skeptical eye toward organized religion (even as people are predominately religious) because of a mistrust of it being a kind of busybodying, whereas I think Southern literature is soaked in religion and religious belief. I wasn’t surprised when Twain’s brother just showed up out of nowhere to die off. That seems right to me, that a Midwesterner would just assume that we’d all know he had a family and not be alarmed by a brother magically appearing. Whereas, in Southern writing, family relationships are central. Even the way he’s nostalgic strikes me as different from Southern writers, since he’s so keen to be clear that the times and places he misses had their problems back in the past.

But I don’t know. I feel like I have a good idea what constitutes Southern literature, but it’s hard for me to put my finger on what I think Midwestern literature would be.

But, he had a brother named Orion. Granted, I don’t know how it was pronounced. Oh-rye-un, fine. The Clemenses could be Southern. Ore-eee-un and there’s no doubting that they’re Midwestern.

I find it a little annoying that the government is all “just don’t have sex with that many people, okay?” since there are enough non-sexual ways to contract HIV and rape is common enough that concern trolling over slutty behavior just doesn’t seem that constructive to me. After all, if you have sex with 50,000 people who don’t have HIV, you’re never going to get it from sexual contact. But if you have sex only once with one person who is also a virgin but got it from being stabbed with an infected needle when he reached into a garbage can to rescue a kitten, you are at great risk. Plus, not everyone can control who fucks them or how, sadly.

Anyway, don’t miss Campfield in the comments of Meador’s post passing off twenty-five year old information as definitive. I don’t know about you, but I use 1988 as my guide for everything. That’s why I’m afraid of the Soviet Union and think the Taliban are our friends.

Anyway, the back end of the book is apparently just Twain snarking on everything, including the Atheneaum in Columbia. I love his description of the mule race and wish we could have one here in town. Or, shoot, Columbia, once you forgive him for making mean comments about the Atheneaum, you could have mule races I would attend.

1. Stacey Campfield has some strange ideas about what airline pilots get up to in their free time.

2. While I don’t believe you should fuck Stacey Campfield just out of general principle, you should for sure now not fuck Stacey Campfield, because he doesn’t understand how sexually transmitted diseases are transmitted. And he is a grown up. With internet access. And he doesn’t think straight people can get AIDS. And he’s an elected official. In charge of making the laws that govern us. People, he’s MY AGE!!!!

3. He’s not ashamed to be out in public spouting his monkey-fucking airline pilot giving gay people AIDS which heterosexual people cannot get from heterosexual sex conspiracy theories.

My mind continues to be boggled by this nincompoop.

But I dreamed about Mark Twain all night. In my sleep. Which I had! Solid and uninterrupted.

I don’t want to get too excited because lord knows I thought this cold was going away last Friday and here it is almost Friday again, but I slept through the night.

It’s the small victories, people.

Anyway, if we lived in a mansion, I’d have just gone into the library and read Mark Twain.

Of course then I’d be complaining that the Butcher and I never spend time together.

So, there you go. Nothing makes me happy, except the possibility of finally not being sick.

Fowler, everything you say is uncivil and little of it has any merit.

It’s high time everyone just treated you like this was so, rather than playing nice hoping that you’d treat them nicely in return.

Honestly, it’s Floyd and Fowler who make you realize just how revolutionary something like “Treat others as you’d like to be treated” is. These dumb jackasses are literally braying in alarm that they’re actually being treated how they treat everyone else.

Did they think that Jesus just issued that dictate for fun?

Hint: No.

It’s basically a law of human nature that people will treat you how they see you can be treated. And one of the ways they learn how you think you can be treated is to see how you treat others. Run around talking shit about everyone you think you’re better than and eventually the people who think they’re better than you are going to talk some shit about you.

What the fuck? Did they just sit around being all “Well, we don’t have tv. What can we do to entertain ourselves? Let’s creep the fuck out of the future!” and, seriously, why are we not sitting around thinking of ways to creep out the future?

But the thing I find incredible is that, while Life on the Mississippi is supposed to be an autobiography of sorts, he’s doing novel-type shit with the book.

I mean, all along the way he has repeatedly mentioned Napoleon, repeatedly mentioned how people easily reroute the river in ways that dick other people over, and repeatedly developed these themes of loss and change. So, no, he doesn’t have to spell out what happened to Napoleon (though it’s possible his initial readers would have been more familiar with it than I was), but he tells you, over and over, before he tells you that the town is gone.

It’s a remarkable bit of writing, carried out over the course of almost three hundred pages. I’m curious about what’s going to happen in the back half of the book.

I am just enjoying the shit out of it. Possibly more than I’ve enjoyed a book in a long time.