And Here I Thought a Confederate Flag with Your Face on It was about Heritage

Hank Junior continues his effort to insure that his family says “No, no, we’re kin to Don Williams.” when people ask them if they’re related to him.

It’s interesting to see that he’s expanded his repertoire to hatred of gays.

The other day Peter Cooper was talking about dumping a bunch of people into the Hall to catch up on the people who should be in–Hank Jr. among them. I think Hank’s basically insured that he’s not going in while he’s alive. It’s a shame, but imagine the PR nightmare for the Hall if he got up at the ceremony and spewed this shit

And it’s becoming more and more awkward in the music industry to ask a vast support network of artsy people to grin and bear it while the people they support run them and the people they love down.

But, you know, in a way, I almost feel bad for Hank. He has never hidden who he was, and yet, as long as he stated it through the thinnest of symbols–associating himself with the Confederate battle flag rather than openly saying he hates black people–entities like ESPN and the NFL were happy to have him representing their products. All he’s doing now is stating directly what he’s been pretty overtly signalling for years.

And yet, for some reason, this is a problem. Maybe they should have believed him back in the 70s and 80s, you know?

Anyway, this whole thing is both hilarious and heartbreaking to me.

Hank Jr. has more than almost everybody on the planet. He should be one of the happiest dudes there is. And yet, he never has been. He’s always been a kind of sad, angry fucker, even if he sometimes kept that hidden behind a level of bravado. He has the whole world if he wants it and what he wants is to be really angry at gay people and Obama.

What a mind fuck that level of racist and sexist anger is, that a man can have everything and still feel like its meaning is diminished because the people he hates aren’t suffering enough. You know what I mean?

He has so much money that, if he wanted, he could surround himself only with straight white people. He could live as if there’s not a gay person or a black person in the world. That’d still be ridiculous and evil, but at least his harm would be mostly mitigated.

But instead, instead of just withdrawing from a world that’s not set up 100% to his liking, he’s making 2012 the year of the tantrum. And in doing so, pretty much ruining his legacy.

He’s shooting himself in the foot in order to show the world the gun’s loaded, you know?

What is the New Kitty?

I wanted to take a picture of the new kitty’s face so that we could contemplate what kind of cat she might be. I am torn between her being a Maine Coon and a Chinese Lion. If she is either breed, she’s exceptionally small for her kind. She also refuses to cooperate for a picture this morning, unless, somehow, looking at her ankle tells you something about her breeding (Oh, my god, she’s a Victorian Hussy!)

Bethesda

The Professor and I went out to Bethesda to see what we could see of the landscape that shaped Mom Murrell’s life. We had pretty good directions to the old homestead. One of John Murrell’s men described going back to visit the place and said it was on the north side of the Rutherford creek, a mile east of the Presbyterian church on the Franklin-Lewisburg Highway. To make a long story short, this means they lived on the Bethesda-Duplex road.

Bethesda was interesting, if overwhelming. I need to make a checklist–see something cool, stop, take a picture of it, contemplate picture at leisure.  Instead I just gawk and stare. Bethesda is tiny, but the mind-blowing feature is that there are three or four antebellum homes with the outbuildings still standing. You just so rarely see this.

Anyway, I was telling Bridgett that I had my doubts about the inn at Bethesda detail because Lewisburg didn’t exist until after John Murrell was in prison, so where would a steady stream of customers for them to rob have been coming from.

But this is one reason looking at the landscape, both in person and on terrain view can suggest an explanation. They were not going from Franklin to Lewisburg. They were traveling from the Trace to Murfreesboro. And this would have moved them in the direction of Bethesda. It’s pretty obvious when you’re there–that the old roads are all designed to come into towns on a general east-west axis and that, even now, finding routes to go straight north and south are limited to main roads. If you get off on a side road to wander, you are only going east or west. There are no side roads that will take you very far north or south.

So, now, I’m back on board with an inn in Bethesda. I still reject that Mrs. Murrell was the sole bad apple in that family, though, the corrupting force that ruined the whole family. Though I admit, I take a certain amount of pleasure in imagining her ordering her brothers and husband to go bail her sons out of jail, while she ran a whore house and a den of thieves.

I just have a hard time believing that one woman at that that time could have made her whole family go along with her against their will. Now, if the whole family were a bit rotten… That I could buy.