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?
Tiny Cat Pants 
You know I’m not a big fan of Hank Jr. But I have to say that I don’t think he consciously hates black people — not individually, not as a group, possibly not even as some shadowy, ill-defined, retributive figment of his imagination. Homosexuals I’m not so sure about. But I think that what he wants is for a black person (and most specifically a black man) not to be the boss of him or be able to scare him. Because he is five years old. And since, so far as he’s aware, no one in the world is older than five, then no one (except the shadowy, ill-defined, retributive figment of his imagination) could have voted for a black man to be the boss of the whole country, because that would be scary, because no one is the boss of him. So clearly a black man who made it to being President must be all those false and evil things, and cheated and lied his way into power.
And we could psychoanalyze him to death, you know, about being five because his father died so young, or falling off the mountain, or whatever. But I think the truth of it is that a great deal of the culture (political and otherwise) of middle Tennessee is all about being five, and being scared, and not having anyone else be the boss of you. So I think that he was properly socialized to Nashville; it’s just that it looks different in the rest of the world.
“He’s shooting himself in the foot in order to show the world the gun’s loaded, you know?”
That is such a great sentence.
In other news, the girls and I are going to be in Nville next week for Americana, Peter and Eric are having a Red Beet party at Crossroads (on Broadway, you know that place) Friday, 5-8, I think it is. Maybe I’ll see you there, that would be fun!
I agree. That’s a great turn of phrase.