Gov. Lee's Idea of Leadership

[TexasTowelie]

Lee's inaction on COVID and rejection of federal unemployment aid show us what he thinks of freedom


In a better world than ours, it would be deeply embarrassing that the two most insightful books about white Americans were written by one man 140 years ago — The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Life on the Mississippi. Have we really not improved or become more complicated since then?

No, dear white readers. No, we have not.

The central, damning, conceit of Huck Finn is that the only good man in the novel is not recognized by white society as being a man at all. Schools still force Black kids to read Huck Finn as if there’s some good that can come from giving white people an excuse to say the N-word repeatedly at school. I have to think that Mark Twain would find the biting humor in white people turning a book that is, in part, about how white people fail to see their own shittiness into an endurance test of white shittiness for Black people.

Speaking of an endurance test of white shittiness for Black people, the Nathan Bedford Forrest bust is still enshrined at the Tennessee State Capitol. Can you imagine the field day Twain would have with this fact? The fact that we glorify an old slaver who shit himself to death and treat him like some pinnacle of Tennessee accomplishment because he was slightly less stupid than his fellow Confederate generals, who lined their men up in a field and let larger armies shoot at them?

Tennessee, home of the mediocre white guy.

Which brings me to Gov. Bill Lee. Lest we forget, more than 12,000 Tennesseans died of COVID-19 while he did as little as humanly possible. Population-wise, it's as if all of Nolensville were wiped off the map in the past year. And now Lee is cutting off access to the enhanced unemployment benefits the federal government was providing because, and these are actual words that came out of the Jolly Reaper’s Twitter account: “Tennesseans have access to more than 250,000 jobs in our state. Families, businesses & our economy thrive when we focus on meaningful employment & move on from short-term, federal fixes.”

Read more: https://www.nashvillescene.com/news/pith-in-the-wind/article/21147381/gov-lees-idea-of-leadership

[NJCher]

1. If I were jobless

And my governor cut off federal assistance, I would start work right this very minute to boot his sorry ass out of the governor’s mansion.

How presumptuous to think that he knows best in this situation.