Let’s nip this in the bud: I hate it here. The greater area of Knoxville, Tennessee, exists to curdle my hard-won equilibrium, from the hillbilly-themed minigolf courses of Gatlinburg to the disco ball folly of the dilapidated Sunsphere, that copulatory 1982 World’s Fair eyesore that mars the skyline and impugns my genitalia. Oh, how I rued returning last winter to the all-clogging revues of the outdoor stages in Market Square and the hideous full-body Big Orange jumpsuits that blight one as an enthusiast of the Vols’ varsity scrimmage. I rubbed my eyes and wondered if I’d ever really awakened from the nightmare of Baptist churches that double as city-states, reeducation centers, and mini-malls, vending every variety of Christ-branded merch whose secular equivalents can be procured among the godless camo-print bargain hunters of West Town Mall; there, I stared at a glass cabinet of miniature rubber ducks in MAGA hats, and somebody in a tie-dye hoodie called me a faggot. (“I’d like to meet your tailor,” I shouted back.) So much for Southern hospitality.
Loathing the dead-end thoroughfares of youth is a national pastime, of course, but I don’t recall seeing you on MTV News after protesting your high school’s disinvitation of the Indigo Girls once the principal belatedly discovered their brand of confrontational sapphism. (Hastily rerouted to a local pub, they were probably wondering how they’d managed to attract the goth crowd.) No street preachers crashed your senior prom to call the homecoming queen the Whore of Babylon. Nor did your protest poem “Jesus Christ Was the Fifth Beatle” run afoul of the censors when you edited the school literary magazine (not totally sorry to see that one go, actually). I have always known Tennessee to be the backwater vanguard of regressive, faith-based politics, from the Scopes Monkey Trial to Governor Bill Lee’s legal justifications for refusing interfaith, interracial, or same-sex marriages. Knoxville in particular is the test market for cheerily oppressive right-wing mayhem waged at the expense of a neutralized electorate—that and Mountain Dew as a whiskey mixer. To wit, Knoxville is the county seat of Knox County, population 500,669, a bastion of misrule that twice elected as mayor the vanity politician Glenn Jacobs, who once wrestled in vermilion spandex for the World Wrestling Federation as the hellacious Kane. (Mayor Jacobs, by the way, declined to be interviewed for this story. I don’t see what Alex Jones has that I don’t.)
It doesn’t coax a ton of hope from the area’s frail liberal bulwark that the county mayor’s only applicable job experience is his membership in the Brothers of Destruction. Hell, maybe they should run The Noid as secretary of public safety. He’s red too. American decline knows no voting bloc and is just as observable in Scarsdale, but my exile among the yanks was always bound to be impermanent anyway—where would I be without Dollywood’s bountiful bosoms and inanimatronic singing rocks? Where else could I browse the University of Tennessee’s body farm for spare parts or procure that game with the pegs they have at Cracker Barrel?—and the political preference for mediocrity that contaminates the very limestone of East Tennessee’s methified landscape is a fact willfully ignored at our national peril. With celebrity-as-political-party as the national zeitgeist, I have the sinking feeling that, to paraphrase Milton Friedman, we are all Big Orange now.
The Knox and the Pound
Before he inhabited the mayor’s office on Main, across from the riverside Calhoun’s steakhouse where I used to feed my Adderall to a morass of catfish, Glenn Thomas Jacobs was raised on a beetle-sized farm in a dung-sized town in northeastern Missouri. Jacobs abandoned an early dream of playing for the Chicago Bears after a knee injury kept him benched from college football, instead putting his seven-foot, 320-pound frame in the service of the scufflesome arts, wrestling for Jerry “the King” Lawler as the festive Christmas Creature (like a big mean elf that is also a luchador). Lawler’s name recognition outside the ring probably owes a lot to his mastery of the wrestlers’ solemn vow of secret fakery known as kayfabe—that is, staying in character even if you’ve got a baseball bat wreathed in barbed wire stuck to your hamstrings—in his feud with Andy Kaufman, in that most of America believed that this churlish Southern man really wanted to murder the guy from Taxi. By the early nineties, Lawler was the star attraction of the Memphis-based United States Wrestling Association (USWA), one of the few holdouts from Vince McMahon’s liquidation of regional territories under the WWF consortium.
Gone were the days of Hulk Hogan telling the Hulkamaniacs to take their vitamins.
In 1995, the circuit brought Jacobs to Knoxville, where he wrestled as Unabomb for Smokey Mountain Wrestling and “felt like a star” for the first time at the Knoxville Civic Coliseum. (That’s great and all, but this is the same show-going public that heckled R.E.M. and Dave Chappelle off the stage and even managed to piss off The Artist Formerly Known as Fucking Prince.) This is where Jacobs met his wife Crystal, relocated, and would eventually settle down with an insurance business when he wasn’t, say, acting as auxiliary bear-wrestler for a Japanese promotion. Soon after, he found himself folded into McMahon’s expansive roster of gimmicky strongos as an angry dentist called Isaac Yankem before finally scoring a decent character in Kane, who debuted to fireworks on pay-per-view in October 1997 as the archenemy of his canonical brother, the funereal cowboy Undertaker. (According to the tie-in novel Journey into Darkness, Kane was believed killed in the fire that took Taker’s parents, and now he controls fire, but he also wants revenge on fire—the story is ludicrous.)
Big, red, and monstery, his scars hidden behind a mask designed by a New York-based company specializing in bondage-wear, Kane would become one of the mainstays of WWF’s Attitude Era, along with Taker; The Rock; the preternaturally loveable Mick Foley, whom Jacobs had faced in Puerto Rico in his Cactus Jack persona, now portraying the pain-loving Hannibal Lecter-coded Mankind; and, above all, Stone Cold Steve Austin. Gone were the days of Hulk Hogan telling the Hulkamaniacs to take their vitamins, or 1980s avatar Mr. T moonlighting as a wrestler while cutting motivational raps about treating your mother right. Rather than splitting professional wrestling into do-gooder “babyfaces” and dastardly “heels,” the state of the badass art meant promoting WWF’s new crop of defiant antiheroes to the top of the ticket and the grim and gritty pop cultural vernacular of The Crow, Spawn, and Korn.
I knew who Kane was at the time not because I was any kind of connoisseur of swole slab-jobbery, but because I was a child—I just never expected this information to be relevant. Personally, I was a partisan of Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters, otherwise known as the X-Men, but my peers were Punisher kids with rattails and No Fear shirts. Mainly they cherished Stone Cold, whose authority-adverse surly redneck persona was the perfect foil to McMahon and made Austin 3:16 T-shirts more ubiquitous in my high school than wallet chains or that cool S on Trapper Keepers. “Talk about your Psalms, talk about John 3:16,” Austin bellowed after winning the 1996 King of the Ring tournament, “Austin 3:16 says I just whipped your ass!” That Norman Rockwell dadgumism had turned into an edgy amalgamation of confrontational evangelical panegyrics and nu-metal bands will surprise no one familiar with a social demographic that sacrifices utility to the dark powers of spectacle; reveres the mysterious internet troll Q; or sees no contradiction in electing felons, adulterers, and sneering television carnival barkers to office to serve their conservative small-town Christian values. They did, after all, install a man who pretended to be a demon from hell for money. Meanwhile there’s nary a business marquee without a homily on it, and these are, like, Taekwondo studios and Valvolines; the strip malls are thick with shops vending Christian equivalents of coffee and Moon Pies and other things I’m pretty sure are nondenominational. I’m not saying you can’t have both brimstone and sanctitude, but I am owed an apology for being sent to the school psychologist for my Christian Death shirt.
Fire Powers
The turn of the century is remembered for “keeping it real” and “sticking it to the man” à la indie rock and Sprite commercials, but the Stars-and-Bars South didn’t get where it is by rejecting fantasies of power. Celebrity pastors were big here, as were Kid Rock, monster trucks, and Strom Thurmond. The remedy to real-life accountability, and an undercurrent to the doomed take-me-as-I-am pleas for acceptance of Kurt Cobain or the mealy boomer pathos of Al Gore, was neokayfabe, McMahon having upended the traditional illusion that wrestling was something other than choreographed muscle-porn ballet. As McMahon’s own career was constantly at risk of becoming overwhelmed by iniquity—he was soon to appear in federal court to answer for distributing steroids to his wrestlers; his company’s first female referee had alleged, on Geraldo Rivera’s television show, McMahon was guilty of rape; and in 1997 came the unscripted Montreal Screwjob, in which McMahon manufactured Bret Hart’s loss of the championship belt before he could jump ship to World Championship Wrestling—he made himself the new big bad in WWF’s passion play, puffing up the exaggerated mogul “Mr. McMahon” he’d begun to play when he’d come to Memphis to absorb Lawler’s USWA talent pool.
One day you’re electrocuting Shane McMahon’s testicles, the next you’re stumping for Donald Trump in Iowa.
To get around having to treat his employees like athletes or offering comprehensive health care, McMahon had rebranded professional wrestling as “sports entertainment,” which also allowed him free rein to put what Kurt Andersen has called the fantasy-industrial complex into action for a fandom no longer separated neatly into marks and sharps. WWF’s reliance on “worked shoots”—where staged backstage antics contributed to the in-ring dramaturgy—flipped the script on what constituted realism and meant McMahon could lean into his least desirable qualities and call it a character. As Abraham Josephine Riesman puts it in Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America, “You can project an image of parodic villainy in public to cover up any actual villainy you’re committing in private.”
Kane, however, was no Stone Cold. Rendered mute by his resurrection by hellfire, the McMahon-styled “Devil’s Favorite Demon” couldn’t cut promos like Stone Cold or the members of D-Generation X (though the belated addition of a voice box meant Kane could utter “Suck it!” like a pro). Nor was he the most prepossessing performer, since his freaky mask meant that half of the time he was loping around the ring like Frankenstein, looking for the camera in his peripherals. But the character endured even as his storylines declined: late arcs would see Kane enroll in anger management classes, seek revenge on Triple H for defiling the corpse of his dead girlfriend, and don a monkey suit as “Corporate Kane.”
Kane’s corporate guise was a dry run for the respectable, Pee Wee-goes-gargantuan vibe he’d cultivate as a politician. Jacobs had discovered libertarian politics when union workers tried to stop him from dragging a dumpster into Madison Square Garden (whereupon it became a prop and outside their jurisdiction) one SummerSlam. He was inspired to seek office by Trump’s 2016 election, seeing the door was open for one more trash-talking populist with a no-collar fanbase and something to prove to cynics like me who think wrestling is fake or that an incoherent platform should be a barrier to civic power. So, with his head full of Austrian School sophistry and Ron Paul behind him, Jacobs formally entered politics as a Republican in 2017 and won a twenty-three-point surprise victory in the Knox County mayoral primary. Seasoned Kaininites, starstruck moderates, and alt-right types alike were willing to bet on a wild card with no political experience. Having perfunctorily defeated his Democratic opponent, Jacobs took office the following year.
Now that yesterday’s sideshows are today’s legislators, the enshrinement of a wrestler as one of Trump’s approved parochial lieutenants is merely one tube in the McMahon-to-MAGA pipeline. While consensual is not a word usually attached to Donald Trump, wrestling’s malign inveiglement in his empire is at least reciprocal. He sponsored Wrestlemania IV and V in Atlantic City in 1988 and 1989 and later shaved McMahon’s head at the culmination of a kayfabe feud in 2007. Both men play similar characters: devious rich men whose fragile egos can only be slaked by the humiliation of their foes. Vince’s scandals have proliferated. At last count, he has paid at least $19.6 million to settle sexual misconduct claims, withdrawn from his role as chairman even as his company—now known as the WWE—merged with the mixed martial arts Ultimate Fighting Championship, is under a federal probe for sex trafficking and sexual assault, and on and on unto the degeneration of all earthly standards. His wife, Linda McMahon, has emerged as the GOP’s bagwoman in the meantime. She spent $100 million on two unsuccessful runs for Senate, coordinated $18.5 million for Republican attack ads in Florida, and has amassed more than $17 million in donations to Trump Super PACs while WWE’s wrestlers have continued to die young of cardiovascular disease, prescription drug abuse, and head injuries as “independent contractors” without pensions, union protections, health insurance, or offseasons. As thanks, she has been nominated at the time of this writing to do for the Department of Education what Kane did to the Undertaker at Royal Rumble in 1998: bury it alive and set it on fire. Jacobs and Linda go back at least to 2003, when Kane destroyed her in a fake-even-by-wrestling-standards Tombstone Piledriver (his signature finishing move, cribbed from Taker, is as unoriginal as his gloss on Hayek). Vince donated $100,000 to Knoxville after Jacobs returned to the WWE to make in-character appearances as Kane in 2018, and Jacobs himself appeared in a TikTok video with Trump during the 2024 election, where the president lauds his homunculus’s “fire powers” like they constitute a gutsy campaign promise. Pretty immaterial, unless you’re a snowman agitating for gender-affirming care and affirmative action.
Platitude Era
Toward the end of Jacobs’s 2019 memoir Mayor Kane, he declares that libertarian economics depend upon the recognition that there “is just a natural cycle inherent in free markets.” But natural’s not in it. In his how-our-farts-bequeathed-a-factory primer Evil Geniuses, Kurt Andersen describes how 1980s libertarians set up think tanks and lobbying groups to fend off labor unions, limit the expansion of Medicare and Medicaid, and rebuff climate science. He identifies the bellwether as Grover Norquist’s 1986 Taxpayer Protection Pledge, which asked Republicans to guarantee an antitax platform and ensure the indefatigable “small government, pro-business” genuflection that has abetted individual disempowerment and persecution ever since, as wealthy voters are asked to choose between their pathos and their pocketbook. And when you’re talking about tax loopholes, you’re talking Tennessee, which has maintained one of the lowest tax jurisdictions in the United States while beating up the poor with regressive taxes: goodbye independent bookstores and record shops, hello Exoquip heavy machinery, the Omega Digital Solutions startup, and the cocktail lounge in a bank vault (I didn’t go; sounds like a trap).
The enshrinement of a wrestler as one of Trump’s approved parochial lieutenants is merely one tube in the McMahon-to-MAGA pipeline.
This is something Governor Don Sundquist learned the hard way in 2001, when—despite gamely cutting welfare, lengthening jail sentences, and helping terminate the public services commission—he proposed a state income tax and wound up with his office vandalized by a mob. (I remember a different scandal, when a “stray dog” Sundquist picked up outside an Italian restaurant turned out to have an owner, leading to an absurd feud between the governor and a ten-year-old boy.) Around the time she was showing up the Indigo Girls to play a peaceful concert at my high school gym, Taylor Swift got her hands dirty with politics for the first time and endorsed Democrat Phil Bredesen for Senate following his two terms as governor, an office he held until 2011, and Knoxville’s mayor, billionaire Bill Haslam, came in to legalize discrimination against homosexuals looking for a city contract, end collective bargaining for teachers, have fifty-five Occupy protesters arrested in Nashville, allow creationism to be taught in science classes, sign a law to prosecute pregnant mothers who use narcotics, and oppose same-sex marriage at every turn.
While still making sporadic appearances in the ring in 2018, Jacobs promised to fight the opioid crisis, not raise taxes, and back small businesses as mayor. Which is to say, Jacobs campaigned on what he called “liberty-friendly themes,” but liberty in the hands of the libertarian is a gated community, and Jacobs had no idea what he was doing beyond spinning his celebrity into a shallow ideology too general for anyone to meaningfully object to on paper. Nevertheless, he presented himself as a skeptical-on-both-sides libertarian populist before simply acquiescing to the prevailing MAGA cant and pledging to oppose the radical left’s socialist agenda. Both the Undertaker and Senator Rand Paul contributed forewords to Mayor Kane and, lest you mistake the continuity between pugilism and “this perverted form of entertainment” known as politics for a dichotomy, Jacobs writes: “After Wrestlemania, there is always Raw the next night. Life goes on, no matter how consequential the previous night’s events might have seemed at the time. After any election, there’s always another. Story lines begin building again. . . . It’s my team versus your team. But, trust me, folks, you ain’t part of anyone’s team.”
Promoting his opus in an interview with Fox News, he waxed babyface, “Yes, I was concerned about being taken seriously. But I was confident that I could do that. . . . The race was really a clean race.” The campaign was similarly wholesome, consisting in part of anti-bullying speeches at Knox County schools, knocking on doors (during which the Steel Cage survivor somehow blew out his leg, making his victory speech in a cast), and friendly ads insisting on government transparency.
Turns out you need taxes to support ambitious building plans and a functioning Health Department to fight addiction; critics haven’t had to look far for signs of corruption in his frequently reshuffled staff, even if it isn’t exactly a Chinatown-level conspiracy. His former campaign manager and Chief of Staff Bryan Hair was indicted for improper use of a county golf cart. Hair was put on leave, along with Parks and Recreation director Paul White, who alleged Jacobs asked him to lie. “A total suck-up who went as power-crazy as you can go as head of Parks and Rec” is how one journalist described White to me in characterizing the flurry of luxury sneakers and hiking boots purchased on the county’s dime; Hair, meanwhile, is “actively praying on the decision” to run as Jacobs’s successor.
More worrying than Cartgate was Jacobs’s response to the pandemic. It will not have escaped your notice that counties don’t normally have mayors; Jacobs’s position was formerly called county executive—the city of Knoxville has a different mayor, Democrat Indya Kincannon—but one of his few actual responsibilities is public health. In a March 2020 address from his office, Jacobs advocated for fist bumps to stave off Covid, boasted the county had seen zero confirmed cases, and cautioned against bad-for-business hysteria. Six months later, when Tennessee was appearing on the White House’s “red list” of states with unchecked Covid growth, Jacobs was the sole “nay” in a Board of Health vote for mask mandates. He also cast the only vote against curfew for bars, under pressure from prominent citizens like Chuck Ward, owner of a honky-tonk called, I kid you not, Cotton-Eyed Joe. When he couldn’t get what he wanted in 2021, Jacobs dissolved the Board of Health and reconstituted it as a zombified advisory board with largely ceremonial powers while putting his anti-vax cronies in charge of official health care. (When I visited in the aftermath in 2022 and donned a mask in a crowded bar, everyone stopped to stare at me until somebody explained that I was “from New York,” like I was Rain Man.) In a scary propaganda video funded by a local mattress impresario and State Representative Jason Zachary, who made it a crime for minors to obtain abortions without their parents’ consent, footage of Black Lives Matter protesters and Anthony Fauci plays while Jacobs laments “violent mobs who lust to erect a socialist utopia on the ashes of the republic.” Over a shot of Knoxville’s unstimulating skyline, he adds, “It can happen here. It will happen here.”
It didn’t happen here. The only mobs I have ever seen locally were queuing up for a fireworks display, and advocates of basic equality and protections against discrimination spoke to me in hushed tones like I was meeting Deep Throat at the grassy knoll, same as ever. What did happen was that a scaremongering bully pulpit seized authority from competent administrators, opposed drag shows, called gender-affirming care “exploitation under the guise of inclusivity,” unilaterally altered the law to allow guns in libraries, lobbied commissions on behalf of feckless building projects without funding the infrastructure to support them, and dragged the county further into debt while cheering the demise of Roe v. Wade. But that’s life under the reign of Kane: one day you’re electrocuting Shane McMahon’s testicles, the next you’re stumping for Donald Trump in Iowa while a snowstorm buries your down-home constituency.
Tennessean is Tennebelievin’
I figured most of the Southern contingent had more on their mind than questions of constabulary—like Popcorn Sutton’s home recipe for moonshine and doing donuts around the Ruby Tuesday’s parking lot. Nonetheless, I dove into dive bars, bothered the mayor’s majordomos, and met his ideological opposites for coffee—not at Christian shops, the same old heathen kind. (My old friends, I should say, declined to suffer my memorable company: Was my Dungeons & Dragons buddy grudgeful that I spent his bachelor party haranguing the strippers about Judith Butler, which seemed important to me at the time? Was the flaxen former singer-songwriter still miffed that I made fun of him for jettisoning his indie rock career to rap as LiL Iffy, pioneering the Harry-Potter-derived subgenre of Wandcore?) One guy I spoke to had a photo of Jacobs posing with his lawn sign reading The Wrestler Mayor is a Moron; another who works in immigration remembers being told not to come in one day due to a worked-up militia that failed to materialize. Emails to a nurse practitioner who joined Jacobs’s anti-mask initiative went unanswered. The clientele of Marie’s Old Towne Tavern were happy to point out that the mayor is a respectful guy, and opinions on Jacobs were bland across the board: a family man, a good listener, a joke politician onto whom folks were free to superimpose their deeply held beliefs (at least until you get him going on Murray Rothbard). But maybe that joke isn’t funny anymore, and we’ve fallen out of the habit of wanting more.
When my parents made me break up with her for wanting to drink my blood, she burned the haunted old mill on Virtue Road down.
More, however, is exactly what Jacobs has in mind after the unglamourous county seat, which has on occasion been a springboard to national office. He has not officially announced his candidacy for the governorship, but he could have fooled me. Jacobs formed the Big Red PAC late last year to (explicitly) prop up MAGA Republicans and (implicitly) raise money and marshal allies for his inevitable campaign. But his plans may be scuttled by ally Senator Marsha Blackburn’s hotly rumored run, in which case he will support her with an eye on her vacant seat. Either gubernational hopeful will likely face Jacobs’s immediate predecessor as Knox County mayor, Representative Tim Burchett, a sort of congressional symbiote to accused sex offender Matt Gaetz (before he resigned in disgrace). Burchett’s own scandals as mayor included expunging the records of a stepson accused of rape, failing to report gifts, fostering corruption among his staffers—staffers whom Jacobs, a political neophyte, retained—and, as a humble small town mulchman in the 1990s, getting caught making compost out of contaminated city waste. As a member of the Freedom Caucus in D.C., Burchett has challenged the results of the 2020 election, voted against the debt ceiling, falsely accused a Kansas man of being an undocumented immigrant and the culprit of the mass shooting at the Chiefs’ 2024 Super Bowl victory parade, and called Vice President Kamala Harris a “DEI hire.” Burchett has also introduced the Cartel Marque and Reprisal Reauthorization Act of 2025, which, if passed, would give the president authority to tap armed militias to subdue whomever they term “cartel-linked.” Regardless, the next governor will be succeeding Bill Lee, who signed a 2024 bill requiring Tennessee teachers to report students who request to be referred to by pronouns that differ from those on their school forms, just one of some two dozen anti-LGBTQ laws enacted in Tennessee since 2015, in which it leads the country.
In light of the state’s legacy of weaponized evangelism and fond revisionism, a giant from hell is not much of a novelty despite his outsider posturing. Folks who missed the 1982 World’s Fair and only know Knoxville as the place Bruce Willis is decamping to on his chopper in Pulp Fiction or because of that guy from Jackass may be loath to acknowledge that it is the secret crown of creation. Just not in a good way. Fundamentalists have been beta-testing regressive educational and discriminatory policies ahead of nationwide imperium around these parts since the days of George Wallace, well before Trump and his frontier understudies made vigilante politics more nakedly bankable. It’s no fluke that the Supreme Court is fixing to uphold a ban on gender-affirming care for minors that was cooked up in Tennessee’s Christian nationalist laboratories; or that the state’s abortion ban is so draconian it had to be sued in order to provide life-saving support for patients with dangerous pregnancy complications; or that Murfreesboro 180 miles up the road was taken to court for a “decency ordinance” that banned books and criminalized homosexuality ahead of Project 2025. Tomi Lahren, Candace Owens, and Ben Shapiro have all relocated their business, themselves, or both to the state, recognizing a safe space for hard-right reactionary echo chambers.
“The tip of the spear” is how state congresswoman Gloria Johnson put it to me when I met her at a kosher restaurant advertising delicatessen classics that is, let’s face it, just a brunchy Shoney’s (that’s not a blintz, that is cake). The rare prominent Democratic standard-bearer in Knoxville, she has faced an uphill struggle in her district of seventy-thousand constituents for more than a decade. Johnson narrowly evaded being gerrymandered out of existence, and, as one of the Tennessee Three (not to be confused with Johnny Cash’s backing band), avoided expulsion by a single vote after protesting the House’s refusal to hear speakers on behalf of gun control following the 2023 Covenant School shooting in Nashville. Back home, she contends with abominations like the Patriot Church in Lenoir City, a mile from where I grew up, whose congregation venerates Trump, hounds Planned Parenthood, and disrupts drag shows. Wary of the out-of-state putsch by theocrats hoping to establish a foothold in Jackson County and keep women from attending college or voting—along the lines of Sumner County’s one-party rule by Constitutional Republicans, who enshrine “Judeo-Christian values” and mull secession from the Union—Johnson has the unenviable task of trying to pass mundane stipulations like paid family leave, hurricane relief, funding for public schools, and an immediate ceasefire in Gaza while up against people with six-figure salaries who believe in magic. “In all ninety-five counties,” she says “there are people who don’t vote for elected officials. But they would vote for Kane. And that’s terrifying.”
Custom of the Country
The Tennesseans who voted Jacobs in for being a genuine non-politician (one former country commissioner told me “He’s just Glenn”), as well as the gladhanders who may well gild his nudnick legislative career moving forward, are probably exactly right. Neokayfabe doesn’t mean the lines aren’t blurred; it means the page is blank. Being pretend for real, and selling it for the cameras, is all anyone has ever asked of Jacobs. But this fight isn’t fixed, and no one has stowed a folding chair underneath the bleachers. That he is a fully posable action figure easily manipulated by actual politicians, ideologues, and plutocrats is a bonus to the supermajority powers that be. As he writes in Mayor Kane:
In life, having confidence in one’s abilities is often what makes you or breaks you. I’ve found that to be true in sports and business. If you convince yourself that you’re capable of doing something, you stand a good chance of achieving your goal, even if you don’t actually possess all the necessary skills or tools. Likewise, you can have everything you need to succeed, but if you don’t believe in yourself, you can sabotage your own success.
I learned the limits of believing in yourself a long time ago, from the first girl I ever felt up, in the wilds between subdivisions. When my parents made me break up with her for wanting to drink my blood, she burned the haunted old mill on Virtue Road down and graffitied “Ozzy Rules” over the rotor. As a friend opined at the time, “No kidding.” But the real dealbreaker was probably when I asked how she could be sure she was really an immortal Highlander, following in the singular lineage of Conor MacLeod and Sean Connery. Her reply froze my delicious blood and has reverberated through many a heartbreak: “Nothing matters, and nobody cares.” No argument there; applied indifference certainly appears to be the custom of the country. Was it ever otherwise?
Everyone I spoke to told me there was one person I had to seek out if I wanted to see any hope in hick outreach, so I met nonbinary Knoxville Americana musician Adeem the Artist at their zen-vibes studio just off the Old City. “I have been learning our true history, and I hate it,” they sing on “Heritage of Arrogance,” an answer song to Aaron Lewis’s anti-Springsteenian, butternut anthem “Am I the Only One” (it goes “Another statue comin’ down in a town near you/ Watchin’ the threads of Old Glory come undone,” and so on). “True history” for Adeem, who interrogates their own whiteness on albums with titles like Cast Iron Pansexual and White Trash Revelry, doesn’t mean the kind of alt-weekly curios about the Wampus Cat cryptid, or the time Jean-Paul Sartre passed through Knoxville on a junket, either. On August 30, 1919, a black bootlegger and sometimes deputy sheriff named Maurice Franklin Mays, who happened to be the illegitimate son of Knoxville Mayor John E. McMillan, was arrested on all-but-arbitrary grounds for the murder of a twenty-seven-year-old white woman. When a lynch mob congregated at the jail and discovered that Mays had been moved to Chattanooga, they demolished the building and began raiding black-owned businesses across the city, beginning one of several race riots in more than three-dozen cities over the course of the summer, resulting in an estimated six hundred deaths. If this is news to you, it is to me too; and this was Market Square, home of the famous Farmer’s Market, Preservation Pub, and mural of Dolly Parton (everyone says the eminent Oarsman sculpture is a tribute to Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree, but I just see a dude in a boat). Nothing mattered, and nobody cared.
It’s not about learning from the past so as not to blunder into repetition—you learn from the present if you can locate it—it’s about the deliberate occlusion of information by a white conservative Southern panjandrum to maintain an exclusive on the narrative. The Knoxville News Sentinel eliminated a huge chunk of its newsroom in 2017, shortly after being acquired by the massive media holding company Gannett. One of the laid-off journalists recalled to me the shift away from local news in favor of sipper-bottle MAGA pablum, the difficulty of getting Obamacare after Governor Lee had refused it, and how residents of the liberal enclave learned to shut their eyes, if they could afford to. Catastrophically low voter turnout, especially among young people, has left politicians—including Knoxville Mayor Indya Kincannon, who was sued by the paper after secretively hiring the new chief of police via an outside private search firm—with a blank check to railroad external investigations, ravage the homeless population, quote Bible verses at minority rights activists, and govern via X.
Every Southerner who’s found a home in the city wears the chip on their shoulder differently.
Adeem has had the occasional show cut short after taking to the stage in a romper with pink-painted nails (shades of the Indigo Girls controversy of 1998) but spoke to me as a seventh-generation Southerner who once opened for Ray Wylie Hubbard in chicken-wire Texas and told the crowd of chaps-and-spurs country fans not to believe the holier-than-thou liberal media; hickster identikit and accountability for its ingrained racism don’t have to be at odds forever. No one’s going to listen to another “post-woke white,” in Adeem’s words, looking to make enemies out of a rural, disinherited class. Costumes are common to wrestlers and politicians, but just being yourself becomes an act of heroism when other people are all too happy to paint you as their adversary.
On the surface, change and suburban Dixie are not exactly bedfellows, but on my recent visit home, I saw visible queerness in bars and burger joints—which is where America’s at—when none of the gay people I knew in high school made it out alive. Not every punk I went to shows with grew up and completely folded their values into the status quo. There is hope in the willingness of groups like the Tennessee Equality Project to take their fight to the Supreme Court, or the Tennessee Three’s fighting to be heard on gun control on the House floor. If better opportunities for those who suffer under red state policies are possible, they will come from a homegrown dissonance, like the civil rights organizers of Alabama, the labor unions of West Virginia, or the folk singers who matched their rhythm to the stroke of the assembly line—people to whom cultural superiority would never naturally occur and who have no choice but to insist on their identity because it’s the one thing nobody’s figured out how to take away. An inexperienced folk hero of humble origin and incidental fame who pretends to the people’s interest (and fire powers) was able to make such inroads only because most folks ignore politics to the extent it is possible.
News from Nowhere
Once word leaked that a journalist from New York had been dispatched to the hinterlands, the local weird-beard barroom theosopher concern treated me to familiar discourse on the petroglyphs of Mars, crisis actors, and Pizzagate; at least the conspiracies of suburban Appalachia never lose their paranoid luster. Later the weather turned, and I kept my distance from a representative of the Boo Radley demographic shadowboxing with a streetlamp in the middle of a rainstorm; he turned to me and said by way of apology, “Oh, I’m just over here fightin’.”
For some people, shadows fight back. I, on the other hand, had fucked off to New York, where my vote in national elections will never matter, at first opportunity. What can I say? It hasn’t always been easy, and this is my attitude era. My fellow hometown hero James Agee wrote, “In this enormous machine, the balance wheel is human,” but he was talking about the Tennessee Valley Authority. (I have no particular quarrel with the TVA.) I’ve made damn sure nobody can confuse me with someone sympathetic to small town bloodsport. Me, I went native a long time ago, trying to look good in front of folks who take for granted what my stranded brethren have no choice but to personify, even if I don’t happen to be fooling anybody.
Every Southerner who’s found a home in the city wears the chip on their shoulder differently. What’s the same is how we avoid each other’s eyes, because we know the secret of how bad people really are, and the others must be protected from the cannibal stupidity of the Bible Belt. The apparition of a famous fakir in national office whose social conscience is the howling void, a populist who will wave away accusations of evildoing as the price of doing business, whose shadow of influence ensorcels an indifferent elite of gormless fat cats and technocrats motivated by faith alone and banking on ignorance at the expense of the powerless: surely, only in the sticks do such revenants hold sway. If I close my eyes, they’ll go away. Nothing matters, and nobody cares—that’s country stuff. In my experience, everything counts. Somebody will do something. But I’ve been wrong before.