Well this is just awful: an African-American couple who were about to close on a vacation home in Lebanon, Tennessee found “a drawing of a man hanging from a noose and a racial epithet sketched on the property’s masonry entrance,” reports The Tennessean. The couple, Kenneth and Deborah Boyd, say they “had to reassure” their teenage daughter “that they would be safe” on the property, after she saw the hate pictures. Lebanon needs moar hopey/changey.
A disabled Vietnam veteran, Mr. Boyd wanted to buy the house to fish, chill, that kind of thing. With trees all around and a big lake, the property looks like a straight-up oasis–except for the wall full of racist pictures and scribbles now on the Boyds’ potential property.
Apparently this isn’t the first time land in the area was attacked by monsters. “The developer of the Old Hickory Lake area property said there had been a similar incident near the undeveloped lots in April,” The Tennessean says. Overall, however, hate crimes decreased last year in Tennessee — except in Nashville, and Lebanon a bit east of Nashville.
So WTF is going on in the Nashville metropolitan region, to make hate grow and rear its head in such ugly ways? Is it because of the flood, and related anger? People, there are other ways to handle frustration. Maybe try Mark Sanford’s favorite stress-relievers: hole-digging, and hole-filling. They seem to be working for him, and don’t even cost much.
Oh, and while your Wonkette was trying to find more info about the Boyds’ depressing story, we found out about another instance of Tennessee hate vandalism–this time against the planned Islamic Center of Murfreesboro, where a sign was broken. This was incident #2 at the Center–the first involved a spray-painted “Not Welcome” sign.
A terrible Tea Party lady named Lou Ann Zelenik, who is running for Congress (she will be the Boyds’ representative in Washington, if she wins — they must be so excited!), says on her website that the mosque is “part of … a political movement designed to fracture the moral and political foundation of Middle Tennessee,” which is God’s country, don’t you forget it:
Until the American Muslim community find it in their hearts to separate themselves from their evil, radical counterparts, to condemn those who want to destroy our civilization and will fight against them, we are not obligated to open our society to any of them.
Then she quotes Martin Luther King, Jr.! At least we can all agree that MLK was okay.
[The Tennessean/WSMV.TV/VoteLouAnn.com]
{ 66 comments }
Why are some of those Klansmen wearing high-heeled pumps?
Sigh.
Can we please just having a fucking supervirus wipe out (ahem) humanity once and for all already? Talk about “not welcome…”
As Martin Luther King said, “in the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends,” so let us not be silent. Stand strong for our God, our families, and our country. God bless you all.
I don’t think MLK meant what she thinks MLK meant. God knows how she interpreted his “I Have A Dream” speech.
Relax people; it’s just the Tennessee Welcome Wagon doing their job.
“Where you from and how long yall be stayin?”
take me to another place, take me to another land…
[re=606298]Autochthon[/re]: Obviously members of the J. Edgar Hoover Chapter.
Wait, so the couple didn’t like it much when the good folk of Lebanon portrayed the negro muslin prophet MoMo wearing a rope necktie? These black people sure are mysterious! What do they want?
And ‘murfreesboro’ is obviously a made up name!
[re=606298]Autochthon[/re]: Don’t be sexist against racists.
designed to fracture the moral and political foundation of Middle Tennessee
Incest?
Jesus. I knew things were bad in Tennessee, but really, Lou Ann Zelenik? Elective offices in Tennessee are open to Polack women? I doubt that the authors of the Fourteenth Amendment had this in mind.
I’m sending a concerned email today to my friends in the local Tea Party. I only hope it’s not too late to find a blonde-haired, blue-eyed propertied male whose last name wouldn’t have been out of place on the Mayflower.
These coloreds don’t run!!!
In related news Rand Paul issued a press statement that while he disagrees with defacing property with racist stick figures, it is protected activity under the 10th Amendment. Just so you know.
[re=606301]Katydid[/re]: I think she misread the title and thought it was the “I Hate a Dream” speech.
[re=606301]Katydid[/re]:
They’ve hijacked the constitution, bible and Jeebus for so many years they must be looking for new material.
[re=606311]Manos: Hands of Fate[/re]: Well, since the defacement was to someone else’s private property, I think Paul could argue (but probably won’t) that Mr. Boyd can track the culprit down and shoot him and not with votes either.
Well, Jesus. It IS Tennessee; surely we aren’t all that surprised.
[re=606300]mostly corn[/re]: countdown to letters to editor/ posts to local news stories about how outside agitators are making a big deal about this and it’s really just a COUPLE of potentially murderous assholes, not ALL of murfressburgertowndom, in 5..4…3… those people are almost as infuriating as the actual culprits.
[re=606318]Texan Bulldoggette[/re]: I mean this is a state that puts up monuments to Nathan Bedford Forrest, what’d you expect — tolerance?
I think the KKK needs to hook up with the teabaggers and then bring back the cross burnings. Cause if you cross them with the teabagger’s obesity and shockingly high ineptitude, they’re sure to miss the yards/crosses and set themselves on fire.
Until the Southern White Christian community find it in their hearts to separate themselves from their evil, racist, anti-Islamic, Klansmen counterparts, to condemn those who want to destroy our civilization by turning it backwards 150 years and will fight against them, we are not obligated to open our society to any of them.
A Tennessee Caliphate could only have one objective: destroy NASCAR and country music.
I weep for our nation.
[re=606319]PsycGirl[/re]: Yes, feel free to read the comments on that article on the Tennesseean, if you want to hate everybody. Why, how do you know the vandals were white? Those black people probably did the graffiti themselves, for the publicity! And so on.
[re=606298]Autochthon[/re]: ah, we prefer the term klansPEOPLE. please don’t be sexist, it is so closed-minded and like 1950′s of you, sexism.
Won’t the coming Rain O’ Death from the Gulf take care of these folks? Oh sure, I’m sure there are plenty of good folks in the deep south, but you have to break an egg if you want to lead a horse to water.
Kenneth and Deborah Boyd owe these vandals an apology!
[re=606323]JMP[/re]: Brilliant!
[re=606326]Josh Fruhlinger[/re]: That’s a good point – and a useful tip when you’re moving to a new community: accuse all of your potential neighbors of committing hate crimes against you. It’s a surefire way to “break the ice” and make a lot of new friends!
Rand Paul is going to reignite his slumping campaign by arguing that Tennessee-haws have individual, God-given rights to hate whomever they choose, and the 1st Amendment protects their right to scrawl it in stick pictures or whatever subliterate methos they choose (note it’s on property that the Negro does not yet own).
And the mosque IS a part of a “political movement designed to fracture the moral and political foundation of Middle Tennessee,” along with public education, public sanitation/ hygiene, and the laws against bestiality and incest. Fight back, Volunteers!
[re=606298]Autochthon[/re]: The ones in the high heeled pumps are the Ladies’ Klan Auxiliary. It isn’t proper for ladies to do the more unseemly chores of the Klan, so the run the bake sales. I’m pretty sure my husband’s racist bitch old grandmother is their grand dragoness.
[re=606325]Johnny Zhivago[/re]: Where do I sign up for that???
Well, this just ruins my favorite Ron Sexsmith song.
[re=606326]Josh Fruhlinger[/re]: And do you know that Rev. Wright is a racist too? Just want to make sure you know that before you get all worked up about this noose thing.
What a horrible country.
[re=606298]Autochthon[/re]: That would be the Kunt Klux Klan or Sisterhood members
[re=606323]JMP[/re]: You totally beat me to this. Win.
eh-hem….The state in question is spelled T-E-N-N-E-S-S-E-E. You left out an ‘S’…..
[re=606298]Autochthon[/re]: Because Ms Zelenik finds them flattering
[re=606326]Josh Fruhlinger[/re]: Oh it’s bad; it starts off right away with whining about the article using African-American because it’s “politically correct”and just goes downhill from there.
Note, there is no such as political correctness; when people start complaining about it they mean “Why can’t I use the N-word without getting yelled at?”
True story: I actually have a photo from my college days with a friend and I standing under a Bank of Murfreesboro sign that reads “free chicken with overdraft benefits”
[re=606326]Josh Fruhlinger[/re]: I did go back and read them and learned that there is NO EVIDENCE that this is a hate crime, even though the noose and racial slurs might make it seem so to lefty PC liberals; also I learned that the fact that a black man can afford a vacation home means that there is no more racism in America except some reverse racism. It’s only 10:10 am but I need a drink.
[re=606343]AgentQ[/re]: S’s are like assholes. Tennessee has too many of them.
[re=606343]AgentQ[/re]: UHHH, we removed the extra S to INSULT THE RACISTS, obviously. But we’ve “fixed” it now, because you people don’t understand our high-minded satirical stylings.
There must’ve been a sale on those robes.
[re=606362]queeraselvis v 2.0[/re]: So what does that say about Mississippi?
H.L. Mencken visited Tennessee, to attend the Scopes trial; it moved him to write an essay called “Homo Neanderthalensis,” don’t worry, its public domain:
. . . What all this amounts to is that the human race is divided into two sharply differentiated and mutually antagonistic classes, almost two genera – a small minority that plays with ideas and is capable of taking them in, and a vast majority that finds them painful, and is thus arrayed against them, and against all who have traffic with them. The intellectual heritage of the race belongs to the minority, and to the minority only. The majority has no more to do with it than it has to do with ecclesiastic politics on Mars. In so far as that heritage is apprehended, it is viewed with enmity. But in the main it is not apprehended at all.
That is why Beethoven survives. Of the 110,000,000 so-called human beings who now live in the United States, flogged and crazed by Coolidge, Rotary, the Ku Klux and the newspapers, it is probable that at least 108,000,000 have never heard of him at all. To these immortals, made in God’s image, one of the greatest artists the human race has ever produced is not even a name. So far as they are concerned he might as well have died at birth. The gorgeous and incomparable beauties that he created are nothing to them. They get no value out of the fact that he existed. They are completely unaware of what he did in the world, and would not be interested if they were told.
The fact saves good Ludwig’s bacon. His music survives because it lies outside the plane of the popular apprehension, like the colors beyond violet or the concept of honor. If it could be brought within range, it would at once arouse hostility. Its complexity would challenge; its lace of moral purpose would affright. Soon there would be a movement to put it down, and Baptist clergymen would range the land denouncing it, and in the end some poor musician, taken in the un-American act of playing it, would be put on trial before a jury of Ku Kluxers, and railroaded to the calaboose.
[re=606298]Autochthon[/re]: Because at least one of them is running for Congress, and has interesting opinions about MLK.
[re=606367]Prommie[/re]: Thank you for that.
M[re=606367]Prommie[/re]: Mencken also predicited (sorry, too lazy to look it up) that eventually we’d elect a leader as stupid as this majority he speaks of. Came true in 2000 (elected by a 5-4 majority of the Supreme Court), and now the entire Repuke Party makes it look like he was giving the leader too much credit.
[re=606305]facehead[/re]: I think an illiterate called Murphy named the town.
[re=606380]harry palmer[/re]: It came true for the second time in 2000; it had already happened in 1980, leading to disaster both times.
WTF???
[re=606388]pub_option[/re]: Actually named for a family called Murfree. Who were likely illiterates, as pretty much everyone was then.
So, hey, when Nashville flooded, we didn’t ask for much, but now that it is election season, we really need some outside help (read: “$$$”). Please give!
Unfunny caution:
In 1989, Reverend Jose Williams led a march of about 15 into Cummings, GA to protest the fact that black people had been forcibly removed before and that the town was still segregated. The group was attacked, and there were many hate signs. Two weeks later, Williams returned, with a crowd of some 15,000 local anti-hate protestors. The whole Klan network put out the call to make a show of force.
There they were: all twenty of them.
The point is that it only takes one or two people to create an enormous impression of hatred. Given the localism, and the way that nationally we’re giving racism and hate a free pass, I wouldn’t be surprised if we haven’t got a local family, or perhaps two, who like to do this sort of thing and sneak away. That was, by the way, the initial mission of the KKK: to be “invisible,” to pretend to be everywhere. Once the light shines, the reality is ridiculous. It’s almost the opposite of Arizona, where officials are propagating the hate.
(I know: bring the funny or GTFO. In this case, the Cletuses who pull this crap are themselves really, really ludicrous.)
[re=606423]Geogre[/re]: True that. I just give myself happy vibes by imagining them being mauled by bears.
[re=606323]JMP[/re]: Word.
[re=606423]Geogre[/re]: I refuse to believe the Tennessee is going Ludicrous Speed, but I do believe the new family is surrounded by assholes.
[re=606367]Prommie[/re]: And thank you very much for that. How sad that nothing has changed. Perhaps Richard Dawkins should send some missionaries to Tennessee.
[re=606366]weejee[/re]: I should’ve thought that was self-evident. Mind you, it also means that we’re #1 in the nation for something other than obesity, poverty, low educational levels, and endemic racism. So, uh, win?
Middle Tennessee, which is God’s country, don’t you forget it
Which god? I forget.
[re=606512]Lascauxcaveman[/re]: Baal? Moloch? You know, “that old-time religion”…
[re=606367]Prommie[/re]:
” …it lies outside the plane of the popular apprehension, like the colors beyond violet or the concept of honor. If it could be brought within range, it would at once arouse hostility. Its complexity would challenge; its lace of moral purpose would affright. Soon there would be a movement to put it down…”
This reminded me of PBS/NPR pledge break pitches.
Tea Baggers are taking America back……to 1950.
[re=606512]Lascauxcaveman[/re]: I’d guess Dionysus, the god of drunkenness and madness, whose parents were brother and sister.
Coincidentally, Mark Sanford’s stress-relieving hole-digging and hole-filling would also be economy-relieving, if the government would pay people to do it!
Can we just call it Palestine TN?
problem solved
I was just in Lebanon, TN last weekend for a family reunion. Met a whole slew of people I never knew existed, with the same last name as me. Seems like they account for half the town. Hope it wasn’t any of them!
I would ask for a price reduction on that particular piece of real estate.
Because of the bad neighborhood an’ all.
[re=606298]Autochthon[/re]: Because the spike heels get stuck in the dirt.
[re=606367]Prommie[/re]: Maybe it’s the English teacher in me but that is an awesome chunk of Mencken.
Comments on this entry are closed.