The Rotting Away of Nashville and the Rest of the West (with notes on Fresno)

Scenes From a Nashville Convenience Store

by Jim Goad

I didn’t expect to see so many derelicts in Music City USA. I thought the home of country music would be a little more…country?

Last week I fled the Atlanta metro area to spend three days in Nashville for my birthday. As a Philly-born expat who’s lived in all four corners of the USA, I’ve lived south of the Mason-Dixon Line and east of the Mississippi River for nearly seven years. I’m especially fond of the Upland South, which includes nearly all of Tennessee except its western lowland fringes that are capped off by that ugly and battered fake gold tooth called Memphis.

Since Nashville is a country-music mecca surrounded by rolling mountain greenery, I anticipated something far more wholesome and unspoiled, something more befitting the Upland South than the South Bronx. I thought I’d see red-and-white checkered shirts, cowboy hats, and hoop skirts. What I saw were dreadlocks, sideways baseball caps, and stained sweatpants. ...

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     The last time I stayed in a cheap motel, although the rates were not all that low, it was in California's Central Valley, located on a major commercial boulevard that had once seen better days, at that time a relatively new looking structure, part of a national chain, with sort of a modern utilitarian California adobe look, small rectangular columns outside the lobby drive-through. Entering on a hot summer twilight, it was not unpleasing to the eye, but the conditions turned out to be appalling. 

     For one thing, if you walked barefoot across the room after a shower, you would begin to stick to the carpet, whereupon you would discover that the soles of your feet had become black with grime. I could go on ...

     But the strange thing was that complaining was impossible or completely unsatisfying, because there was a sort of racially charged atmosphere there, with the cleaning staff, made up of poor Mexican women, seemingly fearfully answering to their Indian overlords.

     So complaining amongst this confusing mix of foreign peoples, with their quaint languages and mysterious customs and social hierarchies, you felt like 'The Ugly American'--while being an American in America! 

     Afterwards it occurred to me that this is exactly what our open-borders intolerant Tolerance Police want. I really couldn't clearly explain myself because I was mistakenly judging them by American standards of basic cleanliness and customer service at an address in Fresno that was no longer American. 

     As for Nashville, I've heard it now has a thriving vibrant 'Little Kurdistan,' which says a lot. And remember, this is a buttons-popping-with-pride Red State! (for how much longer?)