It’s fitting that the Teabaggers chose Nashville for their hoedown; it’s safely within the Bible Belt, but full of enough crass, ersatz show business to offset its provincial dreariness and add to the absurd fakery of the whole event.  It’s been twenty years since I last visited that fair city, but I doubt it has changed much, and thus it is the perfect venue for a command performance of Caribou Barbie and the Bluegrass Morans.  The Opryland Hotel, like everything else in Nashville, is a cheesy box in the suburbs, surrounded by parking.  It’s a little like Wasilla, really.  Sarah will love it there.

The actual “city” itself is a lifeless, tatty, and hollowed out backwater; its majestic Richardson Romanesque train station has been turned into a hotel; what few historic buildings remain huddle in disconnected clusters around the state capitol building and the river, and a downtown “revitalization” project did the exact opposite.  It consists of an utterly charmless convention center, bland hotel, and a lame shopping mall covering several blocks, connected by pedestrian overpasses and sitting atop forbidding, windowless parking garages.  A stroll through this boring panopticon bubble came up snake eyes as far as finding a decent cup of coffee, but was nonetheless revealing.  No one except the lowliest help was anything but white, and everyone seemed oddly glum.  A pretty young (white) clerk in the shabby and dreadful department store, Castner-Knott’s, when asked about her hometown, drawled, “Ah hate it here; ah cain’t wait t’leave,” an observation that due to the glacial slowness of Southern locution, took a shockingly long time for her to utter.  She dreamed of moving to California with her boyfriend after a recent visit there, her first outside the South.  Indeed, looking at it from Castner-Knott’s in downtown Nashville even the crappy Robinson’s store at the hideous Beverly Center couldn’t help but have looked good to her, but I wondered whether that accent would go over with the 90210 crowd.  She urged me to go see the replica of the Parthenon in Centennial Park, “It’s jus’ lak th’ one in Greece, only fixed up.”

Dinner out was another baffling experience; we were encouraged to go to a district of restored cast-iron and brick buildings that somehow survived Nashville’s “urban renewal” and found a short but lively street of places that were actually open with people coming in and out, again nearly all of them white.  (I wracked my brain to figure out whether there were ever any real black people in the city to spark so much obvious white flight, but  I never found out.)   There was a brief wait at the door, and we asked some exiting patrons if the restaurant was any good.  ”S’all raht if y’lak French fude.”  Hmm.  Not a very ringing endorsement, but our table was ready, so we went in, not wanting to spend thirty bucks on a cab out to the suburbs where all the supposedly good restaurants were.  The menu consisted of standard American steaks and seafood; the only vaguely French thing I could find was French fries.  They didn’t even have bearnaise, let alone escargot or some of those spooky French things that turn out to be brains or something.  I was kind of disappointed, but by that time, not too surprised.  I had “Le New York,” medium rare.

Back in the 60′s, Jessica Mitford was writing for Esquire Magazine about the civil rights struggle and when she traveled to Nashville was as mystified as I was that such a place would call itself the “Athens of the South.”  She mused, “Do Athenians call their city  ’The Nashville of Greece?’”  I rather doubt it.  But nonetheless, all these thousands of years later, Nashville is probably the perfect choice for the teabaggers, never mind that its agora is paved, striped, and regularly patrolled to keep out darkies.  Democracy was born in Athens, but Nashville has the fake version, which is even better because thanks to Dick Armey and Sarah Palin, it’s been “fixed up.”  The teabaggers will be right at home.

UPDATE:  I just watched snippets of Palin’s speech, if you want to call it that. It was the expected mixture of resentment, paranoia, and lies, but somehow it was still worse than I imagined, especially the audience reactions.  I need to dig up a transcript and a barf bag before I can translate it, much less dissect it.  Perhaps in a nod to Nashville, her hair was considerably larger than usual.  More later on this CHNN station, and on CHNN News Overnight.