Nashville, Tennessee

There exists among us … a profound conviction that the South is another land, sharply differentiated from the rest of the American nation, and exhibiting within itself a remarkable homogeneity.

W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South

I arrived in Nashville late at night, on a near empty plane from San Francisco that had emptied out at Dallas, Fort Worth. The night air in Nashville was humid and hot. So hot that I kept thinking that I must be standing in direct sunlight. But outside it was dark and I could hear crickets and cicadas. No sunlight yet. That was to come in the morning.

I had been nervous about getting into the United States. Lisa and I had got our visas relatively easily, but the man who interviewed us at the U.S. consulate in Auckland had warned me that as my passport expired in September, there was a possibility I might be refused entry at the border. “I have no problem letting you in to my country,” he said putting his elbows on the desk in front of us and showing us his purplish tattooed arms: “After all, you’re our friendly neighbours to the North. But the guy at the border might just be havin’ a bad day…”

I had delayed my ticket by two days to help my chances of getting my replacement passport in time, but a paperwork error meant that I was forced to travel on the old passport. Worse: it also meant that I was travelling alone, without Lisa and her mysterious boundary-crossing powers. But I had prepared a dossier of papers to help me with my case should the need arise.

It did. At San Francisco, the guy wasn’t necessarily having a bad day, but he was thorough. He checked my visa, examined the papers that I had brought, and asked me more than a few questions. But crucially, he failed to notice the expiration date on my passport, and instead silently stapled an entry permit into it. “Have a nice day” he said. I was pretty sure he didn’t mean it. But it did make me think that Americans are pretty attuned to good days and bad days.

Vanderbilt University had put Lisa and myself up in a crappy hotel on a suburban strip in West Nashville. The most that could be said about the place was that it came with a small kitchenette and that it had air conditioning. Other than that, there was nothing to recommend it. Nor, for that matter, was there anything good to say about this part of West Nashville. Broad, blank and bordered by low, flat suburban buildings, there was little shade and few people walking anywhere. But we were without a car, and in the morning I had to find a cup of coffee. I found myself walking through the campus of Vanderbilt University, founded in 1867 by Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt as a way of bringing more erudition and respectability to the South. Shaded by great waxy magnolias and other enormous trees, the university thrives on an endowment that has since grown to over four billion dollars. And it looks the part.

Searching Craigslist, Lisa found us a beautiful house to rent in East Nashville. Our landlord is a spunky Nashville dyke who has bought in an area that is experiencing sharp gentrification. “Don’t go walking by there,” she said as she drove us past a couple of red brick apartments. “Gunshots there all the time…” We looked, and all I could see was a black woman taking in her laundry from a clothesline. Near where we live, it is quiet and peaceful, and the streets are canopied with large, cool trees. Fireflies hover over the grasses in the evening. At night we can hear the train whistle from the nearby L&N railroad. Just a few blocks in one direction, there is an excellent Tex-Mex restaurant and a westcoast-style café. A few blocks in the other direction and across a large busy road is an area we have been told to avoid. It is no coincidence that it is a primarily black area.

Nashville is not a beautiful city. It slouches, gap-toothed, against low lumps of land formed by the Cumberland river as it winds its way through middle Tennessee. This state used to be the traditional territory of the Cherokee, Choctaw and Chickasaw people, until they were either killed or driven off by the new American state. Andrew Jackson made his career as an Indian killer here in Tennessee. In 1812, Tennessee became known as the “Volunteer State” because of the large number of men who signed up to fight against the British and the two Canadas. Sometime in the 19^th century, the invention of the cotton gin made Tennessee rich, and thousands of slaves were brought in to work the fields. Despite this, Tennessee was apparently reluctant to join the Confederacy and was the last state to secede from the Union before the Civil War.

Tennessee emerged from Reconstruction relatively unscathed, and although it was better off than neighbouring states such as Alabama and Georgia, it is not now a wealthy place. Development arrived with Roosevelt’s New Deal and the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority, but it seems there has been little progress since. Such wealth as there is has certainly not made its way into the hands of its black population, over twenty-five percent of whom live in poverty, according to a 2000 census. Guidebooks will tell you that Tennessee’s biggest industries are electricity, education, healthcare and religious publishing, but the reality, it seems to me, is that Tennessee’s major industry is the production of both privilege and exclusion. Advertisements for hospitals, medical insurance and open-heart surgery (“We mend broken hearts”) remind you that the poor and the vulnerable go without adequate healthcare. And this state’s “Right-to-work” laws are targeted against unionisation in a manner that goes well beyond New Zealand’s infamous anti-union employment legislation. I have yet to confirm that there is no minimum wage here.

Of course there is the music. But there is also the war. For the last few days I have been listening to the radio. It’s what I do when I need to figure out how a new place works. On the phone-in shows and in the reports from Washington, you can feel that the disapproval ratings that have begun to dog the Bush administration and its prosecution of the war have started to transform into something a little harder and angrier, but almost wholly inactive. There is a feeling of defensiveness and hostility against those who would say outright that the invasion of Iraq was wrong from the beginning. After 9-11, there can be no culture of dissent against the American Imperium and its war machine. What opposition there is has focused on the poor management of the war and on the best way to fight “Al Qaeda”. There will be no movement that ends this war. There will be no occupation of the streets or of buildings. Instead, following the strategy of the Bush administration, much of the blame for the violence of the occupation has been levelled at the American-backed government cowering behind the Green Zone in Baghdad. Here, there will only be resolutions passed in Congress and ratified by the Senate. Without a defeat or a victory, the occupation of Iraq will be placed in the hands of others and will be gradually forgotten. Listening to radio in the kitchen while neighbourhood windows flicker blue with television, I do not think that Americans will learn anything from what may be their worst mistake of the 21^st century. I am not sure that I want to live here long enough to find out if I am right or wrong.