Theme Park of Poor Choices

For going on three centuries now, the lower end of Nashville’s Broadway – say, from Fifth Avenue down to the river – has been a zone of commerce and retail trade and, more recently, serious tourism.

A century ago, this street was near enough to the old Opry to draw the most ardent fans of real country music. And, if you couldn’t get into the Ryman, you could be entertained by the wannabe buskers on the sidewalks outside the honky-tonks, the saloons where money walks in the door and never walks out. Later on, when the Titans and the Predators came to town, network television could count on colorful cutaway shots galore, what with the all the neon on this strip of seeming nocturnal happiness.

This was our very own French Quarter, our Boardwalk, our Navy Pier, our Las Vegas Strip.

Then it accelerated.

I remember thinking, at some point in the past decade, how our downtown had become just another theme park. Nashvillians had been lamenting the loss of Opryland USA, but its sensation of celebrity had merely shifted to the central city. For a lot of us natives, first the crowds became an issue. Then it was harder (and more expensive) to find a place to park. Then, what I might call the non-alcoholic retail slowly departed.

Now, our Lower Broad is famous again but for all the wrong reasons. With our world gripped by the coronavirus, and our state and city with it, Nashville’s Broadway has become the wrong kind of cutaway shot for news media. Our downtown has become a theme park of poor choices.

Over the weekend two Tennessean staffers, the reporter Yihyun Jeong and the photographer Andrew Nelles – ventured into this zone. They returned with this story and these images of a rolling “super-spreader” event: https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/health/2020/08/03/broadway-partiers-ignore-nashville-mask-mandate/5567471002/

On the one hand, these scenes are quite familiar to us. On the other hand, considering the Covid public health nightmare that is still racing through our society, these pictures are chilling.

The defiance over face coverings has found a festive, malleable Theater of the Absurd on our Lower Broadway. Some of these seem oblivious to the danger. Others, when asked, become very angry. These strut their selfish sense of freedom down the sidewalks, ranking their personal liberty over your public health. City Hall and the Health Department seem flummoxed and paralyzed by that especially.

Observing all this, it is not the melodies of Hank’s “Oh, Lonesome Me” or Dolly’s “I Will Always Love You” that I hear in my head. It’s now more like the darkness of the Eagles’ “Hotel California” or Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction.”

May God save us all.

© Keel Hunt, 2020