The Insult Honor

One thing I wish I’d done a more elegant job of hammering home here is the way Nashville continues to use “honoring” J.C. Napier as a chance to insult him.

You would be hard-pressed to find a more civically engaged Nashvillian of more national prominence who didn’t hold a state or national elected position. Prominent banker, prominent lawyer, name on our money during his time at the Treasury, educational reformer, friends with really prominent and important thinkers.

There are things that happen for men like that in town–they get parks named after them, they get buildings named after them; they get schools named after them. All of which Napier got, but, in usual Nashville fashion when it came to him, in the shittiest way possible. A man who helped fund a huge park gets half a block. A man who owned a downtown building gets public housing. A man who remade Nashville schools faces having his name taken off a Nashville school building.

We so begrudgingly did what we do for men of his stature, in the smallest, miserliest way possible.

Anyway, I know the MOC now says they never planned on taking Napier’s name off the school. So, that’s good. And that’s all I’ll say about that.

In other news, on this week’s episode of Hello From the Magic Tavern, Chunt the talking badger (who’s a shape-shifter) invents a new game “Cats or Doctors” which involves them having to figure out what a penis sounds like. They all came up with kind of either farty noises or whacking off noises. It was pretty hilarious. Don’t know why I thought of that just now, but it’s worth checking the episode out.