“I think gas prices are going down,” I said to no one. It was a week ago and I was alone, driving along Union and Poplar and seeing posted prices as low as $3.59 a gallon. I was sure I hadn’t seen prices below $4 a gallon in a while, but the news had been filled with “sky-rocketing gas prices” stories for weeks (accompanied by grim analyses of how inflation was going to cost the Democrats the midterms), so maybe I was imagining things?
Then, on Monday, I got an email from GasBuddy, a tech company based in Boston that operates apps based on monitoring real-time fuel prices at more than 150,000 gas stations in the United States, Canada, and Australia. Each week, GasBuddy sends me a weekly update on the country’s gas prices. I usually send it to junk mail, but not this week. According to GasBuddy, prices in Memphis are 17.4 cents a gallon lower than they were a month ago, down to $3.42 a gallon, if you know where to look. Nationally, gas prices are down 23.3 cents a gallon from a month ago. This is good, right? So why is it not news? Maybe it’s because a “falling gas prices” story doesn’t fit a defining media narrative. Or maybe there’s just too damn much news — most of it bad — to keep up with.
Consider, an English teacher in Southeast Missouri was just fired for teaching “Critical Race Theory” in an elective contemporary literature class that was reading the award-winning book, Dear Martin. It was Kim Morrison’s second year teaching the young adult novel, but earlier this year, Missouri passed a bill outlawing the teaching of CRT and parents complained, you see, so …
Oh, and let’s not forget the case of a woman in Texas, Lizelle Herrera, who was indicted for murder for “the death of an individual by self-induced abortion.” It was unclear whether Herrera induced her own abortion or someone else’s, but, you know, details aren’t really important in these matters. Herrera was later released because Texas’ new law banning abortions after six weeks is only enforceable if charges are brought by a private citizen, i.e. a vigilante, and local law enforcement had overstepped their authority. Shocker, I know.
But wait, there’s more. All over GOPutin America, legislators are rushing to emulate bills like these, as well as those similar to Florida’s spiffy new “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which eliminates the nonexistent threat of kindergartners being taught anything about LGBTQ humans.
In Tennessee, legislators are not about to be left behind their Neanderthal red-state brethren. They had been working diligently to pass into law a bill that would remove age limits for marriage, because young girls, they do get weary and sometimes just need a husband who will help them with their homework. A national outcry got our Nash-billies to back off. For now.
Speaking of national outcries … The New York Times did a big story this week on Hillsdale College’s fight against “leftist academics,” which mainly consists of getting state legislatures to give them public money to start charter schools in suburban and rural areas (white) to, as the Times put it, “provide a publicly funded off-ramp for conservative parents who think their local schools misinterpret history and push a socially progressive agenda.”
Our own Governor Bill Lee got a lot of ink in the story as the leading Hillsdale proponent in the country among public officials. Lee, you may recall, intends to give Hillsdale College enough of our tax dollars to fund 50 private charter schools in Tennessee.
And, as long as I’m writing about embarrassing Tennessee elected officials, I’d be remiss in not mentioning Senator Marsha Blackburn’s apparent flashing of the “white power” hand symbol in the Senate chambers while questioning Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin, who is — shocking, I know — African American. Way to go, Marsha. In a week with tons of disgusting news, you found the bottom of the barrel and scraped it.