Authorities are still attempting to determine the author(s) of the massive blast Christmas morning in downtown Nashville, Tenn. So there is some time yet before politicians and pundits tell us whom we must blame and, more cynically, fear.
By accounts so far, whoever turned an older recreational vehicle into a large bomb put some thought behind it. It is still unclear 24 hours later what the bomb’s intended target was. Mass casualties apparently was not the intent. A warning over a loudspeaker in the vehicle gave a handful of police officers just enough time before the blast to evacuate residents in apartments near 166 Second Avenue North. Only three people were injured and sent to the hospital. It is not known whether anyone was inside the vehicle when it exploded.
Christmas morning at 6:30 a.m. local time was not the time to catch a lot of pedestrians on the street. Plus, the bomber(s) took pains to get the neighborhood evacuated. Perhaps the goal was generating fear itself.
Residents awoke to the sounds of gunshots about 5:30 a.m. Those may have been recorded to get their attention:
[Betsy] Williams, the Second Avenue resident, said she was asleep with her wife, Kim Madlom, when they were jolted awake by the sound of gunfire a little before 5:30 a.m. and called 911. When the sound repeated in the same pattern, she figured it must have been a recording, she said.
“It was like it was being fired right next to your head almost,” Madlom told The Post. “It was unrealistically loud in retrospect, and it was the exact same pattern all three times.”
Peering out her third-story window, the 59-year-old said she could see an RV parked across the street. It was a light-colored vehicle the size of a small bus that looked at least a couple of decades old, she said.
As she surveyed the scene, a voice came booming from the camper: “It was saying, ‘This vehicle has a bomb, you must evacuate the area.’”
Then a countdown message began, telling people they had 15 minutes to leave, Madlom said. She and her three family members decided to flee. “That was the thing that made us go,” she said.
While we await more data from investigators or a manifesto or statement from the perpetrator(s), the motive behind the bombing remains unclear. But the nature of fear is again on my mind.
Tennessee is the top COVID-19 hot spot in the country at the moment according to CDC data: 119.1 cases per 100,000 over the last seven days. Despite surging infections including the state’s first lady’s, Republican Gov. Bill Lee speaking from quarantine resists imposing a statewide mask mandate:
“Many think a statewide mandate would improve mask wearing, many think it would have the opposite effect,” he said Sunday. “This has been a heavily politicized issue. Please do not get caught up in that and don’t misunderstand my belief in local government on this issue. Masks work and I want every Tennessean to wear one.”
Lee’s executive order limits indoor gatherings to 10 people, but excludes churches, weddings and funerals. Days after a Feb. 29 funeral in Albany, Ga., the coronavirus hit the town “like a bomb.” Taking notice of that is too political for Lee.
Masks are recommended in Tennessee, but not mandated. Freedom and all that.
Just south of Nashville in Columbia (see map), freedom is ringing, masks-optional.
Bombs people take seriously. Deadly viruses, not so much. The situation recalls a post from 2015 on fear itself. A CNN/ORC poll found that 80% of Americans believed ISIS posed a serious threat to the United States, although as a practical matter what deaths an ISIS attack here would cause might number in the dozens or in the hundreds. Right now, the coronavirus is killing every day more Americans than died in the September 11 attacks.
We took off our shoes at airports for years because one clown tried unsuccessfully to blow up his sneakers on a plane. But wearing a mask to protect our neighbors from a virus killing 3,000 each day is a damnable infringement on liberty?
From my 2015 post:
I have a 1982 Scientific American article here (Xeroxed. Remember kids?) in which study subjects were asked to rank a sampling of 30 sources of risk. Nuclear power topped the list for the League of Women Voters and college students, although it ranked 20 in terms of attributable deaths. Business professionals ranked nuclear power No. 8. Pesticides also made the top ten for the League and college students. It showed up at 28 on the researchers’ list. At the bottom of list of risks for all three groups? Vaccinations. Where would they rank today? We’re not very good at this.
Waldman writes, “The same people who want everyone to constantly proclaim the United States’ awesomeness often act as though we’re a nation on the verge of destruction, so weak and vulnerable are we in the face of knife-wielding masked men thousands of miles away.”
But an unseen virus that’s killing thousands of Americans each day? No big deal. Big explosions down the street? Those we pay attention to for a couple of days. Like mass-casualty shootings at outdoor concerts.
It is as if there is an inverse relationship between the psychic proximity of a threat and our response to it.
From a post from March this year:
I once visited a militiaman’s compound east of Knoxville (long story) where he was prepared for just that [a zombie apocalypse]. Or for Obama’s jack-booted thugs to come to the end of the valley to confiscate his guns. He’s still stockpiling and waiting, one supposes. Since there are no cases reported within miles of East Tennessee, there’s still time to grab extra ammo at the Newport Walmart.
That was when the pandemic was new. Now the virus is all over Tennessee. The problem is, I guess, bullets are not that effective against a virus. So, it don’t worry me.
It’s Happy Hollandaise time here at Hullabaloo. If you’d like to drop a little something in the old Christmas stocking you can do so here: