The performance of Destiny in Dayton Saturday afternoon was good enough for small-town community theater, and it was again for me (as in 2018, when the players purveyed Front Page News) a thrill to sit in the very courthouse (Rhea County) and indeed the very same hard-backed wooden seats that challenged the endurance of the Scopes Trial attendees (including my first landlord) 98 years ago. And it was a delight coming and going in the company of my friend Gary. He’s a great talker. The miles peeled away, the rolling hills south of Crossville were lovely, the stop at Buc-ees to procure Younger Daughter’s urgently-requested brisket sandwich (I got one too, well worth stopping for) was delightfully over-the-top Americana excess.
It was fun meeting up with Ed and Garrett on the courthouse lawn before the show, downing those sloppy chili cheese dogs, and afterwards enjoying fish tacos and an Evolutionary Theory IPA at the Monkey Town Brewing Company.
Darrow finally got his statue…
The play began ponderously, taking what seemed an eternity to seat the Scopes jury. One of the candidates got out of service by pleading decrepitude: “I’m 66.”
That’s what I was thinking about this morning down at the courthouse in Nashville, as 90 names were called over the course of two hours, to seat a pair of juries for immediate service here. Mine was not one of them. So I’m back home, the dogs are snoozing on the couch instead of sweltering in Dogland (and in quality-alerted sub-standard air).
So I’ve done my minimal civic duty. If I were a better citizen I’d be disappointed this afternoon. But I did attend a trial this weekend, and would love to have sat on that jury (then again, the summer swelter-no a/c in Tennessee in ‘25…) and defended academic freedom, free inquiry, and reason. The way things are going, I may still get a chance one of these days. History may not exactly repeat, as Mr. Twain said, but it definitely rhymes. Books are still getting banned, reactionaries and bigots are still getting votes.