The Locomotive of Progress
🚨 Who commits the crimes · Bar Hours · Free speech ruling in Franklin · AG's lawsuit upheld · Orcale rising · Phoenician Scheme · Much more!
Good afternoon, everyone. Today, we consider the cause of crime via Michael Crichton, listen to Skrmetti’s comments on his recent victory in SCOTUS, look at a recent ruling with regard to Franklin Pride two years ago, and review the new Wes Anderson movie. First time reading? Sign up here.
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Recently picked up Michael Crichton’s 1975 historical fiction novel The Great Train Robbery about Victorian thieves pulling off a daring gold heist aboard a moving train in the mid-19th century. I found the introduction of particular interest.
Speaking on the sense of optimism that characterized England during the Industrial Revolution, Crichton points to the train as the most visible hallmark of progress, and with the material progress accompanying the rise of the locomative, many came to expect that man would progress with it.
Here was undeniable progress, and to the Victorian mind such progress implied moral as well as material advancement. According to Charles Kingsley, "The moral state of a city depends ... on the physical state of that city; on the food, water, air, and lodging of its inhabitants." Progress in physical conditions led inevitably to the eradication of social evils and criminal behavior—which would be swept away much as the slums that housed these evils and criminals were, from time to time, swept away. It seemed a simple matter of eliminating the cause and, in due course, the effect.
From this comfortable perspective, it was absolutely astonishing to discover that "the criminal class" had found a way to prey upon progress—and indeed to carry out a crime aboard the very hallmark of progress, the railway. The fact that the robbers also overcame the finest safes of the day only increased the consternation.
What was really so shocking about The Great Train Robbery was that it suggested, to the sober thinker, that the elimination of crime might not be an inevitable consequence of forward-marching progress. Crime could no longer be likened to the Plague, which had disappeared with changing social conditions to become a dimly remembered threat of the past. Crime was something else, and criminal behavior would not simply fade away.
A few daring commentators even had the temerity to suggest that crime was not linked to social conditions at all, but rather sprang from some other impulse. Such opinions were, to say the least, highly distasteful.
They remain distasteful to the present day. More than a century after The Great Train Robbery, and more than a decade after another spectacular English train robbery, the ordinary Western urban man still clings to the belief that crime results from poverty, injustice, and poor education. Our view of the criminal is that of a limited, abused, perhaps mentally disturbed individual who breaks the law out of a desperate need—the drug addict standing as a sort of modern archetype for this person. And indeed when it was recently reported that the majority of violent street crime in New York City was not committed by addicts, that finding was greeted with skepticism and dismay, mirroring the perplexity of our Victorian forebears a hundred years ago.
What made the story of the Great Gold Robbery of 1855 so compelling for Crichton is that it undermined the expectation that man would radically change in response to changes in his material environment, showing criminal behavior to be more complicated than merely arising from want. Crichton wrote this in 1975, but it still rings true today. DAVIS HUNT
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⚖️ Skrmetti's Victory in SCOTUS Yesterday, the United States Supreme Court upheld Tennessee’s law restricting gender-transition interventions for minors and affirming the State's authority to protect kids from life‑altering medical practices. Shortly after the decision, bill sponsors House Leader Williams Lamberth and Senate Leader Jack Johnson joined Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti at the Tennessee State Capitol for a press conference.
Though gender affirming care for minors has become a politically polarizing issue, Skrmetti recognized there’s a little more to it than that. “In some ways, this was almost class warfare,” he said, citing how the expert class represented by the American Civil Liberties Union and bureaucrats in the Biden administration joined forces to try to impose their policy preferences through the Constitution.
Skrmetti explained that just taking a look at the asymmetry of resources in this case reveals how the powerful bureaucratic, political, medical, and expert classes have banded together in rolling out and defending gender affirming policy, messaging, and medical care. “When the suit was brought, I think there were about 30 attorneys on the other side,” he said. They included attorneys from the ACLU of Tennessee, Lambda Legal, the Justice Department, and more. “Lambda Legal apparently raised $285 million off this case since it went up to the Supreme Court,” revealed Skrmetti. “We had a pretty scrappy team of about seven attorneys.”
The AG also acknowledged that the Supreme Court’s ruling on this case would have significant implications for states’ rights. Skrmetti said his team fought for this outcome, which allows “the people of Tennessee to remain self-governing people.” Instead of forced policy prescription through aggressive lawfare, the “mechanism for resolving our disagreements that doesn't involve somebody pro-opting a medical association and then inflicting their will on everybody else” remains intact.
🗣️ Free Speech Ruling in Franklin Federal Judge Waverly D. Crenshaw Jr. issued his opinion on June 3 regarding the Joseph Cocchini v. City of Franklin, Tennessee case. In it, he affirms that the plaintiff was well within his First Amendment rights to express his religious views on public grounds. Cochini had been arrested on charges of criminal trespass two years ago while attending the Franklin Pride Festival at Harlinsdale Farm Park. While engaged in peaceful conversation with attendees, he was approached by four FPD officers and asked to leave.
After admitting that no law had been broken, Officer Kevin Spry proceeded to inform Cocchini that the event’s security coordinator was requesting that he be removed, adding that they were not currently on public property, since the park had been rented for the day by the private organization. Evidence submitted during the hearing revealed that the City of Franklin had given the event coordinators control of the public property, illustrated by footage of briefings by Officer Spry and superiors that the police were to remove whoever the organizers didn’t want there.
Judge Crenshaw’s ruling emphasised the plaintiff’s clear right to share his opinions at a public event on public grounds “...so long as he did so peacefully and without causing a disruption… public officials have an obligation to follow the Constitution even in the midst of a contrary directive from a superior or in a policy.” The case will proceed to trial before a jury on September 9 to determine whether Cocchini’s rights were violated, and what restitution would be appropriate.
🏢 Oracle Headquarters Incoming Oracle is quietly moving its massive Nashville riverfront campus forward. The company has asked Metro planners to rezone nine East Bank acres from industrial to “mixed-use intensive,” paving the way for offices, apartments, and retail on a slice of the 70-plus acres it has pieced together for what chairman Larry Ellison calls Oracle’s future world headquarters. Since 2021, Oracle has spent about $379 million on land—most recently shelling out $60 million in March and $42 million in April—and it still plans to invest roughly $1.35 billion in a campus that could ultimately host 8,500 jobs designed by star architect Norman Foster.
While construction hasn’t started, the rezoning vote set for July 24 is the first tangible public step in months. Metro has formed a dedicated team to coordinate with Oracle, and, to stay on pace for its 2031 hiring commitment, the company has already leased more than 200,000 square feet of temporary downtown office space, including a fresh 60,000-square-foot sublease at Capitol View.
DEVELOPMENT
- Michelin-trained chefs plan Franklin bakery and restaurant (NBJ)
- Building that saw Cash, Bon Jovi and Reba make records listed for sale (Post)
- Gap to invest $58M in Gallatin facility (Post)
✹ REVIEW: THE PHOENICIAN SCHEME (2025)
With 2023’s Asteroid City, Wes Anderson fully waded into political terrain for the first time in his thirty-year career, offering up a COVID deathblow couched in his endlessly obsessive anti-tweeness. But the ageing hipster knives have long been out for Anderson–the allegations of one-trick ponyism that land with all the heft of someone calling Whole Foods “Whole Paycheck.”
As Anderson’s most insufferably pompous first generation fans ungracefully enter middle age, they’ve aimed their ire at the director they loved, not because he’s ever actually fallen into decline, but because they never reached the rarefied indie echelons to which they felt entitled before a dearth of talent and their fealty to designer politics ravaged their worlds.
Rather than offer up red meat for the base, Anderson’s latest, The Phoenician Scheme, dares a certain subset of its audience to dismiss it. As the prickly billionaire Zsa Zsa Korda (Benicio del Toro) enlists his estranged novitiate daughter (Mia Threapleton) to pull off a multibillion-dollar infrastructure project, Anderson navigates the pitfalls of unequivocal success and those that base their entire identities on hindering it. Addressing depictions of his indie excess as a distraction, Anderson has bent the Great Man movie toward his own style resulting in a film both slyly autobiographical and in line with the current sociopolitical climate.
As expected, Anderson trots out an enviable ensemble of stalwarts like Bill Murray, Willem Dafoe, Jeffrey Wright, and Scarlett Johansson as well as newish collaborators like Tom Hanks, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Micahel Cera. But despite the namebrand cast, the film’s most important characters are the faceless federal bureaucrats played by unknowns who manipulate global markets and foreign policy to ensure Korda’s failure and ultimate financial ruin.
The Phonecian Scheme isn’t an egocentric defense of its director. Nor is it a sympathetic portrayal or an evisceration of the Trumpian billionaire class. It’s a movie about where we are now that revels in the contradictions of its seemingly unlikable characters. In short, it does the business of art in a way most of Hollywood abandoned a decade ago.
The Phonecian Scheme is now playing in theaters.
THINGS TO DO
View our calendar for the week here and our weekly film rundown here.
📅 Visit our On The Radar list to find upcoming events around Nashville.
🎧 On Spotify: Pamphleteer's Picks, a playlist of our favorite bands in town this week.
👨🏻🌾 Check out our Nashville farmer's market guide.
TONIGHT
🎸 The Bug Club @ DRKMTTR, 8p, $18.87, Info
🎸 George Clark Shifflett III & His Big Country Orchestra @ Station Inn, 9p, $20, Info
🍀 Live Irish Music @ McNamara’s Irish Pub, 6p, Free, Info
🎸 Kelly’s Heroes @ Robert’s Western World, 6:30p, Free, Info
🎸 Open Mic @ Fox & Locke, 6:30p, Free, Info
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Today's newsletter is brought to you by Megan Podsiedlik (Nashville), Jerod Hollyfield (Crowd Corner), Camelia Brennan (Local Noise), and Davis Hunt (everything else).