Those of us of a certain age will remember when the epitome of wit was reading your fortune cookie fortune aloud to your friends after a Chinese restaurant meal and adding the words “in bed” to the end of it. That was some wild, wacky stuff! For example: “Be slow to speak and quick to act … IN BED!”
You get the idea. Try it yourself with the following actual fortune cookie fortunes:
“An exciting opportunity lies ahead …”
“Your talents will be recognized and rewarded …”
“He who contains himself seldom does wrong …”
“Experience is the best teacher …”
See? Funny stuff, eh? No? Well, you probably had to be there … in bed. Har.
I bring all this up because fortune cookies made the news in the Mid-South last week — and even got some national coverage — thanks to Tennessee gubernatorial candidate (and current U.S. Senator) Marsha Blackburn’s first campaign commercial, which quickly went viral.
Unless you’ve been living in, oh, CHINA, you’re probably familiar with the ad. It begins with Marsha smirking smirkily as she fiercely enunciates and crumbles fortune cookies with her hands at a restaurant table. Marsha assures us she will be one tough cookie and will stop the CHINESE COMMUNISTS from taking over Tennessee’s precious farmland.
It’s like an SNL skit gone rogue. And it seems an odd way to start a campaign, especially given that official USDA data report that no Chinese-owned farms are officially registered as operating in Tennessee. And that’s probably because a couple years back, the Tennessee legislature passed a law that completely prohibits entities (and citizens) from countries trafficking in the international arms trade (which includes China) from holding property in the state.
But Marsha is not deterred by those alternate facts. She goes on to assure us that as governor she will “hunt down communists!” Really? Good luck finding a bunch of communists to hunt down in Tennessee, babe. And if you do catch a couple of those dirty Marxists communing out in Skeeter Falls, you should know it’s not illegal to be a communist. That darn First Amendment still kicks in.
When asked by the Nashville Banner what policies she would utilize to back her claims, Blackburn upped the ante: “Not only will I get rid of Chinese sister cities,” she said, “but I will also make certain that there are zero Confucius classrooms in Tennessee. … When I’m governor, China won’t be able to get their hands on one blade of grass in Tennessee.”
What a relief! Marsha will protect us from the Red Menace, and that includes “Confucius classrooms,” which haven’t been a thing for six years, since Marsha’s previous Chinese fear-mongering spree.
Given the current economic situation, one could reasonably expect Blackburn would announce plans to deal with increased healthcare costs and hospital closures, high gas prices, unaffordable housing, and public school funding being shuttled to private academies — concerns Tennesseans might rank a tad higher than an invasion of Chinese real estate brokers.
Fun fact: Fortune cookies were invented in the early 20th century by a Japanese restaurateur in San Francisco, not by the Chinese. And then there’s this little bit of irony: Wonton Foods, located in La Vergne, Tennessee, produces two million fortune cookies a day, one of the largest such manufacturing plants in the world. So, those cookies Marsha was rage-crumbling in that Nashville restaurant were likely made just down the road.
The ad ends with the sound of a gong (of course) and a waving “Lucky Cat” figurine, which is also Japanese in origin, not Chinese. But hey, if you’re going to go full Asian-cliché to try to appeal to racist morons, who needs to know that?
Does the senator really think Tennesseans are that stupid? Yes. Blackburn’s betting that a majority of the state’s voters will fall for the “furriners and colored people are taking your stuff” line one more time. And why not? Xenophobia has worked great for the current president, and Marsha proudly brags that she has “worked with President Trump to take on China,” so the game plan is pretty obvious — and has been since the Civil War. The old saying was never more accurate: Politics makes for strange, uh, bedfellows.
