Thoughts on watching ‘Nashville’

Nashville is my favorite show, but watching it sometimes feels like that old game where you say a word over and over until it stops being anything except a sound. That word is ‘strong.’

In the Nashville universe, everything you approve of is ‘strong’ and everything you disapprove of is ‘weak’ or done because the person is ‘afraid.’ Particularly, everything Rayna does is ‘strong,’ even when it contradicts what she did in the previous episode. Though I have no problem with this, because Rayna is perfect, I begin to wonder about the idea of strength after the thirtieth time I’ve heard it invoked.

‘Strong’ isn’t just a Nashville thing. Friends kept telling me I was ‘strong’ when I had cancer, even though all I was doing was lying in a hammock. I occasionally tell someone they’re ‘strong’ when I hear about problems they’e overcoming, secure that they will take it as a great compliment. It feels like an almost too intimate, too important comment to throw around a lot – at least that’s how it feels to me, though I see it used on my Facebook feed almost every week.

What does it mean when something becomes a culture’s go-to compliment? If today’s go-to compliment were ‘white,’ as it once was, we’d ask some pointed questions about it. If it were ‘a real man,’ as it once was, we’d have something to say about that.

‘Strong’ is harder to fit into a narrative of recognized prejudice, nor do I want to create a new one for it. All of us are sometimes strong and sometimes weak, but what does it mean when we enshrine our strong moments in a compliment and an identity we’re eager to claim, while discounting our weak moments? Life currently demands a lot of strength, I get that – but so what? Life currently demands a lot of money too, but we don’t compliment our friends by saying they’re ‘rich.’

How would life look if we turned this lens around? What if instead of finding ways to interpret people’s good actions as ‘strong,’ we applauded the parts of those actions that sprung from ‘weakness’? The fact that this seems like nonsense even as I type it just makes me more suspicious that I’ve been brainwashed, and more anxious to try breaking out of the ‘strong=good’ box.

I don’t even know what these words mean any more. I can only conceive of them in relative terms; the ‘strong’ usually overpower the ‘weak.’ That makes me even more nervous about the way we throw ‘strong’ around nowadays, as if we’ve forgotten that.

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