Petition to Rename Nashville International Airport After ME, Specifically

I want to be very clear about something before a single other word leaves my keyboard: I do not fly out of Nashville. I have never flown out of Nashville. I do not have current plans to fly out of Nashville. And YET. Governor Bill Lee of the great state of Tennessee has apparently decided, in some backroom, on some Tuesday, without so much as a courtesy phone call to me, that Nashville International Airport should be renamed after Dolly Parton. And I want to know — I NEED to know — who signed off on skipping me in that conversation.

This is not about Dolly Parton. Let me say that twice so it sinks in through whatever cotton wool passes for institutional listening these days: THIS. IS. NOT. ABOUT. DOLLY. PARTON. This is about a governance process, a naming committee, an airport authority, a STATE HOUSE, that apparently believes it can rename a piece of public infrastructure — a place where I, a taxpaying, boarding-pass-holding, overhead-bin-negotiating member of the American traveling public, could theoretically one day be forced to walk past a sign — without running it by me first. I was not surveyed. I was not polled. There was no comment period that reached my inbox, and believe me, I check my inbox obsessively, specifically for this kind of thing, because this is exactly the kind of thing that happens when nobody checks with me.

You want to rename an airport? Fine. FINE. I am not a monster. I am not opposed to honoring a woman who has, by all accounts, contributed tremendously to music, to Tennessee, to charitable literacy programs, to the general cultural fabric of this nation. That's not the issue. The issue is PROCESS. The issue is CONSENT. The issue is that somewhere there is a Tennessee state government employee — a manager, a director, an undersecretary of AIRPORT NOMENCLATURE, whoever holds that portfolio — and that person needs to get on a call with me, TODAY, and explain to my face why a decision of this magnitude was allowed to proceed without my sign-off.

Because here is what nobody in Nashville seems to understand: every time an institution makes a decision — ANY decision, a policy, a name, a font choice on a public sign — it is a decision made ABOUT ME, whether or not I am in the room, whether or not I am in the state, whether or not I have ever purchased a ticket on Southwest out of BNA. I am a citizen of this country. This airport exists within the borders of a country I also live in. That is called STANDING, and I have it, and I am invoking it now.

Do you know what it's like to open a news alert and just — absorb this? To learn that a sitting governor stood up, in public, and proposed slapping a new name on a whole airport, and the wheels were already turning, the discourse was already happening, cable news was already covering it, and I found out the SAME WAY EVERYBODY ELSE DID? Like a bystander? Like a member of the general public?? I refuse to be a member of the general public on issues that concern airports. That is not a category I consent to being placed in.

And don't tell me "it's just a name change, calm down," because I have heard that line before and it is ALWAYS a precursor to something worse. Today it's a name on a terminal. Tomorrow what — they change the boarding announcement chime without asking me? They redesign the long-term parking shuttle route without a town hall? Where does it end? WHO IS WATCHING THIS SLIPPERY SLOPE IF NOT ME? I have appointed myself the watchman on this wall and I am telling you, the wall is undefended, and I am exhausted, and no one is paying me for this, and I would like that noted for the record as well.

I want to speak to whoever runs the Tennessee state legislature's naming subcommittee, if such a subcommittee exists, and if it does not exist, I want to know why NOT, because clearly the current system — in which a governor can simply STAND UP at a podium and PROPOSE something like this — is a system with a gaping hole in it, and the hole is shaped exactly like a form I should have been allowed to fill out. Where is the form? I want the form. Send me the form. I will fill out the form in triplicate and I will not be gentle about it.

Let's talk about the AUDACITY required to rename a whole airport — a facility with RUNWAYS, with a CONTROL TOWER, with TSA CHECKPOINTS full of people just trying to get their shoes back on — and to do it in the name of "honoring" someone, as though honoring is a process that happens IN A ROOM SOMEWHERE ELSE, far away from me, without my input, my testimony, my carefully considered eight-paragraph statement on the emotional and civic weight of airport signage. I have THOUGHTS on airport signage. I have ALWAYS had thoughts on airport signage. Nobody has EVER asked me for them. And now, the one time it would have mattered — the one time a governor stood at a podium and reshaped the actual PROPER NOUN of an actual AIRPORT — nobody thought to check in. NOT ONE CALL. NOT ONE EMAIL. NOT SO MUCH AS A CARRIER PIGEON.

I am documenting this. I want that on the record too. I am keeping a file — a real, physical, manila file, because I do not trust the cloud with grievances this important — and in that file is this entire episode, timestamped, dated, cross-referenced with every other instance in which an institution has made a consequential decision without first passing it by me for review and, ideally, notarized approval. This file is getting long. This file could, at this point, be adapted into a limited series. And every single time I add a new page to it, I think: this is the last straw. And then somehow, some institution, somewhere, finds a way to hand me ANOTHER straw. Tennessee, today, you handed me a straw. A big one. Shaped like an airport.

So here is my ultimatum, and I want it understood as exactly that — an ultimatum, non-negotiable, extremely serious: I want a hearing. I want it public. I want it livestreamed. I want the Governor's office, the state legislature, and whatever regional airport authority currently holds jurisdiction over Nashville International to appear before a panel — my panel, a panel I will assemble, made up of people who understand the sanctity of not being blindsided — and explain, on the record, why this proposal moved forward without a single check-in with the traveling public, represented, in this instance, by me, personally, as head delegate of an association of one.

Until that hearing happens, I am escalating. I don't yet know to whom. There may not currently exist an office positioned to receive an escalation of this particular size and shape. If that office does not exist, IT NEEDS TO BE CREATED, and I am available, on relatively short notice, to staff it.

Rename the airport. Sure. Honor Dolly. Absolutely, why not, she seems to have earned it fair and square through decades of demonstrable public contribution, unlike certain governors I could name who simply STAND UP one day and MOVE THINGS without consulting the people those things are supposedly for. But before a single letter of new signage goes up over that terminal, somebody in Nashville owes me a phone call. I am home most evenings. I am waiting by the phone. The phone, notably, has not rung.

This is not over. This is never over. I am watching every runway in this country now, and I do not blink.

— Alice, Unconsulted