Grit, Guts, & Glorious Winners

I spent a little too much time reading about meaningful and soul crushing things this weekend (read: Iraq). I’m stuck thinking that everything I could write about here doesn’t even scratch the surface of true relevance – a notion which I have contradictory feelings about even when I’m not in this mood. I don’t want to soil any sports that I actually care about by writing about them when I’m like this. So, I’m going to write about something I consider so irrelevant and I care so little about that I don’t give a fuck if I come off as a snarky, pretentious dick: Nascar.

I just glanced at SI’s and ESPN’s Nascar section to find something topical to bitch about. I couldn’t linger for long, my hippocampus was beginning to atrophy. Apparently, someone named Kyle won some race recently. I think he drove in circles for a couple of hours. That’s as far as I got, because just reading about Nascar makes me want to stab myself in the eyeballs.

I have a bad taste in my mouth related to Nascar. In my hometown, there were many fans of Nascar. In my hometown, there were many people growing up with me that held racist beliefs. There was overlap. A house with a Nascar flag on my bus route also flew the Confederate flag. During my time in high school, there was an incident involving several white students wearing shirts emblazoned with the term “White Pride” to school. This caused some nervous shuffling and staring at feet on the part of the administration until the kids were told to take their shirts off.

I later asked around about the controversy. I hoped to write a short piece for the school/community newspaper (bit of a story about why it’s both) about it. Wanting to be fair, I interviewed one of my peers that had worn one of the shirts. I asked him why they had worn the shirt, he replied, “Well, the niggers and spics can wear whatever pride shirts they want. I’m white, we should be proud of our race.” (Suffice to say, I gave up on the article.) He was wearing a hat emblazoned with the number 3. I later found out that was a Nascar hat.

So, I formed a pretty negative view of Nascar. Everything surrounding it just seems charged in a sort of pro-White, pro-male, pro-Confederate/South, pro-laissez-faire, pro-conservatism manner. There’s what, one female in Nascar? I remember the sports media making a huge deal that there was finally another black driver – in fucking 2004 there had only been two. As though that somehow represents progress. The executives, the sponsors, and the sport itself seem dedicated to a kind of culture that fosters ignorance, sexism, and racism.

And the fans just follow along in this bullshit. While googling for this piece of writing, I found this. That seems like something the racist fucks I went to school with would just eat up. And, from the extremely slow pace at which racing diversifies (Nascar seems perfectly fine with the lack of diversity), it seems like this segment of professional racing promotes an environment conducive to ignorance and racism among its fans.

To say what I’m pussyfooting around: near every person I’ve met that follows Nascar closely had – at the least – ignorant, hateful, racist views.  Since I have no hope of writing anything objective today, I’ll just state my own ignorant and hateful view that I know not to be true: Nascar fans are a all a bunch of stupid rednecks.

Now, I shouldn’t say this. I shouldn’t do this! I shouldn’t hold the belief that certain people are ignorant or stupid or or racist simply because they like watching a few cars drive in circles at high speed for hours. I shouldn’t utilize my experience with a few Nascar fans to form an opinion about all of them. I really don’t. I know it’s not true. Not every Nascar fan delights in racism and ignorance. I know this to be true.

However, I also know that the fans and participants in Nascar have overwhelmingly voted for and supported Republicans in recent years.  So, let me have my fun. Let me make some baseless observations. Let me get something out of my system, because if I don’t, I might just explode.

The Nascar fans voted Bush. The Nascar fans voted for many of the men and women behind the disaster that is the United States’ current foreign policy. They voted for the people that capitalized on fear to motivate military action. They voted for the people that sent us to Iraq on false (and often vaguely, if not explicitly, racist) pretenses.

The people the Nascar fans voted for have gotten us into a disaster, unmitigated and draining.