Saltine Jihad Goes to the Races

I'm just going to excerpt a bit. We already knew this, sorta, that the great mass of unwashed, beer bellied Bush voters are racist scum.

Why America Loves NASCAR
(Hint: Because it's not black.)
by David Wright
October 14th, 2005 7:31 PM

By Nicholas Powers

By saying NASCAR isn't black, I mean it isn't African American. And NASCAR is not at all black: Not in the cockpits of the stockcars; not on the pit crews; rarely, if at all, among the multitudes filling the 160,000-seat speedway stands. It's considered an all-American sport, inclusive and meritocratic, but to see it on TV or in person, it does have a certain flavor.
Not all of America loves NASCAR. It's mostly those who live in the "red" swath of middle America, an area that includes the South and the Southwest and that helped elect George Bush last November. These are the ones who punched Dubya's chad, the ones who did so purportedly as a vote for "values." So significant is this group that television networks are increasingly gearing their programming toward it.

Last fall, ESPN presented a biopic on the life of the late NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt. The movie, 3, casts Earnhardt (Barry Pepper) as the idealized "American Everyman." He grows up in blue-collar poverty, with racing as his single-minded passion (father-inspired). Neither love (women, inexplicably, are drawn to him like country singers to whining lyrics) nor children (he fathers a passel, abandoning some with brooding regret but no apparent damage done to any of the parties involved) can keep him out of the cockpit and away from his destiny with all-American herodom. Throughout he remains blissfully unaware (and, remarkably, utterly untouched) by the historical moment.

This is, after all, the 1950s, '60s, and '70s South. Yet, though the movie is set largely in North Carolina during an era when Southern society was in violent turmoil, black characters are missing altogether from 3. In fact, African Americans, as a group, are referenced just once in the movie, in an anecdote about delivering moonshine to the "black" neighborhood (not the "colored," "negro," or, probably more accurately to the speech of poor whites of that period, "nigger" side of town). African Americans, both then as well as now, make up a significant component of the culture and landscape of the South. Even so, the scriptwriters wrote blacks out of the narrative. The NASCAR audience, they seem to be saying, would not mind the absence. (Ironically, the network's TV ad closed with the tag-line: "One man, one sport, one nation.")

Where this idealized "Dale Earnhardt" is Everyman, today's American Sportsman has become, in Sly Stone parlance, Everyday People. That is to say, he's black. Specifically, urban black: hiphop; flamboyantly flashy; naturally gifted but lazy. The American Sportsman/black athlete personifies the opposite of the values that the NASCAR fans seem to hold dear. As opposed to the NASCAR driver presented in 3, a white man who leathers his hands working with tools and relying on his daring to earn victories, the American Sportsman/black athlete squanders his God-given talent and is loud-talking and brash. He is a millionaire whiner who complains about how inadequate is his pay (Latrell Sprewell), or who brawls with paying fans (Ron Artest). He is lascivious, perhaps even a rapist (Kobe Bryant). And there's reason to think he's a cheat (Barry Bonds). The 2004 US Olympic basketball team—which, despite boastful predictions, won only Bronze—represents the worst of the American Sportsman and, like that shamed team, has brought disgrace on the country before the entire world.

You get the picture. It's an easy picture to see as you are inundated with it and attendant images in the media daily.

This picture is a map of the detail between looting darkies in post Katrina New Orleans and white hurricane survivors just trying to find some grits and bacon.

It’s the imaginary rapes in the super dome and the young black kid who, after being left to die for 4 days, fired a shot from his roof to get attention from lag behind rescuers, but because of his race was accused of shooting at the rescue helicopter.

It's the same difference between repulsive, sexist pig, blues man thieving Rolling Stones spewing misogynist vitriol about women and Snoop Dog doing the same thing, only the white media crucifies Snoop for it while Sirius Satellite Radio removes the world music channel in favor of an all Rolling Stones all the time station. (I don't want to hear the woman bashing shit from anyone but COME ON. It isn't just black rappers who do it and not all black rappers do it anyway. And at least the young black rappers have the energy and testosterone to make good their sexual threat, unlike the senior discount Rolling Stones who bore my ass off and are so 20 minutes ago I can barely care enough to get good and pissed off.)

It is an infinite loop of double standard and no matter what black folk do, the same crackers will embrace the same saltine, Bush loving, pick-up truck, Toby Keith world view, because God's grace gives them permission to look down on someone as they choke on their own arrogant, ethnocentric bile, and still get into heaven at the end of the day.

It is the sealed expectation of one about the other. It is a cancer on America's nervous system, just like homophobia, and has been used to manipulate the perceptions and votes of those who appear unable to think critically for whatever reason, and those who are unable to feel much of anything other than ME FIRST GODDAMNIT!

And the media just keeps feeding it.