The Disappearances (It Was the Best of Times, It Was the End of Times)

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Did you see the way that A.J. Allmendinger came out of nowhere on Lap 180 of the Southern 500 at Darlington last Saturday night, brakes gone, failed or simply exhausted trying to gain purchase on that tough, rough track, spinning on the apron and then arrowing backwards straight up track at Turn Three directly into the path of the No. 48 of Jimmie Johnson, causing a race-ending collision for the  No. 48 — Johnson’s third of the year — and perhaps sending the No. 48 team into the downwinding spiral out of Cup contention, allowing someone else — at last, at last — a chance to stand there in the media sea and falling confetti and chaste smiles of a Sprint Cup girl — one, maybe two, maybe all three of them – the championship limelight shifted, for sure, perhaps, under the skirts of the Lady in Black?

When a four-time champion falls, is the stock-car racing world rearranged, with new potencies and alliances and dramas to follow? Or does the silver-blue No. 48 Lowe’s Chevy cast an icy shadow, like so much pack ice falling into the sea that we all eventually drown? Is he simply leading the way for the rest of NASCAR’s lemmings?

I know, I know: Way too early to be reading last rites on Team 48, pal. Or on NASCAR. But fadings and disappearances have their own lucency and draw, as if a recently-emptied door has more presence than the lush figure who moments ago was filling it before deciding (or being asked) to go. It’s a backwards way of reading the times-somewhat guilty, somewhat erotic, bittersweet and bluesy for sure–but reading it the other way may not even be possible any more. Things are changing way too fast for foresight to pay off in any way, though it must, it must.

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Have you ever watched a miles-long ice shelf, almost blue it’s so white, fall slowly and serenely into the regal sea, so much ice and snow that you could fit the state of Delaware (and Sunday’s coming race in Dover) into the tumbling pack, a polar firmament letting go of her lover’s hand, sinking away into oblivion? There is nothing so beautiful or fatal than that descent; or is it that the tragic fall is always the so tender and gorgeous and heartbreaking? One by one the ice shelves fall, like white-laced suicides, day and night, week after week, year after year, world without end, world towards its end, at least the world which sustained the human species for three going on four million years.

In the sum of these disappearances there’s a toll — a deadly one, for those persist in living on the world’s coastlines — but that’s for tomorrow, or the next: for now, it’s just so damn beautiful, so akin to something hard to name, like watching the better half of your heart break away and drift off on its tiny floe, waving goodbye in the last of your own life’s light, going, going, gone.

Weather is what happens tomorrow; climate is what occurs over the next century. As a fretful occupant of the moment, with limited peripheral vision for the big picture, a cold winter in Florida or a pack of blizzards in the Northeast seems to refute the notion of global warming; what is now is forever, right? How sadly true of human perception, so lost in its moment (and that can include a moment packed with reveries for the past) …

Maybe if I were up in the Arctic Circle for a summer watching the entire ice pack melt away, destroying the habitat of polar bears (watch them drift off on the floes,  furry white flakes of extreme existence no longer able to sustain in a world which has warmed just far enough to drop them in the drink): such disappearances are out of view of Central Florida, which is cool this morning — 68 degrees in May is so unusual — and is so comforting in my central vision that I forget the rest, the world just up or down the street, over to the coasts where worried residents now watch the sea on pristine-ish beaches, waiting for the black cloud to arrive out of the blue.

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Can you see beyond the horizon of your own dailiness to perceive what’s happening beyond, in the sky, at the poles, in deepest water? For me, the proper calibration of what is called climate I have to forget the sweet southern-belle drawl of jasmine in full bloom on the massive vine which crawls up the fireplace just beyond the opened window behind me as I write this morning.

Rilke wrote in his Sonnets to Orpheus,

–Learn

To forget that passionate music. It will end.
True singing is a different breath, about
nothing. A gust inside the god. A wind.
(transl. Stephen Mitchell)

Have you heard that deeper, wilder, sadder, most gorgeous singing? It’s sad and sweet — like the Lady in Black in some beat-up trailer in the rural backwaters outside Darlington, sewing back up her torn skirts after her lovers have fled, humming along to a Hank Williams song on the radio — yet deep and resonant, like the throat of the sea in a large crashing wave, or the voice of Hamlet’s Father walking on the ghostly frozen ramparts of Dunsinane in the darkest rooks of the night.

Have you seen with eyes calibrated for time’s disappearances? It requires a lens with the focal distance of our grandparents eyes – all of mine have been dead for 20 years – rocking on porches in summer light watching fireflies more numerous than stars flash their semaphores into the crepuscular saturate of dusk (so red and gold and dark, like the sunburst finish of a drowned Gibson J-45 guitar), remembering the world of their parents, wholly lost to oblivion to my mind but living on somehow in my genes, my thought, this post.

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To my present eyes I can’t piece together exactly how the world has changed – nor how much – in this past century: but send me my great-grandparents’ eyes from their collective oblivion and I may truly see the true depth of our latter history’s field. And be truly terrified.

It’s taken just a hundred years –about 3 one-hundred-thousandths of the tall of our whole history as a species — to go from a world where horses pulled buggies to one where Sprint Cup buggies hurled round tracks with a thousand horses under their hoods; to go from where news showed up in the papers weeks after events occurred to the howl of the 24-hour news cycle; from the first labored flights of rudely-cobbled planes to crawlers on Mars and telescopes in the orbit of earth taking pictures of deepest space; from births which were damn difficult to births now infected with more than 300 chemical contaminants, giving a cancerous taint to the placental wash and splash of mother’s milk; from the the first oil expeditions into the Gulf of Mexico to look for oil, to the oil-infected sink that sea is fast becoming.

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The Wright Brothers take humanity into the air on Dec. 17, 1903, for 12 seconds and 120 feet, allowing a view of horizons not yet seen; the Hubble Telescope orbiting the earth, peering ever deeper into the horizonless margins of knowable space.

If I had the eyes of a century, so much would be apparent — probably too terrifying, but amazing too in its sweep, one which becomes a swoon and then a blur as the rate of technological change became an exponential, the relatively slow rising line of human history become a Dow spike of a summit of a housing bubble of a jet of fire out of a burning oil rig, rising so fast there is no longer any way to measure it. Rising out of sight.

But as the descendent of an ape I can only see the predatory snakes in the grass at my feet, in this day, a horde of quibbles and fears and anxieties and lusts which overwhelm my vision with dailiness. It’s why evolutionary scientists say that homo sapiens was a lousy pick for dominion – possessing foreskins, yes, which are removable, but no foresight greater than the next day or week or maybe a year. No foresight to plan for what obviously coming; it makes lousy parents and grandparents and great-grandparents of us, blaming the kids for what we allowed to happen.

Oh well. I just soothe myself on the milk of this early morning in May 2010 which feels as pristine and whole as childhood, aloof to every way in which my body, my world, the heavens are disappearing. The jasmine’s in bloom; what else could matter at this moment?

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Did you see the footage of the burning of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig? A gusher of flame, a spout of lava from a burning whale, a Roman candle vomiting weird phosphor into the night sky. The fireboats surrounding it sprayed tiny fountains of water which seemed as ineffective as wishing the Eyjafjallajokul volcano in Iceland would stop its spew of ash into the skies which drift to Europe.

So futile: and so balletic, as all destructions are, ferried to us in the Cinemascope of our imaginations (where the curtains of distraction are ever falling, their scarlet brocade woven of ten million channels on TV and endless tablets of Oxycontin, of MySpace and porn and Grand Theft Auto and text messages, threads beyond count of inchoate jisms of ones and zeros).

With the theater disappearing so fast that we have no proper digestion for single events –was it yesterday that the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico? Iceland’s volcano spumed? that earthquakes shook Mexicali? and Chile? and Haiti?, that blizzards buried the Northeast and oranges  froze on every citrus tree in Florida?

Soon the disappearances lose their distinction in the torrent, and we are no more able to slow or stop the exodus as those tiny tugs could put out the Deepwater Horizon fire jetting high into the contemporary night.

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Deepwater Horizon was, until it exploded, on the verge of being announced as a great victory for the oil industry, tapping some 50 to 100 million barrels of crude in the Macando Field, a lode of oil and gas under 5,000 feet of water and 13,000 feet of rock. Thus the handle of the rig, working at a horizon so deep — a mile beneath the perky, sun-reflecting surface where pleasure boats filled with millionaires and iced vodka and perky-nippled naiads sunbathe in the nude on the upper deck. So deep that we have as much experience working in its abyssal troughs as we do in outer space.

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The Deepwater Horizon on happier days; what was down there before spuming oil started killing everything off.

At such depths as the Deepwater Horizon was working, the pressures are intense: we’re fisting into a core of the earth which grazes the great molten sea at this world’s heart, life hundreds of millions of years old fallen and decayed and hammered and brewed over the eons. Oil is the tarry, molasses-thick blood of ancient death. It’s one thing to drill down a few hundred, even a thousand feet of earth to hit a pocket of such goop; another to risk penetrating the core of Mother Earth scrabbling for a tankful of that food upon which combustion engines feed.

Usually all goes well enough, but when an environmental accident occurs–like at Chernobyl or Bhopal or Love Canal–a single instance, like a 1,000-year flood or a big meteor stirke-a single thing gone wrong counterbalances the entire big-money effort weighing down the other pan.

As it proves in the bitter clarity of hindsight, it seems that those depths and pressures were too intense for the precautionary measures in our technology, or at least the ones we require the industry to take (or asked industry to police themselves with rather than be regulated.) At such depths, our measures are sorely tested; and were on the night of April 20, when something – a big bubble of methane gas, apparently – escaped up through the stopgaps and rose up to the surface and blew everything hell, the inferno a multiplication table of depth times pressure times hubris.

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Two days later, on April 22, the 40th anniversary of the first Earth Day — founded in response to the Santa Barbara oil spill of the previous year — the 396-foot-long, 256-foot-wide rig collapsed and sank to the bottom of the gulf, some 5,000 feet down.

Hard ironies choir as, ever since, we’ve watched containment measures fail and fail and fail, as a quarter of a million gallons of oil spew out of the shattered pipe into the Gulf. Do you remember the chant “Drill, baby drill!” at Tea Party gatherings? Indeed. Can you remember events of a decade past? There’s Vice President Dick Cheney behind closed doors with oil industry executives at the start of the Bush administration, telling them to “have at it, boys,” as NASCAR officials have green-lighted track mayhem. (One of the items that was apparently discussed in the meeting was allowing Gulf rigs to forego the costly blowout preventers.)

The slick hangs off shore, like a dead body in the water, killing what isn’t seen – all the sea life which now chokes in its habitat – and darkening the dreams of Katrina-harrowed coastal residents with the invasion of this next body-snatcher, up from an alien abyss where all the rules are different and zeal – this time, for energy independence – hastened us into catastrophe.

I heard one official say the other day to an agonized fisherman – Gulf fishing is being annihilated – “You want that oil out there, or on shore?” Of course we save our own parishes, but what about the parishes of the deep? Who cares about what we can’t see, is not blooming with the jasmines right now? The surface of the sea looks perky enough in sunlight, what do we care about the emptying space below?

And like Katrina, thought the initial pyrotechnics were the most photogenic, the lingering aftermath is what truly kills the spirit of a land. And sea.

Happy Earth Day, indeed.

psace

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British Petroleum execs are quick to point out that they had 1,500 successful rig projects in the Gulf before Deepwater Horizon. Do any of them count against the coming hurricane of earth shit, interred like a ghoul from a grave so deep its occupant thought it would be forever safe from our prying hands, swirls out there in the Gulf, hovering offshore, its direction unsure just like a stalled cyclone?

Maybe Louisiana’s wetlands or the Florida Panhandle. Maybe it will drift a bit to the south and get picked up the Gulf Stream and round Florida to descend upon beaches in Miami and Fort Lauderdale, Melbourne and Cocoa and Daytona. We can’t know, yet, and BP execs aren’t about to say out loud what they fear the most. Corporate and old policy and Tea Party lips are tight and silent, praying to dodge the bullet they fired into the earth, hunting for ghostly remains of dead dinosaurs.

How do you like the waiting? Does it hover over your day the way it does mine, like a great manta in the sky, wings so slowly, slowly flapping, a destiny which has yet to claim its mark while the corporate bigwigs for BP and Haliburton and Transocean point their bony fingers at each other before honest and productive souls in Congress, whispering, like three bad boys caught throwing eggs at traffic from an overpass, its not my fault, it’s his fault, or his …

For the rest of us, we wait and watch, suspecting that another disappearance is staging its long, slow, dramatic fall, a shelf of beaches and sea life which was already fragile and endangered and sold to someone with more money than God slipping forever from view, replaced by shores of crude.

A deepshit horizon, wouldn’t you say?

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Are you old enough to remember the pre-digital world? Back before text-a-whirling smart phones, before iPods and social networking, before the Internet and personal computers, before hand-held calculators and Casio digital watches-I mean, back when I was in grade school in the 1960s, we used slide rules to do our math equations, when we were permitted to use any calculating device at all.

I remember my slide rule, white with an intricate matrix of numbers sprawled across its girth, with that sliding middle piece that went out like an erection and a crosshair encased in clear plastic which gave the irrefutable evidence that ax2 + bx + c = a Big Fat Zero, buddy, which was me at aged 10, the fat nerd a year ahead of the rest of his class (I’d gone to a school in a predominately Jewish suburb and then the family relocated to Evanston, where Dewey Elementary was seventy percent black), who got beat up routinely by everyone from my older brother (who had been put back a grade for learning difficulties, so though we were two years apart we were in the same grade) and anyone else who needed to enjoy a sure-fire asskicking to relieve the daily tank of rage. (Chicago in the 60s was a magmatic corrosive on the hearts and minds of its large African-American population.)

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Up in my room (where I spent most of my childhood), I read Tom Swift books and pretended I was James Bond. I dissected crickets in formaldehyde and looked at their mangled parts in my microscope, pretending I had a clue of what I was looking at. I had a chemistry set in the basement (where my parents thought an explosion would do the least damage), but I feared to go down there because we kids all believed there was a skeleton in the coal bin. I’d cooerce the Eskimo girl who had been adopted by someone down the street to come lay on my bed and watch my goldfish together while I put my hand down her pants. On the radio WLS played “Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones and “I Got You Babe” by sonny and Cher and “Stop! In the Name of Love” by The Supremes.”

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One of the fad toys of the time were hexa-flexagons, origami-like computational contraptions of paper which spilled out numbers which someone deemed oracular, deep-water integers which interpreted, for better or ill, the fate of our little personal worlds. Does she love me, does she not? Open-close, open-close, open-close, work the folds: 36. Will my parents divorce? Repeat procedure: 3. Will I become James Bond when I grow up? The flaps open and close like a squid’s sharp beak, about to devour us entire: 12.

(How vast and wild my imagination when I listened to the 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea soundtrack on a record put out by Disney! To think of dying in deep water, drifting down down down, the immensity of emptiness and cold and pressure without a breath of air to take like long squid arms hauling me down to a place which gave me nightmares … And why night, the dark mare or horse is also the black mere or sea, and nixies are water-horses, or nightmarish men who ride horses over waves – there’s one of them on my father’s family crest, the old Gaelic name of the family taken by my younger brother before he died, drowning in his shattered heart …)

The numbers were there plain as day though what they meant was wholly arbitrary, a complex mud for simple interpretations. Like believing the stars foretell our fates, or that the topography of a lover’s face bore a spiritual physiognomy, ley-lines of sex and lies and disappearances out that final door of every sad affair.

The digital age was slowly gestating in 1965. The first glass fiber cables were being used in IBM punch card readers. Digital Equipment Corporation introduced the PDP-8, the first microcomputer, used primarily to interface to telephone lines for time-sharing systems. Ted Nelson coined the word “hypertext” in a paper presented to the ACM 20th National conference-“nonsequential writing” “that branches and allows choice to the reader.” Blogs are supposed to be the  quintessential hypertexting environment–others certainly are–but to me there’s enough intertextuality within a post to keep a reader busy.

A prototype of the mouse was developed (made of wood and metal wheels), so was the first cache memory chip used in mainframes and minicomputers; and IBM started shipping its 360 computer family, a series of computers which had the unique ability of talking to each other.

So the digital age was happening in 1965. Just one in my field of vision could imagine it, except Tom Swift, who was living in the future way back in 1935. Hell, “Star Trek” hadn’t even come out, yet.

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But it was coming, the digital age I mean, with its billion-fold strands of 1 and zero code, alliterative scrawls the size of ocean waves smashing through a culture, the times.

I first came, I think, watching the fish with that Eskimo girl, rubbing myself against her as we watched those fish swim and swim, our breaths heavy and hurried and strange.

My hexaflexagon couldn’t have predicted that moment. Neither could it predict the moment we are living in today, though all of the numbers were surely there.

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And I still use my hexaflexagon to crunch the numbers, in my head at least; but now they don’t add up and I can’t import a meaning onto them. The numbers are the meaning, as menacing as they are moronic.

But then, it’s always been the dipshit horizon for me ….

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Two words are inextricably mixed into my memory of using that hexa-flaxagon, I remember a teacher in my 7th grade math class talk about the discovery of the largest numbers ever. There is googol – ten to the hundredth power, or the number one followed by 100 zeroes — a number which gives a sense of scale to the number of subatomic particles in the visible universe (back in 1938, when Edward Kasner was writing Mathematics and the Imagination. His nephew Milton Sirotta came up with the name; other, more proper names for this big-ass number include ten duotrigintillion and ten thousand sexdecillion.

As Emerson suggested in “Circles,” if you think you’ve found a limit, you just located a periphery to launch from in search of the next. So there’s googolplex – ten to the power of googol, or the number one followed by googol zeroes. How big is googolplex? According to Carl Sagan, there isn’t enough space in the known universe to write such a number out in longhand. Lucky for us, I guess, that known space is so small compared to dark space and parallel or string space, the unknowable and the indefinable providing a limit where you might be able to cram, hell, a googolplex-googolplex, a Mardi Gras of numerals with more bared breasts than there may be stars.

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The naiads of the deep space horizon, thanks to the Hubble Telescope.

When I think of that old hexa-flexagon I used to crunch out what I prayed would be a destiny better than my lousy childhood’s day, the flexing motion I somehow think of as googol, googol-plex. Who knew I was querying a search engine which wouldn’t be available in the known (and online) world til 1998, and whose corporate headquarters in in Mountain View, California. Google is the search engine of choice for most computer users (about 146 million users every month), indexing billions of Web pages and using complex algorhythms to read my querying mind and come up with the best hits, usually the pages everyone else links to (what the hive determines is God is God.)

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Google and Googol-plex, the search engine company’s iniquitous – or  ubiquitous? – den in Mountain View, Calif.

What else to manage the unknowable universe of cyberspace? But back then, googol and googol-plex were incantory phrases for desire and its ends: whether Lauren Knipmeyer would say yes to a date to go bowling some Saturday afternoon; whether my parents would stay together, whether I would become a doctor or a scientist or spy like James Bond. No, no, no, no, no, no: Hindsight always knows the answers to such questions, but my hexa-flexagon was nippled with possibility and inked with outcomes more dramatic than the mundane life I ended up living.

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Googol, googol-plex: Such numbers are large enough to absorb the monstrous sums now devouring our world.

Let’s say you get cancer – 1.4 million Americans do, every year. The average expenditure for cancer treatment is about $300 thousand, and about half that number will die — 118 out of a thousand Americans, or one on ten).

Did you know that you were hatched with almost all the lethal carcinogens already present in that tiny pumping heart of yours? A recent President’s Cancer Panel researchers have found some 300 contaminants — industrial chemicals, consumer product ingredients, pesticides and pollutants from burning fossil fuels — in the umbilical cord blood of newborn babies.

In a report released May 5th, the panel (appointed originally by President Bush) declared:  “The American people — even before they are born — are bombarded continually with myriad combinations of these dangerous exposures.” Blaming the situation on weak laws, lax enforcement and fragmented authority, as well as the existing regulatory presumption that chemicals are safe unless strong evidence emerges to the contrary, the panelists advised President Obama “to use the power of your office to remove the carcinogens and other toxins from our food, water, and air that needlessly increase health care costs, cripple our nation’s productivity, and devastate American lives.”

Damned from the git-go.

Googol, googol-plex: No one can hex or flex us outta this one.

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Do these numbers scare you, too?

• The national debt, including state and local governments, is somewhere around $12 trillion dollars.

• The average American carries about $100 thousand in mortgage, credit card debt and loans–$300 trillion dollars.

• One in the Americans are at least 40 percent fatter than their normative weight (that means they’re obese).

• Medicare expenses this year are expected to total $450 million. Over the next ten years, Medicare is expected to cost about $6.4 trillion dollars.

Big numbers. Not quite googol-maybe not ever-but try Googling them  in just a few years.

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Do you wonder if there’s a global equivalent to obesity? I’m thinking of debt-ridden economies like our own, like in Great Britain and Ireland and Iceland and Greece. Have you watched the rioting in Greece this week over austerity measures lowered, like a doom, onto the populace by the government? Or see the 1,000-point downward spike in the Dow Jones for a single hour on May 6 as fears of a Greek default gripped Europe?

Is such debt related to other bloated attitudes, like Dick Cheney’s casual, even arrogant attitude toward raping the ecology which resulted in so much deregulation and hand-tying of agencies whose job it is to make sure companies don’t do exactly that?

Maybe man’s mastery over matter is the very cause of obesity; all of those labor-saving devices just make it easier to sit and do very little (see me, frozen in place here as my fingers tap tap tap tap tap tap away). Such benefit for mankind is Old-Testamental,the old phallocentric deal where God gives man dominion over the earth. The Tea Party to me is bunch of angry white dudes who are the aging equivalent of skinheads, become a monkey wrench of rage against progressives, against whole-earthers, against the Robin Hood-headed politicos who try to point government policy toward levellng the financial field so more can benefit (rather than clear-cutting the earth to haul out the coal). NASCAR is of that indulgence, a fool’s dance begun with the attempt to survive a southern white man’s old, stolen privilege, to drink and drive fast and lynch niggers and screw whoever they want to. That’s the octane to it, the inspirational booze. And the conflict is that such privilege is gone, tossed on the landfill of history, festering along with too much technology and dispossessed Islamics and a global ecology and economy that’s rotting.

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Moses “The Dominionator” parts the Red Sea; Dick “Dr. Evil” Cheney blackens the Gulf.

As the fatty oil spill crisis in the Gulf spreads, it deepens and worsens, hanging out there just getting bigger, growing a threat no one’s willing to fully name yet. British Petroleum on May 8 announced that their first attempt at containing the source of the spill had failed. A concrete funnel the size of a 4-story house had been lowered 5,000 feet to reach the spill and icelike hydrates, a slushy mixture of gas and water, had clogged the opening at the top. They’ll try again, perhaps using heated water or methanol inside the dome, but no one is sure if it will ever work. Containment boxes like this have been used before on leaking pipes, but never at this depth.

Soon they’ll lower a smaller, similiar containment device called a tophat, hoping that those sludgy icy hydrates won’t form. They may not, and they may. No one can claim much expertise working in the abyss.

(image: BP’s tophat, which looks a lot better on Britney Spears, whose fortunes are being greatly impinged on by the oily dreck of Lady Gaga. But more on that later.)

Meanwhile, about 210,000 gallons of oil spumes out of the broken pipe every day. Though the massive slick has yet to reach any shore along the Gulf, tar balls from the spill have washed ashore in Dauphin Island, Alaska.

Rigs in the Gulf aren’t required to be outfitted with remote-control switches used in North Sea oil rig operations which could have been used as a last-resort solution in such spills. The decision not to burden the industry with the cost of these switches (around $500,000) was made in the secretive energy task force headed by then-Vice President Dick Cheney.

Leather-suited Sarah Palin-looking more and more like a cheesecake Fox announcer (oh yeah, she is) made no mention of Cheney in her latest Facebook post on the matter, blaming “foreign” companies as the culprits. Palin said she repeats the slogan “‘drill here, drill now’ not out of naivete or disregard for the tragic consequences of oil spills… (but) because increased domestic oil production will make us a more secure, prosperous, and peaceful nation.”

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Still, I’d like to have that hexa-flexagon to ask these questions, even though I already suspect I know the answers:

• Will the oil spill hit Florida? (Yes.)
  
• Will Jimmie Johnson win a fifth consecutive championship this year? (Not if Denny Hamlin can help it, and he can.)
  
• Will one of my family, or my wife’s family, die this year? (Beats me.)
  
• Will the disappearances include these very words?  (Yep.)
  
• Will anyone care? (Yo, exactly what URL are you screaming from?)

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According to Google’s  index of hot search trends as of May 11, 2010 – that would be the midnight-to-5 a.m. shift, since this installment of the greater post is being drafted on this day — this is what’s on a lot of people’s querying minds:

1.caddyshack soundtrack

2.daffys

3.emma the amish model

4.genesis 2 24

5.vernon jordan

Most of this comes from the pop-cultural mind: “Caddyshack Soundtrack” must refer to American Idol contestant Christine Bowersox’s rendition on May 10 of “I’m All Right,” and Emmy the Amish Model was a gal who appeared on Howard Stern’s radio show the same night. Christian anxiety picks up with the Genesis bible verse – “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh” (King James version) and refers, apparently, to the reason why the Supreme Court cannot allow gay marriage, and why any Supreme Court nominee from Barack Obama must be fought with every tool in the shed, including shotguns and scythes, if necessary.

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“American Idol”-to-be Christine Bowersox.

The list from the full day previous – May 10 – shows the following top five searches:

1. century 21 department store

2. christine staub

3.frank frazetta

4.erica blasberg

5.melissa huckaby

Now we get to workday manias, like shopping (Century 21 is line of department stores which sell high-end stuff at TJ Maxx scale); Christine Staub is the daughter of Danielle Staub, who is one of the Real Houswives of New Jersey – a gal of 16 who has eclipsed her mother’s notoriety by becoming cover model (here we get a bit of mother-daughter enmity, soap-operatic mojo to opiate the drone of household chores); fantasy artist Frank Frazetta died yesterday, and Erica Blasberg was a 25-year-old LPGA golfer of small fame who was found dead on May 9, with all the mystery surrounding her death (sucide? murder?) getting the Net’s wires trembling; and Melissa Huckaby is the California teacher who, on May 9, entered a guilty plea in the abduction, alleged rape and murder of 8-year-old Sandra Cantu, thereby avoiding the death penalty.

Go figure.

Enquiring minds gotta know, especially the dirt.

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A Frank Frazetta fantasy print – more pop than we could have imagined. Frazetta died May 10 at age 82 following a stroke – not his, but the Reaper he so well imagined.

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I’d like to query that hexa-flexagon with these questions, even though, as before, I already know the answers. They aren’t Google-answers, but their wisdom speaks googol, affording me the comfort of infinity:

• Will I ever get properly — read indecently — laid again? (Googol, googol-plex.)

• Will I make a contribution worth the living anyway? (You already have. You’ve lived.)

• Will it all end in 2012, or with the Christian Rapture? (No, but don’t count out mass extinction due either to a stray meteorite or digital implosion)

• Is there no limit to the number of zeroes in nothing? (No)

• Is there no limit to what we still must endure? (Oh, shut up.)

• Will I ever learn to write a short post? (Does papal bull take a shit in the woods?)

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Do you think that pop music is a dying ember? The recording industry has become perhaps the worst victim of the digital age. Since 2000, music sales have fallen from $26.5 billion to $17 billion in 2009. People can download music for free from all over the Net–not legally (but who cares about that in cyberspace?) but enough. Pay-per-song industries like iTunes have had some success, but not enough to counter the catastrophic fall in CD sales.

Artists aren’t making money on sales of their music; rather they get it from touring. U2 earned $123 million for their 2009 U.S. tour, selling some 1.3 million tickets. Bruce Springteen ($94 million), Elton John and Billy Joel ($88 million) and Britney Spears ($82 million) all did well, too.

But do the math: If you wanted to see U2 last year, tickets cost on average $71 dollars. That’s a pretty expensive date to indulge in songs you once believed in and could even, when drunk enough, dance to.

These days, chart success is fleeting and fast. Nothing stays on the charts for too long any more. Wonder where all but one or two “American Idol” winners ended up? In the same oblivion shared by anyone else trying to make a buck singing their songs.

But there are exceptions. One is Lady Gaga, pop’s latest sensation. Her past two albums have sold 12 million copies.

In his article, “The Last Pop Star” in the latest issue of Atlantic Monthly, James Parker describes first Pop and then the Pop sensation which is Gaga, both in terms which scream the proud irrelevance of fashion and a demeanor which must, perforce, eat its young:

At the heart of Pop, real Pop, is a white-hot blank. It sizzles into materiality in the form of this body or that body, this voice or that voice; it drapes itself in allusions, symbols, trinkets, scraps of dazzlement. I t can enter the world in triumph, with a bang, in a flash of beauty; or sordidly and crappily, filtering from the ceiling of a Taco Bell or glimpsed on a screen through somebody’s lonely apartment window, a dismal flickering. It seeps into conversations, your everyday chitchat – “Did you hear …?” “Have you seen…? – and you talk about it as if under a compulsion, like a sleepwalker, the syllables strange on your tongue. Plenty to say about Pop (although it repels intelligent commentary) – about its shapes and styles and so on. But always, always, at the core, an ecstatic and superheated Nothing.

Then we get Lady Gaga, “the multiplatinum alpha and omega of Pop, and she’s burning out its circuits.” …

Her assault on the culture has been meticulous. Pre-Gaga, she wrote songs for Britney Spears and New Kids on the Block, a line of work she pursued while immersing herself in burlesque, performance art, and all-round club madness. AS Lady Gaga … her music is top-quality revenge-of-the-machines dance-stomp with beefy, unforgettable choruses … It’s Pop music, but Gaga-dom is the thing: a persona, something like the incarnation of Pop stardom itself, that she has foisted upon the world. In wigs and avant-garde getups she appears, strange-eyed, her large, high-bridged nose giving a hieroglyphic otherness to her face. On red carpets the presence manifests, where Gaga, like a dome of many-colored glass, refracts the white radiance of Pop.

“… And who wil be post-Gaga?” Parker concludes. “Nobody. She’s finishing it off, each of her productions gleefully laying waste to another area of possibility. So, let’s just say it: she’s the last Pop star. Apres Gaga, the void.”

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Ah, the white noise of the voice, sensory overkill, the same image repeated endlessly through the googol and googol-plex devices out there for carrying a message – iPods, televisions, digital cameras, mySpace pages, even video games: eventually the bit torrent becomes a whiteout, then a burnout, then a fadeout.

A dying fall.

Perhaps Lady Gaga the goddess of the industry’s death, a Kali in feathers who exists only to burn gorgeously as it all falls into the sea. I sympathise with James Parker, but I guess he’s too young to remember the rioting that broke out when Parisians head the first recital of Stravinky’s Le Sacre du Printemps in 1913, or how girls in bobby socks acted around Frank Sinatra, or what pandemonium ensued when Elvis Presley curled a lip and shook those crazy hips of his, or how the music press saw the end of History in the Sex Pistols of 1977. Every age of pop has its death knell, it’s white hot-dying core; I don’t expect Lady Gaga to be the end of it, just an Emersonian circle whose next limit is beyond my capacity to dream – or nightmare.

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To every age, its end:  Les fin-de-siecle Stravinsky (1913), Sinatra (early ’40s) and Johnny Rotten (’77).

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The Cumberland River overflowed its banks near downtown Nashville on Tuesday, May 4. Nashville’s music industry took a devastating hit.

Have you tried to play a 1962 Gibson J-45 sunburst acoustic guitar that is filled with a gallon of Cumberland flood? Muddy waters, indeed. After the Cumberland River flooded downtown Nashville a few weeks ago, the inventory of damage in this music capital has been slow to assess. 20 people lost their lives. The Grand Ole Opry House was inundated. The Nashville Symphony lost two Steinways when its basement flooded. But the most savage toll of all on the heart of the country music industry was at a facility beside the Cumberland River called Soundcheck, where hundreds of the city’s musicians stored their instruments.

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Brent Ware inspects a 1952 Gibson Les Paul. The instrument had been kept at a Nashville-based storage facility called Soundcheck, which was flooded by the massive rainstorms last week.

Fateful decisions-wrong ones, or forced ones-affected outcomes which were either miraculous or tragic. The Soundcheck facility =- actually a complex of storage lockers, repair shops and rehearsal spaces for major country artists gearing up for recording and performance gigs-took on the inventory of historic instruments from the Musicians’ Hall of Fame after the city acquired its property to make way for a new convention center. And then, storage bins higher than 3-1/2 feet — the floodline — were spared.

Lost in down under: a Jimi Hendrix-owned Stratocaster guitar, and the bass used in Hank Williams’ “Your Cheating Heart.” In all, the Soundcheck flood affected an estimated 600 musicians, from stars like Vince Gill to workaday professionals.

Raul Malo, founder of the country band The Mavericks, was the owner of that Gibson J-45. Weirdly, the J-45 retained its sound, but the rest of Malo’s collection at Soundcheck died in the flood, their backs swelling till they cracked, necks twisting, like underwater roots, beyond all repair.

“Last night, I was sitting there with my wife, listening to my new album, and I said, ‘Those guitar sounds on this record, I will never be able to duplicate again because all of those guitars are gone,'” Malo says.

Do you know the sound of a future erased? Listen to “The Mavericks,” the first album by the band in five years.

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Raul Malo of The Mavericks and a 1965 Gibson J-45.

I had a Gibson J-45 once. My father gave it to me back in 1975 when I spent a summer working in New York City between semesters of college in Spokane, Washington. A honey of a guitar, smooth as silk and rich-timbred. That sunburnt finish looked like a Singapore sling, a motley of reds and honeys with a tequila glow to it. A real seducer. I played in some folkie groups with that guitar, coffeehouses mostly, as I was losing my faith in folk music and education and becoming enamored with electric guitars and pussy. I quit school and started playing in rock bands, carrying along that J-45 like an old fuck, someone you still call on now and then late at night when the hot chicks have gone home with someone else. I sold that guitar for a hundred bucks, I think, in 1980 when I was readying to move to Florida. A great guitar, like a woman whose qualities I only came to appreciate long after she and I as one entity washed down the river of time, gone almost even from memory.

But you never do forget what the frets feel like. Not after hundreds of hours making that musical foreplay, noodling and jamming and chording and picking and soloing my way to a certain Paradise, if only for the breadth of a song.

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Just as the damage to the inventory of the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville is know becoming known, NASCAR opened, amid great corporate and political hooplya, its own Hall of Fame in Charlotte. Oddly, it bears a certain resemblance to the shrine in Nashville. Same race, perhaps, diff’rent track. The NASCAR Hall is oval-shaped, in emulation of an oval short track, including a banked ramp to the second floor, with full-sized cars placed in emulation of racin’. Cars, guitars, what’s the difference anyway? And country music’s going in the same direction as NASCAR, or vice versa, into the white pop noise of the moment, monied and about nothing, really.

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The NASCAR Hall of Fame, which opened to the public on May 11.

It does make me wonder if shrines to history get built when something is thoroughly dead. Too much of life floods into the past; for NASCAR, it only took decades to accomplish, paired to a big commercial industry whose lifeblood is refined oil, the available stores of which have dwindled to the point that companies are daring to drill into the deepest water. The oil slick spreading from the uncapped pipes of the fallen Deepwater Horizon rig may not reach as far as Charlotte – if the oil gets into the Gulf Stream which rounds from the Gulf of Mexico around Florida and hugs that coast a while, fast streams outward across toward Europe – do not doubt that the sense of NASCAR’s obsolescence will fall off a continental shelf and tumble down into the abysm along with The Supremes and polar bears and that nerply naiad who once lived in a goldfish bowl next to my bed.(It doesn’t help that, according to estimates from official box scores, attendance decreased in nine of the first 10 races of 2010 with double-digit drops at Bristol Motor Speedway (14%), Phoenix International Raceway (13%) and Talladega Superspeedway (13%). International Speedway Corp., which owns Phoenix, Talladega and 10 more tracks that host Sprint Cup races, reported that operating income for the first quarter of 2010 was down 28 percent from last year.

I heard on the radio today that the original BP estimates of how much oil and gas have flooded on to the Gulf are shy – by the power of ten. Experts analyzed video released by BP on May 12, and their findings suggest that as much as 700 thousands barrels of spume has been getting loose. Which means that the Deepwater Horizon spill has, by now, surpassed by far the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill of 250,000 barrels of oil. (Source: NPR.org)

British Petroleum, of course, disputes these figures, and says that the company is more focused on taking whatever corrective actions actions it may.

Top Hat heads into the drink today, but this new, much larger number for spillage suggests that capturing — and cleaning up — this oil may be a much bigger challenge than anyone has let on.

Do you wonder what sort of disappearances, what set of disappearances, broods out there beneath the sun-dapples surface of the Gulf of Mexico?

Tom Swift may have been able to find and fix all of those things in his Jetmarine; me, I work the folds of the disappearances, tallying a random sum which has no other meaning than it bears a certain pleasure, albeit a dying one, as Rilke wrote in at the end of the tenth and final Duino Elegy:

And we, who have always thought
of happiness as rising, would feel
the emotion that almost overwhelms us
whenever a happing thing falls.

Googol,

Googolplex:

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Who’s Gonna Take Care of the Darlington Stripe I Left in My Shorts? Mother, of Course

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Saturday night’s race at Darlington comes on the eve of Mother’s Day. NASCAR’s traditional pairing of these two events gives a unique perspective on a hell of a good fellow’s total thrall (or horror) ((or both)) with Mother.

Darlington is deep in NASCAR’s South Carolina motherland, two hours from nowhere, famous for having nothing other than Darlington Raceway as its only attraction, keeping drivers holed up in their trailers with their wives and girlfriends for wont of anything else to do.  There used to be two races at Darlington – one in the spring and the other at Labor Day – but a failing local economy (textile mills closing down) made it a hard draw, so the fall race went to California and the spring one placed on Mother’s Day weekend, which for the past four years has guaranteed a sellout. Why such a pairing has made Darlington a financial success, go figure; but there must be something between racin’ and Motherhood which go together like, well, Elvis Presley and a peanut butter, banana slices and bacon sandwich, served up by his mama Gladys. But more on that later.

Good mama or bad? Racin’ on the eve of Mother’s Day suggest that both faces of the person who brought us into the world are included. Nestled among the verdant fields of tobacco farms, Darlington Raceway has a track of legendary woe, whose odd shape purportedly was due to a recalcitrant owner of a minnow pond at one end which forced track builder Harold Brasington to create a track which had a tighter, narrower and more steeply banked turn at one end (honoring his pledge not to disturb the minnow pond) and the other turn wide, sweeping and flat.

The configuration was made even tougher for drivers because of its egg-shaped design, with straightaways which were longer than most tracks of the time, allowing cars to drive at relatively high speeds before having to negotiate those wildly different turns.

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Darlington Raceway from up high.

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Odd empowerment and limitation, like a mama’s prophetic words. It may not be the reason, but in this sense it’s fitting that Darlington is called “The Lady in Black.”

I should know. About a mother’s prophecies, I mean. One day when I was 11 or 12 I headed out the door of our house in Evanston, Illinois, to walk to the El to catch a train into downtown Chicago to visit my father, who had moved out some months ago and was living on the 48^th floor of one of the Marina Towers, I had, tucked under my arm, my telescope, saying that I should have a great vantage on the stars from such a height.

Actually, the height was excellent for snooping down on the Playboy Mansion on Drake Street, which wasn’t far from there.

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Which heavenly constellation did Mom see in my eyes? Ursula Minor—my Little Dipper–or Claudia Jennings, Playboy’s Miss November 1969?

My mom wouldn’t let me bring that telescope with me. “Son,” she said, “there’s more to life than a bed, a babe, and a bottle of booze.”

I honestly had clear idea how those three things were connected when she said that; but like a hammer nailing in something complete and final, her words made me vow that I’d find out.

Oh yes, I would.

Who set me on, who fated me to that curvy road of left-turns which eventually led me to this moment of Mother’s Day Weekend 2010?

Why–Mother, of course.

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Actually, Darlington is known as the “Lady in Black” because its white walls darken over the course of the race from tire rubs of cars going high in its turns; every rookie driver receives his Darlington initiation proper when his car gets a Darlington Stripe from contact with the wall. Darlington’s walls starts out clean and white as a baby’s blanket and then the racers have a go at her, leaving her by race’s end mauled, besmirched, blackened.

In James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, the river Liffey is personified as Anna Livia Plurabelle, who, in the dreaming mind of an anonymous, aging man, is a mother who picks up all of the Dublin’s wastes and carries them out the to the ocean. If you want to read the closest approximation of what goes through a dreaming person’s mind, try Finnegans Wake. But beware. It’s wild and incoherent and everything in between, written like a race track, with the first word of the book the one which follows the last. This “night-book” took Joyce his last 17 years to complete and is considered unreadable by a sane mind, the rants of voice lost in the deepest recesses of the Realm of the Mothers. I knocked if off reading a couple of pages on the can for a year and a half; I can’t recite a single passage from memory, but it’s pure ear music, a book dredged up from the bottom of the human well.

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A bronze statue by Eamon O’Doherty rendering Joyce’s Anna Livia Plurabelle, a maternal personification of the River Liffey. Locals call it the Floozie in the Jacuzzi.

Dunno if the folks in Nashville feel the same about the Cumberland River which cuts through town, swollen above flood levels from record rains over the weekend. The Cumberland also deluged some of the city’s most important revenue sources: the Gaylord Opryland Hotel and Convention Center, whose 1,500 guests were whisked to a shelter; the adjacent Opry Mills Mall; even the Grand Ole Opry House, considered by many to be the heart of country music.

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The Grand Ole Opry House was inundated by a flooded Cumberland River over the past weekend.

Did you know the Greeks called wine – their booze – “the fiery drink of the black mother”? I wonder if the Cumberland River’s flooding of the Opry has spawned a dozen whiskey songs, like so many tears, about cruel Mamas and how the twang will yet survive.

I can’t help thinking here of Mom trudging through all of our rooms when we were kids, picking up our dirty laundry and lugging it all downstairs to the basement where she ran (it seemed) endless loads of laundry. It was Mom who laundered out the skidmarks in my BVDs, Mom who washed my semen-stained sheets when I hit a furiously masturbatory stretch of puberty. And she never said a word about any of it, not that I recall.

I also think of Darlington Raceway, receiving all those skidmarks on her clean white walls from all of the boys, silently taking it all in, becoming a Lady in Black while cars fight it out on an oval which has no real beginning or end.

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Of course, for every swipe at the Darlington track, there’s an equal scrape to appear on the side of a race car.

The “Darlington Stripe” is both an initiation and a badge of honor, signifying that a driver has driven hard the way Darlington demands – fast and high.

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Darlington Stripes.

“It’s just part of the race there,” Jimmie Johnson says, who has won twice at Darlington. “The track is so narrow and there’s so much slipping and sliding that sometimes you just run out of room and go up and kiss the wall and lean against it to get you pointed in the right direction and keep going on.”

Sometimes a Stripe is a graze, and sometimes an accumulation of these dings in one race will doom a car to worse and worse handling. And, of course, many cars wreck hitting that wall too hard.

Drivers may think that Talladega is the scariest track on the circuit, but Darlington is one known as “The Track to Tough to Tame.” Here are some quotes from drivers prior to the 2009 race, collected by Monte Dutton:

“Darlington is just a special place. It’s like no other. It’s the toughest place we go. I don’t care who you talk to. It is absolutely mentally and physically one of the toughest race tracks, and it’s unforgiving. as well, and I guess that’s what makes it part of being tough. There’s no margin for error at Darlington, and I love it.” – Greg Biffle.

“I remember watching the Darlington races as a kid on television. Wide World of Sports would sandwich my brother Darrell, and Bobby and Donnie Allison, between ping pong and sumo wrestling.” – Michael Waltrip.

“The cars have changed, the speeds have changed and the asphalt has changed, but I don’t believe the driver’s thinking has changed one bit.” – Jeff Gordon.

“Darlington’s tough, but I like it. It’s a very narrow, fast race track that has a lot of history and is a very prestigious race to win. It’s one of those places where I’d like to win a Sprint Cup race.” – Kevin Harvick.

“I’d love to win because the track has a lot of history. A lot of great names have been in victory lane there. It’s so tough to win. It’s such a tough race track. And when you’ve won there, you’re considered one of the tougher guys in the sport because you can conquer this race and conquer what this track throws at you.” – Dale Earnhardt Jr.

“Just don’t hit the wall. I think every car on the track is going to hit it; it’s just how hard everyone is going to hit it.” – Kasey Kahne.

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Unlike Talladega races, where Wynona often squirts her fortunate milk over just about any racer coming off the final turn, few journeymen drivers ever win at Darlington. Even masters of most other tracks have failed to crack the Darlington egg.

Rusty Wallace, who won 55 races over 25 years, never won at Darlington. Not in 43 starts.

“I just had this unbelievable not good luck there,” he says. “Now there’s some guys that take to that place like water. … But that was the one that just drove me personally completely crazy.

“I just never had the comfort to fly down that back straightaway into what is now Turn 3, which used to be Turn 1, and just drive that baby 190 mph right up against the wall because every time I’d do that I’d get 20 laps right and the 21st I’d screw up and hit the wall.”

Among active drivers, Tony Stewart hasn’t won at Darlington in 17 starts; Kurt Busch and Kevin Harvick are both 0-13.

Hard to please this demanding mama. Yet others have proved her favorite sons. Of the 43 men who have won a NASCAR Sprint Cup Series race there through 2008, more than half – 24 to be exact – have won at least twice.

Among active drivers, Jeff Gordon leads with seven wins.  Jeff Burton, Mark Martin, Jimmie Johnson and Gregg Biffle have all won twice at Darlington.

Dale Earnhardt, Sr. won nine times. “You never forget your first love,” Earnhardt said once about Darlington. “Whether it’s a high school sweetheart, a faithful old hunting dog, or a fickle race track in South Carolina with a contrary disposition. And, if you happen to be a race car driver there’s no victory so sweet, so memorable, as whipping Darlington Raceway.”

Heroic drivers may think they beat The Lady in Black, but that just keeps them in thrall of Her, which is, of course, every bad mom’s stratagem. (More on that later.) The most successful driver of all time at Darlington is David Pearson with ten wins. A favorite son; what could he do wrong there? Many believe Pearson to be the greatest stock car ever; his mettle at Darlington may be the proof.

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Monte Dutton once recorded a conversation between Tony Stewart and David Pearson about how to race Darlington, bringing the two of them together before a race in Phoenix a few years back.

At the time, Pearson was 70 years old, Stewart 33. Pearson’s last championship occurred in 1969, when what is now Nextel Cup was referred to as Grand National and there were no races in Las Vegas.

Perhaps more than any of his contemporaries, though, Stewart is a throwback to the days when dinosaurs named Pearson, Richard Petty, Cale Yarborough and Bobby Allison ruled the earth. Earth, at the time, mainly consisted of the South.

Pearson, who won 105 races, was leisurely strolling around with another notable resident of Spartanburg, South Carolina, former car owner and ace mechanic Walter “Bud” Moore. As luck would have it, they happened to be in front of the stall where Stewart’s No. 20 Chevrolet rested, shortly after the end of a practice session and as Stewart was climbing out of his orange car.

“Do you know Tony Stewart?” I asked Pearson.

“I’ve met him,” he said. “I don’t know him. I know he can sure enough drive a race car.”

“I think you’d like him,” I said. “Hang on a minute.”

I then walked over in front of the car, where Stewart was discussing various matters of technical significance with his crew chief, Greg Zipadelli.

“David Pearson’s out there,” I said to Stewart. “Want to say hello?”

“Give me a minute,” said Stewart.

I walked back out and started talking with Moore, about whose teams I used to write, and Pearson, the hero of my youth. The topic was familiar: how much times have changed, how not all the changes have been for the best, how much all the cars are just alike, etc. It was the kind of conversation oldtimers have regardless of whether they’re athletes or shoe salesmen.

Pearson looks as if he could climb right back into a stock car and run five hundred miles. He seems far more robust than a man who underwent open-heart surgery a few years back. He has the same barrel chest and broad shoulders he boasted when he was winning 11 races in 18 tries in 1973.

After a few minutes of chitchat, though, the proud ex-champion was getting a little restless. With a small sense of urgency, I excused myself and returned to the garage stall, where Stewart had been intercepted by someone else.

“Hey, Tony,” I said, “the best stock-car racer who ever lived is out there, and I don’t think I’d make him wait much longer.”

Stewart looked up. “Don’t let him get away,” he said. “I’ll be right there.”

Thirty seconds may have passed before Stewart strode out into the desert sunshine.

“Hey,” he said, shaking Pearson’s hand, “I need you to drive my car for me at Darlington. I ain’t worth a damn at that track.”

Pearson didn’t flinch. “All you got to do is drive that thing as high on the track as you can get it,” he said.

“That’s what I’m doing,” Stewart said, smiling.

“You ought to have driven it when it was hard,” replied Pearson, who won there a record ten times. “It’s easy now.”

— from Haul Ass and Turn Left: The Wit and Wisdom of NASCAR (Monte Dutton, 2005)

Darlington winners are proud sons.

They wear their Stripes like servicemen.

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Darlington losers bear their Stripes with something akin to throwing skidmarked BVDs in the hamper.

They’re a condemnation only a mother could understand. Boys will be boys, and drivers will collect their Stripes at Darlington.

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Jeff Gordon and his mother Carol.

So what’s Mom got to do with racing? On the surface, very little. Most racers moved into an exclusively male world quite young, taking up go-karting with Dad, spending their childhoods in the garage and the track, staying pumped on octane and testosterone.

And yet, many inventions cherished by men – the ones they call “toys” – place them psychologically in the realm of the Mother. Many of these toys are named after women. Take boats, which are always referred to in the feminine gender – “she’s a leaky, untrustworthy, fickle sow of a tug.” Many boats are also named after women: Angel of the Sea, April Rose, Blondie, Blue Eyes, Caribbean Queen, Dixie Girl, Dulcinea, Fanny my Girl, Fatima, Gipsy Girl, Mary of the Sea, Mistress of the Ocean, My Princess, Neptune’s Daughter, Ocean Dancer, Rachel the Sublime, Rebecca, Salome, Sofia’s Dream, Swimming Girl, Tequesta, Unconscious Lady, Veronica, Widow’s Love. … A boat, it seems, is both substitute and improvement on the whole notion of woman, protective mom on the waters, a sexy weekend thing with privileges.

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The lusty 1849 HMS Sea Witch and her modern equivalent.

Like ships, guitars are always referred to in the feminine gender and also are frequently named after women. Famously there’s Lucille, the name of every Gibson guitar owned of blues guitarist BB King. (Like a succession of wives, there is only one sustaining love, no matter what guitar a person picks up to play.) George Harrison named his ’57 Les Paul “Lucy” after red-haired comedian hottie/mom Lucille Ball. Stevie Ray Vaughan named his ’65 Fender Strat “Lennie” after his wife. (Oh, boy, do I remember a Lennie from my past …) Billy Gibbons named his starburst ’59 Les Paul “Miss Pearly Gates,” as if her very frets were a stairway to heaven or, perhaps more loosely, the ballsy leads he could throw from that guitar could famously lift polka-dotted skirts faster than a Texas sidewinder.

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BB.King with Lucille; Stevie Ray Vaughan with Lenny; Billy Gibbons with Miss Pearly Gates.

Some drivers have christened their cars with women’s names. Dale Earnhardt Jr. named one of his cars “Wild-Eyed Crazy Mary.”  Kyle Busch named his No. 5 Chevrolet “Twisted Sister” when he drove for Hendrick Motorsports.  Clint Bowyer named one of his race cars in ’07 “Betsy”.

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Clint Bowyer with winning Betsy; or was it the winsome, sinuous Athena Barber, Bowyer’s girlfriend at the time, who was more responsible for Bowyer’s 2008 Nationwide Championship, which he nabbed with only one win? Bowyer eventually dumped Barber, and it’s been a long time since that he’s had much luck on the track.

Some are borderline names, suggesting a somewhat uneasy relationship with the opposite sex. There’s the noir “Midnight,” the handle which Rusty Wallace gave the #2 Miller Genuine Draft Pontiac which won his 12 races in 1993. And for a crasser, more misogynistic bite, there’s the 1986 Ford which rookie of the year Alan Kulwicki affectionately named Sirloin.

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Rusty Wallace’s Midnight wins the 1993 New Hampshire race, but it couldn’t do diddly against the Lady in Black.

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Alan Kulwicki in the No. 35 “Old Sirloin”; Claudia Jennings, aged sirloin now perhaps now but in ’69 the wasn’t a better, more prime cut in the land.

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Men have all sorts of names for their offending members, but to my knowledge they are exclusively masculine. Little General, Johnson, Love Hammer, Meat Whistle, Donut Holder, Salty Dog, Pickle, Woodie: Pure penile braggadocio.

If any man has given his penis a woman’s name – especially his mother’s – then surely he’s a serial killer (think Norman Bates here in “Psycho”, or wearing a wristband and walking around in a ward where the doors have no handles on the inside. Or taken up with lipstick lesbians who get turned on when a dude whispers, “my Gloria just loves French kissing …”

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As Norman Bates found out, when you call your gigglestick “Mommy,” it will start to look – and act – like this.

No: Calling your dingdong Sue is loading the dice against your fate. Nor, I suspect, could an overdose Cialis rouse a pecker named Mommy from its zonked lair. Besides, devotion of Mother is paired with lust for her Other, the naughty girl who will do anything you want her to and more, the one you would never bring home to Mother and can’t do without.

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Claudia Jennings: In 1968 I discovered that Woman did not have to look – or act – like Mother. Claudia Jennings, 1968 Playboy Playmate.

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Maybe we think these pesky perky alternate brains of ours really do belong to us. A lot of civilization got built that way, re-centering the spiritual and actual domains of human existence around the phallus. (Phallocentrism is the notion feminists seek to cut off. Or so it seems when some uppity woman gets behind the wheel of a race car.)

Male gods ruled Olympus, but they usually did so through rape or marriage (or both). When Apollo slew the dragon of Delphi – at high solar noon – don’t think that he was appropriating Her prophetic lair.

I don’t hear my mother’s oracles much any more; they’ve been taken over by wise aphorisms, like that of St. Thomas who said, in the Gnostic gospel rejected by the Church Fathers:

If you bring out what is inside you, what is inside you will save you; if you fail to bring out what is inside you, what you fail to bring out will destroy you.

Women are born with the equipage to become a mother, but boys have to become men, which is always a willed act requiring initiation.

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Once, in our older, developmental history, religion was matriarchal: the Great Goddess ruled over all, from the turnout of the hunt to the fertile growing of grain. The light of consciousness was feeble and easily subsumed back by the great dragon of the unconscious.

Mom was pretty big back then. The original Mother’s Day may root back to a festival of Cybele, one of the Greek great mother goddesses, held around the vernal Equinox. Her ancient title was Potnia Theron and alludes to her Neolithic roots as “Mistress of the Animals” (thus Goddess of the hunt). In her story her son, the hero Attis, is about to marry a woman when Cybele reveals herself in her full goddess aspect, driving Attis mad. He goes mad and castrates himself (cutting off the member which so offends Mother) and dies. Cybele takes pity on her son and resurrects him in the form of the pine tree which, as the story evolves, is the tree we cut down at Christmas to celebrate the son of the Queen of Heaven.

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Great Mother Cybele gets up close and personal with son/future sacrifice Attis.

Human civilization kept on keepin’ on, building cities and innovating weapons of mass and massier destructions. The flint axe became the sling became the crossbow became the blunderbuss became the cannon, each weapon more potent than the last for ejaculating death and destruction on The Enemy. Horses were worshiped as earthly votives of the horse-goddess Epona; men whispered sweet somethings in their ears as they hitched up and began racin’.

During the Middle Ages, a specific Sunday was set aside for Mothering Day in the liturgical calendar of several Christian denominations (in the Catholic calendar, the day is marked as Laetare Sunday, the fourth Sunday of Lent in honor of the Virgin Mary and the “mother church”. Children who served in houses were given a day off on that date so they could visit their families. The children would pick wild flowers along the way to place them on the church or to give them to their mothers.

Women were kept in their place by the authority of Pope and King, but no one doubts they continued their rule from hearth and bed. In 1870, a Mother’s Day Proclamation was written by Julia Ward Howe. Oddly, its purpose was political, a form of protest against the carnage of the Civil War and the Franco Prussian War. Howe believed that women had a responsibility to shape their society at the political level. She couldn’t vote, but don’t believe that Mom didn’t have a lot of clout.

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American ur-Mom Julia Ward Howe demands some R-E-S-P-E-C-T.

The Presidential declaration of Mother’s Day in the  U.S. was first made by Franklin D. Roosevelt in May 1934 and then repeated by presidents Kennedy (1963), Johnson (’64), Ford (’76), H.W. Bush (’90), Clinton (’93) and G.W. Bush (’08). As if we needed the reminder that Mom was expecting her due from husband and brood.

There came to be a Father’s Day, too – duh – but that holiday pales in comparison to the sort of dough sons and daughters fork out in honor of Mom. About 150 million Mother’s Day cards get mailed. Mother’s Day is the busiest day of the year for restaurants, beating out even Valentine’s Day. Florists make a quarter of their annual sales volume on Mother’s Day (yes, whipping the panties off Valentine’s Day).

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Traditional Mother’s Day card.

Of course, Mom isn’t just Mom – it’s every mother. If your wife has kids, she qualifies as a Mom. (In our house, my wife cares for cats – that means she gets Mother’s Day cards from both me and the cats).

Father’s don’t get any equivalent of that sort of guilt, respect and attention. Why? Most people, I suspect, feel that it was Mom who put the real sweat equity in child-rearing from womb to tomb. The home is Mom’s turf, her nest; Dad showed up after work and barked out orders, but the real emotional heavy hauling was usually done by Mom, for better or much, much worse. We remember our Dads, but Mom is so essential to our identity – for better and worse – that our eventual lives are ruled by Queen Marys and Ladies in Black, our race through life warded over (and wardened by) Her smile and clucks of disapproval.

For we all know that without Mom we wouldn’t be. She made us, for better and ill. She tests us at the doorstep of every conscious move, whispering or cackling on our shoulder like a dove or a crow. Whether we like it or not, we do it for Mom, long after her mortal representative has faced from our life.

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We know not to fool with Mother Nature, whether that involves drilling into the Gulf or building a house on a barrier island in Florida or simply going against our own nature. Offense against the order of things – what the alchemists called opus contra naturuum – upsets the balance and makes strange things happen. Magic requires a certain skill, a means of walking high tensile wires between bliss and doom. It means going balls to the walls on the Darlington straightaways and going high—oh so precipitously high—on the turns. A Darlington Stripe says The Lady in Black is watching. Mother is waiting to collect all her sons.

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In an Associated Press auto poll, most American drivers have a close connection to their cars and think of them as gender-specific. The most common names were “Betsy,” “Nelly,” “Blue” and “Baby.” Sixty-two percent of drivers polled admitted to talking to their cars.

Guys love their cars sometimes more than anything else. I’ll bet there are racecar drivers who only feel like themselves when they’re safe behind the wheel going close to 200 miles per hour.

Stephen King played this out into a baroque horror tale with Christine, about a malevolent, murderously-spooked ’58 red and white Plymouth Fury which one day catches the eye of a dorky teenager named Arnie. In the 1983 movie adaptation by John Carpenter, Arnie becomes obsessed with restoring the beat-to-Gehenna car, changing into a leaner, tougher, crueler sort of guy as the car is restored to its pristine glory.

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Arnie behind the wheel of Christine.

Then the weird stuff happens. Taking the most popular girl in school out on the date, the dame almost chokes to death on a hamburger; Arnie is convinced Christine is jealous and will have no other women sitting in her. Thugs who have it in for Arnie vandalize the car almost to pieces, but Christine restores herself–thanks to a lot of reverse-motion photography–and death comes to Libertyville as Christine murders the gang one by one.

I can’t help feeling that Arnie’s dad had a car like Christine once and was forced to give it up when he met Arnie’s mom. Christine is an old love’s revenge against mom by a son turned bad. Some loves, its turns out, are eternal. In the book, the father is found dead in Christine, apparently of carbon monoxide poisoning, and Arnie and his mother are killed in a car wreck. (Witnesses say there were three people in the car though only two bodies are found.)

Bad to the eternally damned bone, that’s Christine—and unstoppable, even in death. After the movie, Christine kept showing up – in Stephen King’s 1986 novel It and The Stand. In an episode of the TV series Quantum Leap, Sam Beckett is seen driving Christine along with his friend, a young Stephen King.

Young men don’t forget their first cars, the cars they souped up like muscle cars, the cars they banged their girlfriends in. The woman who runs the antique shop where my wife works a few days a week lives with a guy she knew from high school; they got back together with after her divorce. John still has the restored ‘34 Ford he took this woman out on their first date, in 1950, when they were both in high school.

Some boys never let go of their toys.

Or their dream girls.

And the toys don’t let go, either.

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I have another wild conjecture. What is it about cars and women with big breasts? A muscle-car seems to demand a voluptuous catch to go with it, as it all that enginned testosterone necessarily melts the brassieres off big-hootered mamacitas. Is Mom watching her son through those bulging eyes?

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When it comes to boys and cars, size matters. Perhaps too much.

And this: racers who have big-hootered wives or girlfriends don’t win many races.  Kurt Busch won the Sprint Cup championship in 2004. Busch married Eva in 2006, and he hasn’t done better than 4^th place in the points standings since.

Jimmie Johnson married slim model Chandra Lynn in December 2004. He won his first Sprint Cup Championship in 2006.

Kevin Harvick, currently first in the points standings, is married to Delana, another slim woman.

Jeff Gordon, who has placed second in 8 races since his last win in spring 2009, is married to slim ultramodel Ingrid Vanderbosch.

Kyle Busch, who couldn’t stop winning races in 2008, finally married his sweetheart Samantha Sarcinella this year. Formerly a slim aerobics instructor, somewhere along the line Samantha got breast augmentation surgery – and Kyle began slipping down the points standings in Sprint Cup competition, with a dismal showing in 2009 and struggling again this year.

What once seemed so easy for Kyle seems a distant possibility. Is that because tracks are hostile to another mother in Kyle’s life?

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Hot: Slim Chandra with champ Jimmie; Ingrid and Jeff; Delana and Happy Harvick. Not: Busty Eva with Busch; embusted Samantha with Shrub.

Are big breasts – the very sign of potency in the owner and driver of every monster car – bad, bad mojo for those who would hold high stock car racing’s highest trophy?

Is there more Mom in a track than we ever suspected?

And the less off-track rack She has to compete with, the more She cracks a smile on her favored sons?

Enquiring minds gotta  know …

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In this Theme, there’s always a tale to top all others. The most extreme example of car-love I know of (but surely there are wilder extremities) is the story of a man in Washington State named Edward Smith who considers his current car, a Volkswagen Beetle named Vanilla, his current girlfriend. And admits to having sex with it. (Do NOT try to imagine what this sort of fuel additive does for a car’s performance. Let’s not start any trends). In fact, the man admits to having sex with some 1,000 cars.

“I appreciate beauty and I go a little bit beyond appreciating the beauty of a car only to the point of what I feel is an expression of love,” Smith says.

“Maybe I’m a little bit off the wall but when I see movies like Herbie and Knight Rider, where cars become loveable, huggable characters it’s just wonderful.

“I’m a romantic. I write poetry about cars, I sing to them and talk to them just like a girlfriend. I know what’s in my heart and I have no desire to change.”

I’m going to venture that Smith was conceived and delivered in the back seat of a car, will die in one and be buried in one, just like the fat-cat Texan who was buried in his Cadillac. Monstrosity and perversity come, I think, when a person can’t distinguish between the divine Mother and Her personifications. Rapists, molesters, pedophiles, collectors of child porn, serial killers and lone-wolf one-night-standers: all of them are lost in abyss of Mom’s uteral compulsions, obsessively re-enacting a birth gone terribly wrong, as if each act of violation somehow appeased Her. Go figure.

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Edward Smith with sweetheart Vanilla.

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The Divine Smith is empowered–thus enslaved– by his appropriations from The Mother.

The feminine connection between men and the tools they devise for mastering Mother Nature goes back into archetypal territory—way, way, way back. A tool is an invention, a creation which comes not from the womb of a woman but the forge; it is a theft from the Mother, an appropriation of Her creative energy.

For his monstrous strength, the blacksmith god Hephaestus of the Greeks was rejected by his mother Rhea (he was tossed out of heaven and was lamed. In lieu of that primary connection he created the forge, that monstrous womb which made iron malleable. Upon his anvil Hephaestus then hammered out swords and shields and other cunning implements for heroes as they did battle with, well, representatives of the Mother — dragons and Medusae and the like.

Hercules or Herakles was “The Glory of Hera,” yet he was hounded all his life by his cruel mother (the wife of Zeus). Driven insane by his mother, Hercules kills his wife and children; as part of his sentence, he is forced to perform twelve impossible Labors to regain favor with Mom, such as relieving the Nemean Lion of his pelt, killing the Lernean Hydra, rassling the Minotaur to a fall, plucking the belt of the Amazon queen Hippolyte, beating a hundred-headed lion so he could steal the golden apples of the Hesperides (which belonged to Hera), and harrowing Hell by rassling Cerberus, the Hound of Hell.  In the end Hercules accomplished every Labor – earning him eternal fame as the hero who beat all the old monsters of the matriarchy. But in the end, the hero’s mother complex did him in. The woman he eventually marries suspects ole Herc is doing the nasty with another woman, and contrives to get him to wear a shirt poisoned with the blood of a centaur Hercules had killed.

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Club-sticked, lil’-willie-wicked Hercules defeats the Lernean Hydra.

Tah tah tah, Hercules – what you defeat is what always gets you in the end. Archetypally and psychologically, heroes battle more with their mothers than their enemies, who may indeed simply be either sent by their avenging mothers (or seem to be) or be just so damn similar to them.

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Hercules and Omphale; Elvis Pelvis giving it to universe of adoring female fans,

How different is that ole Greek hero Hercules from, say, Elvis Presley? The King of Rock had an obsessive relationship with his mother, Gladys Love Smith Presley, whom he described as “the most wonderful mother anyone could have.” (OK, nothing to unusual about that, not at this time of year.)

With his first large royalty check, Elvis bought his mother a pink Cadillac. He also bought the family a home, Gracelands, and lived there with Gladys and his maternal grandmother Minnie.

When Gladys died, witnesses heard a heart-wrenching howl from Elvis. He threw himself on her coffin at the funeral and had to be restrained. For days he carried his mother’s nightgown and slept with it.

No matter how great his fame spread around him, and no matter how many women came into his bed—including major Hollywood dames like Cybill Shepherd, Juliet Prowse, Ann-Margaret, Connie Stevens and Natalie Woods – no woman could be better in his eyes than Gladys.

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Ann-Margaret with Elvis in “Viva Las Vegas!”

The man who could have any woman on earth was denied the only one he wanted.

That’s some powerful mom-mojo wouldn’t you say?

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Can you spot the difference between the 2 photos? Elvis is serious in only one of them.

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Kyle Busch won his first Sprint Cup race of the 2010 season last Saturday night at Richmond. It’s been a dry year for the younger Busch, compared to the torrid pace he set in 2008, when he racked up an incredible 21 wins between NASCAR’s three premier series, including 8 Sprint Cup wins.

Kyle beat The Lady in Black – or rather, was given Her blessing – in 2008. He was on a tear no one thought beatable.  At Darlington he led a race-high 169 of 367 laps and racked up a record race speed of 140.350 mph.

At 23 years old, Kyle Busch was the youngest driver to win at Darlington.

Still, it wasn’t easy. Fans booed him (he’d spun out Dale Earnhardt the previous week at Richmond) and he thought his car handled pathetically.

By his own count, the No. 18 Toyota went into the Darlington wall “probably five or six times.”  At one point Jeff Dickerson radioed Busch, “I know you are digging, dude, but you’ve got to take care of that thing there. You’re scaring the fans. There’s not enough security up the Turn 2 wall. Just nice and easy.”

“I can’t tell you how many times he tried to give the race away by slamming into the wall, his right side was destroyed,” said Jeff Gordon, who finished third.

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Kyle Busch crosses the finish of the 2008 Dodge Challenger 500 at Darlington. Would you look at the Stripes on that car …

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That year, the No. 18 Gibbs Racing Toyota had an M&M’s paint scheme to promote the latest release of the Indiana Jones franchise, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Harrison Ford reprised the lead role after a 20-year haitus.

In the movie, it’s 1957 – and a much-older Jones is trying to prevent Soviet agents from their hands on a psychic alien crystal skull. Computer generated stunt doubles gave Jones/Harrison some of his old mojo back. It wasn’t a success really with fans, but the film went on to gross $786 million worldwide, the second-highest-grossing film of the year.

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Kyle Busch’s car, after winning the 2008 race at Darlington and doing a bodacious burnout.

Indiana Jones, as a treasure-findin’, Russkie-fightin’ hero—more in the mold of smart Theseus or Odysseus than brawny Hercules–always finds the favor of the old magic. He hates Nazis of every stripe, just like Mother Fate. She’s always there for Her favored son. Help arrives this time from an interdimensional being whose mysterium extends from under earth to the furthest stars.

Indiana Jones respects Mother and gives Her back her holy relics, casting them back into the abyss.

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In this movie, he goes home and marries the girl.

Ford was 64 years old during the filming of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. It was a homecoming of sorts for the series which made him a blockbuster star.

He says he wouldn’t mind appearing in another of the series, “if it didn’t take another 20 years to digest.”

Like Darlington, Hollywood has her favorites sons. And Harrison Ford is one of them.

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In 2008, Kyle Busch looked like he was destined to become one of NASCAR’s favorite boys. That year, he racked up an incredible 21 wins racing in the three NASCAR series. Amazingly, it wasn’t enough to beat Jimmie Johnson for the Sprint Cup crown. Busch’s flame spluttered in the Chase and he ended up 10^th in the points.

Last year Kyle had 20 wins between the three series (winning the Nationwide championship with an incredible 9 wins, 25 top-5s and 30 top 10’s, but his Sprint Cup aspirations again proved elusive and he finished 13^th in the points. (This year Kyle is 5^th in the points standings in Sprint Cup competition and second third in the Nationwide Series.

This isn’t Kyle’s year—yet—but maturity may have taught him to save the pyrotechnics for the Chase. Many see Kyle Busch as the lone competitor to challenge the supremacy of Jimmie Johnson, but this year Kevin Harvick seems to be to more that man. Harvick took the lead from Johnson after finishing third at Richmond (Johnson finished 10^th). Harvick is hot to win the way Kyle Bush was hot to win in 2008; but fire alone does not a champion make, not these days, anyway.

Besides, Kyle’s married now. He’s an owner now of a truck team.

The Rowdy days are passing on to other wild sons like Brad Keselowski.

Or it may simply be that his wife is too big-breasted for the approval of the tracks he races on.

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In a NASCAR Moms article published at ask.com a few years ago, Ramona Vickers, mother of Brian, was asked to give a story from her son’s childhood that was prophetic about his eventual career as a NASCAR drivier:

(Brian) always loved to go fast and race you at everything he did, whether it was racing down the stairs, up the driveway and back, taking the trash out, getting the mail or just bike riding with his family. He saved his allowance and volunteered to do extra chores to make money so he could buy a go-kart. He absolutely loved it — he tore up the yard racing around the house. When we took him to a go-kart race where a friend of ours was racing, that was all it took – he was hooked …

… When he was about 10-years-old, (Brian) and his father were in the basement working on his go-kart getting ready for the next race. He was actually sitting in the go-kart while being weighed and just couldn’t sit still. He started sticking his fingers in the holes on the steering wheel and one of his fingers got stuck. We worked for hours trying to get his finger out, but that only made his finger swell. He wouldn’t let us cut the steering wheel off because it was his favorite one, so we had to take the wheel off the go-kart and he slept with it. He thought his finger would slide out just like it slid in – but that didn’t work. We went to the emergency room the next morning to see if they could get his finger unstuck, but they couldn’t either. And after all that they finally took him down to the maintenance department and had to cut the steering wheel off anyway.

… He raced go-karts for several years and then moved on to Alison Legacy Series to Late Models to Hooters ProCup Series and then on to the Busch Series and now Cup.

Asked what she hoped to get from her son for the coming Mother’s Day, Ramona answered, “Time at home with the family and I.“ Vickers will have to catch a flight south after Darlington on Saturday night if he’s going to make it to Palm Beach, FL, where Mom lives (he also has a home there). Mom Ramona serve as office and administrative manager of Scio Verum (“To Know Truth”), the company which handles all of Brian Vickers’ business matters.

In seven attempts, Vickers has failed to finish in the top ten, though he has led for one lap. Right now he’s 24^th in the points standings.

Brian Vickers’ chances at Darlington don’t seem good. But Mom would approve, anyway. “It is really exciting, but sometimes it does get a little nerve-wracking. But he has always been able to keep me on the edge of my seat, even to this day. He loves what he does and is very happy – so that makes me happy!”

Vickers is supposedly dating Amy Chiott, a blonde in the brassiere league of Eva Bush. What do you think the Lady in Black thinks of her?

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Mom Ramona Vickers with son Brian; Brian with girlfriend Amy.

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The Sibyl gets down to business at the Oracle of Delphi.

When Apollo killed the dragon at Delphi, he appropriated the vatic cave and made it an oracle in his honor. A mystic priestess called the Sibyl still sat on a tripod located over the cavern’s vents; driven mad by sulphuric fumes rising from the depths of The Mother, she would rant and fume and shriek. Apollo’s priest would then interpret those ravings and present back to supplicants the answer to their (paid) query.

Over the lintel of the entrance to Delphi was an inscription: “Know Thyself.”

Actually, it said, “Know thyself, and know that you are not God.”

Or Goddess. To know her truth, you have to go dark, away from the lights of the metropolis and into the wilderness of the old primal soak.

If you would know yourself, you must know you can never leave Mother, though every act that cuts the umbilical cord makes you more conscious, more independent, more innovative, more fated to round back to her in some way, as racers always finish exactly where they started.

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Me, I plan to have lunch with my mother along with my sister today. I’ll give her my card, which features a photo of a flower shot by my brother Timm who died of a heart attack two years ago at aged 45. Mother’s Day has been difficult for my mother since my brother’s death, following both his death-date and birth-date by just a few years. (Her own father died of a heart attack on the same day Timm was born, just years before, at aged 52.) My first wife’s second husband – I was no. 3 – died of a motorcycle accident on Mother’s Day, after saying his last goodbye to her.

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I’m using the picture taken by my brother Timm of Swan Island dahlias in Oregon–a year before he died–in the card I’m giving my mother today for Mom’s Day.

For my second (current and, I hope, final) wife, she gets flowers and cards both from me and the cats. She never had kids, so our cats are our kin. I sign the card for all the cats, wondering if I should include all the cats we’ve loved and lost over the years – Buster, Red, Zooey – but I don’t. Still, I’m giving her a bouquet of white lilies, which is the flower just now going into bloom in the back yard which we planted after Buster died. The plant is on the other end of the garage from the place where Red and Zooey are buried.

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Buster, Red, and ole Zoe: My wife will never forget them. (She says she wants to buried with Buster’s ashes, which are in an urn on a shelf in our bedroom.)

Freight like that accompanies Mother’s Day, but Mom is able to bear these things, having such a full and complicated heart. The Lady of the Beasts in the old mythology loved her babies, though death was so intimately woven into that love, as is shitty nappies and skidmarked BVDs.

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As in the past four years, pre-race festivities at Darlington always include a kowtow to Mom, with many of the drivers’ mothers in attendance.

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Belle and son Elliott Sadler before the 2007 race at Darlington; Amanda Sadler and husband Elliott. Amanda gave birth to the couple’s first child, Wyatt, in February.

Those moms – and their surrogate wives and girlfriends as well — will settle in the seats and watch their sons go up against the Lady in Black for one of the most nerve-wracking races on the circuit.

One driver will win the Black Lady’s favor, with the rest finding consolation from Mom or her younger representative.

By their Stripes we will know them, and through their mother/lovers these drivers will return.

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Hey, NASCAR: Put the Blame on Mame

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The Aarons 499 race last Sunday at Talladega has generated quite a squabble over exactly what happened there.

“You know, folks, we’ve just witnessed one of the best Talladega races I have ever seen – and possibly even one of the best races ever,” FOX announcer Darryl Waltrip exulted the other day in his Fox Sports column. Maybe he ought to know, having won 84 races as a driver and 3 championships in the premier league. Or maybe he was caught up in something else, partnering with the  needs of the enterprise (a fantasy which empties pockets faster than a whore in a red dress)  more than the rougher reality of the moment.

Waltrip singled out the peculiar and singular style of racing at Talladega on Sunday he called a form of dancing:

The Talladega Tango was one of the reasons Sunday’s race was fascinating to watch. Guys go all the way to the back of the field only to come all the way back to the front. I saw Dale Earnhardt Jr. do it a dozen times, and he wasn’t the only one capable of that.

I talked to Kevin Harvick, and he said his plan worked out perfectly. They took four tires when they needed to, they took fuel when they needed it and he put himself in position to win the race. He’d practiced going from the back to the front all day long to see how long it would take and see what he could do once he got there. A number of guys did that. Dale Jr. did it the most, and his dad used to do the same to set up for the end of the race.

Tango, yes, but with whom? Monte Dutton of NASCAR This Week took a contrarian view in his post, “Talladega best ever? Nahhhhhh.”

I think this particular race, won by Kevin Harvick in spectacular fashion, was great. I think it may go down as a classic. But the greatest race ever? Not a chance.

NASCAR needs this to be the greatest race ever … because it’s the most recent one. NASCAR often sets aside history when it serves its purposes, and it’s purposes at present involve ending a malaise. What better way to boost sagging attendance and flat television ratings than to declare that the most recent race was … the greatest stock car race ever run … or the greatest auto race ever run … or the greatest sporting event ever held … or the single greatest accomplishment in human history.

It’s easy to see Waltrip as a cheerleader for this effort. He has a vested interest. TV ratings for NASCAR races continue to fall in tandem with race attendance, like two cars drafting out of the entire sphere known as NASCAR.

If anything, what Waltrip exalted was perhaps the very thing that’s killing interest in anything but the end of races. Here’s Monte again from the same post:

The greatest aspect of the Aaron’s 499 was its ending, and nowadays that seems to be the greatest aspect of every single race. The up side is that NASCAR’s cockamamie rules makes such an ending almost unavoidable. The down side is that the best drivers in the country can’t seem to run a lap without crashing at the end.

It strikes me as the sort of end-game strategy which daily newspapers are employing, shrinking their papers while raising subscription rates: the corporate media bosses are betting that there’s a buck to be made on the dying fall of the industry.

NASCAR, perhaps unwittingly (though I doubt that) has set up an irresistable dance which will eventually rob itself of the last vestiges of what once made it great.

Pretty strange move. But then, these days are strange, and the logic which moves events is two-faced and dangerous.

Like a whore in a red dress who’s working not for money or sex but the satisfaction of taking desire down by its greed.

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Does this look like commuting to you? Consider that racing at ‘Dega is now safer than driving to work.

Whatever Waltrip saw from his announcer’s booth (lavishly endowed by NASCAR), Sunday’s Aaron’s 499 reminded me, for the most part, of commuting to work. Not that I drive 190 miles per hour amid a pack of cars festooned with ads for everything from Little Debbies to Miller Beer, but there was something, well, almost as everyday and quotidian about the ‘Dega race action on Sunday which I could identify with, which wasn’t what I was expecting—or wanting—at all.

Many of you will probably disagree the race was dull. What, 88 official lead changes (counted each time the pack crossed the start/finish line, whereas the number of actual lead changes was in the hundreds), a couple of Biggish Ones, a finish to beat the devil (with Harvick charging hard enough to win by a nose) and that was Dull? C’mon.

But I’m sorry, it was. For some reason I wasn’t anything as excited watching the Aaron’s 499 on TV as I was for the races at Bristol or Texas, nail-biters where it took a lot of racing to overcome a leader and a lot of strategy and balls to hold on to a lead. At ‘Dega on Sunday, the only lead change that counted among the 84 was the final one in the closing seconds of the race.

It’s possible that I’d overblown my expectations. Late the previous week I had –at ridiculous length—described Talladega as “NASCAR’s Temple of Doom” that the nothing could live up to the hyperbole. Its like how doing The Deed is nothing like imagining it, though nothing either satisfies except The Deed, as if thirst is endless but satiety is just one tall cold glass of water.

Maybe it was all those lead changes that made the proceedings as ho-hum as my drive to and from work, a flux too formless and malleable to resemble the hard-fought dominance we usually see at a race. Probably more so than any other race I’ve seen, I could identify with the track proceedings. Been there done that – on my commute. Sometimes I’m ahead of that guy in the black Beemer who looks like he could use a severe makeover with that hair – looks like a FOX news helmethead –other times I drive up to a light and there he is ahead of me. Or that semi I passed long ago edges up next to me. Physics, not horsepower (OK, there are a few witless idiots who speed through traffic like the rest of us were going 25 mph) determines such ebbs and flows of traffic.

At the Aaron’s 499 I saw no real defining edge to the racing. The FOX announcers (especially Waltrip) had to work hard at coming up with angles and strategies to stifle the yawn over the race down to the final ten laps or so. For some reason, more than any race this year, it was at Talladega – Talladega! – that there was little reason to watch the first nine tenths of the race. I see that sort of action every day driving to work.

Observers of the evolution of human animation in movies say there’s a theshhold, a proximity to looking like the real thing where 95 percent likeness seems real but 98 percent is horribly false.  Maybe there’s a threshold to TV coverage where it looks so close to racing that it doesn’t look like racing at all. (I’m thinking here of FOX’s “pump up the volume” sequence after a restart, where the set trembles at the roar of passing cars so much that it for some reason pushes us away; when it gets that close it seems wholly alien.)

Or maybe it’s because you know there is no real danger in the racing, that no matter how catastrophic the wreck, the driver will get out and sheepishly wave to the crowd and walk unlimpingly to the infield care ambulance. My commute is far more dangerous than ‘Dega now.

Everyone says that ‘Dega is always decided coming out of the last turn of the 2.66 mile tri-oval, and last Sunday, perhaps was typical for The Monster. It wasn’t until the third green-white finish and then it got down to the four or so guys running on fumes who ended up near the front on the final restart that my attention perked up at last. And even then, Harvick’s late move that got him around McMurray to give the win by a nose seemed as predictable as things get at Talladega, the two restrictor plate masters duking it out for the final quarter lap.

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Ho hum. Jimmie Johnson wrecked at the end but he kept atop the points standings, blunting any feeling that this race made any difference at all, that any of the season’s races before the chase do anything but maintain points position. The fall ‘Dega race, as part of the Chase series, will matter, but for four years running the 48 team’s mastery of their car and the track seems unapproachable.

None of the extras thrown by NASCAR into the mix to make this fan-fun seemed to make any difference. The bump-drafting seemed ordinary, the wrecks were predictable enough occasional lapses in the tight weave, the long green flag runs: It looked like the same drive to work I’ve been doing for the past 15 years.

It wasn’t sexy or exciting in any of the guilty-pleasure ways I had so imagined of Talladega.

Just another day at the office at the track where nothing is predictable, most so the droll predictability of the day’s premier race.

Weird.

As soon as Harvick won I gave my wife the remote (she was ironing clothes) and told her to watch whatever she wanted.

I was done with racing. Perhaps forever.

Till next weekend, at least.

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Florida Hospital in Orlando; Salem Hospital, Salem, OR.

Of course, I didn’t know when I wrote that last passage (early Monday) that something was amiss in the big oval inside my own ribcage. Something going wrong inside made outside things, perhaps, seem minor, quotidian. I couldn’t get my heart engaged in the race because it was occupied with other, more disturbing things.

Later on Monday I checked myself into the emergency room of Florida Hospital with chest pains, a racing pulse, pressure in my head and ringing ears. I felt bad, bad. They took me immediately in back, took blood and  chest x rays, gave me a couple of nitro pills and a shot morphine to quell the knot in my chest.

It was weird, following my younger brother’s footsteps, who died of a heart attack when he 44 two years ago almost to the day. I went through all the rooms he did except for the angioplasty lab where they failed to resurrect his anterior descending artery and he died.

Timm never emerged from Salem Hospital. Not alive, anyway.

I drove out of Florida Hospital parking garage on Tuesday afternoon, April 27. The day was clear and unbelievably beautiful. The sky almost a cobalt blue, the trees in sunlight as if they were on fire.

My brother died of a heart attack. Apparently I suffered something between a reaction to steroids I was taking for a bad back or one of those mably-pambly anxiety attacks whose symptoms wear the mask of the Big One.

For a while, though, I thought I was going to leave the race on my 52d lap. I still might – I’ve got a few more months until I hit 53 – but it didn’t happen the other night.

But there were other folks on the ward who said Good Night, Gracie. An old guy in the room next to mine cried out several times in the night. He was hustled out and didn’t return to his room.

I went through the motions. Nurses came in and out of my room taking blood and EKGs, but I didn’t see any electroshock paddles. (My brother had them applied 14 times to no avail.)  I didn’t see any bright white light, unless you count the aura of my migraine, which was piercing yet deep in the flood of my blood washing, in unaffected, perfect rhythm, in and out of my heart.

My wife drove down from Leesburg from her job. By the time she’d gotten there, the docs had figured I was OK but wanted to keep me overnight for observation. She had a terrible headache. I told her to go home, I’d be fine. She waited to talk with a nurse and get certain confirmations. Satisfied, she allowed herself to be shooed off by me. “Go home and feed that cats, take two PM Tylenols, go to bed,” I said. “I’ll call you in the morning.”

When she kissed me goodbye I saw such a face of concern and weariness and love: The face of a marriage which has endured much, with this as just one of the passing terrors. She left and I was alone, the way I wanted to be. Nothing she could do and there wasn’t anything dire enough for her to stay. I felt back she came down at all.

I felt like a fraud. A heart-attack impostor. I guess I’m glad I went in, that heart trouble was ruled out from the mix. Something else is going on, but it isn’t Big One stuff.

My brother was on Lap 44. Pretty early in the race.

Tim Russert didn’t emerge from his hospital—dead on his life’s 58^th lap. David Poole, one of NASCAR’s greatest reporters, didn’t get a pass through the cardiac unit last year, his life’s race ending on its 50^th lap.

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Tim Russert and David Poole.

I got the lucky dog. And I felt guilty. Those who survive the dead always do.

I guess it wasn’t my given Sunday.

If I was a racer, it would have been Wynona, NASCAR’s goddess of luck, who gave me the pass.

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But I’m not sure who let me through. Not yet. That’s why I’m writing this.

Nor will I know for how much longer I’ll get the pass.

Not ever.

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Racing in an oval is a form of circulation: Cars launch from the start line and head for an extremity on the other side of the track – anywhere from a half mile to a mile and a half away – and then round back toward a line which on the return is the finish line, or what in 500 miles will be the finish line.  Then off again they go, ever turning left, ever rounding back to home.

Every racecar’s a platelet carrying a form of oxygen to those extremities, helping the dark parts breathe, if you will, assisted by lungs which haul in air from the outside – that would be us, the fans in the stands and all the eyeballs glued on the TV set as the cars go round and round.

It happens fast. The fastest a NASCAR racecar ever went on a lap on Talladega’s 2.33-mile course is 45 seconds – that’s 212 mph. (Bill Elliott, 1987.)

But the average human heart is faster, beating about 60 to 80 times a minute on average in a resting state and upwards to 165 to 180 beats a minute when going flat-out.

Kevin Harvick averaged about 150 mph in winning the Aaron’s 499. He was going a hell of a lot faster than that when he passed Jamie McMurray for the win, a bunch of prior wrecks and three green-white cautions at the end, there was a lot of slowing down. Still, an average 150 mph is pretty fast.

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If you average out a heartbeat between on-the-couch-watching-the-race and balls-to-the-walls-at-the-gym fast, 120 beats per minute might be an equivalent. That’s about 63,000 beats a year.

Or 3.271 billion beats in a 52-year lifetime.

Who can hear you scream in such a universe of heartbeats?

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Ten laps from the finish, this pileup ended the day for Brian Vickers and Matt Kenseth.

If all goes well, all the cars go out and round and back for a certain distance – in Sprint Cup competition, around 500 miles—with one of those cars arriving at the starting point/finish line before the rest. That would be the winner, upon whom all the glory and confetti and foaming sprays of champagne or Mountain Dew are lavished, while team members howl with glee and the team owner listens to cash registers fly open and one of this year’s three Miss Sprint Cup appointees stands there suited toes to nose in black and yellow – Sprint Cup colors – and smiles and smiles and smiles in a way that always makes me think of a porn queen receiving a basting of the money shot on her face.  It’s of no matter who wins; usually he’s there because of someone else’s bad luck. Wynona has no moral compunctions about changing her partners from week to week.

Of course, not every car usually finishes. Engines, like hearts, fail. There are wrecks, just like there are wrecks on the daily commute or on the drunk roads late at night. It’s somebody’s fault, moving high or low; but the cars are going so fast its not really anyone’s fault, just a fateful warp in the weave which deigns this car to go there into that car and then kaboom and screech and aw shit. The survivors wipe their brows and go whew. It is always best to be out in front, not only because winners are always in front, but also front-runners are usually out of the way of the mayhem.

But on any given Sunday (or rain-rescheduled Monday), anyone can get caught up in a wreck, or have a tire or a gasket blow and find themselves coming to a stop as all the other cars roar happily by.

The end comes way too early for someone on any given Sunday. Since no one really gets hurt anymore in Sprint Cup car crashes, the unwitting victim looks pretty normal when he’s being interviewed a short time after the wreck. Some combination of sheepish and pissed and glum. The wreck-ee usually mentions how someone else got into them and then quickly move on to saying how good the car was, what a great team worked to put out such a great car, mention the sponsor support and then say something about how it’s a sad shame that it had to end early for their car. And then they walk off, back into the garage, off camera, into irrelevance for that day at least.

But when that oval course inside us gives out, we don’t look so good. Dead is not very handsome. My brother looked normal enough at the viewing—a sheet was over his chest, since organs had already been harvested—but his skin was cold and his blue eyes were fused shut. And he could offer no explanation to us about what had happened. I had to glean all of that from the EMT and hospital reports.

Knowing all that made my lap through Florida Hospital last Monday night very, very strange. I knew the narrative already.

I was doing the same tango.

Or watching it.

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I was exhausted on Sunday, having worked like a fool in the garden on Saturday afternoon, putting in some 30 pentas and blue daze and climbing roses. My wife’s idea, really. I was planning to lay on the couch and watch the Aaron’s 312. But it was rained out and I knew she wasn’t going to be able to get those damn plants in, so, despite being on steroids and surely in need of rest, I went out into the upper-80s’ heat and did the hero thang. I got all those fucking plants into the ground despite having to hack through a pesky root system of something – trees in the parkway, I guess – and then pouring out some 15 bags of cypress mulch.

A doctor explained to me around 1 a.m. on Tuesday – the bad cop doctor, the one who tells the morons what fucking idiots they are – that steroids mask pain, so no doubt I way way overdid it, invoking the start of the symptoms when I went back to work on Monday. A normal, stressful day in the failing newspaper industry – and by midmorning, my heartrate was taking off, my chest was tightening up like a wad of paper, I was getting a bit nauseated, my ears were ringing, I was getting a headache.

Maybe I was succumbing to terror of the usual daily spin down the toilet – me at an irrelevant age with my industry tanking and no other lucrative options out there. Enough days of working under such condition, who wouldn’t start to freak? Maybe I thought of my brother’s fatal heart attack a couple of years before and started to panic. Could be. Or, as another doctor suggested, maybe something else is starting. It wasn’t my heart, but something is wrong, and it’s stayed so since. A high-wire sort of anxiety, as if one false move and it’s into the wall for me.

I didn’t know shit on Monday, though, just that I felt bad. Real bad. I waited it out a couple of hours to see if the symptoms would subside. When they didn’t, I finally  called my primary care doctor’s nurse and after explaining how I felt she said, stop whatever you’re doing and go NOW to the ER.

Blame her, fer Crissakes.

But the doctor was blaming me, pure and simple, for blatant stupidity.

A stupid move.

But then, my life’s as crowded with responsibilities as the Talladega pack, so it doesn’t take much of a wrong move to set things in wrong motion.

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There isn’t anything to do in a cardiac observation unit. You just lay there and wait for someone to draw blood or take an EKG, for another doctor to come in and ask all the same questions. You eat food that tastes like soft cardboard. I waited hours and hours for migraine medication to arrive, so I lay there with an anvil in my head and a question mark over my chest.

Maybe that question mark was more than the diagnosis the docs were all angling toward. Maybe it was the ghost of my old birthmark. See, I was born with a red heart-shaped birthmark over my heart. And the heart was transfixed by an arrow. No shit. Only the thing was upside down, and it disappeared when I was three years old or so.

The birthmark isn’t that uncommon, though its placement over my heart is. Kings of the Merovingian dynasty – you know, the guys who were entrusted with hiding the Holy Grail and whose blood flowed, supposedly, from Mary Magdalene, who, if you believe Dan Brown’s tale, was secreted away from Palestine into Europe after the crucifixion of Christ.

In every heart there’s a grail, a cup of wonder, the most magical thing in the world. It was hidden there by the gods because they figured no one would think to look there for it.

I’m not sure who fired that arrow, yet. The answer may die on my lips.

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The only thing you can do in a COV (cardiac observation unit) is lay there. You sleep a while, worry, listen to the sounds of other, more precarious dramas going on in the room next to you, drift off to sleep some more, and watch TV. Lots of TV. I watched “The Office” on TBS, “Dancing with the Stars,” (wild tangos between a pro and lead-footed luminary), some awful sitcom I can’t recall and a terrible drama I can’t recall. (Why is so much TV, so many channels of it, all so bad?)

Then I slept, my sleep disturbed by that fucking migraine headache and by numerous times by nurses checking on me and doctors lecturing me and people dying in the night.

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My brother died at 2:50 a.m. on the morning of April 18, 2008.

At 2:50 a.m. on the morning of April 27, 2010, I lay in a cardiac observation unit bed and started in my sleep, waking with the grip of a migraine tight at my temples and my heart quiet. I farted and went back to sleep, thinking of my wife alone in bed up in our house in our small town, praying she was sleeping well.

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The next morning around 8 a.m. I was told I would be released that day – my heart, in Their accumulated wisdom, was fine. I should have felt relieved, but actually it just made me feel foolish.

It took almost all of day to get discharged. Meanwhile I made calls on my cell, reassuring my wife, making some arrangements at work, calling a few friends to give them the news. I didn’t tell either of my parents where I was. They’d already lost one son to an ER ward like this, and as it turned out I didn’t have his problem. They’re both in their 80s, fer crissakes; why give them a coronary with news of my false one?

During that long wait I watched Gilda on Turner Classics. It’s basically a vehicle for Rita Hayworth to shake out her hair and show off her smile and her gams and wear outfits that glittered like a constellation of eerily-burning stars. Every WWII vet knows Rita like the inside of his own locker, like the fuselage of the B-52 he went down with. She was a good-luck fuck, a promise to make it home.

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In Gilda, though, that promise wasn’t so sure. Hayworth plays a falling angel all too well. One of her big song-and-dance numbers – where she begins a striptease that leaves jaws agape some sixty-five years later – is a song called “Put the Blame on Me, Mame”:

When they had the earthquake
-in San Francisco-back in 1906
They said that old mother nature-
was up to her old tricks.
That’s the story that went around,
but here’s the real lowdown-
Put the blame on Mame boys,
put the blame on Mame

One night she started to – shim and shake-
that brought on the `Frisco quake
So you can, Put the blame on Mame boys,
put the blame on Mame.

They once had a shootin’ –
up in the Klondike when they got Dan McGrew
Folks were puttin’ the blame on –
the lady known as Lew
that’s the story that went around,
but here’s the real lowdown-

Put the blame on Mame boys,
put the blame on Mame
Mame did a dance called the Hichy-koo,
that’s the thing that slew McGrew
So you can, Put the blame on Mame boys …

So it wasn’t an earthquake that brought down ‘Frisco – nor an angry Mother Nature – but someone worse, a hotcha dancer named Mame. Gilda glommed onto that song like random sperm onto a flung brassiere with heavy white cups.

By extension, it wasn’t Krauts or Japs that got so many Americans killed. It was Rita Hayworth.

Though I love my wife and our cats and our house and garden and minor, middle-aged existence, watching Hayworth sing that song I wanted to kiss her, too, and make the exit from my life with a bang (or rather, banging her). Who wouldn’t? Why does Death have such a strangely attractive face, the older you get?

I invited Gilda to come lay in bed with me there while I waited to be released from the hospital with my fraudulent heart condition. But she just waved goodbye and let the final credits roll. I was going home—to my real home, the one on this side of the life.

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I also watched CNN a while, hearing a number of Goldman Sachs executives testify before a very testy Senate panel. Not that I really like Congress all that much, but there are worse monsters in the world, and Goldman Sachs is one of them. (Hospitals are like Congress, in my opinion, filled with well-meaning people who can’t do much of a damn thing for you, even though it costs the world.)

Last month, the Securities and Exchange Commission filed a lawsuit charging the bank with fraud for creating and selling mortgage-backed securities that were intended to fail.

The brouhaha is over what are called synthetic collateralized debt obligations, complex financial instruments which many say played a big role in making the financial crisis worse by providing more securities to bet against. Basically, the financiers at Goldman Sachs created a way for them to sell off bad mortgages and then make money when the market collapsed. They bet against their own customers and laughed all the way to the bank. (In the first quarter of 2010, the company’s net profit soared 91 percent — $3.46 billion dollars.

In the first quarter of 2010, there were 930 thousand foreclosures, up 16 percent from the same quarter of last year.

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In testimony before a Senate subcommittee on April 27, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein said it was not a conflict of interest for his firm to sell mortgage-backed securities without telling investors that his firm was betting against those securities. The government isn’t buying it, and now the Justice Department is reviewing the SEC’s allegations of fraud against the investment firm.

Betting against the house and raking in the dough of death: it’s like the newspaper industry.

If you follow the odd, odd logic of this post, it isn’t Goldman Sachs that sank our economy, but a gauzy strange broad by the name of SEDO (for synthetic collaterailed debt obligation) who seduced us into the latest distortion of the American Dream and then ditched us while we hold the fuse in our hands.

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Also in the news was the bad news leaking out of the Gulf of Mexico, or rather, from an oil drilling rig 50 miles off the Louisiana coast that had exploded and burned out of control on April 20, leaving 11 workers missing and presumed dead. The rig sank two days later and all what originally was thought to be 1,000 barrels of oil a day began leaking. A few days later, Doug Suttles, chief operating officer for exploration and production for British Petrolium, who had leased the oil rig, stated that a two new leaks had been found in the riser and that the spill was more like 5,000 barrels a day.

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Though many measures have been taken to soak up the spill, very little of it has been contained.

The slick is predicted to make landfall on Louisiana coast tonight.

Looking at footage of the slick reminded me of a busted heart pouring out its last. I thought of Gilda’s sleazy black dress and gloves when she was singing “Put the Blame on Me, Mame.”

Easy to blame British Petroleum. They’re one of the worst companies to help America to energy independence. A 2005 explosion at BP’s Texas City, Texas refinery that killed 15 people and resulted in a record $21 million dollar fine from the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration, for safety violations that were allegedly the result of company budget cuts. And in 2006, a BP pipeline leak went undetected for five days, pumping 267,000 gallons of oil into Prudhoe Bay of Alaska, reportedly caused by “failing equipment” that environmental advocates earlier had warned was in need of repair.

In a press release on the BP corporate website, Group Chief Executive Tony Hayward said, “We are doing absolutely everything in our power to eliminate the source of the leak and contain the environmental impact of the spill. We are determined to fight this spill on all fronts, in the deep waters of the Gulf, in the shallow waters and, should it be necessary, on the shore.”

Hayward made BP’s effort sound like the cardiac care ward at Florida Hospital, both concerns going to every length to put a stop to something which originated, much earlier, with a dance—in the former case, our country’s dance with cheap energy, and in the latter, my dance with a life’s sweltering curves, edible potable smokeable and fuckable turns which compose the speeding oval of my life.

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And for all that British Petroleum and Florida Hospital can do to staunch the bleeding, Mame keeps dancing because we want her to, we need her dance of death because its just so damn cute and inviting and magnifying what would otherwise be like dancing alone drunk on the floor after everyone’s gone home.

And—to tie this thing back to where I started –it isn’t NASCAR but Wynona, corporate racing’s gilded goddess of Luck, who’s overseeing the demise of the sport that green-white-checker dress, augmenting the end while killing the race. Bigger finishes necessarily diminish the ends of getting there. Now there really isn’t any reason to tune in until the end.

And in the end, Gilda kissed her man and I got a free pass. I got to drive up to my small town north of Orlando and park my car next to my house and come inside to my  beautiful wife and cats and sigh and say, I’m home.

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Which brings me back to the nagging question: Who let me go? Who is my Mame, my Gilda, my Wynona?

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Not Gilda, nor Wynona, for me. But who? Or what?

Was it the moon, so full and heavy and silvered that night over Florida Hospital?

Was it my own heart, whose purposes and desires are so foreign to my brain, my knowledge? My head tells me life sucks; but my heart is still in love with all of this.

This time, my heart eased off on the gas. I finished the lap without incident, while Kevin Harvick claimed Talladega and Goldman Sachs executives faced their firing squad and an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico kept emptying blood from the world’s deep heart.

I got off this time.  I made it back home, eventually, from my Monday commute.

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But Mame is still dancing. And there are some great races coming up the next three weekends.

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Big Bill France and NASCAR’s Temple of Doom

The shadow of Big Bill’s legacy envelops Talladega Speedway, NASCAR’s most dangerous and free-spirited track

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If you’ve been perusing the usual popular NASCAR watering-holes in the cyberspace, you can’t miss the all of the hoopla about Hall of Fame Inductee Bill France Sr., founder and empire-maker of NASCAR. Much—no, mountains of hyperbole–is being lavished on the man’s tall frame and towering ambition for what began as dirt (or sand) track racing by a moonshine runners and cheered on by local yokels.

But Talladega is the track built by France in which NASCAR’s founder rode the shark, so to speak, setting the sport on an irreversible course to the present moment. Talladega is Bill France Senior’s monster, a immense cathedral to speed and its demons of red mayhem and daredevil glee. Talladega is wild, wooly darkness smack dab in the middle of the NASCAR schedule, scary and feral and thirsty — o so thirsty – for cars that go round til they go boom. Talladega is the shill’s cry which promises the gaudiest prizes on the midway – stuffed bunnies as big as Volkswagens, plastic ninja swords sharp enough to behead a dandelion – crap which leaves you feeling sorry you asked for it and keeps you coming back for more.

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During a double-file restart on the 317^th lap of the rain-re-scheduled Samsung Mobile 500 on April 19 – with just 20 laps ago –- nine cars were caught up in a crash on the front straight which took out the drivers who had led for 220 laps of the race: Jeff Gordon, Tony Stewart, Jamie McMurray and Juan Montoya.

Tony started down just a little,” said Carl Edwards, also eliminated, “and that’s all it took.” Stewart made light contact with the No. 24 of Jeff Gordon –- who had looked just a few laps earlier to be running away with the race -– and Gordon went sideways, getting T-boned by the No. 99 of Carl Edwards. Stewart, Montoya, McMurray, Joey Logano, Paul Menard, A.J. Allmendinger and Clint Bowyer all got wrapped up and wrecked.

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A ‘Dega-style Texas wreck on Monday took out half the top competitors.

The field was red-flagged for 20 minutes to clean up the carnage, and the re-start saw Denny Hamlin running away with Jimmie Johnson, who had just squeaked ahead of the wreck, in hot pursuit. The two finished 1-2 -– clearly a blueprint for season’s Sprint Cup picture, with Hamlin getting to wear the tall Stetson and firing off the six—shooters this time.

“We were supposed to have the Big One next week, right?”

Clint Bowyer blithely quipped about the catastrophic events (bad for his team, anyway) of the Samsung Mobile 500 on April 19.

Everyone knew what Bowyer was referring to. When cars wreck in a big way, all eyes turn to Talladega.

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April 19 was also Patriots Day, commemorating the battle in 1775 between British Army Redcoats and Lexington militiamen in which a “shot heard round the world” marked the beginning of the Revolutionary War and the right of citizens to bear arms against oppressive government.

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A “Lexington militia patriot” falls to “Big Government” during a reenactment of the 1775 skirmish which started the American revolution.

A traditional re-enactment of the famous battle was staged in Lexington, with the first shot fired by the same two guys who’ve been doing it for the past five years, Carlo Bertzaonni and Bill Gundling. (“We fire two muskets in case one doesn’t go off,” explained Gundling.) The shot(s) set off a flurry of gunfire between locals suited up as Redcoats and Minutemen and eight reenactors fell to the ground in honor of the eight colonial militia who were killed in the battle.

Over in Fenway Park, local patriots on the Boston Red Sox militia dropped their fifth in the row, suffering a blowout to the Tampa Bay Rays. Ya win some revolutions, ya lose some.

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BoSox fan / Tea Party junior member lets the home team know how well he thinks the season is going.

Back in Texas, in getting the Samsung Mobile 500 on Monday finally off to a start, Texas Gov. Rick Perry addressed the crowd, saying, “In Texas, we love our guns, religion and NASCAR.” (It might be added that, above all, Texans love Texans most of all.) Governor Perry is paying $225,000 to sponsor Bobby Labonte’s No. 71 Chevrolet for Sunday’s Samsung Mobile 500 at Texas Motor Speedway, whether for his re-election this year as governor or in support of a Tea Party Presidential bid, who knows.

On that same Monday it was business as usual at Fox News, which serves up a mash of tell-me-what-I-want-to-hear “news” like the froth of 32-oz stein of PR beer by a heavy-breasted Oktobergirl for the GOP, oftentimes by firing up the fury against a demonized Other – Democrats, big government, Progressives, Hollywood politics. “Fair and balanced” is the motto, and like all big lies, it’s best shouted from the rooftops while the crawl across the bottom of the screen continues to spew the innuendo and invective. (“Obama chooses to play golf rather than attend funeral of Polish president” – the fact that he couldn’t attend due to the ash plume that’s grounded all Europe-bound flights was not important.)

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Let’s see, the left puppy’s for fairness, the right one’s for, uh, I forget. No matter: Just keep the beer coming.

Fox commentator Glenn Beck is big on guns – at least, the right of law-abidin’, government-hatin’ Republicans to bear ‘em against the rising tide of violent minorities. Speaking against actions by the state of Missouri to crack down on armed militias, he said:

Our researchers couldn’t find a single report of a single death specifically linked to a militia group, or an individual member of a militia, in over a decade. Yet an average of more than 150 officers die every year nationwide. Have you counted the number of dead police officers in Philadelphia? And militia numbers are reportedly down after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 — seems it gave them a bad name. So why are militias getting so much attention from Missouri?

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Beck and boobs: what else could an angry white guy want?

Of course, if Beck went back 15 years on April 19 to 1995, he’d find a darker account of Patriots Day, when Timothy McVeigh’s bombed the federal Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City. The blast killed 168 people, many federal workers, as well as 19 children under the age of 6.

A self-proclaimed patriot who was infuriated by the Brady Bill’s attempt to restrict gun ownership and by government’s assault on the Waco, TX compound of the Branch Dividians, a sect-militia who gloried armed conflict with the government, McVeigh and co-conspirator Terry Nichols timed the Oklahoma City explosion to coincide with the second anniversary of the Waco assault. In 2005 Fox News reported there may have been ties between McVeigh and a white supremacist militia, but in 2010 such ties do not serve the cause of gun rights. They can’t deify McVeigh-yet—but there is a nervous (and weird) association between patriotism and going to war against a government whose policies you don’t agree with.

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Big government hater and self-proclaimed patriot Timothy McVeigh and his rage.

The classic Karl Rove strategy is to blame the opposition for exactly what you’re doing; that’s why Gov. Rick Perry was warning his Tea Party that liberal infiltrators would try to ramp up the anger at Tea Party events on Tax Day last week (as if the Party needed any help in that), and Mississippi GOP governor Haley Barbour, interviewed on Fox News on Monday, said allegations that the Tea Party could turn violent was “a crock,” the product of Democratic Party demagoguery.

Hard to pull off a big one like that in year which, in its first four months, has seen a man incensed over his tax battles with the IRS fly a private plane into a federal building in Texas where the IRS had offices, killing himself and one IRS worker; where 42 members of Congress bill have reported receiving threats for voting for the health care bill; where new militias are spreading like wildfire (The Southern Poverty Law Center, a non-profit agency tracking militia activity report the appearance of 363 new militant in the past year), and which the FBI arrested eight members of a Michigan-based Christian militia which had planned to murder a police officer and then set off bombs at the funeral, hopefully to incite citizens to declare war on their government.

But why quibble with details? Fox News has gold-standard viewership in the cable wasteland, serving up what folks want most: news to abuse, to get pissed off about, reveling in the cheesecake announcers and flag-waving vitriol of its helmethead pundits.

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FOX News babes. Nothing like having cheesecake serve up your meat and potatoes.

Angry citizens who flock to hear the words of Glenn Beck, think Roger Ailes, Beck’s boss at FOX, or Rupert Murdock, Ailes’ boss at News Corp., gives a shit about you? NASCAR fans, think NASCAR gives a shit about you, though it jumps through every empty hoop to give you what you’re asking for?

Do you trust these folks to fight for what is best, to sacrifice the lucrative for the good?

Think again.

Think Talladega.

Bill France Sr. would be proud, for he, too, knew if you build a monster in the name speed and chutzpah, they will come – the teeming horde whose collective pockets almost equals the big big money of corporate sponsorship.

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NASCAR.com is the official news and promotional website of NASCAR. It’s not unlike Fox News. And as Timothy McVeigh perhaps is the long shadow of Fox News, racin’ at Talladega is purest evocation of Big Bill France’s legacy, for better or worse.

Sometimes the work of favorably shaping the moment requires a re-invention of history. NASCAR.com has been falling all over itself this past week praising NASCAR’s founder, one of the first inductees into the NASCAR Hall of Fame. The new NASCAR Hall of Fame facility’s grand opening is on May 11 with the induction ceremony slated for May 23. The first five NASCAR Hall of Famers are France Sr., Richard Petty, Junior Johnson, Dale Earnhardt and Bill France, Jr.

When news and PR get so tangled – the truth-telling found in old school journalism gets short shrift. “Where would NASCAR be today if it hadn’t been for Bill France?” asks Rick Houston in his NASCAR.com article, “Visionary France nurtured NASCAR with his actions.”

In characterizing Bill France Sr., Houston quotes Jim Hunter, NASCAR’s director of corporate communications (what more balanced voice could you tap?):

“He strongly believed NASCAR could be a huge sport someday if it was managed right, and he was right. He helped steer it in a solid direction. France was a giant of a man, but had a great way with people. He could be charming or could be a hard-nosed businessman, whichever the situation called for. He believed in action … didn’t believe in sitting around waiting for something to happen.”

And so we get NASCAR, Big Bill-style, the mechanic-turned racecar driver–turned promoter-turned ball-busting, deal-making CEO transforming the hillbilly sport of dirt track racing into the massive sprawl of superspeedways, money-walks-purses and even bigger corporate money. Bill France Sr. made NASCAR fit for TV consumption by zipping up its Piedmont fly and turning its drivers into corporate pitchmen and he achieved it with a force of will which in time, as his power consolidated, became the absolutism of a family-owned-and-operated empire.

“Buzz” McKim is the Hall of Fame’s official historian. (You can bet PR is part of his job, as selective history is part of Hunter’s gig in corporate communications.) McKim offers this bit of corporate history:

“Big Bill was NASCAR. It was his dream to organize the other groups and give the sport credibility. Not only did he have a great business mind, but his 6-foot-5 stature and his amazing people skills gave him the leadership qualities to keep the group together and dissuade any loose egos among the other organizers.

No doubt the Big Bill France was the founder and achiever who made NASCAR into the multi-billion-dollar enterprise it is today. Big Bill made stock car racing big -— but was that a bad move? Is NASCAR too big for its britches, too expensive for fans and a drag on corporate ad budgets strained by a spluttering economy? Is NASCAR now too big to fail—necessitating, like those financial institutions like AIG, TARP bailouts from the pockets of future Americans? Or does its very size allow gravitas to eventually pull the whole thing down, the way our economy collapsed in 2008 when too much snake oil (some $62 trillion in credit default swaps) turned real estate lucky sevens into snake-eyes?

Did Big Bill France take NASCAR in a direction where it was doomed to fail?

If there’s any track in circuit which offers proof of such an assertion, it’s Talladega, and the story of how this track came into clearly demonstrates the extent of how far France Sr. would go to make a dream come true—a dream which history now suggests is a bad one.

It may also suggest a step in American history which proved a wrong one, a false move, taking us on the path which leads us to this tumultuous, stricken, frightened, hysterical, polarized and impotent moment.

And what was that wrong step? It was in the direction of the money—-big money. There is a saying: “Bad in the beginning, bad in the middle, bad in the end.” Seems like it is always true when someone tries to make a buck out of a pleasure, a sport, an engagement and a thrill. It’s like paying for sex or using an inflatable love doll, like drinking near beer or spending like a rich man using a credit card: There’s nothing further from the real deal than trying to vend it, which is three little steps from stealing it.

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‘Nuff said.

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It is not surprising that the fastest track in NASCAR was built on the relics of a military airstrip, given the propensity of Sprint Cup cars to go so fast they sometimes fly.

Talladega is the track no driver loves; it is The Monster; the biggest, fastest, meanest mega-oval in all of NASCAR, whose tire-shredding, car-launching speeds caused the intervention of restrictor plates. Talladega’s mayhem—four-wide and five-wide racing which results in wrecks which can take out half the field or send cars flying nearly as high as its aging catch-fence—cannot be quelled or resolved to any satisfaction, not with so many of a certain type of fan who  loves this sort of racing—hurling along the banked precipice of fire—and would not have it any other way.

For some drivers, surviving Talladega is about the best they can do. “If you can walk out of a track like Talladega with the fenders on the race car, then you’ve had a good day,” says Ryan Newman. “In a way, I know it’s exciting for the fans, but I personally don’t think that this style of racing should be a part of the Sprint Cup Series,” Carl Edwards said before the spring 2009 race. “It’s just too bad we have to race like this. If it weren’t for points it would be a little different, but you’ve really got to go out there and put yourself in a position where you’re just at the mercy of everything, and I hope that someday we can find a way to race at these tracks without being in that position.”

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Ryan Newman has gone airborne at ‘Dega, and has the lumps to prove it.

Jimmie Johnson has won at Talladega (Spring 2006), but there is no winning strategy apparent to him. “Talladega is the track where you don’t have any control. So much can happen. … There’s a lot of danger out there, and we’ve just got to be smart.” You can run smart, you can lead at Talladega, but none of that can keep you from tangling in a Big One. “I don’t know. I really don’t know what to do.”

If there is a track where Wynona–NASCAR’s goddess of fate–is most fickle and stringent in Her outcomes, it is Talladega. Some drivers have always done well there (Dale Earnhardt won 10 times, and son Junior has won six), but just as frequently drivers who rarely see Victory Lane win there (Brad Keselowski and Jamie McMurray last year; Brian Vickers has one of his two career victories there).

“This place is always about being in the right place at the right time,” says Tony Stewart, who has one Talladega victory. “You can run your guts out all day and still end up 25th. It doesn’t matter. This is one of those deals you just have to be there at the end.”

Jeff Burton says,”As the laps start winding down, the intensity level just goes through the roof. It’s unbelievable how you can feel it here more than any other race track.” “Talladega is just one of those unknown track, says Matt Kenseth. “You could lead 190 laps, then get wrecked or lose the draft and end up finishing 43rd.”

Mark Martin skipped Talladega completely between 2007 and 2008. “There are too many wrecks here,” he says simply.

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Another day at the office for Hernado de Soto in his dealings with the natives.

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Bad in the beginning …

A little more history, for Talladega’s roots grip deeper wounds in the soil.

Hernando De Soto, the Spanish explorer with an eye for bling, landed in Tampa, Florida in 1539. From there, he and his army of 1,000 men came across Florida through Georgia to near the Tennessee line, entering Alabama in 1540.

During his trip, the Native Americans told him about a large Native American city in the area that is now Alabama. That city was Coosa which was located on the site just north of the present city of Childersburg between Talladega Creek and Tallassahatchee Creek on the east bank of the Coosa River.

The town of Coosa was the capital of the Creek Nation which had some 250 small Native American towns. De Soto and his men went to Coosa and stayed about 6 weeks. De Soto was with Cortez in Mexico a few years earlier where they found large amounts of gold. He therefore explored much of this area looking for gold and other riches, which he found none.

However, on De Soto’s trip through this area several writers recorded valuable information concerning the landscape and living conditions of the Native Americans of that day. These Native Americans were civilized agriculturalists, living in thatched covered wood huts and observing complex religious customs.

But no gold.

About 20 years later, Deluna, a member of De Soto’s party returned to the area. His writer recorded the area at that time. On his return he found that the large Native American town of Coosa has dwindled in population. It is thought that the De Soto visit had brought new diseases that the Native Americans did not know how to treat. The decrease in population was attributed to a high death rate from these diseases such as smallpox imported by the Europeans.

Spaniards from the fort in St. Augustine traded with the Native Americans of this area. Then the English established a trading post in Charleston, South Carolina, to trade with the Native Americans, and in 1714 the French built a fort and trading post in the forks of the Coosa and Tallapoosa Rivers near Wetumpka and named it Fort Toulouse. The three countries competed with each other for the Native American trade.

After the Revolutionary War, George Washington felt the need to cultivate the friendship of the Creek Nation. He therefore called a pow-wow. In about 1790, the Creek chief Alexander McGivalry and some twenty-six other chiefs went to New York and met with President George Washington. The chiefs made a treaty with George Washington at that time and returned home.

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Creek Chief Alexander McGivalry.

Things were peaceful for several years, but contact between present and future inheritors of the land were always uneasy. War between the Creek Nation and the U.S broke out in the early 1810’s.

Some Creek tribes kept friendly ties with U.S. forces. In the 1814 Battle of Talladega, Red Stick Creeks had been harrying pro-American Creek Indians at Talladega. Responding to the call for help, General Andrew Jackson arrived outside the village of their Creek allies on January 9, who cried “howdy-do, brothers, howdy-do” to their American allies. The Red Sticks were driven off; Davy Crockett described the Red Stick counterattack as “a rush of locusts led by a devil”; they inflicted 100 casualties on Jackson, but Jackson’s forces were able to inflict some 400 casualties on the Red Sticks and drive them off.

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Red Sticks Creeks assault Ft. Mims near Mobile, Alabama, in 1813, poppng the question to their victims: Where the white women?

One story has it that after local Talladega Creeks were slaughtered by warriors of the larger Creek nation in retaliation for their collaborating with the forces of Andrew Jackson, a Talladega shaman cast a curse on Dry Valley as the survivors left.

There are many at Talladega Speedway who still feel the cold breath of this curse.

Another story contributing to the curse legend was that the great Pawnee chieftain Tecumseh left the Midwest and visited Southeastern tribes sometime around 1811, recruiting for his massive resistance movement against white settlers. The Talladegas supposedly refused to join the movement, so angering Tecumseh that he vowed that when he returned to Illinois, he would stomp his foot so hard the earth would shake in Alabama. Some might say that Talladega Speedway, as the record holder for the fastest stock car, felt a roar which shook the bones of hell.

Another old tale is that Talladega Creeks loved to race their horses “on Sunday” in Dry Valley. Once, an old Talladega chief got knocked off his horse and killed in one of the races, and his death put a curse on Talladega.

Especially racers.

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Is it a dead chief’s curse which so easily dismounts drivers from the Talladega track?

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I have written before about how important it is to found a track on the right spot and for the right reasons. Talladega does not share that honor. Like the poor suburbanites in the 1982 movie Poltergeist whose homes were knowingly built over an Indian burial ground, what is founded on greed can only have a subsequent history of whup-ass and payback.

For all the bad decisions NASCAR has made—-decisions which are showing their clearest implications this season—-Talladega may be the track where NASCAR’s end is revealed, the very ground splitting wide to haul the guilty down to screaming (OK, bankrupt) hell.

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Oh, the things which show up in your swimming pool, especially one that’s been dug out of a graveyard.

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A scene from the 1967 Firecracker 400 at Daytona, with Sam McQuagg  (#37), Cale Yarborough (#71), Bobby Isaac and David Pearson battling for the lead.

Like everything else in the late 1960’s, NASCAR had entered a dramatic period of change. Most of the old moonshiners—both the runners who raced cars and the still operators who financed and built many tracks as a way to launder money—had almost completely disappeared from the sport. So too were the dirt tracks, and the number of short tracks were diminishing. Money was beginning to make NASCAR lucrative with corporate sponsorship beginning to flow in. Bigger and faster was the way NASCAR wanted to go–and grow.

Fan excitement was running high, incited by Richard Petty’s astonishing victory record in 1967 – twenty seven our of forty-nine races, shattering the old record of eighteen wins in a season set by Tim Flock. (Between August 12 and October 1, Petty won ten straight races.) “Everything we did was magic,” Petty later recalled. “I got to thinking I could win every race.”

As early as 1967, bumper stickers started showing up proclaiming, “Richard Petty for President.” A feud with Bobby Allison, started the next year, raised fan excitement to an even higher pitched, pitting “The King” against an upstart from Hueytown, Alabama who rode without factory sponsorship and wouldn’t back down from anybody. The two clashed repeatedly in races, often with their pit crews coming to blows afterward. Even Bobby Allison’s Aunt Myrtle once got into the fray and whacking Richard’s brother Maurice (his engine builder and crewman) with her pocketbook.

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1967 ad for Champion spark plugs.

A companion Grand Touring Series was launched in 1968 –- what became the Busch and now Nationwide Series — designed to help promote the new “sports sedans” being produced in Detroit –- the Ford Mustang, Plymouth Barracuda, Mercury Cougar, Chevrolet Carmaro and the AMC Javelin. Races were 250 miles in length and ran usually the day before major Grand National races. It was an inexpensive way for Dixie Sportsmen and modified drivers to get into the fray, as well as Grand National drivers who didn’t have sponsorship. And it gave the fans more.

But what really fed the appetite for big racin’ was the construction of the superspeedways, huge tracks that could pack in fans by the hundred thousand or more. Michigan, Texas, and Atlanta were all built in the late 1960s. So was Talladega, the biggest speedway project of them all, created through the combined efforts of Big Bill France, who saw a perfect opportunity at an abandoned World War II airstrip near the mill town of Talladega, Alabama, and Alabama governor George Corley Wallace, a demagogue who was always also in favor of development. Fifteen million people lived within driving distance of the strip, including Birmingham to the east and Atlanta to the west.

According to David Pearce in Real NASCAR, White Lightning, Red Clay and Big Bill France, there are several accounts that France lifted the idea from Fonty Flock and others who discovered the Talladega site; Smokey Yunick says that Flock had even created blueprints of the raceway and France stole them. Another account has Bill Ward, an Anniston, Alabama insurance agent and part-time driver coming up with the idea and scouting out the site, only to have France steal it from him.

George Wallace put his political muscle into getting state money to speed up the Alabama construction of I-20, which ran by the site, and build new roads to the track. France would return the favor to Wallace by becoming a vocal supporter of Wallace’s 1968 Presidential run. “George Washington founded this country, and George Wallace will save it,” France famously said. France served as the campaign manager for the candidate’s efforts in Florida, allowing ads for Wallace to be splashed all over his Daytona speedway and helping to deliver the vote in every Florida county.

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Bill France Sr., Gov. George Wallace and wife Cornelia in suite at hotel during the Democratic National Convention in 1968.

France showed his strong-arm abilities in convincing the Talladega locals about the building of a 2.66 mile, 33-degree banked monster in their back yard. He  fought off the city’s desire to incorporate the track inside its city limits – and asking for a 50-cents-per-ticket tax—by saying in an interview with the Talladega Daily Home,

It reminds me of the story of the dog coming home with the bone. He was passing over a little bridge when he saw his reflection in the water. He leaned over and opened his mouth to grab the other bone from the dog in the water. When he did, the bone in his mouth dropped out and he had nothing.

Clearly, the city would follow France’s wishes in the manner of the building of the Talladega track – or else.

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The first race at Talladega was scheduled for September 14, 1969, and there was quite a buzz about the sort of speeds Grand National cars would be able to attain only at Talladega. Congressmen and newspaper editors alike hyped the business opportunities latent in a sporting even which would outsize the legendary college football contests the state was famous for. France was obsessed with breaking the world closed-course speed barrier of 200 mph. One advertisement played on the dream in this way:

Think about it. Fifty rumbling, roaring NASCAR Grand National stockers blasting down the longest straights in stock car racing … then dipping three abreast into the steepest banks in the business at better than 180 miles per hour! The toughtest, bravest, and fastest drivers in the world battling each other for 500 miles … fighting heat and fatigue … pushing their machines to the limit and sometimes beyond.

But timing was bad for the race, whirling with that old, ancient curse. Hurricane Camille devastated Alabama in August, forcing contractors to hurry their efforts to complete the paving job at the track, resulting in terrible driving conditions. Drivers were outspoken in their displeasure—and fear.

“The place is rough as a cob,” complained Bobby Allison. “The roughness bounces the car around so much it feels like its tearing the wheels off in corners.” Most drivers concurred with the concern that their tires would only last a few laps due to the unprecedented speeds combined with terrible track conditions.

The Talladega race also coincided with a second effort among drivers to form a drivers’ union, following the concurrent success of organizing efforts in other sports organizations such as in the NFL and NBA. Big Bill France had successfully squashed a fledgling effort by drivers in 1963–after the deaths of drivers Joe Weatherley and Fireball Roberts–to obtain better purses, improved safety and death benefits back in 1961; using his clout, France ordered a “lifetime” ban of organizer/driver Curtis Turner, then one of the most popular drivers on the circuit.

The 1969 effort was much more concerted, with eleven of the top drivers including Richard Petty, Cale Yarborough, Bobby Allison, Buddy Baker, David Pearson and James Hylton drawing up the bylines of the Professional Drivers Association (PDA). Richard Petty put it this way;

All of a sudden the cars started running 190, 195 mile-an-hour. We was running on some of these race tracks that it wasn’t safe to really be in the pace car. Also, the guys were getting concerned about, hey man, there’s more people coming but the purses ain’t going up.

Cale Yarborough further complained that NASCAR officials “sit up there in their glass tower and talk about safety and then act like they want to kill us.”

Though Petty and Allison were fierce rivals on the track, the need for an organization to protect drivers against NASCAR made them co-workers for a cause. Allison said,

We formed an organization because we felt foolish in not forming one. Every other major sport has its players’ organization. … A guy devotes his life to racing, and he gets only $7,500 if he gets an arm torn off. If he gets killed, his wife gets $15,000.

Allison also said that many drivers couldn’t afford the insurance for what was considered such a risk, and talked about the need for retirement benefits so that when drivers “got out of the cars we wouldn’t be working in gas station for $1.19 an hour.”

As he showed in 1961, Big Bill would not tolerate any unrest in the ranks which would threaten his big dreams for NASCAR. With much of NASCAR’s money riding on the Talladega race (France had spent hugely on the project), Big Bill brought out the brass knuckles. He got into a Holman-Moody Grand National Ford and drove the Talladega course, turning in a 175-mile lap, proclaiming to the press afterward, “It’s a world record for a 59-year-old man.” He then applied for membership in the PDA and filed an entry into the race. Allison called France “a foolish old man,” but France was going to get his race no matter what.

While this was going on, safety concerns were mounting at Talladega. During race practice and qualifications, tires were blistering and cracking after two laps at 190 mph. Charlie Glotzbach said, “they ought to call this race. Nobody has tires any good for more than 15 laps.” Donny Allison, who drove a Ford in a controlled tire test the Friday before the Sunday race, said, “ My heart was in my mouth through the whole race. hat was the most scared I had ever been in my life.” Talk in the pits—where the subject tof danger or risk never came up—was rife with concern. Reporter Bob Carey of Stock Car Racing Magazine observed that for the first time ever, “the words ‘widow’ and ‘funeral’ were spoken in pear-shaped tones’ by the drivers.

Car owners and tire manufactures joined in the fray. On the Friday before the race, Firestone officials, fearing disaster, withdrew their tires.

Big Bill claimed that some “foreign substance” was on the track that was cutting the tires, and ordered his crew to sweep the track. He refused to postpone or cancel the race. ‘We will have a race here. Right now I don’t think we have a major problem.”

France’s financial obligations were certainly behind his determination to make the race come off, come hell and high water. But his true motivation may have been his personal obsession for being the man responsible for breaking the 200 mph speed barrier, and he would see it happen at Talladega, his darling, the monstrous wings of NASCAR’s future. Big speed would open wallets like the legs of any waitress fed enough moonshine and moonlight driving down a lonely country road after midnight; Talladega would be the supreme seducer, slick and fast-talking and game for anything.

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After the dismaying news of the Glotzbach and Allison tire test at the Talladega track, Richard Petty met with PDA members individually about boycotting the race. The next day he informed France that the drivers would not race under conditions that were “like playing Russian roulette.” France’s response was, “There will be a race tomorrow. If you don’t want to be in it, pack up and leave.”

And that’s exactly what Richard Petty along with several other drivers did. France then tried to persuade the drivers who were still around to race, promising that track conditions weren’t as bad as most feared. Besides, he said, the drivers can just drive slower if they want.

Riiiiiiight. LeeRoy Yarbrough said, “Bill, we can’t put on a decent show the way things are now. Sure we can go out and run 175 and not wear any tires but is this fair to the guy that’s paying $25 for his seat?” Allison added, “Can we start on foot and get paid by position? Wait, I take that back, the track is so rough we’d probably trip and fall before we got to the first turn.”

The meeting almost turned violent when Richard Petty called the drivers for a meeting and France tried to follow. Yarbrough, a former Golden Gloves boxer, blocked his way, and France backed down. But the impasse was clear: the leading Grand National drivers were not going to race, but France was not going to call off the race.

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Big Bill tries to barge in on a drivers’ meeting before the first Talladega race.

So this is how the inaugural Talladega 500 race was run: Nine independent Grand National drivers – the ones who had never been competitive in other races, and had no ties to the PDA – stayed to race, lured by the big money and an implied threat by France that if they didn’t run, they would never be permitted to race again. The field was filled out with Grand Touring drivers with their smaller cars, in clear violation of NASCAR’s own rules.

France played on the Piedmont working class’s distrust of unions by having ushers hand arriving fans a statement from France which laid the blame for the boycott on the irresponsible actions of the PDA and crediting France with his determination to have the race anyway for the benefit of the fans. To avoid all of the feared consequences of the race, France did some things to rig the proceedings. He asked track officials up in the tower to tell drivers to slow down when they were going too fast, threw yellow caution flags every 25 laps so teams could change tires, telling the teams ahead of time when the flags were coming.

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Winning driver Richard Brickhouse (who disavowed any allegiance to the PDA over the public address system prior to the race, saying “Winners never quit, and quitters never win” to the cheers of the fans) had average speed was only 153 mph; even so, tires on the smaller Grand Touring cars took just as much a beating as the larger Grand National cars, and France had teams cover up the tires as they came off so the press wouldn’t see them. Given all the rigging, the race saw no major tire blowouts or accidents, and the race was seen as a victory for France.

For the PDA, they had little leverage with France, and without the support of fans, the organization was short-lived. France added a “yellow-dog” clause to Grand National entry forms, where drivers and owners pledged to race no matter what the conditions, even if the car failed to qualify. France assembled a committee to look into driver pensions and the like, but the group met only sporadically and eventually disbanded without providing any concessions to drivers.

Fans who cared for racin’ more than racers turned against their heroes. At the next race in Columbia, Bobby Isaac, the only top driver to break ranks with the PDA to race at Talladega, received the most cheers from fans. There and at the next two races the beer cans rained down on the track, aimed mostly at Petty– angry at him and the rest of the PDA for not racing, and angry at them for standing up for what little rights they had.

What sealed the coffin on the PDA was the arrival of really big money – a 3-year, $1,365,000 contract with ABC sports to televise selected NASCAR events—which gave France the power he needed to squeeze the life out of the drivers’ union. The first Talladega race of 1970 was also the first stock-car race televised under the new agreement between NASCAR and ABC.

The deal helped France consolidate the support of track owners and promoters and destroy other track owners who had tried to run independently of NASCAR, like Larry LoPatin of American Raceways Inc., which had built the superspeedways in Texas, Michigan and Atlanta. ARI eventually went bankrupt and was bought up by others more sympathetic to France and the era of “franchise racing” came to an end. Also, with big TV money, France was able to buy the loyalty of top drivers with larger race purses and other perks. By the early 1970’s, a driver like Petty could earn $100,000 for winning a race.

Big sponsorship money began to flow into NASCAR as the result of negotiations between Junior Johnson (who was considering going full-time with his poultry business as a more lucrative alternative to racing) and the R. J. Reynolds Corp. in 1970. Cigarette advertising had just been banned from television and radio, and the RJR marketing guys were desperate for new media through which to hawk their fuming products. Johnson was looking for tens of thousands of dollars of sponsorship money for his team; RJR had tens of millions of dollars in their advertising budget and saw big NASCAR sponsorship, with races like Talladega now televised and drawing over 100,000 fans, as a perfect opportunity. Once he saw how interested RJR was in NASCAR, Johnson brought Big Bill France into the negotiations.

In December 1970 a historic deal was announced, with the spring Talladega race to be named the Winston 500 and offer a $165,000 purse – second only to the Daytona purse in size – and an additional $100,000 going into what would be called a Winston Cup points fund to be distributed to drivers over the season. The big payoff for RJR came when their lawyers discovered that there was nothing in the new federal law that kept them from displaying cigarette brands on cars that were in televised races, nor kept broadcasters from announcing these brands as the sponsors of events – or even the entire series.

Thus NASCAR’s premier series entered the Winston Cup era and a flood of gold into drivers’ pockets. In 1971, Richard Petty made over $350,000. Smaller races were eliminated from the schedule – reducing the number of races in the season from 48 to 32 – but prize money roared past the $2 million mark.

As one observer put it, “(France) bought undreamed-of prosperity to stock car racing. With the help of sponsors, France hammered at drivers’ rough edges. discouraged public fighting, and generally kept them on a short leash. Whatever political notions, if any, these wild men had in the early days of racing, prosperity made them Republicans.”

And so Talladega, the big bad monster race founded at the center of Bill France’s monomaniacal aspirations, became the ill wind of NASCAR, suffused the golden opium of marketing, which fans inhaled like dope. (Other big sponsors to enter the NASCAR fray about that time were Falstaff Brewing Company, Coke and STP.) No one could fight the trend; for drivers, it was put up or get out. Stiff management from NASCAR kept them compliant and big money kept them racin’ in an orderly fashion. They just couldn’t keep outraged spirits from leaking out of Talledega’s every pore.

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… Bad in the middle …

The legends of ill omen at Talladega grew more ominous and real as the races at the track piled up a violent, weird history.

In the 1973 Winston 500 at Talladega, Larry Smith died in a seemingly minor accident on Lap 14. (There is a track rumor that Smith had cut out the inner lining of his helmet to accommodate his long hair.) On lap 90 of the same race, Bobby Isaac–one of the drivers to break ranks with the PDA and race in the inaugural Talladega 500 in 1969)–pulled over on the frontstretch, got out of his car and walked away, retiring from the sport because, he said, a voice in his head told him to get out. (Years later, while trying to make a comeback, Isaac had a heart attack during a race at Hickory (N.C.) Speedway.)

In 1974, drivers and crews arrived at the track to find their cars vandalized. They found sugar in their gas tanks, cut brake lines and slashed tires.

In 1975, Richard Petty’s brother-in-law was killed on pit road when a pressurized water tank exploded.

“A lot of strange things happened like that,” former driver Buddy Baker said. “There was a big wreck once on the 13th lap. I remember the year I won the race (1975), then I was talking to the media afterward, and someone told me Tiny Lund was killed (in a lap 6 crash). We were good friends, and I couldn’t take it.”

In 1987, Bobby Allison’s car rocketed into the frontstretch fence, nearly catapulting right into the grandstands. In 1993, his son, Davey Allison, was killed while trying to land his helicopter in the infield.

There is a tale that an ARCA driver outran a tornado that touched down on the backstretch during qualifying.

And so the curse legends evolved. But other simply believe it’s what the drivers of the fledgling PDA believed back in 1969: That the track was just too fast and had become a toxic waste dump pure driver fear.

And why not? Talladega Speedway has become a synonym for some of the most vicious wrecks in NASCAR’s history.

In the 1973 Winston 500, 60 cars started. On lap 28, Ramo Stotts’ engine blew, triggering a 21-car crash that knocked 18 cars out of the race. Seriously injured in the crash was Wendell Scott, the only African- American driver to ever win a NASCAR Cup race.

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David Pearson avoided a 21-car wreck to win the 1973 Winston 500. Only 17 of the 60 cars entered in the race finished the event.

In the ’84 Talladega 500 Tommy Ellis sent Trevor Boys’ #48 into a “Talladega Flip” that he was fortunately easily able to walk away from.

It in preparation for the 1987 Winston 500 at Talladega that Big Bill France’s dream of speed was achieved. Bill Elliott set the stock car speed record of just over 212 miles per hour during qualifying.

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Bill Elliott after setting the stock car speed record at Talladega in 1987. Something tells me they knew it was coming and soon.

And in the race, speed caught up with NASCAR. Bobby Allison spun turning on to the frontstretch and flew up into the catchfence, tearing up a section of it. Part of Allison’s car got through and injured some fans. Richard Petty and Alan Kulwicki got also got collected in the crash. Bobby’s brother Donnie came to check on him, and when Donnie asked if Bobby was o.k. Allison replied “Yes”, but he added “You won’t believe the ride I just took.”

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Bobby Allison’s 1987 wreck, where speed could send a car flying at Talladega.

This was the crash at Talladega which saw the introduction of restrictor plates to slow cars down some at speedways like Daytona and Talladega. Attempting to curb the ferocious danger of high speeds at the track, restrictor-plate racing was introduced; it had the intended effect of slowing things down a bit, but caused even worse problems, since now cars began running so close together. At Talladega races it’s not uncommon to see rows of three or four cars, and sometimes even 5 wide on the straightaways throughout most of the field, as the track is wide enough to permit such racing. Breaking away from the pack is very difficult as well.

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A Big One,  Talladega-style.

Such close quarters, however, makes it extremely difficult for a driver to avoid an incident as it is unfolding in front of him, and the slightest mistake often leads to massive (and often frightening) multi-car accidents – dubbed “the Big One” by fans and drivers. –Talladega is notorious for such, and always has been. It is not uncommon to see 20 or more cars collected in the crashes. Such huge crashes are less frequent at Daytona, which is a more handling-oriented track.

The danger of “the Big One” not only can cause extensive damage to cars during a race, but it can affect points standings overall, especially since the second race was moved from July to October because of the Alabama heat.  Then NASCAR developed a playoff system that incorporates the second race, currently the AMP Energy 500, although such big wrecks periodically occurred even before the restrictor plates were introduced as well.

Here’s a short list of “Big One” carnage since the introduction of restrictor-plate racing at Talladega:

– In 1987, Tracy Read (who was Cale Yarborough’s backup driver) was caught up in a big pileup at Talladega and climbed out of his car and began waving frantically for safety crews to put out the flames in his car. He survived that one, but in an ARCA race that fall, Read swerved when Kirk Bryant spun and hit the outside wall. Read drove into the infield to avoid Bryant’s whirling Oldsmobile only to plow head-on into the inside dirt bank. Read, aged 26, died instantly of massive head, chest, and abdominal injuries in the crash.

– In the 1989 Winston 500, Larry Pearson’s car was demolished in a crash that also included Michael Waltrip, Derrike Cope, Hut Stricklin and Kyle Petty.

– In the 1991 Winston 500, Mark Martin did a nose-stand with his car in an 18-car wreck that broke Kyle Petty’s leg.

– The 1993 Winston 500 was especially gruesome. Jimmy Horton flipped over in turn 1 in a multi-car crash. His car was flattened as a result, but he escaped uninjured. Later in the same race, Neil Bonnett’s car tried to tear down the catchfence in the tri-oval after flipping up and over Jimmy Hensley’s car in a 7-car incident. He also was uninjured. And at the end, Rusty Wallace mixed it up with Irvan and went into a wild barrel roll as Irvan drove to victory.

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Neil Bonnett’s about to become a free bird, flipping over Jimmy Hensley’s car.

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Ernie Irvan, looking rather shaken to have survived – and won – the 1993 Winston 500

– In the ’96 Winston Select 500, Jeff Gordon tried to go to the outside of Mark Martin and sent Martin into the wall. The ensuing crast sends Ricky Craven flying violently into the catchfence. Five cars had actually raced underneath Craven while his car was in the air.

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Ricky Craven and most of his car go airbone.

– In fall race of the same year, Ernie Irvan was attempting a pass when he got into Sterling Marlin, whose car then hit Dale Earnhardt and sent the Intimidator into one of the most chilling crashes of his career. The crash broke Earnhardt’s collarbone, but Dale is determined to walk away under his own power.

– In the 1998 Die Hard 500, Ward Burton’s car seemed to barely touch Dale Earnhardt, but the contact sent the #3 into Bill Elliott, whose car was demolished. In the same incident, Chad Little hit the #21 driven by Michael Waltrip. Jerry Nadeau, Ken Schrader and Bobby Hamilton are wrecked.

– In a 2002 Busch Series race at Talladega, a 27-car wreck red-flagged the field for 40 minutes. Only five cars finished on the lead lap.

– In the 2003 Aaron’s 499 (the spring race), contact from Kurt Busch sendt Elliott Sadler flying into one of the most spectacular barrel rolls. Fortunately, Sadler walked away.

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Elliott Sadler pirouettes.

– In the spring 2004 Busch Series race, Mike Wallace got loose in the tri-oval, crashing into Greg Biffle and setting off a chain–reaction crash, that among other things sent Kasey Kahne running wildly into the wall on pit road. Johnny Benson, Jason Leffler and several other cars were collected in the crash.

In the April ’05 Busch Series race, a 20-car wreck occurred 10 laps in; and while 25 laps from the finish, another 10-plus car wreck ended with Casey Mears sliding on his roof all the way from the start/finish line into turn 1.

In the 2006 UAW-Ford 500 (the fall race), Dale Earnhardt Jr. appeared to be well on his way to victory until Jimmie Johnson got into him, having been nudged by Brian Vickers on the final lap, paving the way to Vickers’s victory, one of only two in Vickers’ career so far.

(You can see video of some of these wrecks here.)

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… Bad in the end?

• The ghost of a man with demonic signs carved into his cheek may often be made out laundering a blood-splattered pair of pants in Big Spring after midnight. Many claim this ghost is probably the ghost of a local resident who used to dwell near the Talladega raceway.

• Across from Talladega Super Speedway, a man got electrocuted in the free campground. It is said you can still hear him scream, and sometimes see him walking through the campground, even when there is no one else there, and when its not even race weekend.

• The ghost of an old Indian chief is repeatedly seen on the water’s edge of Blue Hole carrying a cranium—perhaps the very chief that got caught up in a Talladega Big One, horse-race-style, several centuries before.

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On the seventh lap of the spring 2009 race, Jeff Gordon and Matt Kenseth (who had barrel-rolled in a crash in the preceding day’s Nationwide race), touched off a 17-car crash. “Lots of guys, lots of smoke and just a typical way to finish off the month for the Shell-Pennzoil Chevrolet” was the way a glum Kevin Harvick described the crash.

But the end of that race is what everyone remembers. Carl Edwards was leading the race about 500 yards before the finish line when he tried to block Brad Keselowski from passing him. But Edwards hit the right front quarter panel of Keselowski’s car. It caused Edwards’ car to spin before it came off the pavement and flew into the fencing above the outside wall.

Edwards nearly cleared the top of the catch fence before he struck it, with pieces exploding off the car as the fence bent back. His car then careened back onto the track and came to a stop in total wreckage. Miraculously, Edwards emerged unhurt – and theh, somewhat hilariously, ran to the finish line, as Ricky Bobby did once in the film Talladega Nights. (Edwards later said he just wanted to finish the race, he was so damn close.)

When the car hit the catch fence, pieces exploded off the car as the fence bent back severely but did not break.

Seven spectators suffered injuries. “None of the injuries are dangerous or life-threatening,” said Dr. Bobby Lewis, medical director at Talladega Superspeedway. “It’s mostly bumps and bruises with possible minor fractures.” Lewis said one, who was taken to UAB Hospital, likely had a broken jaw and also had a cut on her mouth. The other was transported to Brookwood Hospital because of an unspecified medical condition but was not hurt. (Probably temporary heart-failure, seeing that car coming straight at h/her.)

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Carl Edwards flies into the ‘Dega catchfence in last spring’s Aaron’s 499 at Talladega. Seven fans were injured from flying debris.

“NASCAR puts us in this box [restrictor-plate racing] and will race this way until they kill somebody,” Edwards said. “Then they’ll change it. We’re very lucky nobody got [seriously] hurt today.”

Keselowski emphasized he was thankful that no one was seriously injured but said there is some entertainment value to crashes.

“I don’t want to wreck anyone, but to say a no-contact sport is fun, I don’t buy that,” he said. “These guys want to see contact just as much as I want to give it and take it.”

Some fans agreed. Asked if the wrecks were part of the show, Tim Apfel of southern Florida said, “The last two races were great. I hate to say it that way.”

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In October 2009 -– before the fall Talladega race –- local Creek Indian medicine man Robert Thrower was brought in to attempt a ceremony to remove the Talladega Jinx. Using a bowl containing tobacco, red cedar, everlasting (rabbit tobacco) and wild sage, he prayed —- to some God or god –“We ask for your hand upon each driver. Let this talk of a curse be no more. Let the protection of your hand be a testament to your power.”

Maybe old gods die hard, or die forgotten: in the race which followed, an even greater weirdness prevailed. Obviously concerned about repeating the brutal outcome of the spring race, drivers raced the way they had been instructed, and for the most part the first two thirds of the race was bump-draft-less, orderly single file around the five-wide Tally track. Monte Dutton wrote in his race recap,

The first 150 laps of the race were variously described as a tire test, a model for high-speed rail and a cricket match, which doubled as an insult to fans of exciting cricket. It looked precisely as if drivers, having been sternly lectured in the drivers’ meeting to be good boys, had decided to rebel against the schoolmarms.

Then, just when all seemed lost, Mt. St. Helens erupted.

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With five laps to go, Ryan Newman made contact with teammate Tony Stewart, went airborne in his Chevy which then landed on the roof of Kevin Harvick, bounced off, careened up the track still on a its roof, bounced off the wall and spun down the track until it hit the infield and then barrel-rolled high and came down once again on its roof before coming to a stop.

Jamie McMurray sprinted through the mess to take the checkered flag. “…McMurray won the race by that greatest of Talladega virtues, ”Dutton writes. “He happened to be in front when the demons of Hell rose up from the earth behind him.”

Newman says he has full recall of the wreck, including watching and feeling the sparks shooting by his face because his helmet visor popped open before his car slid upside down along the asphalt track.

“I remember having to pull my visor back down in the middle of everything — I felt like I flipped 10 times, but it was only three, I was all good until the roll cage came down and hit me. I wasn’t ready for that one. It’s the worst hit I’ve ever had.”

As his pit crew watched nervously on television monitors, it took track rescue workers nearly 15 minutes to get Newman out of the car after establishing he was conscious. Newman said one responder held his hand while the others worked to flip the car over and cut the roof off to free him from the mangled No. 39 U.S. Army Chevrolet.

He lost radio communication when the car came to rest upside down, disabling the antennae. But after the car was righted, he was able to radio his crew — including his father, who spots for him — and his wife Krissie to assure them he was all right.

Jimmie Johnson has suggested that altering the track’s 33-degree banking is the most realistic option at Talladega. Newman agreed. “That’s the easiest thing to do because we need to make it so the drivers have to drive the race car,” Newman said. “We need it so it’s not wide open, at some point we need to lift (off the accelerator) and that will make it better.

“We have crashes all year at every track, but only at Talladega do the cars leave the ground.”

But instead attention has focused on a cheaper fix: substituting the wing on the back of cars for a spoiler.

Spoilers instead of wings on the cars may help prevent cars from sailing off like spirits at the Aaron’s 499 this Sunday. But on the other hand, cars are simply going faster this year. During testing of the new spoiler at Talladega last month, Dale Earnhardt Jr. (whose father is hold the record of ten victories at ‘Dega) reported getting up to 213 mph, which beast the official NASCAR speed record of 212.809 mph, set by Bill Elliott in the 1987 Winston 500 at Talladega.

Did I say “beast”? I meant “beat.”

Or did I?

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Testing the new spoiler at ‘Dega last month, Dale Earnhardt Jr. (shown here pitting during last Monday’s race in Texas) reportedly ran a lap over 213 mph, faster than the official speed record of 212.809 mph set by Bill Elliott at Talladega 23 years ago.

The old speed record may get beaten–ironically or fatefully–at The Beast. Maybe it will happen this weekend. Something tells me that is not a good thing. Not at Talladega, where all of NASCAR’s ills are scrawled in the helter-skelter confusion of drunkenness, Mardi Gras beads and ample boob exposure which litters the dark underworld of the Talladega infield after midnight on the eve of the Sprint Cup race.

Simply, Talladega’s faults may arise as from the loosened-up nether regions of its fans as much as the speed of its race cars.

Last year, the Sprint Cup race at Talladega fell on Halloween – Hallowdega, as it is spookily referred to by those who have camped in the Talladega infield for that race. Dale Inman, who was once Richard Petty’s crew chief, once said he wouldn’t dare venture into that place on such a night:

The only way I’d go out there would be as General Patton in a tank with the hatch closed. I’ve driven through there before on a golf cart and I didn’t slow down. Saturday night? Halloween? Lord, that will be something.

If the Talladega races are scary -— thus delightful to the grosser instincts of fans -— the Talladega infield on Halloween is the penultimate experience of hellish fun (just short of actually going to hell, which is where many party revenants in their heart of hearts – the scariest place anywhere in the universe—claim they will go, at the wheel, beer in hand, fishing in the Daisy Dukes of some trucker’s wayward wife).

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Many come in costume even when it wasn’t Halloween. They perform pranks and lewd acts that are comparable to Mardi Gras in New Orleans.

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Git er done.

Before local law enforcement stopped turning their heads and started cleaning things up years ago, there typically were 150 to 200 arrests on a race weekend. That has dropped to 50 or so in recent years, but Halloween is an X factor which can turn escapades into XXX fare – nothing for the faint or family-bent-of heart. (Let it be noted however that there is a family caming area which is largely sanitized of ‘Dega’s excesses.)

Elliot Sadler said, “Talladega is scary enough for me without Halloween.”

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King of Beers.

Other tracks have wild infields – Michagan and Texas are frequently cited by fans—but none have the reputation of Talladega.

Talladega Boulevard is known to some as Redneck Boulevard, and race night turns this penile stretch into something out of “Girls Gone Wild” overdosing on Cialis. There’s a neon sign neon sign over the boulevard that says “What happens here stays here.” A mannequin parked outside of one camper starts in a “race girl outfit” and, as the evening progresses, loses all of her clothing.

Things have cleaned up a bit – owing, perhaps, to the increased cost of attending a race of Talladega – but there’s still a lot of breast-flashing for beads and other public acts of sex as the night degrades into drunken abandon.

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Once ‘Dega infield veteran remembers bringing a stripper to the compound six or so years ago. “Instead of watching the race she made four or five thousand dollars going up and down the boulevard,” he said.

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Another fan also pined for Talladega Nights of old. “This area unfortunately has gone from being an area that everybody had a show to put on to an area where, now, mostly its people who want to see a show. Somehow, I feel, they have effectively killed off the strip’s nighttime action that used to be.”

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The rituals of the Talladega infield have been around for a long, long time. There has always been a strange relationship between the sacred and the profane; there has always been a need for orgiastic sexuality in civilized society. Cuttin’ loose seems intricately wound around keepin’ it together.

Mercea Eliade writes, “Every ritual has, an archetype… all religious acts are held to be founded by gods, civilizing heroes, or mythical ancestors. … Among primitives, not only do rituals have their mythical model but any human act whatever acquires effectiveness to the extent to which it exactly repeats an act performed at the beginning of time by a god, a hero, or an ancestor.” (The Myth of the Eternal Return, 21,22)

What’s different about Talladega – and places like Mardi Gras and Spring Break—is that’s they have lost their sacred origins. At least, the conscious connection has been broken. Can rituals still be carried out unconsciously? Observe a man in a blackout on Saturday night at Talladega.

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Think these two party boys know they’re headed for the mythological zone? Or are they just lost in the ‘Dega zombie zone?

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Perhaps owing to our animal origins, where males copulated frequently with as many females as possible in order to get the widest distribution of offspring, our gods were horny dudes, chasing nymphs willy-nilly through the wood, and fertility was a sacred bestowal of life from seed to womb. The earliest votives of fertility goddesses dating back to the great initiatory caves of the Paleolithic were fat bottomed girls with enormous breasts, visions of plenty with more where that came from.

Sexuality in the agricultural societies which replaced the culture of the hunter-gatherers around 10,000 BC. Mother Earth was supreme here, and matriarchal religions celebrated the Goddess with her virile dude of the moment, sacrificed at the New Year and replaced by another, younger, greener, lustier male.

Marriage was a tribal act, binding families together and creating a basis for home and court and city; romance in relationship wouldn’t even enter into the equation until the trouveres of the 13^th century starting mooning about it in their chansons.

As the bonds of civilization began to cement a society, the licensciousness of the gods became problematic. Wives were expected to stay at home and rear the babies and men had civic and martial duties which precluded extra-marital skirt-chasing.

Yet as everyone knows, there’s nothing like a Thou Shalt to inspire a rebel yell’s Hell Yes, and in every society where abstinence, moderation and self-restraint is preached in order to maintain civil order, rites of licentiousness flourish in the dark. Every pure god requires his devil. All-man Apollo (whose physical beauty and shining intelligence were the archetype of all misogyny and more than a little boy-worship by goaty men) and his counterpart Dionysus, a girly-boy who lured maids into woods to practice unspeakable acts high on wine and the ancient rock-n-roll of the clashing timbrel; in modern translation we have the Christian God in heaven and the Devil in Hell, the former’s purity so bright and clean our language has spare worn words for, while descriptions of sin and hell is a triple silo of bursting ripe metaphors.

In clear response to civilizing restraints which were new to the human animal, ritual time-outs which allowed the community to dive back into its hoarier roots were established. Sanctified sexual orgies flourished in the Western world, from ancient Greece and Rome and on into the Christian Middle Ages; and when the Church became successful in banning the visible and known festivals, the fuse for abandonment kept burning underneath the garters of the good world, made hotter over the centuries as measures of control over the thoughts and deeds of the citizen became more iron-clad.

Civilizations that surrounded the Mediterranean sea, some 2.500 years ago celebrated Phallophoric ceremonies (literally meaning “To Carry the Phallus”). The priestesses danced in public with phalli tied to their hips, singing satirical and obscene songs, joking and mocking. These priestesses, out of the view of the non-initiated, later celebrated sacred orgies, masturbating themselves or one another with these phalli, engaging in lesbic activities. They also employed rods and hermaphrodite statues as dildos.

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Participants dressed in women’s clothes carry a portable shrine with a large pink phallus during the contemporary Kanamara Festival, or the Utamaro Festival, near Wakamiya Hachimangu Shrine in Kawasaki, Japan, April 2009

In Greece, there were festivities consisted of hauling a gigantic phallus through the city as part of the rites of Dionysian celebrations. Kallixeinos of Rhodes went to one in Alexandria around 275 B.C. He claims to have seen a golden phallus 180 feet long carried through the streets.

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Wiinged phallus from the Temple of Dionysos on Delos Island in Greece, ca. 0300 BC. Eros, daemon of sexual attraction, has wings; in his little-bad-boy aspect he’s winged cupid, the fat baby who flies over the population firing arrows of passion alternately barbed gold (for the hots) or lead (the nots, causing the so-nailed to flee their paramours).

Dionysus was a god of mystery, wine and intoxication, his rites celebrated outside the polis walls in the wilderness and by the light of the wilding moon by women who had been driven mad by the god and fled their husbands and children to wear animal skins and dance in the trance of the god. (Not surprising, really, when you consider the tight knot of responsibility and duty and chastity imposed upon them by their indifferent husbands). The stimulation of the dancing, music and wine, to which they were not accustomed, drove them to ecstatic frenzy (enthusiasmos) during which they indulged in copious sexual activity.

Not surprisingly, the Dionysian religion was popular among slaves (especially those working the really shit jobs in the mines, where there was the least hope). In wine, Dionysos became the Loosener, the unshackler of chains which bound not only the feet but the mind as well. Dionysos was the Liberator; in many ways he was a precurser to Jesus, the one who brought personal salvation through the communion of his wine. Often in the orgiastic rites, women would rend animals with their bare hands and drink their blood; later, they would bow before the church altar and drink the blood of their Lord.

Rome also adopted phallic gods and parading phalli around cities and cross roads, worshipping Bacchus, the Roman trope on Dionysos. Livy, in his book, History of Rome (c. 10 CE) says that the cult spread from Etruria (Greece) into Rome, in 186 B.C., and that these “These mysterious rites were, at first, imparted to a few, but afterwards communicated to great numbers, both men and women… When wine, lascivious discourse, night, and the intercourse of the sexes had extinguished every sentiment of modesty, then debaucheries of every kind began to be practiced, as every person found at hand that sort of enjoyment to which he was disposed by the passion predominant in his nature.” Livy despised this “vice – the promiscuous intercourse of free-born men and women.” As if only slaves could be similarly enslaved to their lust.

In Greece, there were two main festivals of Dionysos, one autumn and the other in Spring. Perhaps because Rome was so big, its authority so great, its dominion so final, the number of festivals increased:

• Lupercalia is was celebrated on what we now call Valentines Day and celebrated with wild, sensual dancing where sausages played an important part. Hmmm.

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Can you say super- Lupercali- icious?  A fresco of Lupercalia enthusiasts from a temple at Pompeii.

• Floralia was a festival of the Roman goddess Flora which began on April 28th and lasted for three days. During these festivities, people wore garlands of flowers and “medallions that showed various positions of sexual enjoyment” They were feasts of sexual fun and joy, legitimate erotic licentiousness. Some say they were imported from bucolic farmlands into the cities; once inside the walls of Rome the festival became more dissolute and licentious, unhinged from its sacred roots and become something profane.

• Saturnalia was originally an ancient Roman agricultural feast held in honor of Saturn, god of seeds and sowing. He was represented by the sun in mid winter, and they believed that the sun was approaching death. (Sexuality has a goaty, dirty-old man aspect, greedy for young bodies, an imagination of unimaginably nasty dirty obscene acts.) Saturnalia celebrated the hopes of a new spring, of renewal, of life, as the sun overcame the power of winter and life was to be renewed.

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A Saturnalian devotee, ass-backwards and upside-down. Looks like a member of the Florida state legislature to me.

In all off these festivals, the rules, the order was turned on its ass. Masters waited on the servants, all sexual prohibitions were lifted. Cross-dressing was allowed. Erotic dances were performed with a large erect phallus being carried around in the dancing processionals.

After the fall of Rome to the Christian church, a long period followed of converting the old pagan sites and rituals to Christian use. Christian churches and then cathedrals were often constructed over the foundations of pagan temples. The old festivals were given a Christian twist, so that Christmas took over the winter solstice, Saturnalia became the Christian Twelftth Night or Fools Feast, Lupercalia became St.Brigid’s Day or Candlemas, Easter replacing Floralia and so on.

Different god, same old erectile mania: for all the ways in which the Church attempted to imposes control, the old energies of rebellions still required a way to vent. In 743 A.D. the Hainault Synod mentions a pagan practice (Spurcalibus in februario), adopted it and it became Carnival, the main ’orgy’ (minus the tits and dicks) of the ecclesiastical year: Carnival. During the Renaissance, Carnival was associated with the ancient Greco-Roman rites of Bacchanalia, Lupercalia, Floralia and Saturnalia as well as the festivities of the pagan tribes of Europe – May Day, Lammas, and Samhuin. Carnival was to be the celebration before Lent, and coincided with the end of winter and early spring. During these Carnival festivities, “…some go about naked without shame…”. These sexual traits were lost as time past, yet Carnival still retains (at least in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), its character of a permitted and temporary relaxation of the tension of customary restraints and conventions.

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Mardi Gras is an offshoot of Carnival tradition, coming into existence following the Reformation in Europe during the 14th and 15th centuries. With the Reforms, restrictions from many of the ancient Roman Catholic practices were lifted. Thus, much of the causes were removed though the customs lingered. The name Fat Tuesday comes from the custom of parading a fat ox through the streets of Paris on Shrove Tuesday. Another explanation given is that the French name Mardi Gras means Fat Tuesday, from the custom of using all the fats in the home before Lent.

Shrove Tuesday, derived its name from the old practice of confessing one’s sins on this day in preparation of the holy Lenten season. The verb ‘to shrive’ means to confess oneself and receive absolution. The three-day period of Sunday, Monday, and Shrove Tuesday, was known as Shrovetide. following which the period of Lent begins.

Oddly – or perhaps with the wisdom of the human soul, which has always fought civiizin’ in one way or another – the custom of parading one’s sins as fully frontal as a society can ritually unzip itself (at least once a year) developed into a walking bacchanalia.

Mardi Gras first came to New Orleans through French Catholics who in the year 1699 the holiday on the Mississippi River.

The starting date of festivities in New Orleans is unknown. An account from 1743 notes that the custom of Carnival balls was already established. Processions and wearing of masks in the streets on Mardi Gras took place, were sometimes prohibited by law, and were quickly renewed whenever such restrictions were lifted or enforcement waned. In 1833 Bernard Xavier de Marigny de Mandeville, a rich plantation owner of French descent, raised money to fund an official Mardi Gras celebration.

James R. Creecy in his book “Scenes in the South, and Other Miscellaneous Pieces” describes New Orleans Mardi Gras in 1835:

Shrove Tuesday is a day to be remembered by strangers in New Orleans, for that is the day for fun, frolic, and comic masquerading. All of the mischief of the city is alive and wide awake in active operation. Men and boys, women and girls, bond and free, white and black, yellow and brown, exert themselves to invent and appear in grotesque, quizzical, diabolic, horrible, strange masks, and disguises. Human bodies are seen with heads of beasts and birds, beasts and birds with human heads; demi-beasts, demi-fishes, snakes’ heads and bodies with arms of apes; man-bats from the moon; mermaids; satyrs, beggars, monks, and robbers parade and march on foot, on horseback, in wagons, carts, coaches, cars, &c., in rich confusion, up and down the streets, wildly shouting, singing, laughing, drumming, fiddling, fifeing, and all throwing flour broadcast as they wend their reckless way.

Another view has it that Mardi Gras in the U.S. began in 1703 in Mobile, Alabama, thanks to the efforts of Michael Krafft and the formation of the Cowbellion de Rakin Society. Mobile first celebrated the Mardi Gras Carnival in 1703 when French settlers began the festivities at the Old Mobile Site. Their Mardi Gras celebrations continued until the Civil War.

Mardi Gras is celebrated widely around the United States (with well-known festivals in Alabama, Florida and California) and around the world in Belgium, Brazil, the Caribbean nations, Colombia, France, Germany, Guatemala, India, Italy, Mexico, Panama, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden. But New Orleans is the spiritual center of Mardi Gras.

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Enough background, get to the question on everyone’s mind: So when did women start flashing their tits during Mardi Gras? The tradition is old. Minoan women of the Bronze Age would bare their breasts on festive occasions, apparently playing the role of nursemaids of the god Dionysos. (So there’s a Halloween costume for you boys.)

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The first documentation of it in the U.S. was in 1889 when the Times-Democrat decried the “degree of immodesty exhibited by nearly all female masqueraders seen on the streets,” the practice was mostly limited to tourists in the upper Bourbon Street area.[ In the crowded streets of the tourist section of the French Quarter, generally avoided by locals, flashers on balconies cause crowds to form on the streets, giving ample opportunity for pickpockets to steal from distracted and intoxicated onlookers.

Spectators have traditionally shouted to the krewe members, “Throw me something, mister!”, a phrase that is iconic in New Orleans’ Mardi Gras street argot. Women have long exposed their breasts as an incentive to receive the best throws. (Some krewes have specialty throws, for example the Zulu Social Aid & Pleasure Club hand painted coconut or the Krewe of Muses shoes and mirrors.)

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But the character of this began to change in the 1990s with the rise commercial videotapes catering to voyeurs; that business encouraged a tradition of women baring breasts in exchange for beads and trinkets.

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“As most people know, the infield at a race is one of the coolest places to be on a Friday or Saturday night,” writes a commentator to a post on the goings-on at the Talladega infield. “I wouldn’t say its the best place to watch the race, but it sure has its perks. Talladega takes the cake when it comes to the most outrageous infield on the circuit. I think most racers will agree that it doesn’t get any crazier than Talladega.”

He continues,

After the track closes on Friday a lot of the guys on the different teams go into the infield to check out the latest and greatest. Some don’t make it back to the hotel if the party is good enough. For the most part the team guys will just walk around and check out all the new racing inventions that the fans have come up with for the upcoming season. It would be safe to compare it to Mardi Gras, not as crazy, but close. Everyone in there has there own beads. Most of the girls will do what it takes to get the most beads, and that where the fun starts. The funniest part about the whole experience is Sunday mornings when we get to the track. It looks like a warfield, bodies just laying all over the place, some clothed and some not. The ones that are still standing aren’t standing straight up, and there are a few stragglers that are still hanging on to that last beer and cant put it down. Got to love these kinds of fans. If you’ve never spent the night in the infield and you’re a true race fan, you need to check it out.

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“I live about twenty minutes from Dega and have for most of my life,” another commentator writes. “I can remember going into the infield in the 80’s to visit friends of my parents and staying in their converted bus. I remember when there was a huge mud bog in the infield and the trucks would have a ball. I saw plenty of things but nothing really bad, probably because it was the same group of people twice a year and everyone knew everyone else. I have been to Atlanta, Bristol, & Daytona, but nothing beats Talladega for the party and the people”

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Others report that infield parties are wild no matter where you go. “I’ve camped on the infield of California Speedway at every race since 1998,” comments a third. “If Talladega is the ultimate of infield parties… I am afraid! California is weird, wild, and supercharged. If there are even wilder parties… I am afraid!”

Another picked Michigan. “I’ve done the infield at Dega, and I’ll agree it’s a wild party, but it’s pretty underpopulated. Lots of vast areas of no people. Michigan, on the other hand, is just as wild a time, and they are packed in there tightly on every square inch of real estate. The waiting list to get into the first three rows from the fence is years long.

“On the other hand, having visited Atlanta’s infield twice, I can say it is remarkably tame compared to the other two I mention. Older folks, family oriented, and nicer motorhomes as compared to the outrageous converted school buses, which you seem to see more of at Michigan than anywhere else.”

A third picked Texas. “I have been going to Texas for the last couple of years. We camp outside of the track in turn 3. It is one big party! Friday night, Saturday night, even Sunday night for the ones that stay. I have been describing it as being like Mardi gras but better! Mardi Gras at night then we have a race during the day, then do it again at night. We even have friends that aren’t big into watching the race but they love to come for the party. It is crazy, and we had wonderful weather this year, cant wait for the fall race!”

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A guy named Tim-adega rallied for the home team. “Dega, Ya gotta luv it!. I’m from the Dallas area and my girlfriend (Hooters) and I have been RVing to Dega twice a year since ’99. Oh yeah, it’s a lot like Mardi Gras but better, its good-Ol down home knee slappi’n, body wag’n, good eatin’ southern hospitality. I agree the infield is like no other, its not for the faint of heart, or the jealous type. She has gotten some of the most unique beads I’ve ever seen, “She got um the ol’ fashion way, she earned them”. For those who cannot get into the infield, don’t feel left out there is thee unmentioned area just outside the track, called ‘ The Zoo’. That place will leave you shaking your head with a smile as big as a possum eatin pizza!.”

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One commentor advises another what to bring on her first infield stay at Talladega: “What ever you bring, don’t plan on coming back with. It’s crazy down in Dega and you dont want to be worried about your best cloths gettin messed up. Put on some camo’s and go for it. Bring lots of beads and you’ll have a blast.”

A final one summed it all up. “I drove all the way down to Talladega from Northwest Indiana for the race … Not remembering how big the partying actually was! I was too young to party the last time I was at a race at Talladega. But now that I’m 18, I guess it’s ok. … Seeing that it is still illegal for me to drink, I bet I was just as tore up as half the people out there all weekend!! SHHH!!! I used to live about 20 minutes from the track until about 2001. I knew I was making a mistake by moving away from Alabama. Thursday night was the most energy-filled night of my life. I was anxious to get on the road, and I was dying to party with my old friends at the race. When we got there on Friday morning, my friends told me that ‘Tonight will be one of the most wildest nights of my life.’ Well, it turned out to be pretty boring that night. We camped on Talladega boulevard not far from the dirt track. Now Saturday night was a different story!! There had to be hundreds of thousands of drunk people and naked women everywhere you turned. It was the best sight to see! I recommend to all of you nascar-partiers out there to go to Talladega Superspeedway and stay on the strip…DO NOT STAY IN THE INFIELD!!! (you won’t get in as much trouble for things you do on the strip, because you won’t get caught so easily!! LOL) I will never forget that weekend. It will always hold a special place in my heart. … GIT-R-DUN!”

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Welcome to the infield 3 a.m. zoological zone.

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Carl Edwards says that despite the horrific accident he was involved in at the spring Talladega race last year, he’s looking forward to Sunday’s race.

“That was very close to winning my first race at a (restrictor-plate) superspeedway, and I learned a lot from it. I hope going back that I can find somebody to work with those last couple laps, whether it’s Brad or somebody else.

“It would be nice to be in that position again and have another chance to do that, and I think we will, eventually. But that was a really dramatic finish. I guess I’m looking forward to that race a little more now because of how close we were than maybe I would have in the past.”

Edwards also has spoken several times with Blake Bobbit, the 17-year-old girl who was the most seriously injured fan in Carl’s finish-line accident. (She got a broken jaw from debris that flew through the catchfence when Edwards’ Ford nearly cleared it.)

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Carl Edwards talks accident shop with Blake Bobbitt prior to the Energy 500 at Talladega Superspeedway on November 1, 2009 .

“I think Blake Bobbitt and her family will probably be there again, and I’m so happy that she didn’t hold it against us for what happened to her. She’s a real positive young girl.

“It’s just part of racing. Wrecks are going to happen. She reacted to that whole deal better than anyone could have. She’s so cool. … That made me understand our fans a lot better. We race on the inside of these race tracks, and I can only speak for myself, but you start to think of the fans a certain way. It’s not bad, but she reminded me of what the NASCAR fans are about.”

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Of course, no one really knows this year “what the NASCAR fans are about.” Many factors are stealing them from their sport: dull races, predictable outcomes, high ticket prices, HD-TV. Every track owner and NASCAR suit is trying to figure out how to woo them back.

Talladega officials are promoting what they call “Aaron’s Dream Weekend,” with new rules (bump-drafting returns), an ARCA race added on Friday night, improved traffic flows to the track, cheaper tickets (with two-day packages starting at $49) a just-show-up tailgate package that provides a 10×10 tent, premium parking pass, use of a portable generator and four reserved grandstand tickets for the Sprint Cup Race on Sunday; 18,000 new seats, premium box seating for parties and a fan-texting service which will allow fans to communicate with the track command center to receive special needs assistance. Miller Lite is giving fans the “Inside Track” with a full-service bar located in the infield that will stay open late Friday and Saturday nights.

Aside from paying for the stripper who works her way down Redneck Boulevard – or removing the catchfence to make the racin’ really exciting – I can’t think of anything else a track can do. “Fan friendly” doesn’t seem to be the issue.

As an alternative, they could try ball busting. It’s what Big Bill France excelled at. When he was having labor troubles opening Bowman-Gray Stadium in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in 1961, he declared: “Gentlemen, I won’t be dictated to by the union.” He loosened his tie, removed his glasses, and proceeded to put the “fear of God” into his workers. Before he had “this union stuffed down [his] throat,” he swore, he would shut down his entire operation, plow it up, and plant corn.”

Maybe it takes a Big Bill France to cower Mother Nature into pissing anywhere else but Talladega this weekend.

Maybe the Talladega Curse would be settled if they just gave the track – and all that’s gone wrong with NASCAR – a proper burial.

And plant corn.

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Everything is Big in Texas

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NASCAR’s season provides a test of drivers’ mettle and stamina, gumption and luck on a variety of environments. There are superspeedways and little ovals and intermediate tracks. There are winding road races and roaring straightaways ending g-force-popping banked turns. The circuit travels around the country, not only allowing fans from many markets (because this is business, you know) to spend lavishly at races. The season’s many stops throughout the country allows not only for a championship picture to become clear, it is also a barometer, a corn-dog-and-tall-brew’s litmus test of conditions both local and nationwide.

Ft. Worth, Texas, where Texas Motor Speedway is located—itself site of this weekend’s Saumsung Mobile 500–is a much different place, geographically and temperamentally and even spiritually than Daytona Beach, Florida, as Daytona is so different from Martinsville as Bristol seems apolunar to Atlanta, or Pocono from Sonoma, or Watkins Glen from Richmond. Each race is a different planet in the system, with its own specific gravity and gravitas. It’s hot or cold (where there are races in the winter and summer or spring and fall), it often rains or stays dry as a bleached cattle skull. Track conditions change, not only between tracks, but on the tracks themselves, as the race proceeds on any given day, as they age, as whatever Fortune (or Wynona, as she is known in NASCAR) doles out from what’s hidden in her phantasmagorical Daisy Dukes.

The distance from Phoenix, Arizona, where all the racin’ was last weekend, to Ft. Worth is not that far, not in the reckoning of the wide-open spaces of the fenceless – 850 miles. My first wife grew up in southern Idaho, and her family thought nothing of driving 2 hours to Pocatello just to get ice cream. Everyone’s car had over 200,000 miles on their odometer. Just a hop and a skip and jump over to Ft. Worth from Phoenix, Big Country Style; the tracks at Martinsville, Richmond, Charlotte, Atlanta, Bristol, and Darlington can all be reached in half that distance.

Such distance, such size is especially important to Texans. Nowhere else is there such girth envy.

Mr. Magoo gets off the plane when it arrives in Dallas. He goes into an airport restaurant and orders a cup of coffee. When the waitress arrives, she puts the cup between his hands. He says, “Wow, this cup of coffee is big!” The waitress replies, “Everything is big in Texas.” After enjoying a cup of coffee, the airport shuttle arrives to take him to the hotel. He climbs in and, naturally, notices the size of the seats. He says, “Wow, these seats are big.” The driver says, “Everything is big in Texas.” He arrives at the hotel, checks in, and asks where the men’s room is. The clerk indicates that he should take a left. Unfortunately, Mr. Magoo is bad with directions as well as being shortsighted, so he instead takes a right and ends up in the pool room. After wandering around for a moment, he falls into the hot tub. He spends the whole night screaming, “No! No! Don’t flush! Don’t flush!”

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The big news in Texas earlier this week is that Texas Stadium in Irving—a suburb of Dallas–was demolished, by designed implosion. Home to the Dallas Cowboys for 38 seasons (and five Super Bowl Championships), the owners built a new, $1.5 billion dollar football stadium for the Cowboys in Arlington.

An 11-year-old boy named Casey Rogers won an essay contest by Kraft Macaroni & Cheese to win the honor of pushing the button triggering the stadium explosion. Rogers had started a charity providing food and clothing to the homeless.

Given the right amount of boom-boom, Texas Stadium went quickly, falling like some stricken T-Rex to go from football dynasty cathedral to piled rubble in moments.

Fans were sentimental about all the memories of Cowboy supremacy in Texas Stadium, but the move makes good business sense. Super Bowl XLV will be at the new Cowboys Stadium, with seating for more than 100,000 fans. The 3 million square-foot stadium (affectionately known as “Jerry World,” for Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, whose baby this project is the largest domed stadium in the world, has the world’s largest column-free interior and the largest high definition video screen which hangs from 20 yard line to 20 yard line. Jones told ESPN back in 2008 that he believed that one day, Cowboys Stadium would be as recognizable than the White House.

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In a state where everything is big, the biggest thing in Texas is not a thing or even a dream but an attitude, fuelled by ambition and its shadowy contempts. Like an egomaniac with low self-esteem, Texas is loud and proud and a bit too big for its boots.

Just like NASCAR.

Get down in your saddle and cool a while, and I’ll tell you how, and perhaps why: though I doubt any of my explanations will throw a drop of cold water on the fun.

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Everything is big in Texas. Texas is the second-largest state and has the second largest population. Texas has big, powerhouse sports teams. Its women have big boobs and its men strut around in expensive cowboy boots. (A Texan friend of mine once boasted that his lizard-skin cowboy boots cost 450 bucks. Apiece.) Texan politics is a mixture of major-league hardball and Texas death match wrestling. Late Cretaceous Texas was home to Alamosaurus, the largest dinosaur in North America and one of the largest dinosaurs of its time. The poker game which pays the biggest bucks in competition is, of course, Texas Hold ‘Em.

Tall Texans have Texas-sized appetites. You can order a 72-oz. steak at the Big Texan Steak Ranch in Amarillo, and if you can eat all of it, it’s free. Over at Arnolds, you can order a burger made of 20 lbs. of hamburger that’s pressed into a patty half an inch thick by two feet wide. At Big Lou’s Pizza in San Antonio you can order a 42” pizza and a 36-oz. margarita at Lee’s Taco Garage (also in San Antone).

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Big meat.

And for appetites further down, well: I Googled “biggest tits in Texas” and found   a gal named Shugar n Texas, a late 40-something a big gal around with 38JJ boobs who confesses a weakness for “men and chocolate and shoes, of course,” a stay-at-home-mom, “happily married” cam-girl aspiring porn actress whose hobbies include “playing in the pool and flower gardening, movies and sex.” Also there was Sheyla Hershey, a prettier breast monstrosity (34KKK) who had eight breast augmentation surgeries until she reached the legal limit in Texas for silicone in the body (about 2 quarts). Sheyla wants to earn for Texas a Guiness Book of World Records berth for biggest breast implants and has moved to Brazil to accomplish the feat. All for her home state, says the Houston wife and mother.

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“Bigger ‘n’ hell and half of Texas: 38JJJ Shugar and 34KKK Sheyla.

Texas oozes -no, struts-with confidence. It’s big and bad and doesn’t take any shit from any uppity Easterner.

Especially from Washington, the uppityist, most dictatorial, step-all-over-my-Abilene-Black-Elk-cowhide-boots-and-I’ll-keel-ya mudhole of anti-Texan, anti-business, anti-Godamighty authority next to Gomorrhah or even, perhaps, New York City, whose size and attitude can make a baseball player the richest man in sports. (Alex Rodriguez got the largest sports contract ever at $25,200,000 from the Texas Rangers in 2001, but then the New York Yankees bought out Alex’s 10-year contract and offered him $27,500,000 for a ten-year contract in 2008. Every time Rodriguez steps up to the plate now, he earns $64,710.)

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Business is good in Texas. Its economy is huge (second largest in the country, 15^th largest in the world). Forty-six of 500 Fortune 500 companies are in Texas. Texas has suffered along with the rest of the world in the current recession, but its fundamentals are a lot better. In 2009, Texas’ state gross product (GSP) declined more slowly than the U.S. economy – (-1.7 percent versus -2.5 percent). The unemployment rate in February was 8.2 percent compared to 9.7 percent nationwide. Miraculously, Texas has weathered the national real estate crunch without significant damage to property values, mostly due to strong consumer-protection regulation. (Texas law makes it difficult for homeowners to treat their homes as piggybanks, extracting cash by increasing the size of their mortgages.) The Texas state economy is the best in the nation—take that, Callyfornia, N’Ywark.

A Californian, a Texan, and a New Yorker, attending a convention in a little town just outside Las Vegas, were standing in a seedy bar enjoying a few drinks. The Californian grabbed his wine spritzer, knocked it back in one gulp, then he threw the glass against the back wall, smashing it to pieces. He told the other startled drinkers that the standard of living was so high in California that they never drank out of the same glass twice.  Next the New Yorker finished drinking his Manhattan, and threw his glass against the back wall. He loudly proclaimed that in New York not only were they all are rich from banking and imports, he too never drank out of the same glass twice. Next the Texan drank his beer, drew a revolver, and shot the Californian and the New Yorker. As he was returning the gun to his holster, he told the wide-eyed bartender that in Texas they had so many New Yorkers and Californians that they never had to drink with the same ones twice.

Business is good in Texas because Texans know how to do business in a big way. Texas is about as pro-business a state as you’ll find anywhere. According to Forbes Magazine, 20 of the top 500-richest Americans are Texans, earning their big bucks from everything from oil to hotels to Wal-Marts (Alice Walton is the richest Texan with some $20 billion buck in the bank), banking, pipelines, supermarkets, cable companies, football teams and, yes, salsa (Christopher Goldsbury, $1.2 billion). Fifty-eight Fortune 500 companies are located in Texas, more than any other state.

I’ve seen Texans do business, they go at it like no one else. I’ve been to press association conventions all over the country in relation to my job, staffing a tiny trade booth where I hawk my company’s wares to weekly newspapers. The New York Press Association is the swankest (The state buildings in downtown Albany are jaw-droppingly huge, and Saratoga Springs is old-school big-money.) I’ve been to the Minneapolis state press convention in January when it never got about ten degrees below zero. I’ve been to downtown Boston for the New England Press Association and in places like Lexington, Kentucky and Norfolk, Virginia and Portland, Oregon for the National Newspaper Association conventions, which move around the country.

All of these were good, but the best I’ve attended, hands-down, is the Texas Press Association conventions. I’ve been to three of them. They are cheap, extremely well-managed, convenient, and are a guaranteed sell. They’re always held at convention hotels located right next to the airport, hotels which offered on their adult movie channel balls-to-the-walls at all the right angles, not-just-the-curvatures porn for lonely business travelers long before hotels in the Midwest or Northeast. Those guys know how to do business—smart, efficient, effective, with a broad Texas smile and deep, deep Texas pockets.

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Texas Motor Speedway was built to make money. Erected in 1995, the 1,5-mile quad-oval track is not the largest on the circuit (it’s similar to Atlanta and Charlotte), but it’s one of the fastest.

“If you’ve every wanted to see NASCAR, go to Texas,” posted one satisfied customer at a track-rating site– “fantastic facility, plenty of parking, enough trashy junk food to satisfy any appetite, not too many queues and spectacular viewing.”

Monte Dutton wrote of TMS this way: “This glistening speed palace fits the Lone Star State to a T, from its biblical traffic jams to its full-of-himself president, Eddie Gossage. The national anthem was once sung by a cowboy named Woody who didn’t know the words, and he was pinch-hitting for the concert pianist Van Cliburn, who didn’t make his helicopter.”

Business was so good over the first eight years that a second race was added in the year. Two smaller, old-school NASCAR tracks – Wilkesboro and Rockingham – were closed to make room in the schedule for the Texas dates.

Ticket sales for Sunday’s Samsung 500 are flat compared to next year, but given the state of the economy — and the state of racin’ (remember, Bristol missed a sellout—by more than 20,000 seats00for the first time in 54 consecutive Sprint Cup races). TMS officials expect a turnout of 400,000 for the entire race weekend, with an attendance of 175,000 on Sunday. There’s a ticket price for everybody’s budget, according to Eddie Gossage, president of Texas Motor Speedway – ranging from reserved seats as low as $20 or a luxury condo. “It’s a fluid environment,” Gossage said. “If you just listen to your customers — whether they are individuals or corporations — they will tell you what they want.

Ever the promoter, Gossage was reported to have offered $100,000 to Dallas DJ Terry Dorsey of KSCS-FM to change his name to texasmotorspeedway.com. It turned out to be an April Fool’s joke, and it caught much of the major media with its news-hungry pants down. A perfect promotional stunt.

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Last year, Jeff Gordon won the spring Texas race after a dry spell of 47 races, and it was his first win in Texas after 17 tries. Gordon called the Texas track a puzzler for him: “I would say, at 90 percent of the tracks, I have a good idea of what I need to do,” he said. “At Texas, I was just frustrated. This was tough. The transitions off the corners are like no other. It’s the most challenging 1.5-mile track we go to.”

Since winning at Texas last year – it’s been his only win since 2007 – Gordon has been on a roll of sorts, finishing in the top 5 14 times and second in seven of those races. Texans hate be second to anybody, so maybe that makes Gordon a spiritual Texan.

And hell, Gordon’s big, Texas-rich, resting in a Texan’s usual penultimate spot on the Big List,No. 2 on Forbes’ highest-paid NASCAR drivers list ($28 million a year, including income from promotional deals, second only to Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s $30 million).

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Big things can even call in small packages in Texas, or rather, bigness affects its smallest aspects. Paris is a city of about 25,000 located about 100 miles northeast of Dallas, up near where the state borders with Oklahoma. The town boasts the slogan, “The Second Largest Paris in the World.” It was first settled in 1826 and was a cattle slaughterhouse powerhouse, the city owning the largest facility. The city was also a major cotton exchange. Many wealthy Texans came to live there and built stately mansions. In 1998, Paris was selected as the “Best Small Town in America” by Kevin Heubusch in his book The New Rating Guide to Life in America’s Small Cities.

Big money – big shadow, too. The history of Paris is noosed by the reality of racism in the  Lone Star State. There have been many, many public lynchings in the best little Paris in the West. Been there all along, and not much has changed. On February 24, 2009, the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune profiled an incident at the Turner Industries plant in Paris, where “black workers say nooses, Confederate flags and racist graffiti have been appearing throughout the workplace for months.” (African-American workers there allege that the symbols were in place for much longer – several years — and though they complained, they said they were ignored by bosses or told to be quiet.

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Harry Dean Stanton in Wim Wenders’ “Paris, Texas”

The city found an awkward immortality in Wim Wenders’ 1984 film “Paris, Texas” and stars Harry Dean Stanton as Travis, who has been lost for four years and is taken in by his brother (Dean Stockwell). He later tries to put his life back together and understand what happened between him, his wife Jane (Nastassja Kinski), and his son Hunter (Hunter Carson). Paris, Texas is notable for its images of the Texan landscape and climate. The first shot is a bird’s eye-view of the desert, a bleak, dry, alien landscape. Shots follow of old advertisement billboards, placards, graffiti, rusty iron carcasses, old railway lines, neon signs, motels, seemingly never-ending roads, and Los Angeles, finally culminating in some famous scenes shot outside a drive-through bank in down-town Houston. The film is accompanied by a slide-guitar score by Ry Cooder, based on Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground.” Newsweek referred to the film as “a story of the United States, a grim portrait of a land where people like Travis and Jane cannot put down roots, a story of a sprawling, powerful, richly endowed land where people can get desperately lost.” The film won the Palme d’Or (Golden Palm) at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival.

Leave it to those far Easterners in Europe to besmirch a tiny jewel on the necklace of Texan pride which swings somewhat periolously from Shayla’s 100-acre cleavage.

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Speculation swirls that Paris Hilton has gone Texan with breast implants. Though she has long denied having them — “Years ago I asked my dad for a boob job and he said it would cheapen my image. So I decided not to do it,”  she once told the press – images on TMZ the other day sure gave the impression. Given other recent photos of the rail-thin heiress/party girl, the rumor seems like a fib, a Texas-size whopper.

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Paris, Texas, and Paris Hilton, Texas-style.

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Tall tales go with big Texas.

A Texan went to Chicago and thought he would buy a new “city” outfit. He went into Marshall Fields and when asked by a sweet young woman if she could help him, answered, “Yes ma’am, ya see, I’m from Texas and I want to buy a complete outfit.”

Well, her eyes lit up as she asked, “Where he would like to start?”

Well ma’am, “How about a suit?”

“Yes sir, what size?”

“Size 53 … tall, ma’am.”

“Wow, that’s really big.”

“Yes ma’am, they really grow them big in Texas.”

“What’s next?” she asked.

He replied, “How about some shoes.”

“What size?”

“Size 15 … double D.”

“Wow, that’s really big!”

“Yes ma’am, they really grow them big in Texas.”

“What’s next?”

“Well, I reckon I’ll need a shirt.”

“Yes sir, what size?”

“Nineteen and a half … 38,” he replied.

“Wow, that’s really big!”

“Yes ma’am, they really grow them big in Texas.”

She virtually glowed as she asked, “Whew … is there anything else I can do for you?”

“No ma’am , I reckon that will be all.”

Well she tallied up his bill while the Texan was counting out his money. She asked, “Sir could I ask you a question?”

“Yes ma’am, I already know what it is and the answer is four inches.”

She is astonished and blurts out, “Why, my boyfriend is bigger than that!”

Without so much as a stutter, the Texan replied, “Across ma’am?”

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Politics are big in Texas, which has given the United States four presidents – Dwight D. Eisenhower, Lyndon B. Johnnon, a Democrat, and the father-son duo of George H.W. and George W. Bush. Sorry, Lone Starrers: Virgina has provided the U.S. with eight of its presdents; but four is a lot more than that half-wit state of Hawaii, purported birthplace (there are rumors – OK, fibs – that A-rabia is more the location) of our current President, Barak “Saddam” Hussein Obamacare.

When Texas was a sovereign republic back in the 1830s (after successfully defeating Mexico for rule of the territory) it had four of its own presidents – Sam Houston, M.B. Lamar, Sam Houston (again) and Dr. Anson Jones. Texas (which back then included an what became Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Wyoming) was annexed to the United States in 1845. (Texas was really big back then.) Texas saddled up with the Confederacy (seceding from the Union just fifteen years after hitching up); at the end of the Civil War, most Texans were pissed at the disruption in trade and finance, and hitched their wagons back to the US of A in 1870.

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Two-time Republic of Texas president Sam Houson.

For a century after Reconstruction, the Democratic Party enjoyed electoral dominance on all levels of state government and in the Lone Star State’s representation in the national government. Democratic rule was dominated by a conservative white political elite that strongly promoted economic development, but that resisted change either in race relations or social programs for the poor. Tensions within the party over these issues were effectively muted until the civil rights movement and mounting tensions in national politics finally erupted into state politics in the 1950s. The parties began to change.

Republicans were not completely absent during this period, but their electoral victories were few and limited in scope. The most common successes were at the presidential level, where Texas supported Republican candidates in 1952, 1956, 1972, and in every election after 1980 as Republican strength grew.

Red elephants consolidated their position after the 2000 census when state Senators attempted to draw a congressional district map that would guarantee a Republican majority in the state’s delegation. The Democratic-controlled state House desired to retain a plan similar to the existing lines. Not surprisingly, this created an impasse. With the Legislature unable to reach a compromise, the matter was settled by a panel of federal court judges, who ruled in favor of a district map that largely retained the status quo.

However, the Republicans dominated the Legislative Redistricting Board, which draws the lines for the state legislative districts, by a majority of four to one. The Republicans on this board used their voting strength to adopt a map for the state Senate that was even more favorable to the Republicans and a map for the state House that also strongly favored them as Democrats had before.

In 2002, Texas Republicans gained control of the Texas House of Representatives for the first time since Reconstruction. The newly elected Republican legislature engaged in an unprecedented mid-decade redistricting plan.

Hardball. Texas has been Republican territory since. The state’s as red (in the Republican, not communist sense) as a dripping-rare 72-oz. Big Texan steak.

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Two-term Republican Governor Rick Perry is running again for the seat in 2010, and he beat his opponent Kay Bailey Hutchenson  on a populist, Tea-Party line, suggesting that Texas might secede from the Union – once again – if it tries too much to tell Texas what to do. Speaking at a Tea Party event in 2009, Perry said,

“There’s a lot of different scenarios. We’ve got a great union. There’s absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what might come out of that? But Texas is a very unique place, and we’re a pretty independent lot to boot.”

Hardball. To boot, there’s even speculation that Perry is planning a run for the presidency in 2012. Last week on the gubernatorial stump, speaking before the Southern Republican Leadership Conference in New Orlands, he He exhorted the GOP to be the proud party of “no,” especially given Washington’s direction. Because Republicans, he said, know what government’s role is: “It’s as servant, not as master. It is as protector, not as provider…” He embraced Tea Partiers as people who are “bringing back America to its rightful place, people who understand what the Constitution is all about,” he said.

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Rick Perry speaks of Texas seccession at an Austin Tea Party gathering in 2009.

Like Republicans. But mostly, like Texans.

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For ARCA racers, this is a big weekend with the Rattlesnake 150 at TMS on Friday night. It’s the first time the series has returned to this track since 1998.

The last ARCA race – last weekend, on April 11 — was at Salem Speedway in Salem, Indiana.

Salem seats 10,000.

TMS seats more than 200,000. (Though how many of those seats will have bodies in them for the Rattlesnake 150?)

ARCA racer Alli Owens of Daytona Beach had her best finish (ninth-place) in the Salem race assisted by new crew chief Jeff McClure. Owens wrote in her Facebook Notes about the race,

… The 200 lap race put our #15 team through the most adversity you could imagine. I got hit under yellow and caused a tire rub, went a lap down, got our lap back from the lucky dog, took four tires and worked our way up to second, got shuffled back to seventh and then wrecked by Bryan Silas and went a lap down again, got the last lucky dog and then got caught speeding on pit road, and finally the last thing I want to add to that is every single wreck took place right in front of me the whole day! I managed to destroy all four corners of my race car and still come back and finish 9th on the lead lap! WOOOO WEEEE talk about exciting!!!!!

Looking ahead to Texas, she says, “Racing at Texas is going to be awesome. I struggled a little bit there at our test session, but I found my confidence at Salem. I’m really looking forward to carrying that over at one of the fastest tracks on the circuit. We’re definitely prepared and ready to go. My teammate Steve Arpin won last weekend, so hopefully I can bring Venturini Motorsports another win at Texas.”

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Alli Owens with a fan at Salem last weekend; Owens’ No. 21 ElectrifyingCareers.com Chevrolet after the race.

For the ARCA drivers, the experience of driving at a big track like Texas (they were at Daytona in February, and will race at Talladega on April 23) must be like that of the guys on the bus of the Class A Durham Bulls, imagining what it’s like to play in the big leavgues. In the 1988 movie, Kevin Costner plays Crash Davis, a career minor-league catcher who is brought in to coach a young pitching phenom named Ebby Calvin Laloosh (played by Tim Robbins) who has a wicked-mean fastball but no control. One day, as the team is make the long trek by bus to their next minor-league gig, Crash reveals that he one played in “The Show” (the major-leagues):

Yeah, I was in The Show. I was in The Show for 21 days once – the 21 greatest days of my life. You know, you never handle your luggage in the show, somebody else carries your bags. It was great. You hit white balls for batting practice, the ballparks are like cathedrals, the hotels all have room service, and the women all have long legs and brains.

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Minor-league catcher Crash Davis (Kevin Costner) advises rookie pitching ace Ebby Laloosh (Tim Robbins) in “on how to survive in the Show (the major leagues) in “Bull Durham.”

Surely racing at Texas must be like worshipping at a cathedral for the ARCA crew. Its Texas-style immensity blows away the tiny tracks which are their normal, barely-scraping-enough-together-for-the-next-race fare.

ElectrifyingCareers.com, a site which encourages careers in the electrical industry, is Owens’ primary sponsor. Nothing against these folks, but sponsors at the ARCA racing level are, well, rather obscure. Here are some of the other sponsors of cars at the Kentuckiana Ford Dealers 200 from last weekend at Salem Speedway: Buffalo Wings & Rings (Patrck Sheltra, finished fourth); Anti Monkey Butt Powder-Advantage Chiropractice (Darrel Basham, 15^th); American Legion-David Law Firm (Jerick Johnson, 21^st); ApplianceZone.com (Brad Smith, 23d).

Hey, ya gotta do what ya gotta do. I’m sure the ARCA crew will be singing the praises of racin’ at the cathedral known as Texas Motor Speedway.

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The niceties of tea parties – think of delicate old ladies in lace and red hats tipping porcelain china cups to their red-purple-lipsticked lips – don’t come to mind when you see images of Tea Party rallies. They’re jostling, hostile and jingoistic, full of signs that read “I’m Mad As Hell” and “No Obama Socialism.”

Tea Party darling Governor Rick Perry is paying $225,000 to sponsor Bobby Labonte’s No. 71 Chevrolet for Sunday’s Samsung Mobile 500 at Texas Motor Speedway.

“It seems every election cycle,” Ramsey Poston, a NASCAR spokesman, told the Houston Chronicle, “you see candidates from both parties looking to make that connection with NASCAR fans.”

Mr. Labonte’s car will also carry Perry slogans and will be shown across Texas in the days leading up to the race, beginning on Wednesday at barbecue restaurants in San Angelo and Llano. Mr. Labonte will wear a blue fire suit with “Perry Governor 2010″ on the front when he drives the car at Texas Motor Speedway.

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Gov. Rick Perry with Bobby Labonte and the No. 71 Chevrolet, festooned with an ad for Perry’s Texas gubenatorial / presidential?? race.

“I couldn’t be more excited to have Governor Perry on board the No. 71 for the Texas race,” Mr. Labonte said. “It’s always great for me to come back to my home state, and now I’ve got an even bigger reason to be able to connect to all of the fans and my fellow Texans.”

Governor Perry, a Republican who is running against the Democratic candidate Bill White, the former mayor of Houston, said he was sponsoring Mr. Labonte’s car because the two Sprint Cup races and IndyCar race in Fort Worth were among the most popular events on the state’s sports calendar, adding an estimated $300 million to the area economy each year.”

Perry is gambling, Texas Hold ‘Em Style, that Tea Party appeal will be a big draw among NASCAR’s base. Maybe he’s holding two aces with that sure knowledge, but Labonte? He’s currently 31^st in the points, and finished 31^st, 40^th and 39^th in the past three Texas races. Maybe Perry is gambling that folks will remember Labonte’s glory days, when he finished 3d in the first four races. Aces or deuces for Perry, that tax-drubbin’ douche, or Labonte, who’s still racing for glory at the fag-ends of a career?

Well, hell. Bobby Labonte’s a Texan (Corpus Cristi). The only Texan on the Sprint Cup circuit, too. Need anyone say more?

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Today is Tax Day. The Tea Party Express comes to the end of 47-stop tour today in Washington. Yesterday the Express was in Boston, site of the original Boston Tea Party. Speaking before a crowd of about 2,000, Sarah Palin (wearing a red leather jacket) accused President Obama and his Democratic allies in congress of backing policies that will produce “un-American results.”

“I’m not calling anyone un-American, but the unintended consequences of these actions — the results — are un-American,” said Palin. She resurrected a campaign flub of Obama’s to mock the president’s policies. “I want to tell ’em, nah, we’ll keep clinging to our Constitution and our guns and religion — and you can keep the change,” Palin said. The reference was to a comment Obama made as a candidate about people in economically depressed communities clinging to guns and religion.

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Sarah Palin addresses a Tea Party crowd in Boston yesterday. What’s with all the leather suits? Surely, big money’s involved. California Attorney General (and Democratic gubernatorial candidate) Jerry Brown is investigating Palin’s contract to speak at a state university. The Associated Press has reported that a copy of the purported contract, found in the trash bin by students, specified that the ex-Alaska governor get first-class airfare and three rooms at a luxury hotel.

CBS reported that Palin thanked the Tea Party Express group for “putting up with all the B.S. from the lamestream media.”

Maybe it’s lame to report this, but Politico recently reported that The Tea Party Express is not exactly a grassroots organization. Maybe this is splitting hairs and lame truth-seeking, but it was really the brainchild of a Republican political consultant in Sacramento seeking to “give a boost to our PAC and position us as a growing-force/leading-force as the 2010 elections come into focus.”

Lame too perhaps, but similarities between the Tea Party and the Boston Tea Party for which it was named (well, sort of – the “Tea” really stands for “Taxed Enough Already”) are thin. Both protest government bailouts of large interests – Bostonians of 1773 were protesting the English governments subsidizing of the British East India Company, making competition for the tea market impossible for the colonists. But the cry in 1773 wasn’t “No Taxation!” but “No Taxation Without Representation!” meaning that colonists would rather destroy the tea rather than conceded to the authority of legislature in which they were not directly represented.

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The Boston Tea Party. On Dec. 16, 1773, colonists dressed up as Indians boarded three British ships and threw their stores of tea into Boston Harbor in protest of the Tea Act, which attempted to expand the British East India Company’s monopoly on the tea trade to all British Colonies.

The Tea Party of today is a bit cloudier of purpose. Palin characterized spending as out of control and suggested the current administration had raised taxes, despite the fact that the ninety percent of Americans have gotten a tax cut under Mr. Obama. And ironically, the richest Americans which are monopolizing wealth in this country have the most to gain from making the tax cuts implemented by the Bush Administration permanent at the end of this year.

Saturation of wealth at the top is what’s robbing middle-class Americans of their livelihood, pushing them to the outer limits of suburbia. And seven out of ten jobs eliminated in the recession came from the blue-collar sector, a recession which, at root, was due to lax regulation of Big Finance going back to Ronald Reagan (not the TARP resuscitation of the economy in 2008).

One of the enduring ironies of American life is that while taxation in America is much lower than most other places in the world, resistance to taxation is the highest in America. And it’s also a strange truth that the very people who have the most to gain from the policies of the Obama Administration – the so-called blue-collar, working class poor – are the ones who are most stridently opposing them. But such subtleties get lost in the vitriol and clamor of just being pissed off at someone.

Besides, anyone used to the details just don’t really matter. American’s aren’t that well-educated and seem less and less concerned about things like subtext and context. The other day, Gov. Rick Perry, responding to criticism from his Democratic opponent that the state’s education system is failing, shot back, claiming that the drop-out rate in Texas wasn’t so bad – only about 10 percent. According to Texas’ foremost authority on dropouts, the non-profit San Antonio-based Intercultural Development Research Association, more than 1.2 million students have been lost to attrition in Texas since 2000. The total number lost since 1985, the year the state hired IDRA to study the magnitude of the problem, is more than 2.9 million.  The organization generally calculates that Texas public schools fail to graduate one out of every three students (thirty percent), with the percentage inching up to 40 percent for black and Hispanic students.

And that’s despite an estimated $18 billion in federal stimulus dollars helping at the state and local government level.

No wonder so many whoppers get out at Tea Party events. You want to win big at Texas Hold ‘Em? Bluff and bluff big.

And for the vested interests who have the most to gain from more tax cuts, they can only rub their hands with glee.

Business will be good in Texas, that’s for sure.

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Maybe big Texas has something to do with tall tales and memory. Texas has a long history – the first European explorers found the regions populated by Indian tribes in 1519. Texans remember their republic and Republican squabbles. They remember their Alamo, though memory is selective (the Alamo was a church, not a fort, and the folklore of the siege of the Alamo in 1836 extends far more widely than its dull truths – some historians believe that Davy Crockett survived the siege of the Alamo only to be executed by the Mexican military, but what’s more fun than going out in a blaze of glory?)

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Davy Crockett  (right) whups Mexican ass at the Alamo ass despite a lack of bullets.

Texans sure have pride in their long memories. Maybe that’s why Eddie Gossage booked dinosaur-rockers Foreigner to play before last year’s spring race, and is bringing in Peter Frampton to play before Sunday’s race. Frampton is a legend that won’t die, like the Alamo – his 1976 album “Frampton Comes Alive” sold 16 million copies (it was in the bedroom of just about every girl I went home with back in that day) (what radio wasn’t playing “Baby I Love Your Way” in the summer of 1977??), and he’s managed to keep recording. (His 2007 instrumental album “Fingerprints” was nominated for a Grammy, and he’s getting ready to release “Thank You, Mr. Churchill” later this month.

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Peter Frampton, then and now and how.

“What better way to get the fans of Texas Motor Speedway fired up for the Samsung Mobile 500 than to hear that famous ‘talk box’ guitar sound of Peter Frampton,” Gossage said. “His live performances throughout his career have been legendary, and I expect that to hold true when he entertains the crowd at “The Great American Speedway!”

That “talk box” of Frampton’s like a single line by a Saturday Night Live comic for which they are endlessly remembered – like Gilda Radner’s “Nevermind!” or “Well, excuse me!” by Steve Martin or “The Stevemeister, makin’ the copies” by Rob Schnieder. Frampton’s “talk box” delivers the goods, Texas style, straight ahead and with all the braggadocio of Davy Crockett at the Alamo, killing 20 wetbacks with a single rifle shot.

The crowd will be thrilled.

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Texas is a gun-friendly state. The right to bear (and flaunt) arms is as important as, say, the right to wear cowboy boots or get massive silicone breast implants. Limits are few and scorned. Beyond federal minimums, about the only restriction in Texas is law, tailored after a Houston city ordinance, prohibiting making a gun available to a minor.( The law was passed in response to a rise in accidental shootings by children with their parents’ guns.) More than 150,000 Texans are licensed to carry handguns, and many more have them in their homes. There is a gun show in the Houston area at least once a month. In Texas, a loaded gun in the car is OK as long as you are “traveling,” which is defined as driving from one county through another to a third.

In 2009, following Montana’s lead, a bill was introduced in the Texas legislature challenging federal authority to regulate guns under the interstate commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution. Under the proposed legislation, firearms and ammunition produced in Texas for use in the state would be exempt from federal laws and regulation.

The bill’s sponsors say it is more about defending states’ rights and sovereignty from an over-reaching federal government than about guns. “I think states have got to stand up or else most of their rights are going to be buffaloed by the administration and by Congress,” said Republican Texas state Rep. Leo Berman, one of the bill’s chief sponsors. “It deals with firearms and ammunition, which raises eyebrows, but it’s more of a 10th Amendment bill than a Second Amendment bill,” added Andy Kuchera, his legislative director.  “Sovereignty is a big issue right now.”

Governor Rick Perry supports allowing teachers and staff members to carry guns at school as long as they are adequately trained in gun safety.

“I’m pretty much a fan that if you’ve been trained and you are registered, then you should be able to carry a weapon. Matter of fact, there’s a lot of instances that would have saved a lot of lives,” Mr. Perry said.

The governor is a staunch advocate of right-to-carry provisions and has advocated allowing licensed gun owners to carry them into places where they can currently be banned, such as college campuses, churches, bars and private businesses.

The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence – a movement started after the shooting of White House Press Secretary Jim Brady in an assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan in 1980  — gave Texas an “F” in its efforts to curb firearm trafficking, for nonexistent efforts to strengthen prepurchase background-check requirements, for lack of restrictions on ownership of military-style assault weapons and lack of any legislative efforts aimed at keeping firearms out of the hands of children or controls placed on the carrying of firearms in public places – specifically, for allowing colleges and employers to restrict the carrying of weapons.

But Texans, as a rule, aren’t buying it. As the argument goes, “guns are like tools: crazy people use anything to commit crime.” Smart Texans lock and load and wait. And they’re willing to break with the Union in order to defend their Alamos to the death.

In a hardball state like Texas, firepower is often the resort of choice for settling differences, for better and ill.

On April 11, Billy Joe Shaver was found not guilty Friday in the shooting of a man outside a bar in Texas in 2007. A jury reached a verdict after two hours of deliberation in the case involving Shaver and the man he allegedly shot, Billy Coker.

After the verdict was read, Shaver hugged supports, including band members. During the trial, Willie Nelson showed up for the last two days of testimony of the four-day trial.

“I knew in my heart we would win,” Shaver said outside the courthouse. As for Coker, 53, Shaver, 70, said, “I am very sorry about the incident. Hopefully things will work out where we become friends.”

Shaver testified in his own defense saying he feared for his life when he shot Coker in the upper lip in the patio of a bar in Lorena with a 22-caliber pistol. Shaver said Coker showed a knife inside the bar and asked him to go outside. “I wanted to scare him … wanted to beat him to the punch. I feared he was going to kill me,” Shaver said.

The prosecutor asked Shaver if he was jealous because Coker was talking with his wife, Wanda. “I get more women than a passenger train can haul. I’m not jealous,” Shaver said.

A witness, Daniel Silvas, said he thought Shaver was trying to “get away” before shooting.

“I couldn’t fight him, no way, he was built like a doggone fireplug. He’s younger than I was,” Shaver said.

Shaver said that when Coker realized Wanda Shaver had been married to Coker’s cousin, “he went bad real quick.” The ex-husband committed suicide. Bad feelings existed between Wanda Shaver and Coker’s side of the family.

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Billy Joe Shaver, right, talks with attorney Dick De Guerin after being acquitted. DeGuerin, considered one of the state’s best criminal defense lawyers, worked on the case for free.

source: Country Standard Time News Magazine

Shaver settled his dispute Texas-style: so too another man who bought a pistol from a local gun shop and then went ballistic.  On November 5, 2009, at Fort Hood—the most populous US military base in the world, located just outside Killeen, Texas—a gunman killed 13 people and wounded 30 others. The shooter was Nidal Malik Hasan, a U.S. Army major serving as a psychiatrist. At approximately 1:34 p.m. Hasan entered his workplace, the Soldier Readiness Center, where personnel receive routine medical treatment immediately prior to and on return from deployment. According to eyewitnesses, he took a seat at an empty table, bowed his head for several seconds, and then stood up and opened fire. Initially, Hasan reportedly jumped onto a desk and shouted: “Allahu Akbar!” (“God is Great!”) before firing more than 100 rounds at soldiers processing through cubicles in the center, and on a crowd gathered for a college graduation ceremony scheduled for 2 p.m. in a nearby theater.  Witnesses reported that Hasan appeared to focus on soldiers in uniform. He had two handguns: an FN Five-seven semi-automatic pistol, which he had purchased at a civilian gun store,  and a .357 Magnum which he may not have fired. A medic who treated Hasan said his combat fatigues pockets were full of pistol magazines. He was shot by civilian police officers, and is now paralyzed from the waist down Hasan has been charged with 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted murder under the Uniform Code of Military Justice; he may face additional charges at court-martial.

Ironically, except for MP’s, soldiers at Ft. Hood are not allowed to carry weapons.

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Type of semi-automatic pistol used by Hasan in his attack, purchased at a civilian gun store.

Score-settling and masculinity are ingrained deep into the literature of both the Wild West and pulp crime novels of the mid-20th century. “It’s awfully nice to get so goddamn mad at something you want to bust it wide open,” Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer reflects in My Gun is Quick (1950), “and it’s a lot better to take that goddamn something you’re mad at and smash it against the wall and do all of the things you wanted to do, wishing it could have been done before it was too late.”

Yes, the thrill of getting even, of getting ‘er done … it’s almost sexual, isn’t it, something you nail with every punch, every pull of the trigger …

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A couple of Texas hunters are out in the woods when one of them falls to the ground. He doesn’t seem to be breathing, his eyes are rolled back in his head. The other guy whips out his cell phone and calls 911.

He gasps to the operator, “I think my friend is dead! What do I do?”

The operator, in a calm soothing voice says, “Just take it easy. I can help. First, lets make sure he’s dead.”

There is a silence, then a shot is heard.

The hunter says, “OK, now what?”

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Texas is pro-business. It is also pro-guns and pro-capital-punishment. It is pro-creationism and pro-life. And it’s willing to re-write the books to gird and guard these majority beliefs.

The Texas Board of Education approved in March a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light. “We are adding balance,” said Dr. Don McLeroy, the leader of the conservative faction on the board, after the vote. “History has already been skewed. Academia is skewed too far to the left.”

Efforts by Hispanic board members to include more Latino figures as role models for the state’s large Hispanic population were consistently defeated, prompting one member, Mary Helen Berlanga, to storm out of one meeting, saying, “They can just pretend this is a white America and Hispanics don’t exist.”

But Texans only know hardball. “I reject the notion by the left of a constitutional separation of church and state,” said David Bradley, a conservative from Beaumont who works in real estate. “I have $1,000 for the charity of your choice if you can find it in the Constitution.” Is he talking maybe about the Tea Party Constitution, or maybe the constitution of the old Republic of Texas?

Conservatives also included a plank to ensure that students learn about “the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, including Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract With America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority and the National Rifle Association.” Call it educational re-districting: he who has the right to write the textbook gets to re-write history.

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For a look at what a properly Tea-Partied, Washington-seceded Texas might look like, think of Infield Nation, Texas-style, a place filled with “devotees of beer, NASCAR and top-lifting chicks,” writes one online enthusiast. “I’ve never been to Mardi Gras,” writes another, “but I’m pretty sure that partying out in the Texas infield on a race weekend is a glimpse into what it’s like. Let’s just say lots of beads are involved, as are semi-naked women. It truly is a sight to see (and, for me, requires a decent amount of beer consumption… wine is a little too prissy for this event).”

The partying began in earnest yesterday in the Texas Motor Speedway infield as NASCAR Nation’s louder, rowdier clan celebrated American freedom at its best, with flags, beer and breasts in abundance.

The following account of the TMS infield from the fall 2008 race comes from Bruce Cameron whose blog is The Racing Reporter:

Two weeks prior to the race, a small city emerges on the infield and at the surrounding camping areas of TMS. Tens of thousands of RV’s, campers, tents, trucks, buses and throngs of Nascar citizens move in. The smell of “NASCAR Napalm” hangs in the air. NASCAR Napalm is a combination of grill smoke, dirt and various waftings of propane, gasoline for generators and 90 weight “whale oil” used in the rear end of the race cars.

… The mood Friday was festive as it was Halloween. Prior to the truck race, costumed kids were seen trick-or-treating throughout the infield. At the conclusion of the truck race, it was the adults’ turn to do their own version of trickin’ and treatin’. Naughty Nurses, Ozzy and Sharon types and others displayed their energy atop million dollar haulers, cheap campers or old converted school buses. The tops of campers and scaffolding made a convenient staging area for the 2 story beer bongs.

Every night, there were cheers, loud music, and merriment from the Crown Royal Coaches on turn 1, make-shift night clubs near Turn 3, and campsites everywhere. With NASCAR fans, it’s all systems go.

There were Marti Gras beads adorned by men and women, along with various levels of dress. Most NASCAR fans express their allegiance by wearing the colors of their favorite driver or his sponsor. T-shirts, hats, flags, and pajamas of all colors covered the infield. One woman got attention with her shirt that asks Dale Jr., “Do you want to Mount An Dew Me?”

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A lady fan showed me her campground (she has one at home), a “Jimmie Johnson Love Nest.”

If you are rich enough to be near turn one and have pavement, you can easily ride your bike, motorized beer cooler or skate on a rip stick to your site. Many others ride bikes as a necessity for food, bathroom access or visitation. Golf carts clog makeshift roads and passageways. Some fans who needed a lift, would grab a rope and a skateboard to be pulled to their destination by one of the motorized carts or pit bikes. People have been known to be intoxicated, go to neighboring camps, knock on doors and ask to borrow your gas-powered cart to “drive around and drink beer.” The incredible part of this in addition to their blood alcohol level is their sense of entitlement.

Many camp sites were enjoying multi-player games such as Wii sports. These don’t go so well if you are under the influence. Several players were in deep denial and continued to play despite their very poor performance (with the game and otherwise). Other games were played where intoxication was not quite a hindrance – dice were rolled to determine how many drinks were to be consumed, cards were dealt to determine who consumes, etc. Jello shots were consumed by the hundreds along the backstretch.

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For a different look at what a properly Tea-Partied, Washington-seceded Texas might look like, think of the Branch Dividian compound near Waco Texas. The Branch Dividians formed back in the 1930s as part of a reform movement in the Seventh Day Adventist church. The group gained members and moved to a hilltop near Waco, Texas, moving a few years later to a larger compound. In 1959, Florence Houteff, widow of sect founder Victor Houteff, announced that the Second Coming of Jesus was immanent, and members of the sect were told to gather at the compound to await the blessed event. That didn’t happen, there were some years of squabbling over leadership and things got ugly. One member killed another with an axe over who was the chosen messiah. The murder went to the insane asylum and the survivor became David Koresh, the leader at the compound when things really got crazy.

On February 27, 1993, the Waco Tribune-Herald began the “Sinful Messiah” series of articles. It began,

If you are a Branch Davidian, Christ lives on a threadbare piece of land 10 miles east of here called Mount Carmel. He has dimples, claims a ninth-grade education, married his legal wife when she was 14, enjoys a beer now and then, plays a mean guitar, reportedly packs a 9mm Glock and keeps an arsenal of military assault rifles, and willingly admits that he is a sinner without equal.” The article alleged that Koresh had physically abused children in the compound and had taken multiple underage “brides” amounting to statutory rape. Koresh was also said to advocate polygamy for himself and declared himself married to several female residents of the small community. According to the paper, Koresh declared he was entitled to at least 140 wives, that he was entitled to claim any of the females in the group as his, that he had fathered at least a dozen children by the harem and that some of these mothers became brides as young as 12 or 13 years old.

The ATF raided the compound on Sunday morning, Feb. 28, 1993. Koresh was tipped off a mail carrier who was his brother-in-law who had been asked by a reporter for directions to the camp. Gunfire was exchanged, killing 3 ATF agents and wounding 16. Five Davidians had been killed. In both cases, some of the dead may have been killed by “friendly fire.” A siege then ensued (are we talking about the Alamo here?). Fearing that a mass suicide would be attempted, the FBI went in with armored vehicles and .50-caliber rifles. Soon after, fires broke out simultaneously in different parts of the building.

As the fire spread, Davidians were prevented from escaping; others refused to leave and eventually became trapped. In all, only nine people left the building during the fire.

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The siege of Waco goes up in smoke.

The remaining Davidians, including the children, were either buried alive by rubble, suffocated by the effects of the fire or shot. Many that suffocated from the fire were killed by smoke or carbon monoxide inhalation and other causes as fire engulfed the building. Footage of the incident was being broadcast worldwide via television. In all, 75 died (50 adults and 25 children under the age of 15) and nine survived the fire on Apr 19 (on Feb 28 five had been killed in the initial ATF raid and buried on the grounds, one killed by ATF after the raid while returning to Mt. Carmel and 35 had left during the FBI standoff).

Nothing remains of the buildings today, as the entire site was bulldozed by the ATF two weeks after the end of the siege. Only a small chapel, built years after the siege, stands on the site. Despite significant primary source video, much dispute remains as to the actual events of the siege.

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Think of Waco and overdub it with Sarah Palin’s words yesterday in Boston: “We’ll keep clinging to our Constitution and our guns and religion — and you can keep the change.”

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Oh, but back to racin’.

Owner Tony Stewart makes his 400^th Sprint Cup start Sunday at Texas. Speculation swirls about Kasey Kahne’s relocation to Hendrick Motorsports (possibly replacing Mark Martin in 2012) and racing for a year’s interim with Stewart-Haas racing.

Jimmie Johnson comes in leading in the points, but he knows how precarious his lucky run can be. Last year, the big monkey wrench thrown into his fourth consecutive Sprint Cup championship came in the fall Texas race, when Sam Hornish got into Johnson five minutes into the race, causing the No. 48 car to slam hard into the inside wall on the back straight. Chad Knaus and company (with aid from some of the other Hendrick Motorsports teams) worked on the car for an hour and got the car, in some kind of shape, back on the track so Johnson could finish 38^th and not last.

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Jimmie Johnson drives down pit road to rejoin Sunday’s Dickies 500 at Texas Motor Speedway. After a lap 3 accident, Johnson’s crew was joined by members of the No. 5, No. 24 and No. 88 crews to help replace the rear-end housing, hood and nose to get the car back on the track on lap 115.

The spoiler is supposed to get its first true test at the fast Texas track, though most drivers don’t think it will make much difference over the former wing. Jimmie Johnson, for whom the wing has been a very fortunate device, is probably the uneasiest about its introduction, yet in the manner of how the Team 48 runs, expect a slow but sure evolution with it.

As I said before, Texas has been the only oasis of victory for Jeff Gordon since 2007. As hot as he’s been running, expect him to go all-out here. Kyle Busch is long overdue for a Sprint Cup win at Texas (he is gunning for his fifth consecutive Nationwide series win at the track, joining Jack Ingram and Dale Earnhardt in the record books.) So is Carl Edwards, who won both Texas races in 2008. South-of-the-border Juan Pablo Montoya’s bum luck may change here and his always-fast car will get him his first raceway win.

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Last year, when the Texas Longhorns lost to the Alabama Crimson Tide 37-21 for the BCS football championship, Eddie Gossage made good on a bet and raised the Talladega flag over Texas Motor Speedway. I’m sure he’s gunning for a stellar event in Texas this week, as the next race moves on to Talladega.

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Eddie Gossage reluctantly flies the Talladega flag at TMS after the Longhorns lost to the Crimson Tide.

By federal law, Texas is the only state in the U.S. that can fly its flag at the same height as the U.S. flag. Think about that for a second. You fly the Stars
and Stripes at 20 feet in Maryland, or California, or Maine, and your state flag goes at 17. You fly the Stars and Stripes in front of Texas Motor Speedway at 20 feet, and the Lone Star State flag flies at 20 feet. The Texas capitol is the only one in the country that is taller than the capitol building in D.C. That’s the law, signed those in as part of the deal when Texas stopped being the Republic of Texas and joined the United States.

Whoops — I just checked that source and it turns out to be an urban legend, or, as they say in the Lone Star State, a tall tale. Well, you can put your boots in the oven, but it don’t make them biscuits. Texas is still a part of the USA, and just like every state it flies its flag in the no. 2 position.

Texans hate being number two at anything. Tea Party Texans are probably politicking to have the number two removed from the count, it not being fit for prime time. (Jeff Gordon, who has finished second seven times since winning the spring Texas race last year, probably wouldn’t mind getting rid of the number two, too.)

And they had better be on guard, according to Governor Rick Perry. He’s urging those participating in in today’s Tea Party Tax Day rallies to “continue looking over your shoulder … for people trying to make the Tea Party party into something that it’s not.” Apparently he and other Republican strategists are concerned that liberals will seek to infiltrate the rallies with racist signage in order to generate negative publicity. Perry said “you can bet that every dirty trick is going to get played on tea parties, trying to marginalize them, trying to make them into something that they’re not.” Nice idea to blame someone else for the anger sure to boil at the rallies.

Perry knows the value of a whopper. And he’s learned, like George W. Bush, to let the attack dogs do the barking. He was also not scheduled to speak at any of the rallies today.

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