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Full-Throttle Jesus: Toward a Critical Pedagogy of Stockcar Racing in Theocratic America

2010; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 32; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/10714413.2010.495254

1556-3022

Joshua I. Newman,

Race, History, and American Society

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Newberry's (2004) analysis runs counter to the vast majority of journalistic musings and scholarly research on the sport, if one were to concede that a bunch of white men driving their automobiles around a concrete oval for five hours is indeed sport, which remain committed to exploring the increased relevance of stockcar racing in the North American sporting popular—if not specifically fixed on its economic possibilities as America's fastest growing sport—in a decidedly banal tenor. In spite of the obvious labors of cultural and political intermediaries to construct a discursively and materially constituted cultural apparatus within speedway spaces, during television broadcasts, and in the print media coverage—one that carries with it a spectacular set of images, practices, institutions, rituals, commodities, and identities—there is but a scant critical discourse devoted to interrupting NASCAR as an important neoconservative cultural technology within contemporary American society. Many within the political sciences, and particularly those well versed in the debates between the U.S. Moral Majority (often self-identified as paleoconservatives) and the more economically minded, state-supportive conservative ideologues referred to in U.S. discourse as "neocons," insist on a distinction between the two terms. Here I make use of the term paleoconservative not in isolation of, or binary to, neoconservatism. Rather I follow Wendy Brown's (Citation2006) reading of the work of Francis Fukuyama, Anne Norton, David Harvey, Grant Smith, and others in suggesting that the schism between paleoconservatism and neoconservatism somewhat collapsed upon one in post-Reagan American political economic discourse. While the former political sensibility is often located within traditionalist, Biblicalism, masculinist, sometimes racist, anti-Federalist ideologies and the latter more often associated with what critics have referred to as the state-fashioned "American empire building project," the two have been in some ways negotiated through the twin dynamism of free-market hegemony and values-based orthodoxy that held dominion over the cultural and identity politics particularly operating within George W. Bush's America. My focus here is in some ways more native to the politics of paleoconservatism as produced and contested within the conservative identity and cultural politics emanating from the U.S. South, and as such I use that linguistic point to anchor the cultural logics of conservatism's contemporaneously collapsed logics. We have seen this double-helixed insertion of sport culture and religious fundamentalism on the economic, political, and cultural relationships of many a society: from Europe of the Middle Ages to North American Industrialism on through to post-industrial South America. In practice, this meant spending entire weekends in "NASCAR country"—sleeping in local motels, eating sausages and drinking beers hours before each event, wondering about (or what Guy Debord refers to as derivé) the spaces and spatial practices of NASCAR, speaking with various strategically identified and randomly selected cultural agents along the way—all the while performing the role of "researcher-fan" (and thereby not contesting or stepping outside the normative boundaries of fan conduct). Whereas elsewhere my colleagues and I have labored to connect NASCAR—as an extension of the cultural logics of the "New Sporting South"—to broader machinations of (1) the neoliberal empire-building-at-home project (Newman and Giardina Citation2010), (2) the normative identity politics of neo-Confederate whiteness (Newman and Giardina Citation2008), and (3) the corporatizing processes at which penetrate NASCAR's spectator experience (Newman Citation2007), here I attempt to further populate this critical project by examining the role NASCAR plays in popularizing and reaffirming (Evangelical) Christian fundamentalist hegemony in post-9/11 North America. Importantly, many fans point to Earnhardt's last act, whereby he effectively died protecting his son's place in the race (Junior went on to finish the race in second place) as the great sacrifice of a proud father. Only Christian organizations have been granted authorization from NASCAR to perform this modern-day missionary work. One flurry of spectacular discourse at a late summer race in 2006 illustrates this strange (pro)fusion of stockcar culture and Bush-era paleoconservative values: In the opening moments of today's race, a local minister evoked the "Lord's Prayer," through which he called on "Jesus is our savior" to "protect our American way of life." Then, a "special guest," Republican Senator George Allen took the microphone. Allen applauded the sea of "patriots" present at the event, and called on those same NASCAR fans to hold fast to their "patriotism" by "supporting our troops, staying together, and fighting the war of terrorism." Senator Allen then turned the focus of his stumping to his own political future, and rallied "his people" by saying "If the folks voting in the election were the folks at this race, I'd be in great shape!" (Fieldnotes) Just as George W. Bush and his cabinet had done two years prior, George Allen's politico-religious stumpings were an (failed) attempt to capitalize on NASCAR's pedagogies of belonging to a shared political ideology, to a collective religious movement, to the imagined spectatorship of NASCAR. With the possible exception of the post-9/11 seventh-inning stretch renditions of "God Bless America" performed instead of "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" during Major League Baseball games in 2001 and 2002. Of note, the New York Yankees have continued this tradition through the 2009 season. Where the living conditions are most desperate, particularly in the U.S. South, is where these evangelic modalities are most concentrated (Hedges Citation2007). The stress to accumulate livable capital is more pronounced by way of the heightened demands of two-worker families in the context of a post-industrial rural labor climate. As the main employers of these regions tend to be Wal-Mart, Ruby Tuesday, and Exxon, the wage labor is often suppressed and laborer oppressed. As a consequence, "red states," and particularly those which are said to have the highest concentration of self-identified Christian fundamentalists, invariably have higher rates of murder, illegitimacy, teenage births, and divorce rates (Hedges Citation2007).