Column by George Sibley
Culture – January 2005 – Colorado Central Magazine
I’M SITTING HERE writing this early in December, hopeful that by the time you are reading it somewhere between late December and early January, the usual miracle will have occurred and all will be somewhat the same with this rolling ball of rock and fire we’re hanging on to, or off of. Our axis won’t have wobbled unduly, gravity will have continued to assert its mysterious will against the planet’s tangential urge, and we will again be heading toward spring, summer and – well, that’s far enough ahead to look.
Typically, it’s a time for journalists and other chroniclers of the past to address the future. But thought of the immediate future makes me wonder why I’m not hoping instead for a significant wobble in the planet’s axis. Why not something real from nature’s darker side that would shake our fantasy land up a little? The relatively quick return of the glaciers that would pack a mile of ice over the financial centers of the earth? A sizeable asteroid landing on a meeting of the G8, or the Daytona 500? Or a new virus beginning an advance through the world, maybe one that attaches itself to large electronic transactions, currency trades, and Hummers, and afflicts primarily the voraciously comfortable — a true Type A virus?
That grumpish attitude is of course still fallout from the election last month, and what it bodes for the future. Frankly, it’s not the election itself so much as some recent responses to the election that I’m finding discouraging. A specific example is the replacement at NBC News of their old anchor with a new guy who, according to NBC’s president, truly “understands this NASCAR nation.”
Huh? Major media other than Fox are interpreting a 51-49 percent election as the conversion of America to a “NASCAR nation.” But more to the point: Does it matter whether we are or are not now a “NASCAR nation”if the media are going to report from and to us as though we are? If that is going to be the constant mediated noise in our ears and eyes, how long will it be before we are, in fact, for all impractical purposes, a NASCAR nation?
What is “a NASCAR nation,” anyway? Or a “red nation,” as yet another NBC exec put it? (Remember when “red” was the worst thing you could call someone?) I had to go online to www.nascar.com – and then go through a dozen windows – before I found out what “NASCAR” stands for. Do you know? Damned if I’m going to tell you if you don’t; you’ll have to look it up yourself if you don’t know what our republic stands for. And you had better hope no reporter catches you before you find out.
But I’m sitting here wondering how we came to this pass. I’m part of a “red state” (although I’m in a bluish part of that state). But even the reds I know here in Central Colorado – gee, it’s fun to call them that – don’t seem to be very big on NASCAR thrills. I dunno, maybe in the privacy of their homes they sit media-stoned by the celebration of consumption that an auto race is, but nobody seems to be pushing to get the NASCAR tour here.
But they don’t seem to be big on the other red thrills of the NASCAR nation, either – the so-called “moral values” of gay fear/hate, abortion fear/hate, science-education fear/hate, and the like. Here in Central Colorado, I get the feeling that most of us, even most of the reds, are embarrassed by those who get in our faces about those things. But now the national media are out turning over rocks in what they perceive to be the NASCAR nation, looking for and inflating these so-called values, and they will undoubtedly find stupidity everywhere, which the local papers will have to retro-cover some way or another, rather than politely not reporting them at all, the way one doesn’t report the fact that the mayor accidentally farted at the town meeting.
HOW DID WE become a nation dedicated to elevating hate, fear and the bone-deep ugliness of willful ignorance into “moral values”? Like poverty, these things are always with us, but we don’t usually celebrate them – and when we do, it usually gets ugly.
So that is all prelude to me expressing my hopes for 2005. I’m sharing my hopes as opposed to predictions because my predictions lack the irrational quality of my hopes, so they would just be glum. Here is what I hope:
I hope that every red in the NASCAR nation meets a gay person without realizing it, and comes to enjoy that person as just another person – then learns the truth when it is too late to hate.
I hope that every “pro-lifer” in the NASCAR nation has to help a beloved daughter or close friend or co-worker make the decision about what Hawthorne called “the unpremeditated offspring of a passionate moment.” I also hope the same thing for every extreme “pro-choicer.” If either one comes through the process without feeling awful (full of awe) about the choices that have to get made in such situations, then they are part of the problem, in my mind.
I hope that all of us Central Coloradans try to come to deeper terms with the just-say-howdy, faux redneck “lifestyle” pretensions so common around here that feed those “NASCAR nation” oversimplifications. “Lifestyles” aren’t life, they’re just convenient cultural costumes we can buy to put on, thereby adopting some readymade cultural identity. For some reason, otherwise intelligent people have had a morbid fascination with redneckism. But the “moral values” waking up in the wake of the NASCAR election are a rude beast in redneck garb that needs to be taken more seriously, and challenged by the living, not through lifestyles.
I hope that everyone everywhere just stops watching what the major media call “news,” recognizing that they aren’t out to deliver accurate stories to an audience, but are out to deliver an audience to a pre-fabbed story. I hope people – especially here in the so-called “NASCAR nation” – read their local and regional papers instead, where they are at least close enough to raise hell with the publishers for oversimplifications and other lies, and maybe to help start the true moral debate we seriously need in this country.
Well, that’s enough for one year. I don’t, of course, expect any of those hopes to be realized in any big way. But one small step is a start. I remember the optimism of a shipwreck movie I saw once. “Pull for the horizon, boys,” said the captain in the lifeboat; “it’s better than nothing.” Amen. Back to the future.
George Sibley teaches, writes, and organizes in Gunnison.
