Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/06/10/nascar-banned-the-confederate.html
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Yeah, good luck with that NASCAR.
That’s like trying to take away tie dye from a Dead show. (No offense guys)
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They’re surprised at a left turn from NASCAR?
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Fragile white racists angry that they can’t racist in public? I’m the opposite of sad for them.
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Maybe this gets us more Rally or F1 coverage. Could be a good thing.
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“a banner that was used by enslavers who wanted to form a country that allowed ownership of people.”
“a banner used by enslavers who wanted to continue being in a country that had long allowed ownership of people.”
Fixed that for ya.
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Not to worry, NASCAR. Those angry white people will transform their need to be regressive racists into some new form, like they’ll adopt Native American caricatures as mascots.
Because apparently the NFL still think mascoting whole groups of people is not racist enough.
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“If we’ve lost NASCAR, we’ve lost the country.” - Richard Nixon, probably.
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They fought a war and lost, and a few of the losers are still sore about it, so [after a period of roughly 85 years where it was not displayed much at all until resurrected as a symbol of white might] they [now] display the flag on cars, shirts, and bikinis.
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My only connection to Nascar is occasionally reading an article about some engineering feat performed in the service of making the cars suck slightly less gas or whatever. That said, I really did not expect this from them. I never thought I’d cheer for them, but go, Nascar.
And having gone to high school in Tennessee, I predict that, after the yelling has stopped, approximately 98% of the pro-treason, pro-Nascar people will have gotten over it. The remaining 2% will nurse a lifelong grudge and will be ranting at their great-great-uploaded-grandthings this time next century.
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This has to be due to pressure on NASCAR from sponsors, but I will take it and be glad for it nonetheless.
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There will be songs written about this.
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Sorry, which side is supposed to be against “cancel culture?”
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NASCAR is an activity in which humans sit in wheeled, self-propelled boxes and hold contests to see who can roll the fastest.
Racing is not my thing to defend, but I am a huge fan of Tom Wolfe’s work, and I have to say that his “The Last American Hero Is Junior Johnson. Yes!” (1965) is “must” reading (I re-read at least once a year, in the The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby collection, which is excellent in its entirety and among my most beloved books).
Here is a choice passage about racing and moonshine:
Moonshining was illegal, however, that was also the unvarnished truth. And that had a side effect in the whiskey belt. The people there were already isolated, geographically, by the mountains and had strong clan ties because they were all from the same stock, Scotch-Irish. Moonshining isolated them even more. They always had to be careful who came up there. There are plenty of hollows to this day where if you drive in and ask some good old boy where so-and-so is, he’ll tell you he never heard of the fellow. Then the next minute, if you identify yourself and give some idea of why you want to see him, and he believes you, he’ll suddenly say, “Aw, you’re talking about so-and-so. I thought you said—” With all this isolation, the mountain people began to take on certain characteristics normally associated, by the diffident civilizations of today, with tribes. There was a strong sense of family, clan and honor. People would cut and shoot each other up over honor. And physical courage! They were almost like Turks that way.
In the Korean War, not a very heroic performance by American soldiers generally, there were seventy-eight Medal of Honor winners. Thirty-nine of them were from the South, and practically all of the thirty-nine were from small towns in or near the Appalachians. The New York metropolitan area, which has more people than all these towns put together, had three Medal of Honor winners, and one of them had just moved to New York from the Appalachian region of West Virginia. Three of the Medal of Honor winners came from within fifty miles of Junior Johnson’s side porch.
Detroit has discovered these pockets of courage almost like a natural resource, in the form of Junior Johnson and about twenty other drivers. There is something exquisitely ironic about it. Detroit is now engaged in the highly sophisticated business of offering the illusion of Speed for Everyman—making their cars go 175 miles an hour on racetracks—by discovering and putting behind the wheel a breed of mountain men who are living vestiges of a degree of physical courage that became extinct in most other sections of the country by 1900. Of course, very few stock-car drivers have ever had anything to do with the whiskey business. A great many always lead quiet lives off the track. But it is the same strong people among whom the whiskey business developed who produced the kind of men who could drive the stock cars. There are a few exceptions, Freddie Lorenzen, from Elmhurst, Illinois, being the most notable. But, by and large, it is the rural Southern code of honor and courage that has produced these, the most daring men in sports.
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Well of course it was “unvarnished,” that stuff is basically paint thinner.
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Automobile radiators are cheap and available (talking prohibition and depression era, here) and readily adapted for use as ethanol distillation boilers, and it’s my understanding that this is a true “hillbilly liquor makes you go blind” trope.
If you are a diligent engineer, you wash the radiator really well before cooking. But I have to wonder how possible it is to clean a radiator under low-budget field conditions. And I assume some cooks don’t clean their boilers because they don’t know or don’t care.
UPDATE (and tip of the hat):
@Purplecat observes:
Washing them out would get rid of the traces of anti-freeze, but the main problem with using radiators in a moonshine still was the lead solder which would gradually leach into the product. Also, the product would inevitably be a bit sulphurous, if you’re using less copper in the set-up.
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Just like rolling coal is illegal. Wouldn’t be as much fun if it wasn’t. Good old boys making their way just a little bit more than the law will allow.
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