NASCAR less interesting than paint drying

By Joseph Gauger
Collegian Staff
March 21, 2007

Call me an elitist, but I have an immitigable disdain for a lot of the common pastimes enjoyed by my fellow Americans. The simple fact is that television, pop music and any other medium produced for mass distribution are primarily motivated by commercial gain. With very few exceptions, this strips our popular canon of any depth or cultural value. As evidence, I’ll point your attention to one of the most egregious examples of this phenomenon, which exemplifies nearly everything that is wrong with our culture at large: NASCAR.

The institution of stock car racing is utterly anti-intellectual. It promotes mindless spectatorship and requires absolutely no thought from its audience. Practically any other sport entails some consideration accessible to its fans. Team sports, especially, rely on strategy and allow for statistical analysis by fans and those professional analysts on ESPN. NASCAR is merely a spectacle, a celebration of the complete absence of mental stimulation.

Similarly, the abject drudgery of a stock car race makes it painful to watch. NASCAR is an event based on watching cars make 1,600, 2,000 or, in severe cases, 2,400 consecutive left turns. I have spent hours of my life watch cars do the same thing over and over again on the road, and I don’t find traffic any more stimulating when it is transplanted to a racetrack and accelerated to high speeds. I’d rather stare at a blank television screen, because when the TV is off, I don’t have to listen to the unbearable drawl of the slack-jawed NASCAR announcer.

Until I saw NASCAR, I thought NFL commentators had an impressive capacity for obfuscation, but at least in football there is the potential for meaningful commentary. The same trend applies for football players, who on occasion say something lucid about the strategy or performance of their team during an interview. NASCAR drivers merely express their excitement with victory or their disappointment with defeat, usually with an appalling lack of articulation. This speaks to the intellectual bankruptcy of the entire institution.

The abhorrent food racing fans and other sports fans in general eat could easily fill a separate essay. This, again, is a microcosm of a problem that pervades American culture. Food at athletic events is revolting, not only in its form and preparation, but also in its excess, which is the hallmark of modern American consumerism. Again, this could easily evolve into a tract in itself, but suffice it to so say that the tailgating food belies a callous lack of concern on the part of fans for their own well-being, as well as that of the environment and their fellow living things.

As a concerned environmentalist, I am offended by the egregious waste of stock car racing. What’s the point of my walking everywhere if a bunch of yokels in nylon jumpsuits are going to drive around in circles for three hours? This so-called sport is iconic of the widespread waste that becomes tolerable to a prosperous society. Even in the face of rising gas prices and the perpetual political problems American faces with oil-producing nations, NASCAR continues to burn fuel as if doing so was some kind of public service. Considering that a lot of our soldiers are fighting and dying for the oil in that gasoline, stock car racing shows how hollow the supposed “support the troops” sentiments so often promulgated by its fans really are.

As a purely spectator “sport,” racing exhibits another sorry trend in our prosperous society: laziness. I have no problem playing sports (unless you count a total lack of athletic skill as a problem), but watching sports has never had much appeal to me. Our society has been so crippled and emasculated by its consumer culture that we need other people to have our fun for us. The deeper our mass media saturation becomes, the more often we experience life vicariously. It not only makes for torpid, ineffective and boring people, it alienates us from our personalities and our bodies. But again, that is a separate essay.

This leaves me to my two major criticisms (that’s right, I consider all of the above secondary).

First, there is the crass commercialism of the institution. Every possible square inch of space is emblazoned with corporate logos, including the cars and the drivers. In that sense NASCAR is not only a personification of America’s problems, but a celebration of its source. If the power of giant corporations in America was somehow limited, all of the problems above could be solved much more easily, because so many of them are the result of corporatization and its concurrent baggage: uniformity, cultural acclimation toward consumerism, disregard for the environment and our human posterity, consolidation of wealth and emotional alienation. The phenomenon of NASCAR embodies the level of control corporations have over the American economy and culture. Stock car racing is a medium for advertisement which appeals to the basest inclinations of humanity.

This brings me to my final criticism: the barely restrained and feebly disavowed bloodlust inherent in NASCAR. Anyone who has ever subjected himself or herself to a race understands that the entire premise of the “sport” is the anticipation of a crash, the more horrific the better. I’ve never heard any compelling explanation by a NASCAR fan of any other motivation to follow racing. The ethical problems with commercializing bloodlust in this way are self-evident and don’t need hackneyed moralization on my part.

I conclude simply by saying that NASCAR represents a disturbing reversal in our society’s progress toward enlightenment and civility.

gaugerj1@lasalle.edu