Alabama Getaway: The Political Imaginary and the Heart of Dixie

EPILOGUE

273 Epilogue Goodlier than the land that Moses Climbed lone Nebo’s Mount to see. —julia tutwiler, “Alabama” Oh Moon of Alabama We now must say goodbye. —bertolt brecht, “Alabama Song” Race Weekend The sound of Sez-you massed, revved, and capitalized? That would be more than 150,000 nascar fans and some four-dozen candycolored stock cars inside the Talladega Superspeedway at summer’s end. Is this, as a New York Times writer claimed, a space for “the opposite of politics”?1 Or are race weekends the Heart of Dixie’s last pit stop? In 2003 nascar dads, a pollster’s catchy term, were said to hold the keys to the November elections. The simplistic label attempted to capture a demographic of white men who worked with hands and machinery, cement and sheet metal, nail guns and electrical wire, with a military stint in the immediate family, accompanied to the track, in fewer numbers, by wives and girlfriends, by kids with multicolored backpacks, rolled-up posters, and visor caps. Come the morning of September 28, nascar dads mainly held the keys to rvs, suvs, and pickups with pull-behinds, en route to ’Dega, or already encamped around the Alabama racetrack. Between Atlanta and Birmingham, along the southernmost fingers of the Appalachians, the exit off i-20 leads to Speedway Boulevard and flatland acres of motor homes, trucks, pop-up campers, and tents. Temporary quarters are marked with flagpoles flying driver numbers, stars and stripes, Confederate fighting colors. Waved along by state troopers in smoky hats and black racing 274 • epilogue stripes up their blue pants legs, fans park in ranks of tight rows among license plates from Alabama and Georgia, but also from Missouri, Ohio, Wisconsin, then wander with thousands over to the shopping midway, dazzled by the metallic glimmer and luminous reflections of eighteen-wheeler trailers, sides flipped up into storefronts for moving all that colorful merchandise beneath the morning sun. From racetrack to racetrack the rolling souvenir caravan follows the nascar circuit. Another sort of crowd gathers around the Dale Earnhardt truck for Sunday morning services. Someone is preaching. A black, red, and silver-trimmed silhouette of the Intimidator looms near the congregants, his arms outstretched. The Sacred Earnhardt of Dixie crashed the wall of death so fastidiously at Daytona in 2001 that no one who witnessed it believed it. Across the Talladega grounds, a carny scene deploys, in all shapes, in jeans, shorts, driver T-shirts, baseball caps, sunglasses, carrying plastic bags full of trinkets and gewgaws, holding cups of beer or fluorescent-green plastic bottles of Mountain Dew. A sweaty throng with barrel-shaped men wearing shirts that read: “Addicted to beer and blow jobs.” These must be the nascar dads. The scene looms flat and treeless near the track, hotter by the minute. In the Corporate Display Area, a pumped-up Viagra exhibit stands close by the tallest structure in sight, the black and gold “An Army of One” tower where recruiters welcome blue-collar kids to refuel the war wagon. “Our fans and competitors will show the world that we stand united in support of our troops in the war against Iraq,” said Grant Lynch, president of the Talladega Superspeedway and former pr manager for R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, soon after the U.S.led invasion.2 From out of the Army recruitment tower emerge guys who’d jump for each other into a firefight or a house-to-house against slim odds on the other side of the world. Sloggers bonded by football, hunting, drinking, Holy Ghost, nation, mission, Toby Keith. Team players who’d have each other’s back if it killed them. Guys who refused to believe, because the magnitude of duplicity, squander, and arrogance went beyond their wildest unwilling experience or worst boss, that a president and his cronies, including the Alabama native who was national security advisor, waving the flag while plying the rhetoric of fear, would send them into death’s quagmire for no good cause. Shortly before the 2003 invasion, soldier-turned-novelist Christian Bauman had complained bitterly about romanticized U.S. Army recruiting pitches, the epilogue • 275 sort of gung-ho, Be-All-You-Can-Be-Army-of-One imagery that pulled him to enlist, to spend four years in Somalia and Haiti, and then to write his realistic novel The Ice Beneath You (2002) about the lives of ordinary troops. “We...