Sporting Automobility: Contextualizing NASCAR Nation

Abstract

Freedom. If the nation’s tableau vivant of commercial imagery and political rhetoric—filled with patriotic slogans and All-American symbolism—has taught us anything over the years, it is that “freedom” is not just another word in the ongoing story of “America.” Freedom from what, or to do what, is often glossed over in order to get more directly to the main storyline: that in the United States, hard work, self-determination, devotion to the country, perseverance, obedience, and above all else, individualism, are all made possible through, and rewarded by, this collective sense of freedom. And as the epigraph suggests, the automobile is often positioned as a central apparatus for achieving such freedom within that enduring story (Packer, 2008). Historically, the automobile has been viewed as a way to realize freedom from boredom, a rite of passage toward adulthood, an escape from bucolic isolation, a mechanism for usurping the law of the land, and even a way to emancipate oneself from the condition of poverty (through the exchange valued labors of industrialism).

America dreams driving. In these dreams you are alone. Flying low and loud and fast down a long, straightrazor stretch of Nebraska interstate, perhaps in late autumn, headed west, sharp cold just coming on, the desolate geometry of those golden stubble fields strobing past you, the sun wobbling low and weak on the horizon, your windshield embroidered with the glare of it, and in your rearview mirror the sky behind you as blue and deep as a bruise. You are cupped in the heated seat. The earth spins beneath you. All the shining instrumentality of uncomplicated power falls easily to hand. Your body dissolves into the machine until you are no more and no less than acceleration itself. The brute music of the engine rises up through the floorboards and the soles of your feet and into your blood until your heart pounds with it, the world blurs and the vast web of human complication dissolves somewhere far behind you and there is no past and no future and nothing bad can ever catch you. Nothing can touch you. That’s the American dream. That’s freedom.

—Jeff MacGregor (2005, p. x)