Shattering violence. Random mayhem. Explosive particulate disorder. Flames. Hurtling monsters. Cool-edged dread. Blind hope. Hopeless luck. Immutable laws, intractably enforced. Long, tearing seconds. Massed fleeting snapshots. Pounding, ripping, howling, flying, tumbling, sliding, thudding, smoking, shedding, screaming, jumbling, smashing, blazing, flapping, flailing, and death, all jammed into a tiny box of time and popped open like a bomb just waiting for everybody to take their places, but nobody else knows exactly where they’re supposed to be, or when.

There. Would you care to go to work at a job that included all that among its ultimately unavoidable attributes?

It was so hard to realize that Dale Earnhardt died at Daytona, Sunday, but there was just no way around it. It was one of life’s little trick moments: the bomb popped and everybody saw it, but nobody knew what the precise hack of the clock meant when it ticked its last on Dale. The autopsy was scheduled for 10:00am Monday at Daytona, and the verdict was massive head trauma, but it seems pretty clear that the whole deal was between the clock and him while everybody else watched Michael Waltrip cross the finish-line only ten seconds later, with Dale’s own son, Dale Earnhardt Jr. in hot pursuit at second place.

They ran across the finish-line at over a hundred eighty miles an hour while that constant #3 car slowly backed down the high bank of turn four to stop on the infield grass, paired in smoking heaps with Ken Schrader. Earnhardt had collected Schrader on his way up to the outside retaining wall, which is where the clock ticked its last for him.

Looking back at it, the Fox Sports coverage hit the events with startling poignancy. Earnhardt was very likely already dead while we looked through the in-car camera aboard Waltrip’s car after the finish. This was Waltrip�s very first-ever victory in four-hundred-sixty-three starts, and the man drove his victory lap with tears rolling down his face, but he had no idea of the momentous turn receding behind him. Talk about your basic multi-tasking: the crash was an amazing event when and where it occurred and it had to be attended, but it was only ten seconds before the finish of what really must count as one of the most hotly contested five hundred mile races at the Daytona International Speedway. So, the eye bounced back & forth in the camera’s frame: the tangle just behind the leaders, the race to the finish, the whack on the wall, the checkered flag, and then the way the two crashed cars came to a stop. It was nearly impossible to soak it all up as it was happening and sort out which story was more important.

“Wow… Dale’s in the wall, but look at this finish… man, that was a tough hit back there, but that’s Earnhardt, and we’ve seen him in hard crashes before… and these two guys up front are still running as hard as they can.”

The truth: at the moment, it was the finish that was more important, because nobody knew that Dale Earnhardt had died.


It might be argued that it would be necessary to believe that he would have approved that kind of action triage, probably with comparison to the argument that it would have been necessary for man to invent God even in defiance of a known fact that he didn’t exist. Maybe so. Maybe it’s an essential auto-da-fe to picture The Intimidator smiling at real race fans who know where the real action is in a scene like that. I’d throw long odds at the bet, though: he would have approved.

We’re talking about a guy who pointed out that crippling the performance of race cars on NASCAR’s two fastest speedways is for "sissies." He was right about that.

In 1988, Bobby Allison nearly parked his car in the main grandstand at Talladega after a hellish crash, and NASCAR decided they needed to do something to rein these people in a bit. It was the next year when I stood in Dale Earnhardt’s pit and watched somebody — I don’t recall who – doing slow loops through the grass infield of the front tri-oval while flashing past at nearly a hundred eighty miles an hour, and there is no question about it: that’s an awesome sight when it�s happening in real-life about two hundred feet from where you stand. It is not a common thing to observe a thirty-five hundred pound car moving that fast and completely out of control, subject only to black-letter physics, while wondering where the hell it’s going to end up. To stand there looking at it, and hearing the astounding moan of that engine blowing through open header pipes as the car traverses major acreage in no time at all, it rips open one’s mind to something really big and serious going on. Some might call it crazy, but if so, then these people are very seriously crazy. They’re so serious about it that they start to circle around behind crazy with a specially clear sort of light shining on their project.

By that year, 1989, NASCAR had mandated carburetor restrictor plates at its two fastest superspeedways, Talladega and Daytona. The idea was to restrict airflow into the carburetor, and thereby reduce horsepower. Fans have always debated the probity of restrictor plates, but here’s a fact: the stock car speed record has stood still at Bill Elliott’s 212.809 mph logged at Talladega, ever since.

Now, I’m going to say this clearly: dead guys or not, the point of racing has never been to go slower.


It’s never exactly been the point of racing to bend sheet metal on the track, either, but stock car racing has always been specially amenable to that sort of thing. It goes back to the sport’s outlaw roots in running moonshine up & down hill country back roads, and the sheer “come get me and do your worst” competitive spirit that drove the bootleggers out into the broad daylight of organized racing. People who risked their lives running liquor weren’t the type to get nervy over a dented fender at a hundred miles an hour, and their professional descendants grew up with a particular gag in their bag of tricks. Open-wheel race cars like Indy and Formula 1 cars play on-track contact between cars the way nitro plays glycerin: touchy, touchy, baby. Those guys don’t trade paint because of all that rolling rubber in the way, which tends to launch cars like rockets when it grabs rubber on the next-door car at speeds beyond those at which airliners are off the ground and tucking their landing gear.

It’s a very distinct tough that can consciously fend-off another car with physical contact at those speeds, and you could put me at the head of the line interested in watching what it takes to do that. You could even call me a ghoul if you wanted to, but you’d be wrong about it. That’s because it never really interested me to watch cars crash. What interests me about racing, in general, is the decimal-point efficacy of someone fighting in those margins against someone else, both bound by absolute and universal limits, and making it through the squeeze. It’s an affirmative calculation of triumph over catastrophe, and, in this arena, it happens so quickly and minutely that we’re talking about a really compelling elevation of human action.

Some might flinch at that characterization, but that’s okay. They probably play soccer. Feebly.

Dale Earnhardt was an element. They say that he could see a draft on another car: he could look at holes punched in the very air by other cars and take advantage of them. The great Junior Johnson stumbled onto the phenomena by accident decades ago, and thereby illuminated it for his brother racers, but it’s almost as if human evolution turned a tiny genetic corner that day, and Earnhardt was born with the mutation. He came into the world hooked-up from one end to the other: from the times of brute power and raw cunning to wind-tunnel engineering and digital performance analysis. And that’s why he nearly single-handedly bootstrapped Winston Cup racing from a regional market ghetto to a great big coast-to-coast deal.

His fans understood that he was in touch with the roots — the essence — of the thing on the track, and people who had never paid attention to it were roused by the thunder. The essence of the thing was to get to the front as fast as possible, and he made a damned fine living pointing this out to people on the track, to many of whom it appeared that the point had become just a tad obscure. In an interview televised on ESPN, he once said, “I hear drivers saying maybe we’re going too fast, maybe we’re doing this or that… Maybe we are. Maybe we’re not. But do you want to race or not? I want to race.” Hooked-up as he was in stock cars, that meant bending sheet-metal now & then. And if some of his competitors were sometimes offended with swatches of his black paint scarring their pretty cars, they could later reflect that it could be valued at many thousands of dollars per square-inch in their own pockets, because race fans were seriously interested in watching the essence of the thing on the track.


Two weeks ago, Dale teamed with his son Dale Jr. and Andy Pilgrim, and drove the #3 GM Goodwrench Corvette C5-R in the Rolex 24-hour race at Daytona. It was his first sports car race. That team drove to a fourth-place overall finish, second in their GTS class. They might well have won if Dale Jr. hadn’t misdiagnosed a broken half-shaft and the crew hadn’t wasted forty-five minutes replacing an entire transmission. Junior is young, though, with no racing experience with differential rear-ends, so the mistake was natural enough. What the performance illuminated, however, was his father’s natural grasp of the essence of things on a race course.


There was only one time I ever even briefly imagined that a race car had gotten the best of Dale Earnhardt. He was wailing down the front tri-oval at Talladega in July of 1996, and leading the race when he got bagged in a pack tangle. He kicked-off the resulting ride with an appalling smash nose-on into the concrete wall, and then hung on for dear life while his car promptly bashed itself to widely scattered wreckage in a full 3-D flying flail. The biggest pile came to rest near turn #1, and it was about half a lifetime before there were signs of life in it.

It hadn’t gotten him.

He walked away from it with a broken collar-bone and sternum, and a week later, he started in the Brickyard 400, a sensational spectacle of Winston Cup cars running at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

Last night, I was thinking about that crash, and I think that might have been the beginning of Earnhardt’s invincibility aura. After he got away with that, something in reality slipped common-sense, and it was just about impossible to consider that he would ever be killed in a race car.

“How does something like this happen?” The question, and others in its general class, often including the word "why," begins to muddle sentiments shortly afterward. The answer, however, is fairly clear: it’s a dynamic crap-shoot. Race car design attempts to shave the dice for a favorable tumble, but the authentic fact is that all bets are off when heavy fast-moving objects with people in them depart rational control. A bit of air off the rear spoiler, a cut tire, an oil-spot on the track, and the whole day gets tossed to the winds, and sometimes a life goes with it.

These people go to work in margins so up-close to the line between life and death that the rest of us wouldn’t even be able to see it at all if we were suddenly placed in their seats. It would make no sense, to me, to stand around and say they’re out of their minds for doing that willingly, even joyfully. I definitely go the other way: what’s magnificent to me is the fact that they do it so well, on average, that they learn to live with the possible price in silent terms, muted in the hearty roar of life to the utmost limits as they see them.

Some of them will now be very seriously challenged to pay attention to that roar. I have every confidence that Dale Earnhardt Jr. will be in the starting grid at Rockingham next week. The thing I’ll be watching to see is how well he can carry the whole hook-up into the future. If he can do that, then he’ll be a man, gauged against the best of them.

Q: "What’s the difference between Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton?”

A: “Tip O’Neill, Sam Ervin, and Maximum John Sirica."

Political fronts over the past two weeks have been just hellish. Within the past few days, there’s all the various mens rea among the Clintooniac press coming to terms with fleeting shadows of a criminal government amid the din of household goods shipping. Going back a bit more there’s the scattershot criminal pardons, comprehending one that only very few are qualified to analyze with principles. (That one goes like this: just because Rich was an “economic criminal” doesn’t mean it wasn’t a rotten thing for Maximum Bill to spring him.)

I was working my ass off in Houston and had just arrived in my hotel room after a fifteen hour day when CNN Headline news — the only thing available at the hour — spit out the fact of the criminal plea bargain, and there I stood too weak to defend myself from it. A savage underhanded blow to the least facades of justice: nobody’s even concerned to pretend anymore. I hadn’t gotten the story in real time so I missed all the sweet palliatives in original song, but the outlines were broad enough. “It’s for the best.”

The Thing was loose. It hadn’t even wriggled out of a cage the way The Dark One had just before his last helicopter ride: Maximum Bill drove the country like his own personal pickup truck chasing hill, dale and border on a midnight dope run for eight years, and then walked out the front door with a receipt in his pocket.

What’s going to happen when things have come to that? Aside, that is, from George W. Bush.

There is a point to “justice”. Justice is a value for which human beings act in order to correct something inimical to human life. It was always a just thing to pursue the end of The Clinton Administration, throughout all of it from first day to last. That was a just fight on the premises that it is a good thing for human beings to live freely as they choose, that nobody ever did that better than Americans, and that this ghastly hillbilly thug and his monstrous wife were always a direct face-front fang at the throats of the first two of these premises.

Long before they boarded the wretched “ship of state”, they were nobodies to let anywhere near it. Sorry as things were for the matter of American liberty when their act rolled into town at D.C., these people were natural trouble on the hoof. Who here didn’t laugh out loud when they boosted Les Aspin to the McNamara chair of international relations?

A wise man — my father, in this case, and about the Colossus of Yorba Linda — always told me, “If you think this president is bad, wait’ll you see the next one.” The man was never wrong for thirty years. Simply burned up from all the dragging nonsense of the Bush government laying on the best years of my life when I was born a free American, I didn’t really get it, then, when Terror Bill came around. I’ve never voted, but I never voted less than in 1992, because I was far, far, too busy for it.

The way he played homosexuals in the military; wotta laff that was. A couple of his puppets didn’t make it to cabinet or other, and from where I sat, he couldn’t hear all the bloody shooting in the Balkans…(not that I would have had him do anything about it in my name, preferring the idea of American volunteer action, but I might have at least expected the man to show some sign of life over it…) Bits & pieces of the beginning of the end, is what I got.

My phone rang some time in the fall of ‘93, and my brother was bending my ear about something, along the course of which he mentioned odd facts in the case of a White House Counsel found shot dead in a park near where Ethan Allen might mount an assault on the capital these days. “So what else is new?” I thought, generally. Another dead guy.

This Thing didn’t really start catching my attention until That Woman tried to sign me up to one of her doktors. I wasn’t going to have that in any way, and that would mean stuff like going to ground under her thumb beyond not paying taxes for this rotten fraud, which I already wasn’t doing. If I had to take to the hills, there was just no way in life that this government was ever going to take care of me.

It was never necessary to stipulate to the Constitution of the United States in order to denounce these horrible people, but it often made decent sport to point out why no reasonable person should respect it or pay for its administration. The way November 1963 lays in history across nearly four decades has never seriously been dealt with as a question of why free people put up with awful, completely intolerable fraud… and a line of that sort really only begs questions of why, then, Nixon happened, or why any of this, down to the present day, was not only allowed to proceed, but was actually bought and paid for by hundreds of millions of otherwise apparently sane individuals.


“How does it become a man to behave toward this American government to-day? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.”

(Henry David Thoreau - 1849)

There is nothing erroneous or otherwise wrong about that statement just because it’s over one hundred fifty years old, and here’s the point: there is nothing essentially different about the times just because of the way they’re dressed up. These are despicable times in American history, when slaves strut their "freedom," and “rights” are a cracked whip. They follow on times in which people who should have known what they were talking about when they spoke those words sold them to vultures in order to just make the screeching stop. I don’t want to hear about Ronald Reagan’s birthday: I’m sure he was a very nice man, but, personally, I didn’t need him to set the federal dogs on every person working for a living in my homeland, yes, for the first time in its history.

All I needed to hear next was that Bush character telling me that “from now on, any definition of a successful life will include the concept of service to others.” In my early thirties, I was: ready to punch his lights out for laying claim to my life. Nobody in real life could have gotten away with telling me something like that and seriously trying to enforce it.

A bunch of clowns put on a circus in 1994. (No: I’m not talking about D’Amato’s hearings.) Here we sit with the Department of Education. Thanks a lot, ladies and gentlemen. Y’all are dismissed.

There hasn’t been a real principle worth fighting for in people other than outright brats, toads and thugs, as long as I’ve been alive. It was only a matter of time before the worst came around again.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

There is not, and never has been, one shred of evidence that Vince Foster shot himself at Ft. Marcy Park with that Colt .38 the way they say he did. More than ninety percent of the people who have ever remarked on the case in my view were completely incompetent to come to terms with that fact. There was never the dimmest prospect that they would grasp what it meant that the case was defrauded in every official report.

It was the sheer scope and breadth of that sort of thing that made it eminently necessary to storm the White House with SWAT teams and “dynamic entry” by January of 1998. The Lewinsky Shitbomb finally touched a raw nerve among the more spineless, and they mounted their pathetic assault on “the legacy” or something. That’s because it couldn’t have been justice, or they simply were not grown up to the task, or both.

If Richard Nixon went down on the rails of perfidy to the game, then, looking at The Ozark Long March, I’d like to know what the game is.

The place was just rife with crumbs and cockroaches. When they weren’t out getting face-time with that “TheAmericanPeople” riff in their kinder-gentler-machine-gun style, every crank got a turn on cue in order to grind out “more ecstatic modes of living” and other mindless rubbish. Charles “Ironsides On Crack” Ruff couldn’t be bothered to ring up Yezhov-Reno the day he found the WHCA videotapes that the skells were lying about and the clock ran out. “Whoops!” Mistakes were made. Move along, citizen: nothing to see here. Steps have been taken, measures are in place, and the Attorney General’s so mad that, why, she’s just shaking.

The thing to do, all along, was to toss Imelda Rodham’s place for the notes she took on L. Patrick Gray’s fireplace scene. Even when she worked for the House Judiciary Committee, she doubtless figured that guy too dim to keep copies to pop from a stage-left dressing room at the right moment.

And the Clintooniac press is distressed over a dresser, now. Pardon me when I say I live in despicable times.

What didn’t they lie about? Why didn’t they lie about it? What was it they weren’t constantly lying about?

These people, to include their various mannequins and apparat, were out there throwing bloody cruise missiles at guys in sandals. They were doing that because The Lying Bastard had drained himself in a White House sink and some people in authority wanted to know what the hell that was all about. These twisted scheming anglers went out and blew up somebody’s private productive property — in my name — in a cynical sleight-of-gland from his balls to sheeps’ guts soaking it up on TEEVEE, and left America holding the terrorist-threat bag.

These people never stopped waving bloody chickens’ heads at the fearful of the land like cheap revivalists, aimed at lining them up for serial and parallel processing. “A hundred thousand more cops!” is what we got after “Showtime” at Waco: just ask ‘em, and they’ll tell you all about it in the "legacy." If you ever get within ear-shot of one of the era’s pressitutes, ask if two million people in prison is part of the "legacy."

These people — these specimens — never stopped pressing their claims to my life, and that, amid an array of pro forma scandal in unprecedented panorama, was the first thing that always made them indictable. It doesn’t matter that their evil philosophy was never strictly adjudicated in trail of that word. The machine can go hang itself: there is no reason why individual people cannot reject with prejudice the things these people thought in action at the levers of government. That judgment does not require official imprimatur.

They were grown to it from a time when dingbats swerved into steely-eyed ideologues and the resulting crash strew tie-dyed starry-eyed neuroses throughout a hitherto fairly healthy culture. The Civil Rights Movement will always be an heroic gleam on the American record, and more than wistful, too, because it was a long time coming. That stinking war was the right thing to fight over, too.

After that, though, they couldn’t find enough of America to destroy, and a fight that big was going to comprehend the roots of the whole project. Which meant: sooner or later I’d be taken care of.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Maybe The Lying Bastard walked because, sooner or later, I’ll be taken care of.

The damned Republicans are cooing over “a patients’ bill of rights” that will shake the loose sand out of the HMO gravel and square that “sector” away. That’s what’s going to happen with that. It’s probably the next best thing without ditching Medicare and Medicaid because constrained markets always require more coercive correction, but it’s headed to hell, anyway. The United States is manufacturing its “health care crisis”, has been for more than three decades, and these people have no hope of heading it off. Dennis Hastert said so in a discussion with Imelda Rodham about medicine. ("Holy mackerel, these are philosophical issues…”)

To indict the infamous Arkie thug might lead to unhelpful questions about why he and his henches behaved the ways they did in their time. It was because killing America was always worth lying about, to them. Bonior and Imelda both copped to it within hours of the House impeachment vote when they sternly warned the troops not to let the VRWC attack their "ideas." There was no obvious reason for that, except for the connection to the fact that The Lying Bastard was what he was and presently driving the government. Here were means to ends, and that was worth all kinds of rampant deceit.

The deceit was necessary to con the marks. It mostly worked, but that’s just a measure of the damage done by the time they came along.

Now, everybody knows this. Everybody who is not right now lying, knows all this, and more, about it.

What is going to happen in the times after the first president to cop a criminal felony plea? How many people know in their bones that it was among the measliest of his tramplings? How many bones in the ground know it?

And he’s just walked out the door for cheeseburgers over Carnegie Hall. Perhaps he stole a leather chair into which he can sweat after a good jog.

Terror Bill got away because justice has slipped its currency in America now. What counts is action, over all, as long as it frames right in viddiebits to harried people hearing it from sharp angles. That’s the presumption where the action is seeping past its reaches in the last eight years. There are agendas and moving-on to get done now and nobody considers what might the times have been like after a criminal president – and presidency — were treated according to their real scale against a precedent like The Dark One himself.

Be they ever so Democrats, and even unto the present day in the case of the lately miserable Sarbanes, they were nonetheless giving good battle to a corrosion that had to be stopped, then. Tip O’Neill, on his accession as majority leader in 1972, was ready for action already in a way that Republicans couldn’t even plausibly fake for eight whole years of the Clinton regime. The trains have run on time, The Big Lug dabs that like a napkin at the shirt-front of his “legacy” in a diner photo-op, and that sort of thing is what allegedly important people find important.

These are despicable days.

It’s no good to handwave in the direction of “uniting” with something irreconcilable. I’m not interested in “uniting” with people who will not act for justice, as justice, and I’m pretty “divided” from that sort of corrosion, which is only going to get worse as it goes. People who keep discarding facts and ignoring the truth end up stupid and blind, and no one like that will ever be an authority to me.