“Hit that car! Hit that car!”
The woman stood on the perimeter, pointing. She was directing her toddler son to ram his toy electric car into another that was momentarily disabled, its plastic body hung up on a log. Carpe diem, little man. In the Scots-Irish school of child rearing, this early form of driver’s education presents a teaching moment of wider import: initiation into the Appalachian ethic of animosity.
If you are an expat from, say, California, living in the South, the next time you are furiously tailgated by a pickup truck, or have a half-full can of beer thrown at you while executing what seems to you an entirely reasonable passing maneuver on a two-lane road, just know that there is a principle at work.
I came to the Warren County Fair for the demolition derby scheduled for Wednesday night, but arrived a day earlier for the “Power Wheels derby” on Tuesday night, not knowing what that might be. Maybe monster trucks? It had to be something awesome. As it turns out, Power Wheels are cars driven by toddlers. If you have spent time around family-oriented events in more polite precincts, you are used to hearing “don’t hit,” “take turns,” “make sure everyone wins” and similar injunctions, all directed against what Johan Huizinga called “the human need to fight.”
“Tech inspection” for the Power Wheels contestants consisted of checking to make sure each car had a balloon duct taped to both the front and the rear of the car. The point of the contest was to pop others’ balloons while keeping your own intact. This more or less corresponds to the goal of demolition derby in its mature form, but with balloons standing in for sensitive components such as radiators.
In the adult derby on Wednesday night, most of the driving was done in reverse; the winning strategy is to use the back of your car to ram the front of others’ cars. Fuel tanks (often consisting of a cheap plastic fuel can) are relocated to the interior of the car, to protect them. All glass is removed and bars of steel or heavy chains are welded where the windshield once was, to prevent the intrusion of another car into yours. Doors are welded shut. I saw the engine computer for one car glued onto the dashboard, to get it away from the radiator. The substance used for glue looked like great globs of roofing tar that had been shat out haphazardly by some passing megafauna. Some cars had exhausts exiting through the hoods, rather than hanging underneath where they would be vulnerable to getting caught on something, giving them a Mad Max vibe. With rattle-can paint jobs and materials that look like they came from Lowe’s rather than Summit Racing, the cars are “use once and throw away.” It’s hard to make out any makes or models amidst the chaos of improvisation. One large blonde woman who appeared to be about thirty years old had stenciled on her car, RAISE HELL EAT CORNBREAD.
The cars line up against a wall for the start, nose in. When the horn sounds, they back out and scatter, and the drivers start drawing beads on one another, heads turned back over their shoulders. Supposedly you are not allowed to ram the driver’s side door of another car, but given the sloppy mud the cars maneuver in, the drivers only have so much control.
What I wasn’t prepared for was the feeling of having gone back in time. Let me be careful here. It is tempting to romanticize rural people as the carriers of bygone virtues, or likewise to demonize them as dragging down the great leap forward. But the cultural moment I felt transported back to was not a Norman Rockwell scene of small-town tranquility. It was more like an Iron Maiden concert, circa 1983. But instead of stage effects, there were actual explosions (of batteries shorted out) and great plumes of radiator steam that looked enough like smoke to convey the proximity of fire and death. Such proximity seemed real enough amidst the loud crunching of sheet metal and the visible whiplashing of heads. One car rammed another with such force that the victim’s car rode up over the aggressor’s hood and onto his roof, and was perched there at a listing angle as the pirate continued plowing forward toward the concrete barrier. The helpless driver’s car fell off onto its side and teetered for a moment before landing right side up, ready for vengeance.
“Hit him in the face!”
“Hit him again!”
The gentlemen to my right in the fenced-off beer pen had taken opposing sides in this emerging duel. They both appeared to be in their early fifties. The tall, lanky one had long hair that flowed out, clearly without benefit of cream rinse, from beneath a Confederate flag cap. The other was built like a fireplug and sported a little rat-tail braid, but was otherwise closely shorn. A lot of people talk about “senseless violence” like it’s a bad thing. But to real connoisseurs, senseless violence is the best kind.
Well-adjusted people are sometimes drawn to this sort of spectacle, but may have a hard time saying why. Of course, there is an easy and respectable thing to say, namely that a contest like this serves as an “outlet” for energies that might otherwise find more destructive release. But to say this is to absorb the demolition derby into the cosmos of the responsible, and thereby invert the meaning it evidently has for its participants. What it seems to offer them is the sheer, Dionysian joy of destruction.
A soapbox derby is a race, usually held by children, in which the cars are powered solely by gravity. Portland’s Adult Soapbox Derby has been running annually since 1997 on Mt. Tabor, a steeply hilled park within the city limits. The event’s website conveys the flavor of it—Burning Man on wheels would be an apt formula—and gives an account of its origins in an experience one of the founders had in San Francisco in 1994 when he witnessed a similar event. He describes the clothing first (“punk,” “postindustrial,” “ripped and stained pants”) and then the action, with
some cars smashing into others. Throwing the daring riders into the blood-filled air and onto the merciless concrete. Another car lost control and sped into the spectators and off the cliff, while still some made it to the bottom and into victory and legend. The crowd was in a maelstrom, pouring beer over each other and raising their fists to the heavens.
I hadn’t come across any such origin story for the Warren County demolition derby; as far as I could tell it was completely devoid of self-representations. The Portland affair sounded a bit frightening—this atmosphere of violence, criminality, and reckless abandon. Would I be able to handle it? Also, I was a little confused. A gravity-powered race with cars leaving one at a time should be a fairly calm and quiet affair, no?
I flew out from Richmond the day before the event, and on the morning of the race picked a place for breakfast that was mere steps from the park, which turned out to be in a lovely neighborhood of million-dollar homes. I had never been to Portland before and was curious to see how they lived. One thing I noticed was yard signs announcing the residents’ affection for various classes of people. Some of these signs had lines written in Arabic that I wasn’t able to understand. It’s impressive that so many Portlanders have taken the trouble to learn this difficult language. As far as I could see, the only people fitting the categories enumerated on the yard signs who were actually present were some Hispanic groundskeepers who tended the botanical cornucopia outside a beautiful craftsman-style bungalow.
As I sat at an outdoor table at Coquine and watched the friendly ease with which the neighborhood people greeted one another on a Saturday morning—the good graces and atmosphere of complete trust—I caught a glimpse of a certain kind of utopia. The homogeneity of the place struck me as the very thing people were said to have wanted when they voted for Trump.
After breakfast I began walking up the hill and caught snippets of conversation as I passed by gathering knots of race spectators with picnic blankets. One well-tattooed woman said to her inky male consort, “Would you like a kimchi lemongrass Bloody Mary, or a regular Bloody Mary?” Farther up the hill, a man said to his blue-haired companion, “. . . and it’s real free market, not this fascist shit we call capitalism.” She looked bored and irritated.
There was a kiosk selling arty T-shirts that said FEAR THE FLAG, referring to the race officials with orange flags who were stationed at various points to keep spectators safely off the course. Ironizing authority even while exercising it, the motto is well tuned to that narrow frequency that allows an event like this to be carried off. There is a certain poignancy to the predicament of rebels become officials; one feels for the fragility of their self-understanding.
I found a spot near the starting line next to a man who had with him a young dog that was somehow both adorable and feral-looking. I said, “He looks like a jackal, or maybe a hyena.” A voice behind me said, “You mean an African dog.” I turned; it was a woman who appeared to be about seventy years old. She gripped one of those hiker’s walking sticks, and had a stern look that suggested she might have some official capacity. I ignored her and said to the dog’s owner, in a jocular tone, “You better keep an eye on him; he might come for your throat.” “That’s actually not funny,” said the woman with the big stick. I decided to keep moving.
The derby is divided into two classes; the first consists of those intent on going fast. I wandered around the staging area before the race and saw impressive engineering in some of these cars, and nice fabrication work. The car that would go on to win this class was a fully enclosed aerodynamic job built and piloted by a team of U.S. Marines, who were there in their camouflage fatigues. They certainly stood out as different, and for that reason seemed oddly vulnerable, socially. They kept to themselves, a quiet countercultural presence on the hill that day.
The second class is made up of “art cars” and here the ingenuity on display was in the service of wit rather than speed. The wittiest team, to my taste, was dressed in saffron robes and piloted a cardboard Rolls-Royce bedecked with garlands of flowers—a reference to the notorious Bhagwan Rajneesh, whose followers took over a rural town in Oregon, and were eventually chased out with indictments for attempted murder. My other favorite was a reproduction of the lovable robot from the film WALL-E, complete with articulated neck and eyes that moved with uncanny expressiveness.
But I wasn’t able to get much interpretive purchase on most of the art cars, if indeed there was coherence to be found. I like art as much as the next person, but I have to confess I have never had much feel for “art” as an urban mood, identity, cultural stance . . . I’m not sure what it is, but clearly it serves some important function for those who adopt it. I gather it has something to do with pointed transgression against communal norms, or rather against norms that are said to have existed at some point. But also, paradoxically, it seems to be a way of belonging to something. And sure enough, the larger pool of entrants, and center of gravity of the event, clearly lay with this contingent. They seemed to have the prevailing spirit of Portland on their side.
I positioned myself at a curve and watched the cars come by in waves. The cars built for speed were sleek and generally moved down the road with a minimum of drama, the fastest reaching perhaps thirty miles per hour. Some of the art cars were doing around ten miles per hour, but of course in their case the whole point was drama, not speed. The drama came partly from whatever cultural reference the ensemble was meant to suggest, partly from the participants’ efforts to deal with ungainly decorative appendages (some of these were huge), and partly from the effects of engineering decisions of the sort one might expect from humanities majors. I watched one car in the shape of a giant hobby horse struggle with a violent shimmy, its two front wheels mounted on separate, vertical steering axes with zero rake (or caster). (Think of the wheel on a shopping cart that shakes chaotically.) I couldn’t help but feel sympathy for the people in the slowest cars. My guess is that when a participant visualizes race day ahead of time, he imagines himself in a speed-blur (as viewed by spectators), leaving a contrail of devil-may-care badassery to wash over spectators who could only wonder at what had just passed. But when the car is moving at a walking pace, it is hard to keep that on-the-edge-of-disaster vibe that the whole venture is predicated on. Those piloting the slowest art cars were left bare for a cold, sober inspection by the spectators. In silence, often. Some racers, rather than sit calmly in the car, gamely embellished with a pantomime of a struggle for control, but these seemed to fall flat at eight miles per hour.
I walked down to the finish line, passing a giant mousetrap along the way. At the bottom of the hill I saw a group of grown men dressed as Teletubbies standing next to a matching cartoon-style mobile, and another group of grown men loitering near a giant baby carriage, dressed only in diapers. While the men seemed to favor themes of self-infantilization, the women contestants wore costumes of empowerment—black jeans, wife-beaters, and motocross helmets. I had the sense of having entered a game of signs with rules of play that were pretty clear to the initiated. In the game of Portland circa 2018, the rules seemed to require the men to signal “innocuous” and the women to signal “fierce.”
In this one can sense a certainly gallantry. The men create space for the women to feel fierce by vacating that space themselves. I could view this costume drama only from the outside, like an American observer of the courtly play of French aristocrats in the salon of Louis XVI. As near as I could tell, to be a gallant requires the observance of certain obliging forms by the men—not a powdered wig and white man-makeup, perhaps, but the waving of a white flag in the battle of the sexes, with the expectation that such gestures will win approval from the women of this milieu. In the eighteenth century, very similar norms prevailed in the ruling class of a society that was about to collapse.
On Memorial Day weekend, 2018, I rode east on Route 10 to Surry, Virginia, to watch my friend Barron compete in a hare scramble race. These are motorcycle races through the woods on dirt bikes. Today’s course was about six miles long, tight and winding, and the adult riders would make five laps through it. The clothing, gear, and paint schemes are so uniformly garish and busy with brand names that it is difficult to make out where the boundary of rider and machine lies. Picture a hybrid human shape, like a centaur, standing on the pegs of a trail bike as it comes power-sliding around a crook in the trail, launching off a bump and straight toward an oak tree, yet somehow banking in midair. The expert riders seem to steer with their asses, planting the airborne rear tire into the dirt to the left, to the right, and back, a rhythm of brief rooster tails and body English that merge into a high-speed, floating motion through the trees. The accompanying sound is the raspy, tinny high-revving of a two-stroke intermittently engaged, its instantaneous throttle response helping to steer the bike. The very best riders look like animals as they do this, as though this mode of movement had evolved over eons: strange and beautiful predators who bring the speed of the open savannah to the dark and intimate confines of the forest.
Because the course is so tight, there are very few opportunities to pass. So the start is crucial. The riders leave in successive waves a couple of minutes apart, from a line five to fifteen abreast depending on the number of entrants in a given class, starting in an open pasture. Each vies for the “hole shot” that will get them into the lead before the first turn. It’s a chaotic free-for-all, with wheelies off the starting line, contact between bikes and riders sometimes going down in the first hundred yards. There is no impartial judge to declare a foul or false start, just a bunch of grown-ups doing it for themselves.
Except some of them are far from grown up. The Pee Wee classes (ages 4–6 and 7–8) start in the same way. Even more than the physical rigors of the sport, this absence of an authority figure to complain to makes an impression, if one is inclined to wonder what makes a kid tough.
The first races of the morning were of these children’s classes; they were already in progress when I arrived. I noticed the occasional ponytail sticking out from under a helmet. The first race came to an end and the riders started pulling off their helmets, and sure enough, about a quarter of them were girls. They do not have a separate class; they just line up with the boys and go for it. Some of them go on to become “wicked fast,” Barron told me, and race as Expert Women.
There is no supervisory entity making sure there is gender equity in the sport, nor does there appear to be a culture of special solicitude for women. They just show up and race. I talked to some of the Expert Women at the race. Most of them grew up in a family of riders, and getting on a motorcycle was as natural as getting on a bicycle.
There is something interesting going on here. If you are alert to it, you may be struck by a certain unforced ease of gender relations among elements of our society that do things like ride dirt bikes. Going back and forth between such precincts and the tidier scenes of upper-middle-class culture, one becomes aware of a contrast; a different flavor to relations between men and women. May we digress into this?
AN ODE TO REDNECK WOMEN
In those segments of society that are more geared into institutions, more dependent on them for the certifications and gold stars that keep people moving through the abattoir funnels of the meritocracy, there is a program of empowering young women that we have gotten used to. As a father of daughters, I gladly participate in it. Stepping outside that world, one sometimes catches a glimpse of a less administered scene, something closer to the self-governing “voluntary associations” described by Tocqueville. In contrast with girl power as an institutional mandate, in these informal scenes there is no bureaucratic authority making sure all girls feel properly, equally empowered.
I was surprised by the number of female riders at the hare scramble. Heartened, too, as I would like to get my daughter J on a bike—simply because I think it would bring her joy. It got me thinking. What makes for strong women? The image of the female ass-kicker has become ubiquitous in advertising, in superhero movies, and in the violent female revenge fantasies that have become a staple of popular entertainment. The very qualities that are called “toxic” in a man often seem to count as “empowerment” in a woman. But the process by which our heroine became so formidable is an imaginative blank that rarely gets filled in.
Clearly, a lot of hope is placed in propaganda. I mean all that girl-power affirmation in schools, universities, the corporate workplace, organized youth sports, the parenting advice industry, corporate journalism, and so on. But the result too often has been a brittle fragility, to judge from the atmosphere of sexual paranoia and victimhood that prevails in upper-middle-class institutions around questions of gender. Administrative mandates and therapeutic regimens multiply—speech and behavior are ever more closely monitored—to protect the delicate sensibilities of our empowered young women. So maybe we should look further afield for an answer to the question of what makes women strong, beyond the social locations where this apparatus reliably turns its own failures into reasons to extend its reach yet deeper. In their relatively unmonitored social relations, the rednecks may have something to teach us.
As a way into this, consider Marilyn Simon’s account of working at a twenty-four-hour restaurant as a fifteen-year-old girl, and being subject to relentless sexual harassment. Initially mortified and embarrassed, she soon found herself dishing out ribald comments to rival the line cooks.
I soon realized that, although one of them would proposition me a number of times during an eight-hour shift, I had the power to reject him—not just reject him but to do so with a playful insult that then made him the butt of jokes along the short order line for the rest of the shift . . . .
It was the very indecency of the back of house culture that made working at that 24-hour restaurant a tolerable job, and it was all the vulgar insults of the workplace that gave a kind of gritty dignity to our work there. Working there one became part of a family. Flouting the rules that govern social niceties, which had to be observed carefully in the restaurant dining room, was the initiation into the clan. What I’ve learned since that summer is that the culture of that greasy spoon kitchen has a rich anthropology; it’s the type of community that populates the taverns of Shakespeare’s plays, for instance, and it functions in direct opposition to officialdom. Its currency is an abundance of filthy light-heartedness, and its economy subverts the normative claims of merit and respectability, those two pillars of social authority and middle-class morality. In the kitchen, the more horrible you are, the better! The profane free culture of the kitchen was the antidote to the polite restraint of the dining room, as it is to the ethic of rigid inoffensiveness that governs our politically correct culture.1
Before one of the Novice races (for teenagers) I heard a woman who looked remarkably like Roseanne Barr bark at a lanky young man who was suited up in his riding gear, but had a hesitant look on his face: “Quit being a fucking vagina!” I had never heard this locution before, and was a bit taken aback. It was perhaps a saltier version of the sentiment that Plutarch records among the Spartan women, who would tell their sons going off to battle, “Return with your shield, or on it.” The lower middle class is where patriarchy is said to remain the most unreconstructed. Yet such patriarchy, if that is what it is, appears quite compatible with cocksure women who seem to have no problem controlling their men—if necessary, by berating them to “man up.”
Perhaps the class difference lies not in the matter of who wears the pants, but rather whether the ruling attitudes correspond to “male norms” or “female norms,” to adopt terms used by the sociologist Patricia Sexton, writing in 1969. I know, this sounds terribly “binary” by today’s standards. But Sexton’s point is that either of these dispositions may be adopted by both sexes, or by neither. Their cultural dissemination and adoption is variable, yet the dispositions themselves are discernible as coherent clusters of values and behaviors. On Sexton’s account, both the men and the women in upper-class society adopt more feminine norms, compared to the working class.2 If we combine this proposition with Simon’s insights about solidarity in back-of-the-house restaurant culture, we can then entertain the following thought: perhaps the use of coarsely sexual language is, yes, a male norm, but one that sometimes serves not to terrorize women but to mark out a class boundary, on the other side of which lie the pearl clutchers.
On Sexton’s account, working-class women prefer their men to be manly, and in that respect may be said to accept male norms as valid, even crucial. The standard feminist response is to say that in doing so, they suffer a false consciousness that guarantees their subordination. But that is hard to square with what one sees.
In fact, working class “patriarchy” can look an awful lot like matriarchy. A good depiction of this can be found in the television show Sons of Anarchy, about a motorcycle gang in northern California. Gemma (played by Katey Sagal), mother of the putative gang leader, Jax, and widow of the gang’s founder, rules not as a mitigating or elevating feminine influence, but from within the male norms of the gang itself, which she entirely shares. She is both tough and womanly: super sexy.
Nietzsche gave a typology of three kinds of lovers. The highest kind longs not for a woman who will save him, a virgin reformer, but for a woman who will love him precisely for his wickedness. Gemma is that kind of woman, a literal partner in crime who spurs her son to a more clear-eyed ruthlessness. And there are indeed hints of an Oedipal dynamic at work between them. He wants to live up to the standards set by the father who won her. As Rousseau said, if you want men to be virtuous, teach women what virtue is. That seems to apply whether one is talking about pagan virtue or Christian virtue, male norms or female norms. Men will make themselves into whatever women prefer.
Plutarch relates that when the army of a certain city was routed, retreating to safety within the city walls, the mothers of the city blocked the gate against them, climbed up on the wall, lifted their skirts, and said, “What are you doing—trying to climb back in here?” The army went back out to fight, and prevailed.
But we have wandered to the topic of what makes men strong (answer: women who demand strength). We started with the question of what makes women strong, and let us return to it. I posed this question to a woman friend, Jess, after describing what I saw at the hare scramble. She said it is simply by “doing stuff, without focusing on the fact that you are a woman doing it.” This sounds right, even obvious in retrospect, and suggests that at bottom men and women are not so different. It eloquently captures the attitude, or lack of attitude, among the women racers.
But Jess went on to name an obstacle to such straightforward “doing” that women are especially subject to in our society, which she called “an overcomer complex,” ironically enough. I took her to mean the seductions of a certain moral valor that women are encouraged to claim for themselves in doing something as a woman, on the premise that this requires a special struggle against oppression, on top of whatever challenges may be intrinsic to the activity. This invites one to stand at one remove from the activity, self-consciously. Yet it is only through full immersion that one gets good at anything. The most impressive and successful women, like their male counterparts, seem not to feel burdened with responsibility to advance the arc of History; they just do what they do, and find their satisfaction in meeting the demands of their craft.
I wandered around the muddy pasture as the Expert Women were getting staged, making final adjustments to their bikes, wiping down their goggles, and getting lined up for their heat. I talked to one woman who appeared to be in her early thirties. She had less of a game face on than some of the others, so she was a bit more approachable. She had started racing just a few years earlier, after having kids, and absolutely loved it. I asked her about the culture of the sport, what it was like being a woman in this setting. Unfortunately, just then the horn blasted: thirty seconds to the start. The pasture exploded with the sound of engines starting, revving high and getting the cobwebs out. I didn’t want to make a pest of myself at such a moment, but I also really wanted to know. I leaned in closer to her helmet and shouted, do you think this is EMPOWERING?
I can’t say for sure if she heard me right. Maybe she only heard the more familiar syllables of “power.” In any case, she shouted, “Try a two stroke! Thirteen-to-one compression!”
Just then the final horn blast sounded and she was off, sending a rooster tail of mud onto my notebook and bespeckling my glasses, her front wheel dancing in the air as she fought to get the hole shot ahead of the others.