The stubbornness of legacy

The Confederate flag flew high over NASCAR again Sunday afternoon, despite NASCAR's best efforts to finally shed it. Some social distancing just can't get distant enough, it seems.

What happened was, some joker got his hands on a plane and trailed a banner over Talladega (Ala.) Superspeedway. The banner had the Stars and Bars on it. It read DEFUND NASCAR.

And so the South, or at least some people's South, rose again, deep in the aorta of a state stained with the blood of racial justice martyrs. And NASCAR was once more flung back to the days of spiritual Jeb Stuarts high-tailing it around mean little rings of dirt in moonlighting likker cars.

It also gave the lie to something the Blob wrote a little over a week ago.

It wrote then that NASCAR wasn't NASCAR anymore, that it was "no longer a regional curiosity thick with Lost Cause wistfulness." Turns out that was only half-true.

NASCAR, see, is no longer a regional curiosity within its boardrooms, and no one there wishes it to be. But the Lost Cause wistfulness remains, at least among a certain segment of NASCAR's  constituency.

They package it now as "heritage, not hate," but nobody's fooled. Ask them what heritage it is they're celebrating, and invariably what emerges is a barely veiled yearning for the day of Jim Crow and "White" and "Colored" drinking fountains and the back of the bus. No one will say it that way, but get down to the guts of it and it's nostalgia for the "states' rights'" that bulwarked white hegemony, and the gun and the club and the noose for anyone disposed to challenge them.

Which brings us to something else that flew Sunday over NASCAR, in a manner of speaking.

Someone, somehow, left a noose in the garage of Bubba Wallace -- who just happens to be the only African-American in the Cup series, and who just happens to be the man who pushed hardest for NASCAR to banish the Confederate flag from its premises for good. And whose 43 car displayed a Black Lives Matter paint scheme last week at Martinsville.

All of this was apparently too uppity for Lost Cause Nation. And so one of them -- presumably one of them -- left the age-old dark warning.

What's a mystery is who it was, and how they managed to do it. Understand, no one just walks uninvited into a NASCAR garage; try it and you'll be greeted with a "Get the hell away from the car!" snarl. They hold their cards tight against their chests, these NASCAR folks. State secrets are less neurotically guarded than the secrets of speed.

So it's hard to see a scenario in which someone from the outside was able to deposit a noose without being seen/challenged/told to get the hell away from the car. I suppose it depends on where, exactly, the noose was discovered. Or when exactly it was placed there.

In any case,  all those words written these past weeks about how NASCAR has truly changed and, boy, what a great day of turning this is, now become forfeit. The most shameful aspects of the sport's legacy are, it seems, as stubborn as lemon balm. You can dig it up by the roots, but the roots somehow grow back.

In which case, the only solution is for the roots themselves to refuse to grow back.

In the week or so since NASCAR disavowed the flag of white supremacy and racism for good and all, more than a few Lost Cause types have said they'd never watch NASCAR again. The diehards showed up with their Confederate flags anyway Sunday -- the streets outside the track were a virtual parade of Stars and Bars -- but NASCAR can only hope they really are diehards, and that the stubborn clingers to an oppressive and disgraced legacy are as good as their word.

In other words: So leave, already.