“We’ve got fuel to burn; we’ve got roads to drive...” – Neil Young, “Rockin’ in the Free World”
The fuel did indeed burn in the Valley this weekend and, despite sinister forewarnings of multi-hour gridlock on surrounding highways during NASCAR weekend, most of the fuel remained where it should – on the Sonoma Raceway track, as Kyle Busch outlasted older brother Kurt, the over-80 degree heat, and the legend of 16th-place finisher Jeff Gordon to take the Sprint Cup, his second Sonoma Raceway win since 2008.
While the excitement of the race, and local-favorite Gordon’s impending retirement, provided plenty of energy in the stands, the weekend was its typically mellow, family-?friendly self – any unexpected volatility was largely confined to overly burdened stomachs in the hot-dog eating contest (for a full airing out, see Kathleen Hill’s upcoming column this Friday).
Not that this shouldn’t have been the case. But some eyebrows were raised earlier in the week due to this being the first NASCAR event – with their, how shall we say, Southern-tinged inflections – in the wake of the June 17 murder of nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina by a Confederate-flag-waving racist – and the subsequent national referendum on “the stars and bars,” the flag adopted in 1861 as the symbol of the Confederacy in its fight to uphold slavery.
The Press Democrat had a short piece this weekend on one knucklehead who draped the flag around his waist during last Friday’s practice sessions at the raceway but, aside from that, we didn’t see, or receive any reports about, anyone else employing their right to obnoxiously offend others with ill-chosen banderole.
The general absence of that Dixieland banner in the Valley this weekend was as notable as the increased visibility of more colorful gonfalon, the rainbow flag, which city officials raised atop City Hall on Friday to celebrate the Supreme Court’s narrow decision affirming the right for same-sex couples to marry.
That neither of those “national dialogue instigating” flags is a daily hot topic in the Valley is important to note, and Sonomans should take pride (of a different kind) in this fact.
Our big topics – the increasing economic disparity between communities, how to care for the developmentally disabled, protecting our watershed – are indeed big. And our littler big topics – where to walk leashed dogs, the amount of winetasting rooms that befit a downtown, how to herd leaves – are, in a word, smaller.
But don’t mistake them for small-minded. Let other regions rail about racist flags and the “homosexual agenda” – most of us, in the words of Neil Young, have burned that heavy fuel; we’ve driven those dicey roads.
Let our fuel be ignited by the angels/devils of electronic cigarettes, vacation homes and fluoridated drinking water.
And, by the way, my retriever will use a gas-powered leaf blower to clear debris from the Montini Trail while we rent out his dog house on AirBnB because I say so, dammit.
Rockin’ in the free world, indeed.
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