What is it Melville said?
Retards, all over the world, stand hand-in-hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round.
Something like that.
The Danes have a word which they claim figures heavily in the national mentality. The word is “Hygge” (roughly pronounced “Heeewlllgh”. The language will remains a mystery to me for fear of severely injuring my tongue). There is no really effective translation of the word, and the only reason I can glean its full meaning is because the Dutch have something similar: Gezellig. Loosely translated it means “cozy”, but with a more ambient definition and increased saliva.
Anyway, for better or worse, I feel that word right now.
When I didn’t feel it was a few days ago when I went to a monster truck rally with some classmates. Admittedly, a weird thing to do, but I looked at it two ways: I’d never been to one before, and the thought of being surrounded by Danish rednecks appealed to me in a twisted sort of way. Also, I figured there had to be story in there somewhere. I mean, it was a German monster truck rally in Denmark, in the company of people from a variety of nationalities —everywhere from Iceland to Lithuania to Brazil.
(This truly international evening would not end until I helped a blind-drunk French girl off a bus and out of pool of her own vomit, made another French girl cry, and drove a normally sweet and placid Catalonian girl screaming mad by loudly playing guitar with a Spanish guy at an awkward hour in the morning.)
Before heading to the rally a few of us were in an Icelandic classmate’s kitchen embracing manly US redneck culture by engaging every stereotype short of burning crosses.
Or trying to anyway.
Sausages were fried accompanied by homosexual innuendo (which in itself is sort of a homosexual innuendo —the medium is the message). Hamburgers were prepared in the proper American way; with buns. That is, until we ran out of buns, and I, overcome with a frenzied hunger, may have eaten a beef patty before it was properly cooked. Twice.
Bruce Springsteen was listened to on a laptop, The Boss telling the European pseudo-rednecks about being born in the U.S.A. The beer flowed freely. This was apparent, if not by the increasing presence of empty cans, then by the fact that a few of my classmates started trying to adopt a Southern Drawl.
I believe that one particular 6-foot-7 Danish guy was trying to sound like he was from South of the Mason-Dixon line. Instead he sounded like a cross between Daffy Duck and Orson Welles. The Icelandic guy, abandoning words altogether, and prattling gibberish, sounded like an Irishman on crack. The Brazilian sounded Jersey, and the German sounded like a paedophile. The two Canadians in the room, most able to generate some semblance of redneckism, remained quiet and exchanged looks across the table. Although one of them did put on a bandanna. A bright orange one.
We studiously examined youtube videos of rednecks doing stupid things — dragging each other behind tractors through mud, lighting themselves on fire, trying to speak, more mud. There is a plethora of these videos on youtube if you want to look and your opinion about humanity isn’t low enough.
In my mind a proper monster truck rally is in a massive stadium, the floor covered with undulating piles of dirt, the roar of engines, and Old Dixie displayed prominently around the place. It should reek of piss, beer, and vomit, and the bearded overweight faces of the audience should be white.
As we approached the thing in Denmark my definition gradually changed from “Monster Truck Spectacle”, to “Something Involving Cars”, to “Eastern European Circus”. That’s what it looked like to me. A section of parking-lot in front of a community centre had been cordoned off with some colourful tent vinyl and a few of those fairground trailers usually associated with shooting little wooden ducks for a stuffed animal. The whole area was open to the sky and wouldn’t have filled and NHL-sized hockey rink. . . rink, not arena.
The show itself —after paying about $35 and taking a seat on a length of two-by-four which served as the “stands”— largely involved German’s doing strange things to red BMWs. At least the first half. You could plainly see four monster trucks parked on the sidelines looking fairly menacing. They drove the BMWs around the track at crazy speeds and then they all stopped so we could meet their drivers. The drivers emerged from their cars, each one brandishing a child of about four to six years old. This, it turned out, is what made this rally different from an American one, aside from the lack of dirt, lack of beer, and lack of union jack flags —was the liberal use of small children throughout the performance. Children wandered around the track, fingers in their ears from the noise of the engines, and the music, and the guy screaming into a microphone in Danish. Children were driving ATVs through flaming boards, and motorcycles were jumped across rows of children lying prone on the concrete.
I looked around me at the audience, and indeed the faces were white. But that was no shock, Denmark is a very white place. I tried to find concern in the eyes of parents that brought their children to see other people’s children get narrowly crushed by a 600 pound pieces of machinery. The only thing I saw was polite applause from a crowd that acted like they were at a Stravinsky recital.
The music that blared throughout the show was not death-metal, hard-rock, or even folk. It was 80s music with Low Rider, the Magnum P.I. theme, and particularly the Beverly Hills Cop theme Axel F on heavy rotation. It’s to this cocaine-addled soundtrack that two red four-door BMWs were driven on two wheels, made to do donuts, passed each other at screaming high-speeds; both forward and in reverse (not that impressive if you’ve ever driven on the autobahn), they synchronized squealing and fishtailing, and drove through flaming boards with a person strapped to the hood of the car. Thankfully not a child this time. Well, there might have been, but at this point is was so dark, with so much smoke, the action was barely visible.
All I could think to myself was, finally the Germans have managed to invade Denmark and it’s in a black cloud of oily smog.
Then it was time to destroy a Toyota Corolla, presumably to show the German dominance in the auto industry.
I remember feeling sorry for the animals in the Eastern European Circus I saw in Prague. The poor buggers just looked so depressed. Well, for the first time in my life I felt sorry for a car. The things they did to that Corolla would have had PETA up in arms. They flipped it, rolled it, dropped it off a ramp onto its back, lit it on fire, and finally, when its engine seized up, they propped it up on its nose and smashed a BMW through it. A forklift that carried the blackened and brutalized corpse of the Toyota off stage was met with resounding applause from the audience.
It was hard to make sense of what was going on around me. It was a small operation, with the drivers doubling as motor-cycle riders, and cotton-candy salesmen. This aspect also reminded me of an Eastern European circus. But what was it that made people so emotionally involved in the whole thing? Was it a manifestation of an atavistic hatred towards machines and small children? Or was it that “Man like thing that go boom”.
In the interest of serious Journalism I spoke to the guy that ran the whole thing. I asked him how many people were involved in the operation? He said, 20. He added that they were doing 116 shows around Denmark and Sweden. I asked him how it was going? He said, “Slow.”
Maybe so, but the Icelandic guy was definitely caught up in the spectacle, or at least his sense of irony was. I cringed when he began chanting “U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!”. He howled with glee when the monster trucks finally arrived and began crushing horribly injured Japanese cars —including that savagely beaten Corolla. He was elevated in the moment, or seemed to be, screaming, “No WAY! They did NOT just do that!”
How did this become popular? What kind of brain-dead buffoonery gave birth to this type of thing? I suspect all of it was the illegitimate pear-shaped child of that Southern salute to all that’s wrong with humanity: NASCAR.
The climax of the show was the arrival of the actual monster trucks; those pick-ups with obscenely large tires, the kinds of tires the people of Powell River Canada might enjoy. Air-brushed on their sides were the names “Ghost Rider”, “Ice Man”, “Dragon”, and — as promised by their marketing campaign which said, “Original Monster Trucks From USA!”— “U.S.A.”. Unfortunately “Ice Man”, for reasons beyond me, wasn’t part of the havoc. I guess even chunks of fibre-glass built around ridiculous engines, over retarded tires, need a day off. Besides, for me, it was just bigger cars driving over smaller cars.
It was when all these things were going through my head that the German to my left said, “I smell oil.”
I don’t think he was quoting Melville
