Video: The Best NASCAR Pre-Race Invocation Ever. Yes!

See the video below

One of my favourite writers is the American, Tom Wolfe. He wrote a story one time in the Sixties about the California car culture and the title was, "There Goes (Varoom! Varoom!) That Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby" and anybody who can write a story with a title on it like that is all right with me.

Like Wolfe, I sometimes write in the present tense, mainly because I’m too lazy to stick to the rules of grammar when I write in the past or the future tenses. It’s easier to be now, as he would say.

Wolfe’s trademark is his white suit. Many years ago, when I was young and skinny, I dressed in a white suit once and I thought I looked like him but then some woman told me I looked like Sonny Crockett in Miami Vice so I put it away and I never wore it again. (That’s kind of how Wolfe writes, if you’ve never read his stuff.)

There’s a point here. Tom Wolfe wrote a lot of sentences that ended with an exclamation mark! He wrote a story once called "The Last American Hero is Junion Johnson. Yes!" and the reason I’m bringing this up today is because I really, really would have loved to see what Tom Wolfe would have done with a guy like Joe Nelms to write about.

Nelms is a Nashville pastor who delivered the invocation before a NASCAR race last Saturday night and he gave thanks to God for Goodyear and Sunoco and every thing and everybody in between, including his "smokin' hot wife!"

I can tell you right now that the name of the Tom Wolfe article on Joe Nelms would have been, "The Best NASCAR Pre-Race Invocation Ever. Yes!"

Watch the video below:

On Monday, Nelms, of Nashville’s First Baptist Church, said he didn’t want to do "cookie-cutter prayers (a shot at NASCAR’S many ‘cookie-cutter' race tracks, incidentally)" and told Serius Satellite Radio’s Tradin’ Paint program that, "I want to get somebody’s attention, so that’s been our desire every time we’ve been up there, to try to make an impact on the fans and give them something they’ll remember and maybe they’ll go home on a Friday night or a Saturday night and say, ‘Maybe I ought to get up and go to church in the morning.’ "

Some people would say Amen to that, but I just say Yes!

Comments

[suede]

The prayer was "borrowed" from the Will Ferrell movie Talladega Nights. I'm going to assume that most of the people at the race knew that, though I doubt many outside of NASCAR and Ferrell fans ever saw that movie.

[D C]

pssst ... it's Sirius Satellite Radio.

[Elizabeth Irreverent]

Should the Wheels section be taken over by religious fundamentalists and end-of-world cults? No!

Just imagine the headlines if this were an Imam praying to Allah, instead of a Christian pastor thanking his God for fossil fuels and corporations.

Please keep religion where it belongs. We have seen enough this year of the harm that inevitably results when religion creeps into public spaces. Yes!

[andrew]

and all God's people say "WOW!"

[clive Rayman]

Love it! Bernie should hire this guy for an F1 race! It would be awesome! :)

[stewart]

serius satellite radio. great spelling too funny

[Sue Rarick]

I'm also a fan of Wolfe's. And he would truly appreciate the reverand. While some people screamed in mock horror about the invocation they didn't mention that in a city filled with literally thousands of highly trained singers, Nashville offered up twi singers that sang in the key of flat. That was far more criminal than anything Rev. Nelms had to say.