Tradition, Americana, Churchill Downs and Stella Artois.

It’s almost time for the Kentucky Derby, and while I’ve arranged a convenient excuse to skip town on Oaks Day (Friday, May 3), a handy route out of the metroplex during Ground Zero on Saturday hasn’t yet been plotted, but no matter. Where there’s bile, there’s a way -- and I've got plenty of bile.

Thus, time for a Golden Oldie: The Kentucky Derby Really Is Decadent and Depraved.

Of more recent vintage is my obligatory annual outrage at Churchill Downs and its perennial, mercenary fakery. Let’s go straight to the sweet swill spot.

---

The Kentucky Derby’s host track is Churchill Downs, which in recent years has pursued an ambitious program of construction and facilities expansion seemingly less relevant to the long history, bright sights and dung-laden smells of horse racing than the benign, swipe-card plasticization required in the here and now, as intended to become a fully functional, beige-colored casino, assuming the Commonwealth’s notoriously vile legislature ever gets around to legalizing slot machines and roulette wheels.

Accordingly, whenever the real money’s at stake, you can be sure that soulless capitalism will be right there, breathlessly drooling in anticipation of sponsorship opportunities, with conceptual coherence always taking a back seat to the sheer weight of numerically ending zeroes, and so it was that two years ago, Churchill Downs triumphantly announced its newest revenue stream.

Churchill Downs Racetrack today announced a multi-year partnership, naming the world’s best-selling Belgian beer Stella Artois as “The Official Beer Sponsor of Churchill Downs, the Kentucky Oaks and the Kentucky Derby.” While attending this year’s Kentucky Derby and Kentucky Oaks, fans will be able to experience classic Belgian lager Stella Artois and its iconic Chalice, which will feature the Kentucky Derby logo.

I remember hoping it was a joke, knowing full well it wasn’t, and (literally) laughing out loud.

According to the travel and tourism folks, the Kentucky Derby is supposed to be about Louisville’s many and varied legends of Southern nobility, among which now must be enumerated the trackside primacy of thoroughly putrid Eurolager from Belgium, as imported into the United States by the highest overseas bidder for a formerly American brewer, and significantly, in this multi-national, big-bucks context, the “official beer sponsor” of the Derby cannot even be out-sourced to Budweiser, in spite of St. Louis being several thousand miles closer to Louisville than Leuven.

Let’s face facts, people: Subway's Italian sandwich collection is more authentically local (in a vaguely tri-colored Neopolitan, fake Gucci, prosciutto gangsta sense of genuine) than Churchill Downs's fiscal embrace of AB-InBev's "classic Belgian lager", seeing as not a single variant of lager is classically Belgian, but hey, fabulously wealthy Middle Eastern sheiks hardly can be expected to know any of that, can they?

It happily reinforces my usual acidic point: Instead of Stella, it should have been AB-InBev's in-house mockrobrew of choice, Goose Island. That’s because at least there really was a time when Goose Island was legit craft back-story, prior to its untimely death and fiscal absorption into the international pay-for-play universe, rendering it into the Zombie Craft Beer it is now.

Then again, maybe we can learn something about the bedrock essence of Americana from this multi-year marriage of Churchill Downs and Stella Artois, not to mention the sad fate of Goose Island: This nation never has stood for very much at all apart from fealty to wheelbarrows of cash. We pretend we do, and offer lip service to ideals, but we don’t. And so it goes.

Be quick; there’s plenty of time for an experiment. Go out and assemble a committee of horse pimps, and we’ll see if any of them can spot the differences between cutesy-pie chalices of Stella Artois and those equally reeking buckets of equine drug-testing residue.

It’s not a trick question, after all.