Wednesday Open Thread: Should You Have To Earn Everything Twice?

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More than any other time of the year, the week between Christmas and New Year’s really gives one a sense of the two Americas. For much of the white-collar world, it’s a de facto holiday week in which nothing gets done, which is not to say that it’s without annoyances; how many of you have been “strongly encouraged” to take your vacation on this bloodless, joyless week instead of, say, in the first weeks of spring or the middle of summer, when you wanted to take it?

For everybody else, it’s just regular life but worse. Wichita linemen and McDonald’s cooks get no break; for the latter, in fact, things get busier. It’s a miserable week to work retail or delivery or foodservice.

Here at the very blue-collar rural philosophy factory where this Substack is crafted on a faithful and recurring basis, we allowed ourselves but the single indulgence of not immediately continuing the Tuesday Ranks. Come back next week, when we will discuss The Top 10 “Bond Girls”, Also The Five Worst. Will we see Denise Williams and Grace Jones on this list? Almost certainly. In the meantime, we have a thorny question in which to indulge ourselves for this vacation-week-that-isn’t.

The thing, and what it means

If I could get all of my readers to walk away from this publication with some sort of retained idea besides “The average autowriter is incompetent,” it would be this: there is the thing, and there is what the thing means, and they aren’t the same. The former is mechanical, while the latter is human.

Every man-made thing has dimensions, capacities, materials. These are measurable and not up for debate; no argument over the length of the SR-71 Blackbird would long survive a trip to the many places where one is available for examination. If someone said it was aluminum honeycomb, like an XB-70, and not titanium at all — well, you could remove a small piece and test it. These are all facts. If you could collectively wipe humanity’s memory of the SR-71 and we all woke up tomorrow to the relative surprise of extra airplanes in every museum, all the plain facts of the Blackbird would eventually be determined.

What does the SR-71 mean? Something different to everyone, I’d imagine. To some, it’s just another plane. To others, it’s a peak of American, if not global, technology and future orientation. Former Soviets might remember it as a vexing insult, while the current design staff at Lockheed Martin probably sees it as a spiritual burden.

Now let me give you two imaginary men. They’re both 75 years old now. Bob, the first man, flew over 1,100 hours as pilot-in-command of the SR-71, much of it on the Russian border playing cat-and-mouse with the massive and capable Mig-31. After retiring from the Air Force, Bob gambled away his savings at Vegas and now works as a Wal-Mart greeter, sitting in a Rascal scooter and mumbling “Weltowama” eight hours a day before rolling home to fall asleep in front of free broadcast television.

Bill was Bob’s high-school classmate, but he got a college deferment and went to work on Wall Street, where he learned at the foot of Mike Milken and went on to earn over a billion dollars extracting value from American investors. Five years ago, in an exclusive arrangement with a California air museum, Bill acquired ownership of Bob’s old SR-71. He’s had it fully restored and it now sits outside his Malibu mountain home needing just fuel and a pilot to once more exceed Mach 3. Once a month Bill throws massive parties for celebrities at “The Bird”; Bob’s been invited but he can’t afford to miss his shift at Wal-Mart.

Question for the readers: Whom would you rather be? Bob, or Bill? For most women, this isn’t even a question. They’d want to be Bill, who has the money, the lifestyle, and the plane.

Ask most men, on the other hand, and the answer is just as quick: they’d want to be Bob. Because Bob flew the plane. He saw the elephant, as Jeff Cooper used to say. Yeah, he’s a Wal-Mart greeter now — but for 1,100 hours, he lived twenty miles above the earth, playing the deadliest games at the highest speeds. Bob’s “man card” is permanently stamped. Bill’s? We’d need to hear more.

Bill has possession of the thing. Bob lived the thing. You see the difference.

We’re not allowed to own Daytonas

That’s an extreme example — nobody will ever own an SR-71 — but you get the idea. The next example: the Rolex Daytona. Fine watch. Beautiful watch. Always carefully made, whether it featured the Zenith or Rolex movement. I’d love to have a Daytona…

…but I can’t.

Because every racer knows that you have to win a Daytona, by winning at Daytona, like my friend and teammate Jesse Lazare did when he was nineteen years old. Wearing a Daytona that you didn’t win is equivalent to stolen valor. This wouldn’t apply to fellow ACF contributor “Sherman McCoy”, who could swap out his Royal Oak for a Daytona and wear it to every Porsche event and every IMSA race he attends. He’s not a racer. He’s allowed to have one. But it would still be seen as “unearned”.

Which is funny. The idea that you can spend $34,750 on something and not “earn” it. Wouldn’t “Sherman” have earned that thirty-five G? Of course. Does that mean he’s “earned” a Daytona? Not in the slightest.

Blues lawyers, Porsche orthodontists

Spend an evening with working musicians anywhere and you’ll hear about “Blues Lawyers” — generally defined as hobbyists who buy the best guitars and amps but who can’t play them for shit, preferring to noodle five notes at a time over a blues track. Your humble author is dangerously close to being a blues lawyer — I’ve played a few hundred gigs for money but it was never much and I’m the worst musician in my family by far. I always tell people “I’m a singer who holds a guitar, and I might as well hold the very best.”

Similarly, the racing community has endless vitriol for “GT3 Orthodontists” and “LMP3 Dentists” who pay all their own expenses in “pro” racing series. These men — almost always men — spend a million dollars a year or more in pursuit of their racing dreams, but they get little respect. They, in turn, like to have contempt for the Porsche people who own expensive street cars but never risk them. I’ve had more than one GT3 Orthodontist say, “No, I’m not the fastest. But I’m out here taking risks every weekend. I’m earning it.”

On the other hand you have a fellow like Eric Kutil, who runs a heavily-massaged and entirely home-built Honda Civic in GridLife Touring Cars. Eric’s Civic, and its pace, and its competition, are pretty tame in comparison to GT3 racing; he’s usually only a few seconds ahead of my wife in her Miata, as a matter of fact. But there is a perception out there that he has gotten to the front of his series through unceasing effort and inventiveness. Realistically, his driver data probably isn’t as good as what you see in the GT3 Orthodonists who are properly and expensively coached up to pace every weekend. But Eric has “earned it” and the GT3 crowd hasn’t — at least in the opinion of the paddock.

As a result, Eric and his friends get packed spectator stands when they race, while even the global Carrera Cup championships happen in front of nobody but the teams and their families. Prediction: in fifty years Eric’s Civic sedan will fetch more at an auction than the average Porsche 992 GT3 Cup car.

Who wants to be the fifth owner?

In a previous life, your humble author took a lot of dinners with the people who owned and operated nine-figure car collections — and they struck me as vultures, or perhaps vampires, who were obsessed with consuming the stories of others. They could be genuinely obsessed with how “their” car finished in a 1967 race. I once wrote a story about a Fifties Porsche factory racer that never actually won an event — only to have the owner call our company CEO in a rage because, unbeknownst to almost everyone, this constant-loser Porsche took an unopposed win in a 1964 SCCA local race of which no trace remains but an entry in the club newsletter. I’m not sure the fellow would have been angrier had I called his daughter a working prostitute.

At the time, it struck me as a sad life to define one’s self as “the owner of machines that other men used to do things.” I joked that these fellows would all have paid top dollar to own any of Steve McQueen’s used condoms; hadn’t they already spent millions on his watches, his cars, his clothing?

I don’t mean to diminish the important historical aspects of collecting, restoring, and preserving the great machines of history. The man who devoted his entire life to getting a second B-29 in the air is nobody’s idea of a dick-rider.

On the other hand, neither was he Paul Tibbets. (To be fair, it wasn’t for lack of trying; Tony Mazzolini was too young to get a B-29 seat until the Fifties, and he flew four tough years in the Cold War when things were expected to pop off at any moment.)

The idea of earning what you own

Maybe it’s the changing nature of wealth in the 21st Century, maybe it’s the social media that brings us face-to-seeming-face with all the people who have all the money and stuff, maybe it’s the creeping rot of Trotskyite collectivism — but more and more people seem to share my basic, BMX-derived attitude that you have to earn what you own. And not by paying for it in the first place, which increasingly feels like a matter of luck rather than skill to many of us.

Rather, you “earn” what you have by putting it to work. Whether “it” is your race cars, your musical instruments, your Camp Perry rifle, or your God-given talents. Until you accomplish something with your possessions, they’re just dead things. Only after serious use do they acquire meaning.

Of course, the older you get the harder it is to “earn” the value in anything, even something like a guitar or wristwatch. I’m not going to earn a Daytona at the flat-broke age of fifty-two. All the more reason to push hard at everything when you’re young.

You may be right, I may be crazy

I’ll be curious to hear what all of you think about this. Do you suffer from compulsions to “earn” what you’ve bought? Do you feel the need to be worthy of your things? Do you snicker in contempt at the men who buy supercars then let them rot at Cars and Coffee instead of filling them with cocaine and strippers? Could you happily wear a Daytona that you’d purchased retail?

The story of the picture

It’s from ten years ago, when I basically lapped a whole “Expert” group in a four-cylinder Camry SE. I did this largely to annoy a super-simp fellow TTAC reviewer who spent his nights hopefully and pathetically emailing the club-racing woman of his dreams with whom I’d already had breakfast once. He said the Camry sucked on track. I went out to prove him wrong.

One of my readers caught me running down a Mazda FD through Shenandoah’s “Big Bend”. I liked the photo because I thought it accurately showed the role of talent, or at least recklessness, on track: here I am, running down a much better car! But another way you could see it would be: I later learned that the fellow from the photo put that FD together from a wreck. Maintained it, tuned it, put in all the wrench time and labor hours. No, he didn’t drive it well. But he, too, had earned his spot on track. So we were both earning our time. Me, because I had the talent to make even a Camry hustle. Him, because he could drag a car from the weeds all the way to Big Bend. So now I like the photo even more. Over to you.