Weekly Roundup: Followin' All The Rules Edition

I learned one of life's most important lessons twenty-six years ago, but it turns out I learned that lesson exactly backwards.

The Ford dealership at which I worked during 1995 and 1996 had a rule that salesmen who sold at least ten cars a month could have a "dealer demo" with a sticker price of $20,000 or less. No Probes, no Mustangs, no Escort GTs. Only one person was allowed to have a Contour SE: our 65-year-old superstar career Ford man who knocked 15-20 cars a month out the door at full sticker to retired restaurant managers and the like. The rest of us were expected to drive something modest befitting family men with whom decent people would want to do business. I usually drove an F-150 XL with a straight six; it was great for bikes and at the time I didn't mind the rat-in-a-cage Regular Cab.

One Friday, in the course of arguing some option package on my next demo back and forth until we were both sweating, our new-car sales manager threw up his hands and told me: "Listen, here's the deal. If you're a superstar like Ralph (the old guy) then you can drive any damn thing you want, I don't care if it's a Mustang GT convertible. But if you're not good enough to sell like that -- if you're nobody's idea of a superstar -- then you have to follow the rules."

What I took from 'Toine's declaration: Go forth and be a superstar in everything you do, Jack, and you will never have to follow the rules. With a few exceptions, this has in fact proven to be the mantra by which I live my life. I never worked a tech gig where I wasn't the last one in, the first one out, and the hardest to find at lunchtime. But I got more done than anyone else in the spaces between. As a writer, I've been remarkably difficult to deal with for everyone from the manufacturers who actually make the cars to the people who have put their careers on the line for me so I could write about them-- but if your child is kidnapped tomorrow and the ransom note demands the best from-scratch three-thousand-word automotive story in the world to be delivered in the next six hours, one finger to be cut off for every error in style or spelling, there's only one number in the world you should consider calling, and it's mine.

Ah, but that's vanity, it's narcissism, it's privilege. The truly important part of what 'Toine told me was the second half, because it had something hidden inside it, namely this: Following all the rules can be your ticket to something even if you're a completely talentless idiot.

Had I truly been as smart as I thought I was at the time, I'd have heard that lesson louder than any other, because God knows that it's the way we live now.

I don't think there's anything inconsistent about Neil Young's attempt to blackmail Spotify into enforcing The Narrative with respect to COVID-19. Some of my friends are very upset. "This guy sang about not trusting the government, not trusting corporations, for most of his life! He sang 'This Note's For You!' He sang 'Ohio!'" Well, yes, but actually no -- he sang about not trusting power structures operated by the generations before his. As soon as the Hillary Rodhams of the world had their hands on the tiller, he fell right in line, the same way I'd stop criticizing the United States Government if they made my brother the King of America. (Frankly, it would be dangerous not to stop, I think.)

The same consistency applies to his stances on the Vietnam War and COVID-19. Neil Young is always going to be in favor of what's safest for Neil Young and/or his friends. Fifty years ago, that meant speaking against the draft. Today, it means speaking in favor of mandatory vaccinations for 3-year-olds.

The Neil Young of 1971 could probably have written a really kickass song about the Omicron Variant that would make a million or more kids get vaccinated immediately, the same way his music probably got a thousand kids curb-stomped by riot police in the Seventies. Unfortunately for Neil, his talent has long since disappeared (if you need proof, listen to any of his last twenty albums) so he has no effective outlet other than to whine and threaten people. Spotify, of course, looked at the relative cash value of the Neil Young and Joe Rogan portfolios and realized that the disparity was so serious, so existential, that they had to act in a non-woke fashion just long enough to preserve their next quarterly bonuses.

Exit Neil Young, pursued by a bear.

There's no need to feel sorry for Joe Rogan. He'll be fine. And there's really no reason to feel sorry for Neil Young -- but I do, just a little bit. I've never been a great musician, so I don't know what it's like to have once been one. The closest I can come is the difference between what 15-year-old me and 50-year-old me could do on a bike. I can acutely feel that difference all the time. Like a phantom pain in a limb that has been gone for decades.

Furthermore, I'm not a musician in my day job, nor am I a cyclist. I can't imagine what it would be like to be mediocre at one's day job. The last time that was the case was... well, probably the first few months I spent selling Fords. And before then I'd been so good at my gig with Ford Credit that they offered to give me a management internship if I changed schools and agreed to work year-round at my local branch. (My father told me not to do it. Joy Falotico's father gave her no such advice, she took the deal, and now Joy is President of the Lincoln Motor Division of Ford Motor Company.)

Alas, the vast majority of people are mediocre at what they do, even if it's working at Wal-Mart. So those people are going to have to follow the rules. And they have to do it loudly, because Matthew 6:6 doesn't apply when you serve the prince of this world rather than God. Many of them have come to take a real pleasure in bein' the best at followin' the rules. No matter what the rules are. It could be anything from wearing two masks to always using the correct pronouns. They're going to do it harder than you will. Guaranteed. These people have very sensitive antennae, always waving in subservient fashion to catch the new rules as they fly from one anthill of mediocrity to the next. You may find that you have run afoul of the new rules, because you weren't listening for them. Do not expect any mercy; you might just as well try to convince Louis Brandeis that you didn't know it wasn't okay for the cotton gins at your factory to be run by eight-year-olds.

As an extraordinary person, your first thought may well be to out-follow your mediocre enemies, to learn the rules better than they ever could and thus triumph, to Atticus Finch your way out of this trumped-up incident involving a chiffarobe, to magnificently turn the tables and show where your tormentors have, themselves, failed to follow the rules. Ah, but you're a single lion and they're a pack of hyenas; five minutes on YouTube shows you how that ends, and it's worse if you're trying to protect a child or other vulnerable person as you do it. Or as a brilliant but mediocre man once said,

"A little piece of advice. You see an agent... you do what we do: Run. You run your ass off."

In this case, of course, "agent" means "agent of the existing power system", whether that e.p.s. is the Matrix or what they call a "Karen" nowadays. Curtis Yarvin understands this better than I do:

Such rules are the rules of power. Some are written. Some are not... We know what the list of them is. That list changes day by day and is written nowhere—any copy is a stale cache entry. You don’t actually expect your writers to refer to it. And they won’t. So why such gestures? . The answer is: they are subtle, semi-conscious gestures of loyalty to power. Voluntary obeisance, like scratching a mosquito bite or licking chapped lips, always feels good. And always soon demands more to feel better. Of course the same is true of rebellion, and its gestures of disloyalty—which also work exactly like a little drug.

Anyone with any hot blood in their veins is occasionally goaded by that blood into disobedience of the unwritten laws. If you have enough talent -- if you are far enough away from mediocrity -- you can get away with a little bit of it. But in so doing you are offering the mediocre yet another chance to drag you back in the crab bucket with them. And they will always take that chance. Because they hate you.

It's not just you they hate, of course. They hate the true, the good, and the beautiful wherever it is found. Because it makes them feel less true, more evil, even uglier. So they work to destroy it. Every child of my generation knows this in his bones, because he read that horrifying C.S. Lewis scene where Aslan surrenders himself to be slain. We can all imagine the ugly, deformed goblins jumping and screeching around in that scene. We could all put faces on those goblins as children, and we can all do it now.

We all also remember what happens to those goblins. And while there is no perfectly happy ending ahead for those of us who serve the true, the good, and the beautiful, we will at least be able to look back at what we've accomplished without lying to ourselves about it. We can define ourselves by the work we did, rather than by the harm we did to the work of others. That is enough reason to carry on, and to thank God we were made to break the rules, rather than to follow them.

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For Hagerty, this week, I wrote about a rule-breaker of a little pickup.

At the request of a friend, I provided the Washington Examiner with a few thoughts about three-quarter-ton trucks.