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Dear Reader
C. Bley Motorsports Au Go Go realizes he’s been dreaming …
Fantasies gone berserk. Really dude, I’m just playing
with ‘ya.
Charles Atlas’ 98-pound weakling pleads innocent.
Hey, we all play with each other.
Fun, utter horseshit, laughter,
tears, amphetamine head-scratches, you know the drill,
and
I … I …
Hell, maybe Dun & Bradstreet were right, or maybe on
that particular day there was a massive hit of Sandoz in the
water cooler, and the accountant-discipline of these bean
counters did a Dale Earnhardt hit into the wall of capitalist
necessity.
I’m not taking this as hard as this gibberish might
intimate. I liked virtually everybody I worked with at the
White House. To hell with it, compared to the current White
House, these guys are grade school bullies compared to the
Russian Mafia.
Strange times, ugly rumors, lookaway truths. Insider wisecracks
say that last year one of your racing bosses was cuffed after
weaving through south-central L.A., the part that’s
a crack forest and a shooting gallery for some of the meanest
kids since the Bolshevik revolution. What can you do? When
I heard that I felt like I was really warming up to the guy.
He wears Levis. Lou Reed’s “Take a Walk on the
Wild Side,” sticks its hairy head into the corporate
doors on Financial Way. Is it in recognition of a fellow
traveler?
And the guy you’re thinking I’m taking liberties
with … he saved my bacon at NHRA on more than one occasion,
but ….business is business. It really is all about
the do-re-me.
The Dun & Bradstreet thing, if indeed it's true, is
a good thing, my travails not withstanding. If this incident
is on the level (and I hear it is), it’s a great learning
opportunity. Right now in 2004 America, a lot of masks are
slowly being removed from this Halloween ball in the Fourth
Reich. Well, kick my ass, NHRA appears no different than Bechtel,
Halliburton, Royal Dutch Shell or, as we have seen (at least
those of us who can read and think), the current administration.
They have to do what they have to do. Ya gotta make the max
and then make tracks. That’s the nature of things, the
way of the world.
I hate to go pseudo-intellectual here, but I want to paraphrase
Marx on the NHRA situation and everything else in sports,
hell, business … Over time, capitalism changes EVERYTHING
into its own image.
Just look at who wins in racing, and for the most part,
anything else. 330-mph billboards. Big revelation, right?
He who has the gold makes the rules.
Right now, I’m in familiar surroundings, looking at
the Budweiser sign through the blacklight haze in the lounge,
and I can say with reasonable certainty that even if me and
a dozen or so others were in fact, left in the lurch, unarmed
in the streets of Bosnia, lap poodles in a garage full of
starving pit bulls, I’m only mildly pissed, but certainly
a lot wiser. At times, life is as brutal and unfair as a prison
guard, still even a dumb dog knows when it's been stumbled
over and when it's been kicked.
To my friends at NHRA and any other working stiff, ones
who may not be as fortunate to HAVE to go the drags every
week (he said cynically), things have definitely changed … dramatically.
To quote the poet Auden again, “Let the citizens beware
when Chiefs of State prefer to work at night.” Any “Chiefs
of State.”
Hold on to your hats. It’s a brave new world, compadre.
For the well-healed and well-financed, it’s the era
of no-matter-what it takes. I don’t care if the store’s
on fire, get the receipts counted and bagged. As it has always
been, the TOP line is the bottom line. The women and children
go last. Hit the exits and head for the hills.
Oh, and if I haven’t said it already, “Happy Thanksgiving.”
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