Turn 3

 Back in the 90's and into the ought's, I was a pretty serious NASCAR fan. I had my favorite drivers- mostly Ford guys like Rusty Wallace and Mark Martin. Growing up in the 60's and 70's, I knew about cars and loved them. Still do. NASCAR races would seem to be a natural extension of that, but that world of racing was at the time, cloistered in the southeastern states. Occasionally the "Wide World of Sports" might show a race on the weekend, and if you were lucky enough to see that, you got a taste of the action in the old days of Richard Petty and Junior Johnson. That was the best NASCAR back then, like seeing Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb playing in their prime. Junior Johnson, they say, had actually gotten his start running moonshine. He was a real outlaw and a good ol' boy. This also was the time when "Win on Sunday, sell on Monday" was a real thing. The stock cars were actually (modified) versions of the Ford, Dodge and Chevrolet muscle cars that you could buy at your local dealership. Thus, the slogan. That era was pure Americana. 

My interest in NASCAR started to wane when NBC bought the rights to TV coverage. I was seriously befuddled when the NBC anchor, Brian Williams, opened the first show gushing about how his network broadcasting the races was the greatest thing that had ever happened to him. What? As a boy growing up in New Jersey? Really? I guess he was genuine in his love of racing, but it seemed so odd coming from his fancy Yankee self. However, the reality of car racing is it has always been a Saturday night thing all across America. It wasn't just the south. However, as Williams professed his love for 'the sport', as NASCAR grew into the wider acceptance of American audiences, corporate America reared its ugly head. I watched a news magazine where an 'expert' showed footage of races and put a dollar figure on everything from the starting lineup to the wrecks. They were monetizing every move on the track! Crashing the car was a good thing! NASCAR had long since become rolling billboards of advertising and that was accepted. If you liked Ricky Rudd and the Tide car, you went out and loyally purchased Tide for the wife to wash your underwear. OK. But it was a good thing to wreck in turn 3 because the sponsor's logo was seen by millions? What the fuck...

Money is how we keep score in America. This was the unnatural progression of things, I gathered. I'm not going to pretend to understand money as it pertains to scorekeeping, but that is the practice, now more than ever. Elon Musk is set to be the world's first trillionaire, because the board that runs his failing car company has been manipulated into paying him that amount for his failures. How the fuck does that work? I'm sure there is more to the story, but I'm also sure I don't care about the dollars and cents involved. He's a spectacular crash in Turn 3 as a human being and you can't convince me that he has earned it. For probably the first time in his life, Donnie John Trump is an actual billionaire, and we all know he's done nothing good to earn it. The way these rich mopes bandy about dollar figures for this, that and the other thing in their lives devoted to the race for more money is as offensive to me as it was when NASCAR graduated to its Big Time. Nobody works anymore. They do credit default swaps, manage hedge funds or become POTUS for a living. The richest man in the world blows up rockets and gave us the world's most hideous 'truck' and his failures are seen as successes, mostly because, "Well, you can't do that, but he can. Like Carlin said, "It's a big club and you ain't in it". 

A guy like Musk could solve world hunger and still be filthy rich. But doing so would be that communist-socialist-liberal fascism that they so despise and anyway, their money is tied up in debt, and could you maybe give them some more because it would just be gauche and difficult to spend theirs in such a frivolous manner? 

America is a fiery wreck in Turn 3 but that is a big payday for the worst of us who have brilliantly figured out how to monetize death, destruction and mayhem for fun and profit. We have lost the race.