Sonny Crockett, Dan Gurney, And Alex Roy, Oh My!
Two posts up in the major media today. On the surface, they are entirely different. Under the skin, it’s the same story.
For Mr. Farago at The Truth About Guns, I wrote The Bren Ten, The Fashion Of Firearms, The Sword Of Legend. For Mr. Nunez at Road&Track, I wrote There’s a new cross-country record. Does it matter? A gun story, a car story. Where’s the overlap?
The overlap is in the gap between fantasy and reality. So. In reverse order. As Morpheus asks in The Matrix, “what is real?” In the end, reality is the sum total of measurable effects. When you throw a baseball to your friend and he catches it, both of you are subject to all sorts of visual illusions and misperceptions along the way. You might not see the baseball’s actual flight due to time lag and the combination of visual saccade/cortical editing. You might think the baseball is bright white and he might think it is dirty. You might think it’s a Rawlings and he might know it isn’t. He might believe in God and you might be a nihilist of the first order. But still the ball travels from you to him, from your hands to his. That’s reality, subject to quantum uncertainty and parallel effects and space-time and all that.
When you live in reality, you base your assumptions and decisions on that reality. For example: What is the most important characteristic of a handgun, assuming that you plan to use that handgun? For someone who lives in reality, there is only one answer: it must fire when you pull the trigger. Everything else — accuracy, comfort, usability, night sights, capacity — is secondary. The gun must work, or it’s worse than having no gun at all. There can be no legitimate counter-argument to this theory.
The jury has long been in on handgun reliability. There’s Glock, and there’s everybody else. The Glock is the AK-47 of handguns, but in fact the AK-47 fails far more often than the Glocks. Some Glocks fire 100,000 rounds with just one failure to operate; some fire that many with no failures to operate. The Glock tolerates extreme weather, abuse, failure to maintain, impact damage, and all other manner of difficulty in the way that no other firearm has ever done. You can drop a Glock out of a helicopter 500 feet above the ground, freeze it solid in a block of ice, chip the ice off, drop it in a muddy river, and then fire it. (That’s been done.)
There are other firearms that are extremely reliable. But none have Glock’s record of reliability. If you needed to pull the trigger on a pistol tomorrow, make it a Glock, plain and simple. That’s reality.
Fantasy is what the mind overlays on reality to make it palatable. I guarantee you that John Mayer and Jay-Z don’t sit around fantasizing very much; if they want something, it’s available to them. By contrast, if you visit any prison or high school, you’ll see people staring at the ceiling dreaming their days away. Some people live almost entirely in reality. Others live almost entirely in fantasy. That’s the appeal of multi-player video gaming: you can live in a fantasy where you can be a starship captain or wizard instead of a lonely midnight dishwasher. Like I was; I used to run the dishwashing machine and stare at the white wall ahead of me, dreaming about driving Ferraris and sleeping with beautiful women. Now that I’ve done that, I dream about my son having a better life than mine.
There are all sorts of reasons people give for carrying whatever pistol they are currently carrying, if said pistol is not a Glock. They are mostly fantasy-based. They are based on the idea that they are so deadly accurate with a Kimber White-Trash Special or Sig Sauer Frustrated Virgin Edition that it doesn’t matter if said gun actually works. Their notion of the future deadly confrontations of their lives is entirely fantasy-based. When the time comes to actually shoot someone, fantasy will be stripped from the situation with a violent, intrusive lack of ceremony and they will be stuck with whatever idiotic weapon they’ve brought to the party. Their “target sites” will be impossible to see in the dark. The cocobolo wood grips they chose will be slippery with their own blood or nervous sweat. The high-power ammunition they bought from a catalog will blind and terrify them. They will be educated at high speed and the cost will be measured in dollars and years or permanent night.
You cannot bring reality to these fantasy-dwellers. They resent it. The comment section at TTAG is already filling up with people who are AEWSUM SHOTZ with whatever crap pistol they’ve picked. Luckily for them, the chances that they will ever encounter reality are vanishingly small. They’ll continue to carry some ridiculous little gun from their job at the law firm to their 7,000-square-foot house forty miles from the ghetto for the next thirty years and for all of those next thirty years they will be secure in their illusions, creatures of fantasy, protected in fantasy by their Springfield Tactical Zombie Edition 18+1 but protected in reality by their money and their wealth and the tax money that funds the local cops.
And that’s fine.
Fantasy has its place.
One of those places is in the matter of cross-country high-speed records. On its face, the idea of the cross-country high-speed driving record is almost unimaginably stupid. You’re putting yourself against the clock, which is commendable, but you’re also putting everybody you meet on that clock. You are risking their lives for that clock as surely as you are risking your own.
More than a few readers have taken me to task already for criticizing the would-be Cannonballers. Don’t I drive at high speed on public roads? Yup. Did 170 on a freeway a while ago in a supercar, and 160+ on a rural two-lane. Was I an idiot for doing it? Yes, but I was alone on the road. When traffic appeared, I slowed down. Because I wasn’t running against a clock. Because I had no reason to endanger others unnecessarily. But the clock has no sympathy for the single mom driving home from her nursing job at 3AM or the distracted minivan driver in rural California crossing the dotted-white line as she fusses with her child’s juice box. The clock demands speed from the Red Ball to the Portofino and it does not care about others. If you would serve the clock — if you would serve the reality of a cross-country record — you put those people at risk.
You also wind up doing stupid, goofy shit like driving with leaky gas tanks and a bedpan. That’s the reality of cross-country driving now: crapping in a pan on the move so you can set a meaningless record. Ed Bolian and his friends set the record in superbly realistic fashion: three dweebs of the first order thrashing some clapped out AMG Benz down the freeway with ten screens lit up in the car and the gas tanks slowly evaporating fumes into their sleepy brains. I’m sure the whole thing was videotaped, and I’m sure it’s about as compelling to watch as a YouTube run-through of a video game.
When Heinz and Yarborough set the last Cannonball record in a Jag XJ-S, there was some panache, some style to that. Two guys fleeing the cops in a sleek flying-buttress coupe to the sound of disco music. It’s romantic, it’s fantastic. It belongs in the past. Bolian and company beat them with twice the horsepower, a variety of equipment that didn’t even exist back them, a GPS tracking service, and Doug DeMuro sitting at home in Atlanta, too frightened to go with him but nonetheless anxiously waiting to fetishize their moronic pseudo-accomplishment for the autistic-spectrum-disorder weenies of the Jalopnik comment section.
Why hammer these guys for their realistic approach to the cross-country record while hammering TTAG readers for carrying a movie star gun or a Brazilian knockoff? Isn’t that a contradiction? Of course not, no more than it’s a contradiction to tell your kid to shut up in church but encourage him to scream his lungs out at a A7X concert. Some things should be dealt with in realistic fashion. Others should be left in the realm of fantasy. If you want to be a hero racer, go racing in a real race series. If you want to feel prepared for a deadly confrontation that is statistically unlikely to ever occur, then prepare based on reality. To everything there is a season, as they say in Ecclesiastes. But is that book fantasy, or reality?
Categorised as: Stuff I wrote
Panache and style to the XJ-S run is where you lost me. I’ll readily agree that this dubious “record” is fairly silly at best, but to say that the entire efforts are cowardly and then laud someone in a 30+ year old Jag with half the stopping and half the handling capability is incongruent to say the least.
I admire the guy for his logistical prowess, and the story Doug put together was properly well written. The 12 year old in me thinks it is still sort of cool for some stupid reason. I think the 12 year old in you thinks the same thing, but I could be mistaken.
Back in reality, I’ll get my kicks with HPDEs and Lemons races.
Thirty-five years ago this country had 102 million fewer people on the freeways, better lane discipline, far fewer OTR trucks, fewer people working second and third shift jobs, you name it. And an XJ-S is far, far more difficult to get to 150mph than a CL55, I say, having considerable wheel time in both.
I thought the original Cannonball Run was cool because it was a race where everybody faced the same conditions and everybody was subject to mischance and karma. If you lost the original Cannonball, you had to wait a year. Now you have people taking multiple shots at this thing after computing the living you-know-what out of it.
It’s become simultaneously far easier to do and far more dangerous to innocent people. And somewhere during that change it slipped beneath the Cool Line.
Excellent points, I agree totally.
i saw a lot of plain and simple missing of the point on your posts both at TTAC and R&T.
these are the people who will endlessly sit and fantasize about themselves in Ed Bolian’s shoes, “really doing it” rather than facing another day of annoying boss talkings-to for web browsing on the company dime. Ed at least deserves credit for ascending from these ranks and making the drive.
they take issue with your articles as if you were disputing the fact that Ed made the drive at all, which is classic straw man fallacy. the question isn’t whether it occurred or how long it took, but whether it was worth it. subjective, but the evidence was presented for the case you’ve been making rather effectively.
the original cannonballers arrived in portofino to applause, booze, loose women, lines of coke, whatever period-correct celebratory aids you can imagine. the current crop arrives to… nothing. they return to their daily lives unable to claim even the internet fame and local bragging rights for fear of legal retribution (at least for a while anyway).
you think Ed Bolian is going to get offers for endorsements? you think he’s going to get laid at a bar telling some random that he is the fastest man on the roads, cross country? (if he tries it would be advisable to leave out the details). the answer so far has been emphatically no - the best i’ve seen in terms of accolades comes from the aforementioned wannabes in their fluorescent-lit cubiciles ready to engage the penultimate “HATER,” Jack Baruth in the arena of blog commentary.