Commander Cody

I was driving home last night on I95 and some kid rocketed past me in a small car that sounded like it was carrying 12 cylinders. Had to have been going at least 110. It felt like a 747 missed its landing on the runway nearby. Kind of thing you see almost every day now on a motorcycle. Made me wonder about the youth of today. Of course, now that I am in my mid 50's such a display of depravity got me to using language and expressing feelings that my father did in the early 70's when I was letting my hair grow and doing everything I could to piss him off. As that car blasted away with no cop in sight, inexplicably the following words crossed my mind: "son, you're going to drive me to drinking if you don't stop driving that HOT ROD LINCOLN." I was so fixated on this that I logged onto Itunes via my Iphone with the other hand on the wheel and bought the song (only 69 cents). And here it is:

Good old Commander Cody. Sort of a Chuck Berry on Steroids. Listening to the lyrics, I now have a much better appreciation for adults of that era who swore that my generation was destined for a permanent place in hell. At least for me, my place in Satan's home will be earned not for anything I did as a kid but for what I did and thought of doing when I was old enough to know better. In my jaded mind, I juxtaposed the lyrics against the rantings of many in gentile society in the past 20 years about the dangers of hip hop and rap music. My knowledge of the former is restricted to the damage they do on South Beach every Memorial Day weekend and the latter to the constant use of the "N" word that would shout from both my daughters' Ipods when they were younger. But the rap lyrics are nothing compared to the Commander. I guess there was a time when there was nothing more American than driving down the road at 100 mph while knocking down your neighbors' mailboxes tossing empty cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon out the window onto their lawns.