It's a beautiful 4th of July Sunday here in LeBron (and Lindor?) land today and being an elderly Boomer, on nice summer holidays, I might be found playing a few summery tunes. Given that I caught the muscle car fever when I was a kid and have never lost it, it's predictable that I would enjoy some of those old "car tunes" from the Beach Boys, Jan & Dean and their contemporaries as a way of feeling a bit younger than my bones today.

My favorite car back in those days was the T-Bird, not that prissy two-seater 'Vette knock-off from the mid-50s that's now always done in pastels, but the 4-seater Square Birds, Rocket Birds and Jet Birds that showed up in Bond pictures driven by Felix Leiter if not by Bond himself. To me, they were the height of cool. I made models of them. I raced them on my HO race track. I dreamed of driving one, especially with a 429 cu. in. dual quad carb engine. Preferably a Landau convertible.

It was with that typical American mid-20th century male mindset that I originally heard the Beach Boys' "Fun, Fun, Fun." The song was surprising but not unique in that the skilled driver was female, not male. Around the same time, Jan & Dean harmonized about a "little old lady" who was the "terror of Colorado Boulevard." That was pretty shocking, but the Beach Boys sang about a young lady, apparently an attractive one, who "makes the Indy 500 look like a Roman chariot race."

And that was back in the day when the supremacy of Indy 500 drivers--at least in this country- was unchallenged. It was akin to singing about a young women who could strike out Mantle in some field aside a railroad track a' la "The Natural."

Since then, there have been some flesh-and-blood women who have tried Indy racing. Janet Guthrie was the first to qualify for the Indy 500. Sarah Fisher is someone I have rooted for both as a driver and a team owner. Danica Patrick was a driver who had some success and plenty of attention as an Indy driver and advertising diva before she moved to NASCAR.

My thoughts today focused on another line from that old Beach Boys tune:

"Well she got her daddy's car."

A brilliant driver. But the tools of her trade were delivered by class privilege.

I have a daughter whom I love very much. She has experienced plenty of gender discrimination throughout her life, and it angers me, but I believe she has been held back much more because of a lack of class privilege. She shares that with her brothers even though they haven't suffered the dual disadvantage from both class and gender. Yes, since we are white, we've all enjoyed white privilege.

We live in a pyramid. At the apex are the white, the male and the wealthy. There's no mystery there. The problem for those of us who object to this stratification is how should we organize, and what should we emphasize to defeat it. Since the Left discovered that it was racist and sexist--and it was--back in the late 60s and early 70s, the focus has been identity politics. Fair enough. Take care of your own house before you tackle broader society. The problem with that emphasis is that the lives of most people in the groups that had been oppressed within the Left have gotten worse while we were busy making things right within our community. Yes, gays can get married now. Yes, we have a black President. Yes, there are women CEOs now, and a woman may be elected President.

Tokenism has replaced a politics of substance that measures what a society does for its oppressed--people of color, women, people with minority sexual orientations, minority ethnic groups, etc.--on the basis of what benefits a majority of people.

An example of the absurdity of what has become Left is military service. Back in the 60s, Arlo Guthrie used inappropriate language to express the thought that being gay was a refuge from military service that many straight men sought. The main point for the Left then was that avoiding being drafted to kill innocent people was the paramount concern. Forty years later, the gay liberation movement decided that it was more important to adopt "straight" values, even murderous ones, to appear acceptable. Now, transgender people pursue the same course, something that seems a bit ridiculous to this Boomer who despises the military and admired MASH's Klinger for using cross-dressing to get discharged.

Why focus your struggle against oppression on being allowed to join the ranks of the oppressors, even killers?

What does equality really mean? Is it all about who can adopt this Capitalist society's core mores and succeed? If so, Hillary Clinton will be our most representative President ever. She has been the champion adopter of this system's corrupt ethical system for decades. If making sure that every gender, race and sexual orientation is tarnished by serving as this society's Asshole-in-Chief, then Hillary will be Fullfillingness First Finale.

Or do equality and justice mean something more than that?