1,000 Greatest Drivers: Alessandro Cagno

You're not gonna get it.

When I visit the nursing home, they always have these various cultural events every day: concerts, bingo games, art therapy sessions, music listening hours, happy hours, church services, men’s clubs, and so on. I kind of want to live there ‘cause they have better community than anything I’ve found since I graduated high school. Okay, Cornell probably had great community if you came from a certain breed of socioeconomic status where your peers wouldn’t treat you like garbage… When I was in high school in 2002, I did volunteer work for a senior center in the Syracuse suburb of Baldwinsville where my grandfather and step-grandmother often went and I helped my dad set up a LAN for them. I wish there was a center for middle-aged people, but I guess I am not super far from being a senior myself…

Anyway, there are two guitarists who frequently play in the nursing home - probably one or two times a month each. One of them played at happy hour in the first floor auditorium yesterday. However, my mom, who lives on the fourth floor, was forced to wear a Wanderguard when she was admitted, so she isn’t allowed to change floors unless a nurse enters a special code on the elevator. If you try to go on the elevator with a Wanderguard, usually a siren plays while the elevator doors remain open and do not shut until a nurse has opened the code. It can take 15 or 20 minutes to go anywhere unless it’s something in the fourth floor cafeteria. Anyway, I was going to take her down yesterday and some nurse in the cafeteria snottily said to me, “You’re not gonna get it.”, which I took to mean “F off. I’m not helping you let her on the elevator.” If that was her attitude, she didn’t have to say anything. No big deal. We’ve already seen this guitarist like ten times. I probably would’ve forgotten about it if not for what happened next.

So, my mom goes back to her room after her elevator transfer was shot down and her roommate out of nowhere accuses me of stealing money from her. I did nothing of the sort. A couple weeks ago, she claimed somebody stole $1,400 off her bed. I think what might have led to the accusation is that I had to pick up Mom’s social security money and deposit it at the bank. Since she is on Medicaid and Medicaid takes all but $50 out of her bank account, her social security checks are now deposited directly at the nursing home, so I have to withdraw the $50 from the nursing home then take a bus/walk to the bank to deposit it to cover two of her life insurance policies at the bank, which are the only things now being auto-deducted (I long ago gave up on maintaining her credit cards…) I think maybe my mentioning that is what convinced her roommate that I was stealing money? So, I began to argue with her. I told her that I had even given back her purple shoes after my mom literally had taken them from her a couple weeks ago and I would not steal money.

Then a couple of the nurses got on my case again just like they did for me using the bathroom in her room because I was arguing with another patient. Then my mom calls her roommate a whore and the N-word even though she’s white. I guess this is because her roommate carries around her most cherished possession, which is a black doll who she calls her baby. Mom became convinced somehow that her roommate is apparently dating one of the black nurses and is worried he’s going to rape her. After Mom said this shit, her roommate threw a large pile of ripped up paper at her wheelchair.

What bothered me beyond just my mom’s racism is that the nurses seemed to have a bigger problem with my behavior even when both of their behavior was significantly worse. The head nurse at least explained it to me afterward that she grants them more leeway because they have dementia and I don’t. Okay, I knew my mom had dementia. I did not actually know her roommate also had dementia until yesterday. That does put a little bit of a different perspective on it, and I don’t know how I can learn to be more patient and not have outbursts myself, even though any outbursts I’ve had were mild in comparison. They’re telling me I shouldn’t try to argue with either of them and they’ll just forget all these events in a half hour and that’s probably true. But none of this would’ve happened if Mom had been allowed to go to the concert…

Anyway, I dont know what to do, man. I still want to keep visiting Mom three times a week even though it’s probably not in my best interest financially or career-wise or whatever. She has nobody else who gives half of a shit about her, and I’m sure anybody who went to college is going to look at this and say, “Good riddance.” You’ll often hear ardent social justice advocates saying things like “no disability excuses racism because I have that disability and I am not racist” or whatever. I get that a lot of the disability community wants to completely separate any form of bad behavior from the disability so people will not negatively stereotype their disabilities based on the bad behavior of others with those disabilities. So, if any school shooter has autism (and a lot of them do), you need to separate it out so people don’t assume all autistic people are school shooters. Look, I get it. I’ve had people whisper on the school bus that I was “the most likely to bring a gun to school” even though I never did.

But is it always true that disability can’t influence bad behavior? I don’t know that I’m convinced. The nurses seem to let a lot of Mom’s shit slide even though most of them are black. They seem to think the only reason she is doing this is because she’s not in her right mind. In the last couple years before she was forced into the nursing home, she was coming to some sudden late-in-life revelations about her mom’s bad behavior and how she didn’t care about her, and I feel myself having the same late-in-life revelations about her. My mom used to crusade for social justice. She wanted to go on a Freedom Ride in the ‘60s but her mom wouldn’t let her. She aided a Vietnam draft dodger. She wanted to be a nurse to save lives, even though she didn’t end up becoming one. She launched the Epilepsy Association for Central New York and fought for disabled civil rights in the ‘90s, giving a couple speeches for disabled advocacy organizations. She spent many years in the 2000s calling lots of people “rich fat white men” (a term that constantly irritated me tbh) and was vehemently anti-Trump despite her own personal bigotry, to the point where she would say just as offensive stuff about him. I really don’t know where this late onset racism came from but I think it started around Trayvon Martin.

Seeing the nurse’s reactions has given me a weird perspective. Why are they more chill with it (even though most of them are black) than I am? It’s weird. My mom often forgets my name and thinks I’m her brother half the time and that doesn’t bother me at all. I’m willing to accept that but I’m not willing to accept the dementia causing her racism and all. Perhaps this is because maybe I’ve read too much of these woke arguments about how “disability never justifies bad behavior” and taken them to heart too much. Granted, a lot of people who make arguments like that are very okay with dehumanizing people as long as they’re dehumanizing a person in a historically privileged group, which they call “punching up”. Man complains about loneliness? Must be an incel who only wants sex rather than just anyone to talk to in real life at all! Yes, dehumanizing the members of historically privileged groups is probably less bad than dehumanizing the members of historically underprivileged groups, but neither should ever be okay. So, maybe I need to learn to stop listening to those sorts of people so I can hopefully be more patient with Mom. It’s not like any of the kind of people who graduated college want anything to do with me anyway since I’m not sophisticated enough for them so I don’t know why I sometimes yearn to impress those kind of people anyway…

I wonder how much of the boomer hate these days really comes down to what people say it’s about (they ruined the economy! they hoarded all the housing stock!) and how much of it really just comes down to woke kids hating hearing their parents say bigoted stuff. Since dementia can cause people to revert to childhood in a way, for boomers, that sends them back in time to an era when racism was more culturally acceptable than it is today so people end up saying vastly more racist things than they would have in the decades before losing their faculties. This is probably gonna happen to every generation, isn’t it? How many millennial liberals when they get dementia are going to get late-onset homophobia? Or zoomer liberals and late-onset transphobia? It seems like that will happen and then we will suddenly become the evil generations. I wonder how much of this is actually punching down on defenseless people losing their faculties. And of course when an old person with dementia who says awful things suffers, a lot of wokes will take glee in their suffering because they seem to genuinely believe in the just world fallacy and “if you were just a Good Freaking Person(TM), you wouldn’t be suffering.” Thinking every boomer is like Donald Trump is exactly like thinking every millennial is like Mark Zuckerberg, but there do seem to be a lot of people who unironically agree with these things. So I condemn Mom’s racism wholeheartedly, but I condemn this kind of schadenfreude people seem to feel when evil people suffer, which also seems pretty immoral to me, which is why I can’t get down with the “rest in piss” brigade either. No one can predict what their behavior might be like after they lose their faculties, so I guess I want to show mercy to Mom. But it is hard. Boy, is it hard.

Anyway, here’s another one of those “pioneering Renaissance man drivers who did everything” who you’ve probably never heard of.

ALESSANDRO CAGNO……………ITALY

Born: May 2, 1883
Died: December 23, 1971

Best year: 1907
Best drive: 1906 Targa Florio

A Renaissance man who served as an important pioneer in the fields of auto racing, aviation, and powerboat racing, Cagno is probbly best-known as an aviator but he earned three major Grand Prix victories during his brief auto racing career, most notably a win in the inaugural Targa Florio in 1906. At the age of 13, Cagno became an apprentice for Luigi Storero, a bicycle racer and engineer who was being to manufacture motorized tricycles with Daimler engines. Fiat founder Giovanni Agnelli frequently visited Storero’s shop and recruited Cagno as the car manufacturer’s third employee, eventually bringing Storero along to form a racing division.

Initially, Cagno served as Agnelli’s personal chauffeur. He began racing primarily in hillclimbs in 1901 but made his international debut two years later at Belgium’s Circuit of Ardennes. He finished third in the 1905 Gordon Bennett Cup, Europe’s then-biggest race, but his biggest successes came after he switched from Fiat to Itala in 1906. The Targa Florio, Italy’s most prestigious sports car race, drew considerable interntional attention as most spectators had never seen a car before. Cagno won the 277-mile race in 9.5 hours, inheriting the lead after Paul Bablot and Victor Rigal’s cars had accidentally been filled with water instead of gasoline. The race marked an important turning point where the balance of power in European motorsports shifted from France to Italy. Fiat’s lead driver Felice Nazzaro was clearly better, but Cagno wasn’t far behind. He also won the Monaco powerboat race in 1906 in a Fiat-powered boat.

After winning the 1907 Coppa della Velocità, Cagno retired after the 1908 season to launch an aviation career. He got his pilot’s license in 1909, founded Italy’s first flying school in Pordenone in 1910, and became the first person to fly over Venice in 1911. He served in the Italo-Turkish War and built the first aircraft bomber before running the General Testing Office for both the Italian and French armies in World War I. After the war ended, he returned to Fiat primarily as an engineer and remained there through the late ‘60s. After Fiat driver Evasio Lampiano was killed, Cagno briefly filled in and resumed his racing career, winning his final Grand Prix in a voiturette race in Montichiari and the first race in the Soviet Union later that year before retiring again.

Although Nazzaro was the best pioneering Italian driver and Cagno was probably more elite as an engineer and aviator than as a driver, he was still both early and dominant enough in his brief heyday to justify placement on this list. He was one of only four drivers with multiple Grand Prix wins in 1906 and 1907 along with Nazzaro, Louis Naudin, and Targa Florio founder Vincenzo Florio, but his wins were much more important than Florio and Naudin’s. I ended up rating his 1907 season higher mainly because there was less significant American racing competition that year. He’s definitely a worthy talent even if his aviation career is probably his bigger legacy.

Year-by-year: 1905: C+, 1906: 3, 1907: 2, 1923: E-