The Truckers: Last Time They Were Smart People, Not donnie Dwarfs

 In, I think I remember this, 1973, the Saudis decided to let America and its people know who was in charge in this world.

They shut off our oil.

It got ugly fast.

I have written other posts about some of my firsthand experiences.

One of the results of that fiasco was that speed limits country-wide were reduced from 70 or more to 55 or less.

That pissed almost all of us off.

The trucking community was at the head of the line of those pissed off.

I was a salesman for IBM in those days and covered a territory I described as being slightly larger than the Holy Roman Empire - Charlamagne, remember?

So I was pretty pissed of about my potential sales per hour time space continuum being truncated by brief case totin' bureaucrats and their lower speed limits.

When I heard Convoy for the first time I learned, for the first time, what an anthem really is, all due respects to the Star Spangled Banner (it's all context, and the Banner at some innocuous public event like a ball game never moved me; I added Banner to my understanding of anthems after 9/11; it was all context) and the context for Convoy was compelling.

I'm going to bring C.W McCall up here imminently to perform for you, but I need to say, since I shot out vitriol in the title of this post, what I mean and why vitriol is warranted.

Bill Fries chose the stage name of C.W. McCall to cover his real identity as a disk jockey or an insurance salesman or some such.

But he wrote a hell of a song: it was clever, it was tongue in cheek, it was in your face and it got to the point - we were all tired of creeping down the Interstate at 55 mph and really wary of the implicit fact of vastly increased police control that the new speed limit created.

We were also tired of being captive to Saudi Arabia.

Contrast what I have just asserted, you be the judge when you watch the video, and see if the  the whiny "I want my freedom to resist science, public health, reason, responsibility to my fellow creatures - my fellow tribesman - and just my right to be in general, a complete asshole", and see if you can see the difference between the truckers then and the truckers now.