Truck Porn

I recently joined a Facebook group named “Fallen Flags – Trucking Companies of the Past”. It has hundreds of thousands of members, most of who have trucking in their past. The group’s stated reason for existing is to share pictures and stories from this country’s trucking culture, preferably from back in the day.

To put it bluntly, it is Truck Porn aimed at the classics when trucks were like women. And some even looked better than women. Personally, I prefer the B&W grainy, been folded four times image with thumbtack holes and a round brown coffee stain blocking part of the name on the truck. Those are the ones to copy and hide under the mattress.

The posts are mostly images with or without explanations or historical context. It only takes a half hour to accrue many likes. My first post had 80 plus likes in the first two hours. The last time I checked there were over 500, which is not unusual. I have never been part of such a large Facebook group.

Since I joined a month or so ago, the rule regarding no politics seemed to be respected by the posters as a whole. I read subtle digs here and there: mostly where a union or independent trucker would feel slighted. They were mostly minor skirmishes that lasted only a few comments.

And then this morning someone posted the image at the top of the page. Less than an hour and 93 comments later, Fallen Flags shed its calm, friendly wrapper and revealed the hate and discontent that roiled and boiled just below the surface.

An overwhelming majority voiced their disgust with such obvious socialist leaning propaganda. Nasty comments rolled off their computers like someone spitting out something evil they found in their mouth. Get in a trucker’s face and nine times out of ten, they will respond in kind.

The negativity did not surprise me. I remember existing in the trucking world for 17 years. As an accused freedom hating commie pinko libtard I had had more than a few heated discussions back in the “My Country, Love it or Leave it” days. I even had to join a drunk driver of a ten wheeled dump out in the gravel outside a bar on some foggy mountain top southwest of Pittsburgh. He objected to my hippie freak flag sad excuse of an American wearing an Atlas Van Line uniform. He kept mumbling how I dishonored my uniform. Since I was sober and he was not, it did not go well for him. At least I kept him from driving that dump truck home that night.

Well, he was drunk so he gets a mulligan. The comments this morning I assume were soberly written. If so, then not much has changed since I pounded the highways and byways of this country. Truckers spend countless miles considering the Universe and their place in it. An often favorite fantasy of mine which I know many truckers shared back in the day were those hours I wasted coming up with how to fix every fucking problem on the planet. And to this day, I know I was right then and even more so now. The ex-truckers this morning wrote with the same confidence.

Sadly, just as truckers from the 1970s tended to do, today they are still not getting it when it comes to their industry’s liberal roots which the meme wonderfully points out. Truck drivers owe the liberals of the early 20th century big time whether one is union or independent. Without those liberals, I would guess the golden age of trucking in the US would never have come to pass. Without those liberals, today’s retired truckers might not have the pensions or Social Security the liberals forced upon us. So hate the liberals all you want, but it only shows that you have been convinced to not know where the butter for your bread came from.

Keep it 'tween the ditches .........................................

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