Published December 12, 2004 in the Hibbing Daily Tribune
We live in a great country. Sure, we just had a very serious election and still face very serious global problems. But let’s face it. Right now many of us are spending a very serious amount of time tending to our fantasy football teams and masking our excess drinking with eggnog and spice punch.
We Americans don’t have to worry about some of the things that people in other countries do, such as coups. Stability is nice. Nobody likes having the nightly news interrupted by ex-military guerrillas from a well-regulated opposition group. Paradoxically, Americans love news stories about escaped gorillas from a poorly-regulated zoo. It’s hard to explain.
The freedom to be distracted by unimportant, often mind-numbing peripherals is indeed a luxury seldom seen in human history. For instance, they had “Desperate Housewives” in medieval Europe, but the desperation stemmed more from Viking conquests and The Plague rather than the social pressures of suburban living. Modern American children compile Christmas lists that include a Playstation. In 1880, American children complete quota or they were sent to the train station. (If this were an old time Vaudeville show, I’d ask a drummer to add a rim shot here, but the Bush Administration eliminated irony a few years ago).
Before our collective capacity for abstract through completely recedes into the slowly smoothing lobes of our sputtering brains, let me say that I found reason for hope during the recent airing of a cable trucker movie.
Unbeknownst to me, the USA Network made a movie called “Trucks” in 1997, based on a 1973 Stephen King short story by the same name, which also existed throughout my entire life without me knowing about it. Here’s the concept: trucks take over the world. Trucks, I said, not cars. Cars are different and, near as I can tell, remain quiet and non-lethal for the duration of the film. Fortunately crossovers like the Subaru Outback and the Toyota Rav4 did not exist in ’73, or the movie’s credibility might have suffered.
I only saw a few moments of “Trucks,” but those late-night minutes in front of the TV had a real impact. Let me recreate, from memory, a pivotal scene from “Trucks.” This is not verbatim, but close.
(Scene: group of surviving humans huddle in a café surrounded on all sides by a dirt parking lot. The trucks, which had just rammed a station wagon filled with people, circle the café at high speed, honking horns and shaking their windshield wipers.)
Chubby guy: “The Industrial Age was bound to end in chaos. We don’t deserve to live after what we’ve done to this planet.”
Guy with vaguely foreign accent: “Do you think those trucks will do any better?”
Indeed! Could killer trucks do any better? Probably not. Following that logical strain, we must ask ourselves, of all the creatures and inanimate objects on Earth, who could realistically run the world best? Trucks are not on that list, and people must be somewhere in the top five, just behind dolphins and waaaay out ahead of the cotton gin.
What does this mean? In what some would consider a low point in intellectual growth, (watching a cable movie about sentient killer trucks) I realized that if we don’t pay attention to the world around us, we might as well bow to the next generation of 18-wheel dictators.
You can enjoy the ignorant bliss of realty TV and popular culture all you want, but don’t forget that we’re here for a higher purpose, at least part of which includes keeping evil killer trucks under control.
Aaron J. Brown is a columnist for the Hibbing Daily Tribune.