132 Comments

This whole fiasco is starting to sound like those cults who predict the day the world will end, then keep bumping it forward when that date arrives and nothing happens. Or like the migrant caravan that was supposed to explode in a wave of hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants streaming into the U.S. but ultimately turned out to be some desperate, displaced people straggling here and there across a thousand miles of our southern border.

The convoy is coming, folks. And so is Christmas.

Expand full comment

They'll keep doing this shit even after all the mandates are gone. I don't think they can help themselves. My prediction is they won't even have the sense to declare victory on mandates and then announce they're going to convoy until global warming gets ignored too.

Meanwhile, real "Can you believe I'm losing to this guy" energy out of the democrats.

Expand full comment

Probably the one and only thing I agree with the anti-Trump Lincoln Project guys about is their assessment that the Dems are truly abysmal when it comes to political messaging. I think a lot of that has to do with the leadership being in their 70s and 80s. They’re tired, complacent, and often don’t seem to realize the nature of the fight they’re actually in.

Expand full comment

Substack is doing the thing where it won't let me like anything else. But pretend it let me, because I tried.

Expand full comment

Does it say "liked by D. Sidhe" but doesn't show the heart filled in? That happens to me.

Expand full comment

I don't see "liked by" anyone unless it gets told to me in email. I'm not sure what that's about, I should probably see if there's configurable stuff. Anyway, it's like AO3, where you can only leave kudos once, and then you just have to bite the bullet and actually say a sentence to actual humans. It's not a bad thing, I'm just kind of lazy and worried I'll offend with a weird compliment. (Last night I told someone how much I looooove the fabulously comfortable vibration-included reclining desk chair big enough to curl into with your feet under you that they've invented for one of their characters, and then held my breath until they said yeah, they get that.)

Expand full comment

Reload the page -- this happens to me all the time

Expand full comment

I don't think it says "Liked by..." unless you're the author. Jeez, you elitists don't know how we common folk live.

Expand full comment

Just so you know, my inner children are sing-songing "You're elitist" at me over and over again now.

I admit, I am not common folk, but I'm not sure it's in a good way. :-)

Expand full comment

I smell a Cletus safari opportunity...

Expand full comment

It's not their age that's the problem. This is hangover from the 1970s and '80s when Democrats lost the White House for more than 2 decades (Carter being a much-disliked break in there). Democrats became cowed and cowering, and they have never recovered. That mindset gets communicated to the newcomers as well. Never actually take a position on anything because you can then be attacked for that position. This was one of the things that frustrated the hell out of me when I was doing political consulting. It made it damn near impossible to get my Democratic clients anywhere. The worst was when my client's Republican opponent got caught red-handed raiding the cookie jar (converting public funds to his private use), and my client refused to issue a statement on that behavior being bad because someone might find it offensive.

It's not just bad messaging. It's NO messaging.

Expand full comment

You might not say it's their age -- but being around to be preoccupied by the losses of the 70s & 80s would make them at least 60 yoa

Expand full comment

The defensive crouch is a permanent stance, yes. And their age has calcified it.

Expand full comment

No, it's not their age that did it. It's that it has been passed down as iron law that Democrats simply do not stoop to fight. If you want to get anywhere in Democratic politics, you have to rub up against the already established Democratic politicians. All of whom will tell you that it's unseemly to fight.

That's how you wind up with Democratic candidates who raise millions of dollars, and lose the election with millions of dollars still in their campaign coffers.

Expand full comment

The fact that the group most likely to exhibit these behaviors is “of a certain age,” and they retain their arthritic deathgrip on power, smothering an entire generation of politicians below them and freezing them out of leadership, indicates that yes, perhaps their age is part of the problem.

Expand full comment

I get that, and probably I'm one of the reasons they're like that, because I feel like there's a line between "fighting back" and "making shit worse", and maybe I should suspend that sort of overt, at least, criticism until we have the upper hand for once or they relearn how to fight or something.

James Carville attracted me because he was out there fighting. Doesn't mean he's not a goon and a twerp with some epic bad takes, which is a realization that took longer in coming.

I dunno. I'm not "go high" or anything, but I'm not convinced stooping lower than they do is a solution.

Expand full comment

At some point you'd think the DLC types would notice that voters are attracted to strong convictions, even shitty ones.

Expand full comment

Jim Hightower keeps making this point. Nobody *wants* to vote for Republicans Lite. They're either all in for performative and policy sadism, or they're wishing like hell the democrats would put up a fighter who could win, and holding their nose as they vote for the consensus candidate to stop the freefall into global tyranny.

My solution, which is to tell democrats off because they won't do what I beg them to, and then vote for them anyway, is sub-optimal, but I was trauma bonded to the democrats at a young age. Reagan had a huge impact on my young life. I got called into the principal's office once for trying to set up donations to hire a hitman to kill enough of them off that we could have re-elections. (I was young, it was half a joke. Otoh, it's when I stopped sleeping with republicans voluntarily, so I feel like it's had its good points.)

Expand full comment

Not sleeping with Republicans is great ground-up resistance -- I was doing the same for white gays with white supreamcist tattoos

Expand full comment

You slept with Republicans? Eww!

Expand full comment

Biden's big win is a trillion-dollar infrastructure bill, and is it called the Biden Infrastructure Bill? Hell no, it's called the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill at every possible opportunity, just to remind the voters that Republicans just want to help, too.

Expand full comment

I grew up not too far from Owego, NY, so I checked the link and found that the 200-some people present were locals "in support of the convoy". Waiting on Godot, and all that...

Expand full comment

Bob Bolus. Jesus.

We all owe a huge apology to Hideo Kojima, don't we?

Expand full comment

I save my apologies for someone I know or at least have heard of.

Expand full comment

(An aside: The late pitcher Pascual Perez is who I'm thinking of: https://www.ajc.com/sports/the-night-pascual-perez-got-lost-and-found-spot-braves-history/9kYEQZobWRdepdVuJsXxRJ/. I laughed, along with everyone else at the time. Then moved to Atlanta, and nearly got lost *myself* on I-285. It's incredibly easy to do, even forty years later.)

Also noticed that the "Trucker Convoy" ran literally and figuratively out of gas about the time that Russian bot farms disappeared from the internet.

Expand full comment

In college in ATL at the time of the Perez circumnavigation, a campus group doing movie send ups as cabaret had a Wizard of Oz parody with a Munchkin number "Follow I-285! Follow I-285!..."

Expand full comment

Same here. Misty watercolor Perimeter memories…

Expand full comment

This piece with its disdain and worse for working class manly men only works against the still inevitable socialist revolution. A little respect for the fuckers -- truckers, I meant truckers, dunno how I slipped there -- and next think you know, the plutocrats are powerless, our elected officials of both parties serve us and neoliberalism is dead.

Now that's not happening.

But what still cracks me up is the manly posturing of these conservative manly men -- ever more and more as they simultaneously cede more and more of their strength, as it were, to the elected officials who make them ever less powered to address what's making their lives shit. Then again, I have a documented antipathy for the entire Patrimony and somewhat likewise for mainstream lib feminism whose vision was limited to doing what med do without considering whether what Man does is in fact good or worth emulating.

So these guys; I’m still laughing at the wusses.

Expand full comment

Thank you for expressing the POV of the Workers Party soreheads, even as a joke. This thread would not feel complete without it.

Expand full comment

Anyone know if the Spartacists are still a thing? I just googled, but didn't find anything. If they still do exist, they're probably tying themselves in knots because their dearly beloved General Strike got stolen by right-wingers. And the mind boggles to imagine their take on Ukraine.

Expand full comment

search "tankies" on twitter

Expand full comment

Thanks, but I'm old-fashioned, so I went to Wikipedia instead:

"Modern tankies generally do not get along with non-Marxist–Leninist segments of the left..."

LOL'ed at "generally do not get along with..."

Expand full comment

I’m a dotard, you need to spell it out; should this snowflake feel that their delicate fee-fees have been hurt? Gotta hold off hitting the Like button til I know.

You know that I really feel in my 🖤 that those populists or whatever’s can just fuck right off.

Expand full comment

"Convoy?" "BJ and the bear?" (I had to google that last title.) That's not even current pop culture, that's late 70s/early 80s pop culture! How many heroic truckers has Hollywood sold us since then? It's as though our news media collectively wanted to be Ron Burgundy and hearken back to their adolescence when Reagan was elected President, and didn't want to know anything since.

Expand full comment

I declare you the youngest person here. We're all counting on you to carry on. Sorry to put it on you like this.

Expand full comment

Hey, I'm only a young 62. With new cardiac arteries!

Expand full comment

You're older than me, though. I'm just decrepit, from front-loading all my vices into my teens and twenties.

New cardiac arteries sounds like an excellent way to enter your sixties.

Expand full comment

Good band name, too.

Expand full comment

right wing culture is still stuck in that time period because that was the last time they paid attention to it.

Expand full comment

The GOP audience is either elderly or addicted to nostalgia TV

Expand full comment

To be fair, they are not alone in this. I just don't like monkeys or I'd have been more into outsmart-the-cops stuff like this.

Expand full comment

The election of Reagan was the end of national trucker/country chic, and the beginning of "greed is good" Wall Street uber alles. This movement is trying to undo forty-plus years of Republican history--and financing.

Expand full comment

1. It makes sense that the American reactionary movement would spit up a guy named Bolus.

2. Maybe all these truckers convoys are just spottings of Phantom 309 (h/t Red Sovine).

Expand full comment

In other dickensian names, there's Canadian Convoy prisoner (at least, has she made bail yet?) Tamara Lich.

As fantasy readers and D&D players know, a Lich is an undead person, a zombie...

Expand full comment

She sounds like a scavenger.

Expand full comment

She's a genuinely horrible person, I can tell you that.

Expand full comment

Bonus points to everyone who had heard of a lichgate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lychgate

Expand full comment

Well, I have now!

Expand full comment

līc, -es, n. — OE "body, corpse" [pronounced "leech"]

Expand full comment

Red Sovine--a man with essentially no talent beyond speaking the most saccharine word-poems into a microphone while actual musicians play behind him. Prolonged listening and induce diabetes in otherwise healthy individuals.

Also re: Phantom 309: The central figure of the story is a trucker who was famous for driving fast. Way too fast, as it turns out. Speeding on a hilly country back-road, he tops a hill only to see a school bus directly in front of him. "He turned his wheels and went into a skid. He gave his life to save those kids." Some hero: If he'd just been driving like a regular citizen at the speed limit, he'd be alive today.

Expand full comment

He was a tweaker with a conscience.

Expand full comment

That track on "Nighthawks at the Diner" is my least favorite, Waits might be honoring an influence, but even at that early stage of his career he was writing circles around Sovine.

Expand full comment

You guys are listening to the wrong trucker acts https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Hvhwn3FiP9I

Expand full comment

Nice! This, oddly enough, is my trucker jam. (The Coal Chamber thing is mostly just a joke I like better than the actual song.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzHw5Vr-_EA

Expand full comment

Don't forget "Teddy Bear."

Expand full comment

Exactly what I was thinking about.

Expand full comment

"No, son...I want you to keep that dime..."

Expand full comment

Cue Dave Dudley (born Darwin Petruska), Wisconsin’s trucker/singer: “Six days on the road and I’m gonna get ticketed in Chevy Chase MD.”

Expand full comment

'Caffeine, nicotine 'n benzedrine (and wish me luck)

Expand full comment

What's most disturbing in all this is the hopeful credulousness of the media. They really REALLY want the convoys to be true. They're so hopeful and anxious and desirous of this thing. "The convoy is rolling! We sent our reporter down to the overpass, and she saw a truck! Proof-positive that America is united in its love of communicable disease!"

Expand full comment

The media is the thing. I don't think they are credulous though. Credulous implies that they are being gamed. As someone said at some point they know and are doing it on purpose. Because they are themselves evil, I would add.

Expand full comment

For many reporters - and especially the ones based in New York - their idea of Real America is literally "halfway between the coasts." Maybe that's why we give so much weight to the Iowa caucus?

it's like how they're mentally chained to the notion of a "political spectrum" where Independents and Undecideds must live exactly halfway between the Republicans and Democrats. "But... but... where else can we put them on this artificially constructed one-dimensional scale?"

Expand full comment

Am I the only one, sort of unrelated, who thinks we might be able to reinvigorate the democratic party by assigning primaries on a rotating schedule? Look, I get that you people in the middle of the country have to deal with a lot of "flyover" bigotry from the coasts. On the other hand, you also have an outsized influence on our politics, and ever goddamned Ford commercial entrenches the notion of the Midwest as The Real America, where Real People do Real Things, as opposed to, say, NYC, where, I dunno, ghosts flit around saying mean things about rednecks and burning their city down. Or, you know, Seattle, where literally no one gives a shit if we vote. And Hawaii, where the election is over before they're out of bed.

Expand full comment

Like, there's nothing we can do about time zones, I get that. You are never going to stop the media reporting on elections before the polls are closed on the east coast, let alone Hawaii.

But primaries? We should be able to do that.

Expand full comment

A. Iowa is a caucus, not a primary, and is the only early primary or caucus in the Midwest. Prior to Super Tuesday, the voting areas were Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina

B. More importantly, I don't think it has a huge effect on the outcome, at least for Dems, Biden ended the nominee after a poor Iowa performance but won big in South Carolina leading to doing very well the next week on Super Tuesday

Expand full comment

We used to have a caucus. One year we went and it was down to two candidates who had not dropped out, or were so far behind nobody bothered to show up from their campaign. And, honestly, the Dean people really only showed up out of desperation.

It may not influence things, but it might encourage actual participation? Sometimes I don't bother with the primary part of the ballot because it just doesn't matter.

I mean, I'd be equally annoyed if my state was the first caucus/primary every year. Why *not* move it around?

Expand full comment

"showed B-roll footage of trucks on highways in support of this concept."

In all of the many, many antiwar marches in D.C. that I participated in, I don't remember reporters once showing stock footage of crowds days before the event just so their viewers could have an idea what it would look like once we got there.

Expand full comment

They barely showed what it looked like when we did.

Expand full comment

I think my favorite was the L.A. Times, which sent a photographer out the day before a big national day of action to photograph the empty stage where the L.A. event was to be held. As an added artistic touch, the big "Stop the War" banner was photographed from behind, so the letters were reversed. Of course, on the day of, when a hundred thousand showed, it being L.A. and all, no reporters were sent because "We already covered that."

Expand full comment

But antiwar protesters can never be an indicator of what Real Americans think, they can only be a cranky minority, even when there are a million of them on the Mall and opinion polls show widespread support for their views.

Right-wing truckers, on the other hand, now that's Real America, and for every one that shows up we just know for sure there are ten million who stand with them but just couldn't get away this weekend.

Expand full comment

IIRC in my town we had about 500 at an anti-gulf war rally. The news didn't show it. But they showed a Terri Shiavo (remember?) event with about 12 participants. Priorities!

Expand full comment

One of the era-defining, epically cruel, pathetic and nasty examples of republican spittle-flinging?

Nah, can't seem to recall...

Expand full comment

Schaivo was the moment where I realized that I was not only unlikely to vote for a Republican, a fact ever since I was 18, but I was actually never going to do it.

Expand full comment

My local paper today had an article on the convoy and its local supporters. Probably 20 column inches devoted to this, along with two photos. One photo showed a bunch of people lined up against the railing on an overpass. The angle the photo was taken from made it look like a large crowd. The SECOND photo was taken from down on the highway as a random 18-wheeler was passing under the bridge: It showed about 5 people standing there.

Expand full comment

Collective h/t to local papers!

Expand full comment

Yeah, sometimes the problem is just the media's desperate need for ratings. They send someone out to "cover that convoy thing" and if the reporter wants the story to air they manufacture some conflict -- show a truck with Trump-shit plastered all over it, get some loud-mouth soundbites from the looney tune who drives it, add that aforementioned B-roll and ta-da! It gets on the air. It's all bullshit, but then what isn't these days?

Expand full comment

If there’s one thing I love about American conservatives/MAGAs/reactionaries (I repeat myself), it’s how they hold themselves in unearned high regard as defenders of patriotism and freedom compared to other countries. Let’s go to the tape:

The French, who are constantly derided as fey, cheese eating surrender monkeys, have an indelible tradition of rioting and fucking shit up at the drop of a hat and getting legitimately aggro at the govt throughout their history, but most recently through the Yellow Vests. These were not the dusky hordes from that racist novel but actual Real French from the sticks and whatnot.

That our seemingly polite neighbors to the north did some real conservative civil disobedience and stuck at it is sort of amazing on its face, but they haven’t had the pressure release of Donny being in charge for four years, just nothing but old Fidel Trudeau stomping on their freedoms for god knows how long. Still, they went and block bridges and whatnot! They actually put their money where their mouth is!

American patriots? Nah. Even in the darkest days of Barry Obummer’s dictatorship, all we got was some tricorner hats and people treating their congressional reps like they treat Sam’s Club customer service.

That’s why this trucker thing is going nowhere and I can’t usually get exercised about this civil war talk. It’s way easier to continue to serve as a keyboard kommando than it is to get into the actual shit. We’re all too lazy and soft and the boss is gonna be on our ass if we take off work too much (how many of those truckers ARE NOT owner/operators?) or they have to keep an eye on those lazy slobs at the pool cleaning business they own.

American conservative freedom is about the right to convenience, and the second that right is abridged, the result is communism/socialism.

That right to convenience is why amongst them, it’s canon that somebody else is gonna do the dirty work of freedom: the cops, the military, 3 Percenters, take your pick. They’ll be watching from their comfy chair at home and posting about it.

One other thing, if Civil War II does pop off, the key to lib commie socialist victory is to kinetically decapitate the diabetes and gout medicine supply chain!!!

Expand full comment

I was with you until the fat joke. Diabetes and gout are a genetic predisposition. Thin people get them too. Loads of really fat people with shit diets don't, because their bodies don't have the shitty genes that lead to immune system disorders. Let's stop pretending diabetes, and in fact weight, are a result of inferior morals, laziness, and stupidity. I know you wouldn't say this about PCOS or t1 diabetes or psoriatic arthritis.

I love you, but it's better when we don't act like conservatives.

Expand full comment

Yeah, I get many comments when I tell people that I am diabetic that I am relatively thin, so many people don't get this

Expand full comment

People have some really weird ideas about illness. I've been told I'm not smart enough to be the kind of person who gets migraines. WTAF.

Expand full comment

Nah, the darkest days of Obama was the Bundy's and white cowboys pointing rifles at federal officers and taking over federal lands (which they still control) to run their cattle. There are a lot of assholes who sit at home and claim to be patriots, but there are more than enough to go out shoten at the rest of us.

Expand full comment

Actually, as far as the cows go, they was already on the land; Bundy just wasn't payin' the rent. He is well over a $million in arrears on his laughably low rent (seriously – it's barely more than free, which is just another example of the massive federal subsidies that such people decry when they go to other folx).

Expand full comment

I thought 1/6/21 made these "82nd Chairborne" takes obsolete.

Expand full comment

Nitpicky note: Oswego is up north on Lake Erie. Owego is in the Southern Tier on I-64.

Expand full comment

Thanks!

Expand full comment

Seems funny a guy named Bolus talking about " squeezing.. choking ...cutting off the air"

These guys all have Mountain Man beards- either they use an elaborate and expensive twice a day beauty ritual or else the beard smells like the spoiled amalgamation of all the meals they've eaten lately. Pretty sure bet that Grizzly Adams trucker smells a lot like that huevos rancheros he ate at the truck stop outside of Plano Texas last week if those huevos rancheros had been left in the back window of a car for about a week in warm weather.

Funny column - nice, though brief respite from all this Shadow Boxing with the Apocalypse lately.

Expand full comment

Is there a chart somewhere that explains the divide between goateed right-wingers and Duck-Dynasty-bearded right wingers? Not that I really care.

Expand full comment

The beardy dudes are likely to be preppers. The goateed ones are probably just making enough money they think it will protect them from the apocalypse,

Expand full comment

Wait, which apocalypse is this? I lost track.

Expand full comment

I'm a gen xer. They've been blending together since I was born.

Expand full comment

You young’uns with yer multitasking…

Expand full comment

"and make cash donations to the cause"

I remain ever astonished at how much money is awash in the vast Homeland...and just waiting for the hoovering-up.

No cause so stupid it won't attract the roooobs.

Expand full comment

Social Security checks go out, and then a percentage gets sent to the people who want to destroy the government that sends out the checks.

Expand full comment

Godz Weeel!

Expand full comment

Yes, and they keep on ridin' it til Jesus calls them home, and even after that, the kids get to vote their absentee ballot for Trump.

Expand full comment

"He ain't absent! He's HEEEERE! I mean, DAMN! He's so present I can still taste 'im!"

Expand full comment

That photo of the crowd *almost* makes me feel sorry for Kyle and the convoy clowns. I've played gigs like that.

Expand full comment

“Mad Max KOA”

[raises fingers to lips] MWAH!

Expand full comment

The media also interprets poor grammar as a sign of laudable authenticity. Using "don't" improperly makes them swoon as much as sources wearing steel-toed work boots.

Expand full comment

Every (White) reporter carries around in their head an image of what "Real America" looks like, which small group of protesters is indicative of a Silent Majority just below the surface.

Expand full comment

“Even now, I have thirty thousand truckers who stand ready to deal a mortal blow to this tyranny. Thirty thousand, would you believe it?”

“I don't believe it.”

“Would you believe, three thousand truckers?”

“No.”

“How about three pickups and a bicycle?”

Expand full comment

I'd respect them more on bikes.

Expand full comment

That's the second largest convoy I've seen today!

Expand full comment