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We got a convoy and are headed North this week! First we meet the man who plans to restore sanity to James’s home state, Kendall Qualls. He hopes to combat the juvenile delinquents trapped in grown-up bodies who’ve been running the Gopher State into the ground. Then we head beyond the border to chat with Ezra Levant of Rebel News, who gives us the 411 on the Canadian truckers who’ve got Justin Trudeau shaking in his bossy boots.
The hosts also talk science™ and wonder why she keeps changing her mind; Stacy Abrams revealing photo-op; and, of course, some Super Bowl picks!
Music from this week’s podcast: Truckin’ by Dwight Yoakam
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The easy way to deal with this until they fix it is to just temporary subscribe to the Superfeed.
I forget what Max’s handle is.
I think I know why. We’ll get it fixed.
It will not be ignored.
Peter, there is a Facebook group called “Freedom Convoy Quebec 4 Ottawa” that is mostly all in French. (I’m temporarily following several Facebook and Instagram groups, just for the fun of following the truckers.)
Is this where James Lileks comes out dressed like Kevin Bacon in “Animal House” to assure everyone that “all is well” in Minneapolis?
Several shows have stopped showing on their own but still show in the superfeed. I use Stitcher, and it happens there too.
Update: We have fixed this and you should now be seeing this episode of the Ricochet Podcast in your Apple Podcast app now. Apologies for the technical issues.
No, Ezra broached the subject of comparing the actions of Antifa and the truckers:
Rob started with something like “I think I might regret supporting this,” then Levant mentioned Antifa, and Rob said “right.”
Did you watch the damn clip?
I used the original podcast.
Rob starts at 50:00 and says “right” at 51:08 after Ezra brings up Antifa.
You won’t often find me defending the SquishMost, but this is pretty thin stuff. With people like Long, you don’t chide them for saying they might regret their enthusiastic support of our guys — you thank them for their support at all. Anything more is just asking poor people for big donations.
Just the same, stay tuned for a respectful chiding of Blue Yeti.
You mean “of,” or “from?”
Listen more. Talk less.
Sorry, but selecting the stoner epic Truckin’ instead of the FREEDOM-LOVING HARD-DRIVING kitsch tune Convoy is pretty tone-deaf. You don’t like it. Well, you also don’t like the stink of cheap diesel or the blare of air horns. I get it.
This awful song pre-dates the awful movie, and charted at #1 in four out of five countries in the Anglosphere core, except for the damned limeys, where it charted at #2. The song is not centered around a power-mad Rambo-type sheriff, but the regulatory squeeze of logging sleep hours and of border weigh stations upon drivers trying to make a living. If you’ve ever wondered why there are all these “Truck Weigh Stations” that seem to be closed, well, they used to be open, and mandatory for trucks. Wait times came out of the drivers’ pockets — like everything else.
My father drove a flatbed. He indeed “hauled logs” in Arizona after working as a no-kidding horse-riding ranch-hand in New Mexico, and before joining the Army, then college, then computer administration and personnel leadership for the State of Alaska. He started an independent computing venture before getting wiped out by tectonic shifts in computing, and eventually settled back into flatbedding until cancer took him out. I grew up under a man who knew how to drop a trailer and how to accumulate value in processor registers (I have no clue). He could program the half-room-sized computers of the day using punch cards, paper clips, and a calculator. Some other time, I’ll relate my childhood tale of moving from Alaska to New Mexico in a 1959 Brockway and a VW bus. “Sands of the Yukon, boy!”
At one time, I probably knew the words to every song on the C. W. McCall album Black Bear Road. Perhaps the song seemed too “on the nose” for use as the send-off to this podcast about (in part) a bunch of truckers who engage in civil disobedience protesting government overreach. I still say that using the Grateful Dead instead is somewhere between annoying and a slap in the face. Leave that nonsense to the fascist wannabes at Ben & Jerry’s.
I’m not saying that the movie is good, or that the song is. The cloying backup singers or whatever that is… But the song certainly is relevant. It was perfect for this. And it doesn’t involve dredging up dope-addled notoriously communist hippies from another dimension.
Harrumph.
I was only referring to the song Convoy, not McCall’s entire body of work. And my issue with Convoy has nothing to do with the fact that McCall had a huge hit with it (good for him!) or his, yours, or your dad’s life experiences.
My issue with it is that the song is what used to be known as a novelty song. They’re fine, as far as they go, but just not my thing (never really cared for Monster Mash or The Purple People Eater, or The Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don’t Be Late) either). And that has nothing to do with the smell of diesel fuel (my first car was a diesel VW Rabbit — it was not a great car) or my distain for air horns (I think they’re fine).
And yes, the movie was terrible. As far as truck driving movies go, I much prefer Smokey and The Bandit — thought about Jerry Reed’s East Bound and Down, but that didn’t seem like the right fit either. Steven Spielberg made a TV movie very early in his career called Duel, about a haunted tanker truck chasing Dennis Weaver around the Mojave Desert. It’s pretty good too!
The version of Truckin’ at the end of this show is by Dwight Yoakam, not the Dead. And that was a deliberate choice for some of the reasons you cite. It also has a ton more energy and Yoakam brings an outlaw quality to it, that I thought was a good fit for this show. The Dead’s version is more of a lament about touring and getting busted for drugs in New Orleans (that really happened, evidently).
I agree with a great deal of what you’re saying here — maybe all of it. Although I maintain that neither you nor I would go to sleep every night to the blaring of air horns (“road horns”) thanking God for the sound of Freedom. I love me some novelty songs, but I haven’t listened in decades — true of Convoy as well.
The point I intended is that the song is more than the song. There’s a cultural connection there, and it matters. It’s flyover country telling the coastal elites to get bent. Truckin, like everything else the dead wrote (until the much-derided but objectively superior later album) means nothing. What Canada calls “the west” excludes their own whacked-out left-coastal fringe, same as with ours.
Anyway, great to hear Mr. Qualls (good luck!), and it has been a while since I heard Levant. Good show!
The music to Convoy was written by Chip Davis, aka the musician behind all the Mannheim Steamroller albums.
Some of you have complained Dwight Yoakam’s version of Truckin’. I will counter. Yoakam is one of the last few vanguards of Country music, and this version is a wonderfully different approach. He makes original songs uncorrupted by corporate nonsense to this day. He has the clout and cash to allow access to the best of studios, but he has never given in to the pop country nonsense.
No; why would I?
I have a tie breaker suggestion to resolve the impasse:
Yoakam is great and I detest the Dead more than words can describe.
I thought Yoakam’s Truckin was cloying with that affected hick accent. Earlier Yoakam stuff (Suspicious Minds (live), a middle-era remake of the obvious) is magnificent! The whole album This Time (which I have on cassette and CD) doesn’t reach as far into the nu-country crooning as this Truckin rendition does.
Still, it’s better than most of what passes for country these days.
Nailed it.
All in favor of the the Truckers and their cause (I wrote the title of the episode). Their taste in music…not so much. But that’s ok.
The Simpsons Convoy
And the government has just declared Martial Law. Fun times.
Yeah, like I said — it’s a novelty song.