Wednesday reading, fish 'n' birds, and messages on trucks

[asakiyume]

In Aventura en el Amazonas both Mayam and Nashi are learning about the chain of life--Mayam when her mother talks to her about piranhas and other carnivorous fish, and Nashi when he sees a cayman gobble up a roseate spoonbill.

"Some fish feed on others," their mother tells Mayam, who is feeling like it would be good to get rid of some of the more marauding of the the carnivorous fish. "It's like a staircase: if you take away one step, all of it comes crashing down."

And

"Nature knows how to do its thing, even if at first we don't understand" says their father to Nashi.

I didn't see a roseate spoonbill, but I did see a harpy eagle, with its fierce, strange face. (The one I saw looked like the one on the right--photo from the Miami zoo's Harpy Eagle Project)



And I didn't fish for piranhas, but I had some kind of carnivorous fish one meal--and I saw a truly gigantic fish in the market. (It's a bit daunting--it's behind a cut)




Yesterday I took Little Springtime and her fiancée to see my father, and during the drive, I passed a truck with a message on the back of its trailer: "Don't like trucks? Buy less stuff!"

Very strange! The driver feels upset about other drivers, presumably car drivers, not "liking" trucks? But the driver is in a great huge 18-wheeler--why should they fuss about the opinions of car drivers? How can it possibly affect them? (Where are they hearing all this negativity?) I'm pretty neutral on trucks, but my impression is that people who feel negatively about them are mainly expressing nervousness about driving near them--or are complaining about bad driving on the part of the trucks--not, y'know, saying trucks are evil or that trucks should disappear, which is kind of what the driver's message seemed to imply.

"Buy less stuff" is disingenuous when all sorts of necessities travel by truck, but okay, let's say people could truly buy less stuff ... then the driver of the truck might lose their job? So on that level too the message was a head scratcher.

Comments

[rushthatspeaks]

I suspect the truck sticker is meant to be sarcasm, and that the truck driver is trying to point out how dependent everyone is on trucks, because anyone who thinks about it for a little while will realize how difficult it would be to 'buy less stuff' to the extent where we are no longer dependent on trucks. There's that whole right-wing political thing in the U.S. and Canada where some truckers have been calling themselves salt-of-the-earth working-class patriots who are being unjustly persecuted, and doing things like that convoy which was so obstructive in Toronto. So this reads to me like an Everyone Hates My Poor, Embattled Honest Profession Without Which None Of Your Lives Would Work sticker.

And I'm like yeah, truckers are overworked, understaffed, and underpaid, and the unions should be more helpful on that, as soon as possible, please. But what truckers are not, in my experience at least, but also from what I know of the U.S. culture in general, though of course there may be divergent subgroups-- what truckers are not is generally vilified. Especially not to the point where that would be an even vaguely reasonable reaction.

[mrissa]

This is exactly how I read it as well.

[asakiyume]

The irony is that if anything, US culture *admires* truckers, for the most part.

[amaebi]

Do you think so? I'm less sure.

And I do think that drivers of cars, pickups, vans, motorcycles, et al, often think and talk of trucks on highways they're traveling as irritating obstacles to be circumnavigated when possible.

[asakiyume]

Well, I don't really trust my experiences as anything more than idiosyncratic, but I by and large encounter positive or neutral representations of truckers in pop culture (I think). But it could be my bias to see those. I don't hear a whole lot of actual IRL people expressing opinions, so I don't really have a sense of that.

I do think drivers of non 18-wheelers do feel daunted by 18-wheelers going at speed--as well they should. That's a lot of vehicle and a lot of speed. But I don't think it translates into hate for trucks? I think even if people find themselves thinking "Man, I hate trucks, they're so dangerous on the highway," if you asked, they'd back away from the "hate" part of it. But I could be wrong!

[amaebi]

Well, I do think that there’s no active or even widespread vilification of truckers. So yeah.

(And I think that the proportion of truckers who are Trumpists is relatively high, and cockeyed sense of being persecuted seems endemic among Trumpists.)

So I agree, and should have made clear, that I think you’re right about the aggressiveness being ill-merited.

I think we’re quite a long way from Smoky and the Bandit or the peculiarly loathesome “Teddy Bear,” though.

[asakiyume]

I'm realizing that even talking about popular culture, I'm only speaking in the vaguest way. In your initial comment responding to my comment, you said, "Do you think so? I'm less sure." And I mean, I am not so super sure myself. But for example, you know how a creepy priest/man of the cloth is a fairly standard feature in movies? It's not that you never get upstanding clerics, but if one appears, it's unsurprising if they end up being corrupt in some way. Whereas, for example, with small-town sheriffs, you have both a negative stereotype and a positive stereotype, and both sorts are fairly common. And I'm trying to think of a class of character who's usually portrayed positively--maybe widower-with-small-child/children (that's a rather narrow category, though... hmmm...) So for truck drivers, I feel like I've seen them portrayed as both good guys and bad guys--sort of like small-town sheriffs, but maybe with more a tendency toward the positive? But I'm kind of just spinning all this out of wisps of impressions. You have actual titles to hand, so I defer to you!

[amaebi]

Ooooh, yes, I understand now. When I was thinking of truckers as American Figures, I wasn't thinking so much of regular characters who happen to be truckers, like sheriffs and widowers, and to some extent clerical types. I was thinking of the American Icon, the Trucker, who was a USian libertarian hero of sorts in the 1970s and early 1980s, but not, I think, any more. And now, as you say, truckers are just people. And "trucker" has relatively little resonance in itself.

[asakiyume]

Yeah, I'm persuaded by your parsing of it, and furthermore, you've really clarified the thing that got my goat the most, which is that truckers... just aren't vilified? Everyone **doesn't** hate your poor, embattled, honest profession. In pop culture, the images that come to mind are maybe four-fifths rugged, cowboy-types whom we're supposed to admire (and then one-fifth skeevy unpleasant types--but come on, people! four-fifths to one fifth!) The sticker was so unexpectedly and wrong-headedly hostile/defensive as to provoke bewilderment and confusion rather than the probably desired angry-owned-lib reaction.

Kind of as if you saw a sticker saying "Don't like bluebirds? Then don't build all those bluebird houses!!!" ... Well, maybe that's overselling the innocuousness or beloved-ness of truckers, but I felt a similar ??? when first reading the sticker.