A review to read (or listen to) by Charles Haywood.
A few months ago, I showed our young children 1977’s “Smokey and the Bandit.” As with so many movies that are more than twenty years old, watching it is like stepping into a different, far better world, before end-stage civilizational enervation exacerbated by Left ideology utterly destroyed the fiber of America. One could write an entire article on the movie, comparing America then to America now, but for today’s purposes, what matters is how it showed truckers as independent, free actors, the modern descendants of cowboys. In End of the Road, Gord Magill, trucker and descendant of truckers, tells us how the profession of trucking was brought low, to the detriment of not only truckers, but of most Americans.
This is a book with a dual focus—both on the existential challenges facing truckers as truckers, and on how those challenges are part of larger undesirable societal changes. It is fundamentally a populist book, directed against the combination of government and corporate power that has reduced the once-proud profession of trucker to, essentially, a powerless and disposable wage slave. In recent years, populism is regularly denigrated by various undereducated internet scribblers, who deny that populism has any political potential, despite voluminous historical evidence to the contrary. Still, for a populist movement to gain political traction, both awareness and some form of proposed organized action are key, and this book offers both, though Magill is not overly optimistic about solutions, which is perhaps why he gave this excellent book its somewhat downbeat title.
