The Texas Tao:
The Wit & Wisdom of Texas Truckers
Introduction, Part II
by Hardy Metcalf, Ph.D.
2. Driving Tips: What Happened After I Bought a CB Radio
No doubt some will be miffed, others amused, and others perplexed to find America's only
"traffic shrink" tackling a "book" audience, which is certainly quite
different from that of his regionally successful radio talk show and magazine column.
My concern about the well-being of our fellow drivers eventually got me out of the studio
and onto the road itself where, through the miracle of citizen's band radio, I was able to
establish direct contact with the traffic-troubled. What I found there is a treasure trove
of traffic truths, a mother lode of interstate insights whose range and vividness far
exceeded the intriguing, often even humorous problems which I had dealt with on my radio
show and in my column. The material, ranging from ethnic humor to metaphysical musings, is
certainly nothing for the merely miffed or the easily amused. It is the stuff of, and for,
the truly perplexed.
The longer this dreadful century wears on, the more it seems that perplexity is the
appropriate response to a time which has given us: two hundred million war deaths, Tom
McCahill, the Zippo lighter, the Cable Value Network, 11/22/63, Jean Harlowe, James Dean,
Proust, Major Bowes, Olivia Newton-John, Mao Tze-Dong, NutraSweet, Glenn Gould, SDI, and a
year's worth of Nietzsche (d. 1901). Let me therefore give a hearty "Welcome!"
to the perplexed.
To the rest, a fair warning. If advice is what you seek, you'd be better off with the I
Ching. If solace, I suggest either early Chuck Berry or the middle quartets of Beethoven.
If mere easy entertainment is your desired cup of tea, you might want either to rent the
latest Woody Allen or settle down with Mr. John Updike's Rabbit series. My path from the
desert warrens of simple, West Texas ranching folk to a listening audience of millions
along the Gulf Coast has been too tortuous, too valuable, too rewarding to waste the
results on advice, solace, or entertainment.
Think of me, please, in my book manifestation, as something of a gardener who has gathered
a packet of diverse seeds from the hardy, hard-growing, hard-yielding plants and plantlets
of his own scrub-ridden turf which, but for those that fall on fallow ground--about which,
more below--can germinate in useful, perhaps even beautiful, ways, some becoming oaks,
some geraniums, some, even, perhaps lovely weeds. The tending of the resultant garden is
of course up to you--though if you should later like to compare notes, I am available
every drivetime afternoon via long distance and am in fact at this writing in negotiation
with my station manager to switch to an 800 number as a means of furthering my
accessibility.
It remains only to deal with the yelpers, and then I will leave you to begin winnowing
what you take as the wheat from what you reject as the chaff. One cannot after all sustain
peak verbal experience in every line one writes, though of course it is well to bear in
mind that one person's chaff may well be another person's wheat. Let us not forget that
whole centuries have found Shakespeare something less than the sine qua non of dramaturgy,
and Sappho to this day has yet to receive her due.
The yelpers: I must dispense with charity, as one does on occasion when one's debt to
honesty falls due. To describe the "yelpers," I must indulge in what seems to be
stereotyping. Any serious observer of the American, nay, the world scene, will quickly
realize that the toes being stepped on here very much deserve a good squashing. Those who
yelp are, in my book, the quintessential twentieth century persons given to a pleased
fondness for and proclivity toward: monosyllablic utterances, allegedly patriotic stances,
empty religionist rituals, and the most arrogant of "intellectual" and/or
"scientific" poseur-ness. They seek, above all else, a quaint simplicity, a
positively antiquarian consistency, and a refusal to have fun so thoroughly carried off as
to seem quite convincingly senile. Encountering those given to more venturesome,
fun-loving, polysyllabic pursuits, they love nothing better to--to mix a metaphor--than to
raise their closed minds from deep in the sand and yelp, like so many put-upon, i.e.,
stepped-upon Pekingese. These persons, loathe as I am to give up on anyone, are, I believe
at this stage in my career, best left to their own peculiar pleasures which, as far as I
can make out, consist mainly in voting Republican at every opportunity. By their unashamed
greed, their polite racism, their quietly vicious sexism, and often rabid homophobia, ye
shall know them. They could teach hard-hearted Hannah a thing are two about diamantine
cardiac conditions, and they will, Lord knows, find plenty to yelp about here, especially
the ones who have actually bought the book in hardback. One imagines that, in coming
months, Messrs. Visa and Mastercard may be dealing with a small deluge of refusals-to-pay.
As you and I know, to our delight, such is the way of the world--as the yelpers also know,
to their continuing and near-perfect misery.
So much for hors d'oeuvres. The soup is steaming and ready. May your digestive system find
challenging, nutritious morsels floating--to mix just one more metaphor--in the putative
sea on which we are all already sailing at this very moment. |