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By David Rothman

As you roll through the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, on the way to the North Carolina border, the fog-softened landscape can make you think you’re in the middle of a subtle oil painting. The other salient sight is monster trucks—solitary or in convoys; moving or at rest on the shoulder of the road; but mostly moving, no few of them over the speed limit.

Welcome to America the Deregulated. At its best this can mean lower prices for you at the supermarket, the result of competition, especially from independent truckers. But deregulation also might kill you and your family.

Carly and I found this out on the way to visit her parents for Thanksgiving. We had been doing an all nighter, to arrive in Statesville, N.C., in time for a broadband Internet installation at their house. Crosby, Stills and Nash and other oldies were blasting away on the AM band to keep me awake, and besides, we didn’t hesitate to pull our 1988 Honda Civic over to the rest stops and sneak in catnaps. Then we would drive on, invigorated by post-nap strolls in the chilly air.

Mr. Monster Truck as “an American Taliban”

Dawn started to break. A beer truck was straining to make it up uphill, so I guided our Honda into the left lane, thinking that I would uneventfully return to the right. What happened next, out of my sight but within Carly’s, was that a fool motorist pulled out into the path of a different truck and barely reached the road ahead of him. To dodge the idiot, this second monster truck was on the verge of entering our lane and crushing us from the right. Luckily the fool’s car was swifter than his mind, and he or she got away, unflattened. It was then that the real terror began for Carly and me, an incident that would prompt a relative, himself a former truck driver, to describe Mr. Monster Truck as “an American Taliban.”

Mr. Monster Truck pulled within ten feet of our Honda and turned his lights on at high beam. He obviously wanted to pass, and I switched on my right turn signal, indicating my eagerness to make way. I expected Mr. Monster Truck to dim his lights back to normal; in fact, he could even have signaled his intentions with a few blinks in the bright mode. Meanwhile I couldn’t just slide back into the lane to the right. The road was somewhat curvy and rain was falling. I needed to watch to my right. But Mr. Monster Truck didn’t care about our lives, and the headlights kept blinding us to the rear. Finally after perhaps a minute and a half with Mr. Monster Truck’s lights at full glow and his truck still just a car length or two from our little Honda, we reached the point where the road curved in a way that provided more visibility to the right; and I was able to change lanes. Mr. Monster Truck sprinted ahead at perhaps 70 miles an hour despite the rain and the mist.

Faster truck, faster money

“He probably was an independent trucker,” my sister-in-law’s husband said last night. “It’s not like the old days. Now you try to drive as fast as you can to make as much money as you can.”

“Suppose,” I said, “I’d just held my ground and not moved until I really felt safe.”

“Then he just might have run over you and kept on going. You didn’t count. You were two people in a little Honda. He owned the road. It’s his road to do what he wants with it.”

A related topic came up, the trucking industry’s scarcity of bumpers at the right height to reduce injury to owners of small cars—the most energy-efficient variety. I wonder about the ratio between: (1) the actuary-calculated worth of the lives of drivers killed by truck drivers and (2) the campaign donations to the congress members overseeing the regulators.

I’ll confess I’m not an expert on the trucking industry and lack the time to become one. Furthermore I’m hardly anti-trucker and readily empathize with the independents, who, like writers, often get screwed by corporate greedsters. My wife’s cousin is married to a trucker. For that matter, my friend Rochelle‘s husband is also a trucker–and even an e-book fan. I’m not going to let the incident turn me into an anti-trucker. I see the nuances here. A self-identified trucker has posted the following:

…deregulation killed the trucking industry….you have to be nuts to run a company where you make only 1 dollar for every 97 cents you spend in effort..and in today’s industry..that is considered good. I read further below about a man’s son working his tail off for Swift. Its a shame you live in a truck and have no time for a family.

So no anti-trucker rant here, just one against the events on Route 77. I can’t resist passing on this story and wondering about the metaphors as they would apply to the Internet and content such as music and e-books. In reality, the issue isn’t simply regulation vs. deregulation. It’s also, “Who’s regulating whom, and over what?” As shown by Sony’s reckless use of a DRM-related technology–multiplying consumers’ vulnerability to viruses–we shouldn’t just worry about laws to protect intellectual property. We also need protections against the “protections.”

Sony in an ideal world

In an ideal world, Sony would be making hefty payments to consumers with the U.S. Justice Department on their side. The Department would perform the heavy lifting, just as Hollywood wants it to do against copyright infringers. I’d also love to see a federal law guaranteeing the right of consumers either to (1) access already-purchased content from an archive provided indirectly or indirectly by the vendors or (2) be able to make legal backups of protected material, bypassing the encryption if need be, if the vendor won’t guarantee safety of the purchase.

But I don’t find much hope in the immediate future–not when the DRM/DMCA lobby is as well ensconced as the trucking lobby, and when so many “consumerist” politicians stay so resolutely mute against the excesses of Sony and the other copyright zealots.

 
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