FROM NEW ZEALAND BY TRUCK

The Undie 500 – from the
pages of Highway America

For the next two days the journey continued through beautiful Appalachian country to Elkton, Maryland, and a Petro truckstop a little over an hour from the drop-off. I parked on the end of a long line of trucks, went for dinner and came back to read a book while music filled the air from the truck radio. When it was time for bed I pulled the blinds around the windscreen and side windows and stripped off to my underpants.

Suddenly there was a loud bang and the truck rocked on its suspension. Earthquake, I immediately thought. Then I heard a scraping noise as a semi trailer was dragged around the front of my tractor. I ripped the blinds open in time to see the culprit drive slowly away looking for a parking space. With visions of Carlos having me fired for having yet another accident I leapt down to the pavement in my bare feet and underpants and ran after the errant driver.

My Undie 500 lasted barely a hundred yards by which time the turban-headed young driver was most apologetic. It was his first day on the road and he was still getting accustomed to the size of the rig and the amount of space needed to turn. In Maryland the police are required to attend all accidents involving trucks and we exchanged details while we waited for them. An hour later an officer arrived, looked at both trucks (I had my clothes on again by then), took our details and departed.

My encounter with the police was better than that of a CalArk driver called Mike. When he got lost in Chicago he stopped a cop and asked for directions.

‘Follow me,’ the cop said obligingly.

They twisted and turned through narrow streets and alleyways for what seemed an age until they finally arrived at a police station where Mike was fined $990 for driving on streets where trucks were prohibited.

As the traffic flow pushed Old Bluey (my truck) along the New Jersey Turnpike at sixty-five miles an hour I watched the big signs flash passed overhead; Willingboro, Trenton, East Brunswick, Sayreville. The number of lanes increased along with the traffic volume and the number of interchanges. I was getting close to the turnpike extension and I needed to stay alert. The Perth Amboy sign flashed by and Carteret, Linden and Elizabeth appeared quickly. The exit for Newark Liberty International Airport slipped by and I changed lanes to line up for the turnpike extension at Exit 14. Suddenly just a few yards away parallel to the turnpike a big jet was taking off from Runway 4 Right at Newark while others waited to line up and the sky around buzzed with jets circling to land.

I looked ahead for the Jersey City sign as thousands of cars and trucks sped towards the heart of the great New York metropolis like minnows into the jaws of a whale. I lined up beneath the sign and followed the ramp through a ninety degree right turn. The Manhattan skyline, the Twin Towers and the Statue of Liberty came into view across the Hudson River as I looked ahead for Exit 14A. I shifted right again trying to recall the precise directions. I needed to go to the toll gates and up another ramp to Route 169 South and turn onto New Hook Road at the second light and proceed to Avenue J and the Exxon plant.

After carefully making all the correct turns to connect with Route 169 South I was dismayed to be confronted with a sign indicating that I was on Route 440 instead. Where the hell did that come from? I asked myself as I slowed and looked for somewhere to park while seeking assistance from the locals. There was a gap between the two carriageways but no free space on the sides so I stopped on the median and ran across the opposite carriageway to an office building that seemed to be just inches from the traffic flow.

‘I’m looking for New Hook Road,’ I told one of the workers.

‘Just keep right on down the one-sixty-nine. It’s about a mile on the left.’

‘How do I get to the one-sixty-nine?’

He looked at me as though I really was the dummy that I was beginning to feel like. Then he looked across at my idling truck in the middle of the busy dual carriageway and back at me again.

‘You’re on the one-sixty-nine, buddy. Are you Australian?’

‘No. I’m a Kiwi from New Zealand.’

He looked at me again as his expression changed to one of incredibility.

‘You come all the way from New Zealand in a truck?’

‘Not quite,’ I replied pointing to a jetliner blasting across the heavens from Newark. ‘I came on one of those. I picked up the truck in Little Rock.’

‘Little Rock, Arkansas.’ He still seemed uncertain about whether to believe me. ‘You know Bill Clinton?’

For a moment I was stunned by the thought that Little Rock could be thought of as so little that everyone living there could be a personal friend of everyone else including the former Governor and President.

‘Well, no. I guess I’m one of the few people who have never actually met him. But thanks for your help, mate. I think I’d better move my truck.’

For an e-book copy of Peter Blakeborough's Highway America go to: Smashwords.com 

 

KEYBOARD VANDALS

The 10 golden rules of
Twitter – and Facebook

David Aaronovitch

No week seems to pass without some tweeter or other having their handle felt by officers of the law. So if you don’t want to be one of them but you do want to communicate in 140 characters, here are my 10 Golden Rules:

1.    Twitter IS publishing. Putting it out there for others to read is publishing. So don’t tweet anything you wouldn’t be happy to see on the newsagent’s shelf with a picture of you above it.

2.    You think you know the law of libel. You don’t. Nor do any of your friends. I have had grown men telling me on Twitter this week that repeating a libel is not itself libel (it is) or that if you don’t directly say X is a rampant Y, but just hint at it then it doesn’t count (it does).

3.    If you’re an obscure nobody who no one follows, but who wants to say something rude sort-of privately, don’t do it under a trending hashtag. You will bring the wrath of thousands of strangers down on your hapless head.

4.    Some people LIKE the wrath of strangers. They’re called trolls. If you feel yourself bridling at repeated rude comments aimed at you and your cherished views then just BLOCK the offender. They disappear as if by magic.

5.    You are hurt. Wounded. Someone has questioned your talent or integrity. You wish to howl with online pain. Don’t. Those who enjoy your discomfiture will gather like crows around a carcass. Laugh. Put up a smiley.

Print books: GypsyBooks

E-books: Smashwords

6.    That brilliant retort you have composed, replete with pungent sexual or violent imagery, which will utterly destroy the Twitter foe who has, despite my advice, so annoyed you? Cherish it. Roll its 140 characters on your tongue. And then, for God’s sake, DELETE IT.

7.    Don’t tweet while drunk. You think it’s clever, and funny, you giggle and dribble at your own brilliant verbiage. But you are opening wide the gates of Hell. Morning will come, cold and clear.

8.    Don’t EVER meet a jolly Twitter companion, even one you’ve been ff’ing (suggesting people follow you every Friday) for months. Not without a police report. I learnt the hard way.

9.    Get yourself a decent avatar (picture) on Twitter. Not that default egg or the eye slicing scene from Un Chien Andalou. For everyone else’s sake.

10. Lastly, the golden rule, the rule of rules. Never, ever tweet anything about anybody that you wouldn’t say to their face. There’s a REASON why you wouldn’t say it to their face. They might hit you, or sue you. So why would you want to tweet it?

@DAaronovitch

Read more: “The unhealthiest falsehood spread on social networks is that users are living lives of constant glamour and hilarity,” says Libby Purves

Peter’s Piece

There is some sound advice above. Using Facebook and Twitter can be a rewarding and fun experience, but all too often the experience can be shattered by people who are cowardly graffiti vandals with a keyboard. 

ADOLF HITLER

Viewpoint: His dark charisma

Adolf Hitler was an unlikely leader but he still formed a connection with millions of German people, generating a level of charismatic attraction that was almost without parallel. It is a stark warning for the modern day, says historian Laurence Rees.

At the heart of the story of Adolf Hitler is one gigantic, mysterious question: how was it possible that a character as strange and personally inadequate as Hitler ever gained power in a sophisticated country at the heart of Europe, and was then loved by millions of people?

The answer to this vital question is to be found not just in the historical circumstances of the time - in particular the defeat of Germany in World War I and the depression of the early 1930s - but in the nature of Hitler's leadership.

It's this aspect of the story that makes this history particularly relevant to our lives today.

Hitler was the archetypal "charismatic leader". He was not a "normal" politician - someone who promises policies like lower taxes and better health care - but a quasi-religious leader who offered almost spiritual goals of redemption and salvation. He was driven forward by a sense of personal destiny he called "providence".

Before WWI he was a nobody, an oddball who could not form intimate relationships, was unable to debate intellectually and was filled with hatred and prejudice.

But when Hitler spoke in the Munich beer halls in the aftermath of Germany's defeat in WWI, suddenly his weaknesses were perceived as strengths.

His hatred chimed with the feelings of thousands of Germans who felt humiliated by the terms of the Versailles treaty and sought a scapegoat for the loss of the war. His inability to debate was taken as strength of character and his refusal to make small talk was considered the mark of a "great man" who lived apart from the crowd.

More than anything, it was the fact that Hitler found that he could make a connection with his audience that was the basis of all his future success. And many called this connection "charisma".

"The man gave off such a charisma that people believed whatever he said," says Emil Klein, who heard Hitler speak in the 1920s.

But Hitler did not "hypnotise" his audience. Not everyone felt this charismatic connection, you had to be predisposed to believe what Hitler was saying to experience it. Many people who heard Hitler speak at this time who thought he was an idiot.

"I immediately disliked him because of his scratchy voice," says Herbert Richter, a German veteran of WWI who encountered Hitler in Munich in the early 1920s.

"He shouted out really, really simple political ideas. I thought he wasn't quite normal."

In the good economic times, during the mid-to-late twenties in Germany, Hitler was thought charismatic by only a bunch of fanatics. So much so that in the 1928 election the Nazis polled only 2.6% of the vote.

Yet less than five years later Hitler was chancellor of Germany and leader of the most popular political party in the country.

What changed was the economic situation. In the wake of the Wall Street Crash of 1929 there was mass unemployment in Germany and banks crashed.

"The people were really hungry," says Jutta Ruediger, who started to support the Nazis around this time. "It was very, very hard. And in that context, Hitler with his statements seemed to be the bringer of salvation."

She looked at Hitler and suddenly felt a connection with him.

"I myself had the feeling that here was a man who did not think about himself and his own advantage, but solely about the good of the German people."

Hitler told millions of Germans that they were Aryans and therefore "special" and racially "better" people than everyone else, something that helped cement the charismatic connection between leader and led.

He did not hide his hatred, his contempt for democracy or his belief in the use of violence to further political ends from the electorate. But, crucially, he spoke out only against carefully defined enemies like Communists and Jews.

Since the majority of ordinary Germans were not in these risk groups then, as long as they embraced the new world of Nazism, they were relatively free from persecution - at least until the war started to go badly for the Germans.

This history matters to us today. Not because history offers "lessons" - how can it since the past can never repeat itself exactly? But because history can contain warnings.

In an economic crisis millions of people suddenly decided to turn to an unconventional leader they thought had "charisma" because he connected with their fears, hopes and latent desire to blame others for their predicament. And the end result was disastrous for tens of millions of people.

It's bleakly ironic that German Chancellor Angela Merkel was greeted in Athens recently with swastika banners carried by angry Greeks protesting at what they see as German interference in their country.

Ironic because it is in Greece itself - amid terrible economic crisis - that we see the sudden rise of a political movement like the Golden Dawn that glories in its intolerance and desire to persecute minorities.

And is led by a man has claimed there were no gas chambers in Auschwitz. Can there be a bigger warning than that?

Laurence Rees is a former creative director of history programmes for the BBC and the author of six books on World War II.

More in BBC News Magazine

Peter’s Piece

Here are some of the triggers that can propel Hitler-type half-wits to power:

·           High levels of unemployment and business failure.

·          A belief that a simplistic new economic order will solve all problems.

·           Widespread racial and religious intolerance.

·           General dissatisfaction with the courts and the sentencing of criminals.

·           A loss of faith in democratic government.

·           Growing numbers of people who regard themselves as victims.

·           Loud-mouthed half-wits shouting simplistic solutions to all the above.

That’s all it takes and wherever we live, we all need to be vigilant.