Welcome to expletive city. You know what I mean. When some phony little man or fake-nailed tentacular-eyelashed housewife tears across traffic like they own the road, their tankesque vehicle a mecha-metaled storm to hide all their inadequacies behind.
SUVs. I guess they do have a practical purpose, at least for people living in countries that have easy access to wilderness areas. My locale couldn’t be more opposite, the citizenry of my buzzing 2.7 million-plus metropolis keener on dollar-flashing than outdoor excursions.
I’ve long since bitten my tongue about SUVs. I’ve tried to understand them, appreciate them, incorporate them into my worldview. And yet the ire surrounding them returns to me, again and again. I’m simply unable to comprehend how anyone could delude themselves into believing they need these outrageous machines.
Perhaps context is needed. Where I live, it’s not out of place to see a dozen Porsche Cayennes, Macans, or some other fancy flavor-of-the-month model out on the road each day (for comparative purposes, my daily commute is only twenty minutes). They patrol the streets like overgrown stormtroopers, their brusqueness and generally bedeviled drivers not for a second giving an inch, traffic-wise or other. Much like a stereotypical bully, they equate size with power, believing that they’re entitled to respect via appearances.
Each day on the road feels like a city-wide steel-plated fashion show, everyone and their monkey out to impress. As mentioned before, this stirs deep emotions in me – vile ones – not because I don’t have enough dosh to join their vampiric ranks, but because they’re consistently able to force anything else out of their way at the drop of a hat.
Speaking of money, salaries aren’t great where I live, families often cramming themselves three-to-a-bedroom in ratty old buildings just to afford the bills. And yet the engine tax – THE ENGINE TAX – on one of these road warriors can make a newly-minted Master’s graduate want to cry about how little their bruising educations are worth! Despite this, SUVs remain ubiquitous, they akin to wasps stinging despair into the hearts and minds of all that share their road space.
So, minus moolah, how do people afford these monstrosities? The answer lies embedded within the fabric of local life: FACE. Yes, even if you can’t afford something, simply showing that you deal in certain echelons becomes a kind of wealth. It’s a societal agreement based on the premise that if you fake it well enough, you’ve bought the ticket. The real price, though? Nah, that’s never mentioned.
The SUV is iconic of the zeitgeist: Big, bold, and brash inside, commandeered by post-modern delusion on the inside. And if this description registers as the cardinal disposition of our age, why not conduct ongoing operations from an SUV, watching all manner of carnage unfold from one’s own four-wheeled vanity prison?