by Travis Bear
I can talk to the couch i’m sitting on right now. I can spend half the day looking for free porn online. I can tell my girlfriend, “No, you didn't catch me looking at porn when you came back from your morning class.” I can even lie about having to drop a loaf, and then finish off my interrupted half-chub in relative solitude sitting on the toilet. I can also buy a huge SUV on the off chance that I’ll feel compelled to ruin my 20” rims, scratch my custom candy apple red paint job and ascend a foreboding mountain on a different continent. Of course I can. But I won’t.
People purchase gas-gulping SUVs for various reasons: to navigate a harsh, African terrain; to transport significant amounts of gear across central Australia in a reasonably small vehicle; to take multiple youngsters to various activities; to carry personal stockpiles of supplies to regions desecrated by a natural disaster and an ineffective government; or to piss me off.
The final reason adequately describes about 99% of SUV purchases. But this group is further comprised of two subgroups: pretentious, cock-knocking twats with enough money and ignorance to burn through gallons of gas and bypass the blatant impracticality of owning such a vehicle, and, pretentious, cock-knocking twats who consider the green emblem welded on the back of their SUV a worthy rendition of their environment-conscious, self-righteous attitude.
Regarding the first group: it’s a fucking show, an exhibition of an insecure mentality. If you need a six-foot-tall vehicle with spinning rims, a $1000 stereo system and boxed frames resistant to several degrees of contortion – then you need to punch yourself in the face 1,857 times for being so fucking unaware of the world around you and, more disturbingly, unaware of the boorish societal norms that have wiggled their ways into your dormant mind. Wouldn't a bottle of penis enlargement pills or a breast augmentation accomplish the same primitive purpose?
Regarding the second group: you’re still driving a goddamn SUV, regardless of what the car company has pasted on the car in order to sell it to idiots like you. If I wanted save myself the pain of reading People magazine’s excuse for journalism,
I wouldn’t read it with my eyes half shut – I’d piss on People magazine, go to the fucking book store and buy a collection of short stories by Franz Kafka. Problem solved.
What is it about a shiny new SUV that blocks a simple rhetorical question from being asked: why the fuck do I need to donate money to oil companies, submit to a horseshit media paradigm that somehow makes me feel better, cart around 10 square feet of cargo space I’ll never need, further confirm international opinion concerning the wasteful, overindulgent spending habits of Americans, and grant the small group of people in charge of the world’s oil supply an even tighter grip on the millions of balls dangling respectively between the legs of status-minded Americans?
Now that we’re realizing the ball squeezing being conducted on a corporate scale at the nation’s gas stations, we’re becoming more and more mindful of gas consumption. But I think we’re missing the point.
Despite the modern availability of emission reducing alternatives to gasoline, huge amounts of consumable crops are used in the production of ethanol. 75% of an average tank-full of ethanol works out to about a year’s worth of corn for a child in an impoverished country.* And that’s the fuel hyped as an alternative to fossil fuels.
Given the current crisis resulting in riots over food prices and drastic inflation in some countries, one can’t help but wonder what it is that’s driving certain companies to consume such vast amounts of usable crops - food that could be contributing to the development of a child’s growing body. With that in mind, does the above question look a little more rhetorical? What is it about our libidinous automotive desire that makes a slick-looking car more important than the well-being of other members of the human race?
In the Declaration of Independence, a wonderful document in which most Americans sincerely believe, certain sacred ideals concerning the equality of all human beings are maintained as “self-evident.” Please understand the implication: this word denotes a natural, unavoidable recognition of the aforementioned equality of all human beings, regardless of one’s status in society, one’s bank account, etc. In effect, nothing could be more obvious – it’s fucking self-evident. Just like the selfish consumption of a conspicuously sizable portion of the world’s resources.
*http://www.livescience.com/environment/071027-ap-biofuel-crime.html
Mr. Bear, novelist and essayist, is currently studying Arabic in the Middle East.
Passionate speech on American waste
SEVEN welcomes essayist Travis Bear.
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