Against Truck Shaming

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, March 10, 2022

 

Everybody knows what’s best for you — especially when it comes to what you drive.

 

Some of you are probably old enough to remember when Arianna Huffington was a conservative gadfly married to a Republican member of the House (who was also the heir to a splendid Texas oil fortune) and used her husband’s failed Senate campaign as a launching pad for a media career. Like Rooster Cogburn, she rode that horse until it dropped dead, then divorced her husband and took up a couple of new causes, one of which was lecturing Americans about their love of SUVs. Driving an SUV, she argued, was literally tantamount to participating in a terrorist attack. There were a bunch of dopey television commercials with SUV drivers saying things like, “I helped hijack an airplane.”

 

That was 20 years ago.

 

Things have not changed very much. Slate has been on an anti-SUV scolding tear of late. In one article, Dan Kois proclaims that to drive a Jeep is to announce that “you don’t care if you accidentally kill a stranger.” Another Slate headline demands: “Are Gas Prices Too High? Or Is Your Car Too Big?” In the article beneath that headline, Henry Grabar lays out what Americans should be doing to reduce demand for gasoline: “driving smaller cars, taking more public transit, living in smaller homes, or inhabiting more walkable places.” As Grabar notes, people who live in walkable areas have the option to drive less, “but most people don’t have that option, because politicians spent the last decade squandering demand for urban living by refusing to build any housing there. Instead, they allowed car-free or car-light neighborhoods to appreciate into exclusive enclaves while population growth shifted into the suburbs.”

 

Status symbols are funny things. For a long time, having a nice car was an important status symbol, especially for men. But for a period of time — beginning roughly with the dramatic decrease in crime in New York City in the 1990s and ending about two years into Bill de Blasio’s mayoralty — the much more powerful status symbol for a certain class of educated young Americans was an address in a neighborhood that made owning a car unnecessary. The turnaround in New York was especially dramatic — violent crime in New York dropped by 56 percent and property crime by 65 percent, compared with respective 28 percent and 26 percent decreases nationally — but urban life took on a new shine in cities from Philadelphia to Austin. They still loved their cars in Southern California, where almost everything is built at the post-war scale that assumes commuting, but in affluent circles in many other parts of the country, owning a car became positively déclassé.

 

And owning a gigantic GM baby-hauler? There is a reason Chevrolet calls its big one the “Suburban.”

An epicure is particular about his pleasures; a snob is particular about everyone else’s pleasures, forever lecturing others about their tastes in music, clothes, restaurants, and their general modes of life. A snob isn’t someone who prefers Manhattan to Scottsdale — it is someone who is irritated that anybody would prefer Scottsdale to Manhattan.

 

It is part of our Puritan heritage that Americans feel compelled to convert our personal tastes and preferences into moral imperatives. You can’t like Roman Polanski movies. You can’t not like Turning Red. Real Americans listen to country music. Country music is for MAGA-hatted pre-diabetic numbskulls. Being smeared with feces is what you get for living in a den of sin like New York City. Don’t whine to me about high gas prices; you shouldn’t be driving that big, silly truck, anyway — what are you, insecure in your masculinity?

 

Etc.

 

This is a big country and I have lived in very different parts of it, from lower Manhattan to rural Colorado. There’s something for everyone here, most of the time not more than 15 minutes away from an Outback Steakhouse. And I suppose that where you choose to live says something about you — if you really choose, which a great many people don’t. I knew people in small-town Colorado who would have decamped for the Upper West Side in a heartbeat, if they could have, and I knew people in Manhattan who dreamt of 40 quiet acres in the west. People are where they are for complex reasons, with personal preference often ranking pretty low on the list. One of the problems with having a national conversation that is dominated by affluent and highly mobile professionals is that we too often speak and act as though everybody had the same options we do.

 

There are people in Houston and Tulsa who drive gigantic pickup trucks because they like gigantic pickup trucks. There are also a lot of people who drive trucks because they are contractors or run landscaping crews. There are people who drive Escalades because Escalades are comfortable, and there are people who simply prefer to strap the baby into the car seat in the back of a big SUV rather than in the back of a Mini Cooper. Sure, maybe they should bitch a little less about the cost of gasoline — but maybe the rest of you should bitch a little less about the cost of a decent house in the Bay Area. We all make our choices. I’ll bet you there is some poor bastard in New York waiting on the F train right now and wishing in the worst way that he were riding in an F-150 instead.

 

People like what they like. It is almost as if they had minds of their own!