By Kevin D. Williamson
Thursday, October 24, 2019
‘Wisconsin Cheddar
. . . Fried to Perfection!” The billboards promise all manner of exotic
delights and profanities here on this blasted godforsaken stretch of I-45 in
the middle of Texas, still sweaty hot and humid in early October, as I go
rumbling up the highway between hideous knots of mosquito woods in the Great White Whale that is the GMC Yukon
XL, which, at 224.4 inches long and with room for nine, 94.7 cubic feet of
cargo volume, 8,500 pounds of towing capacity, a 26-gallon fuel tank, and a
curb weight of just under three tons, is the biggest beast in the General
Motors SUV menagerie, something that one keeps keenly in mind swerving between
tanker trucks full of chlorine at 92 mph while drivers in equally large and
beastly GMC Yukon XLs of their own career from lane to lane, heedless of little
painted lines, yellow or white or double or single, Starbucks in one hand,
iPhone in the other, oblivious to the promises of the highway prophets that “Demo-Rats Will Pay Next November Thank God for
Trump and Abbott!” on the exurban edges of the “Jerky Capital of the World!” and the “Aggieland Safari Come Feed Our Friends!”
and the ineffable promises of beef-themed Christianity at the “Branded for Christ Church” just off the
highway amid the filling stations and “adult”
bookstores and Cracker Barrels and kolache stands. With a 5.4-liter V8 making
355 horsepower, atop the Great White
Whale, I am high above it all, borne like some kind of redneck Cleopatra
in a flex-fuel palanquin, looking down on lesser SUVs, paltry wan little Nissan
Xterra and Toyota RAV4s, with the even lesser little conveyances scurrying
rodentially for the slow lanes as the mighty convoy in the leftwardmost lane,
the fast lane, the passing lane, the conquerors’ lane, drivers not even
bothering to lean on the horns, blowing right on through the herd and leaving
behind only great long contrails of carbon monoxide and middle-class
entitlement.
Honest to goodness, I don’t know what this thing is for.
Like a good sensible middle-aged conservative man with a mortgage and a
navy-blue Brooks Bros. blazer or two, I normally drive a neutral-colored
midsized European four-door sedan when I go from my modest home in a
neighborhood with good property values to the Whole Foods to the gym to the
airport to the dry cleaner and back home again, always careful to signal lane
changes, neither heedless of nor excessively punctilious about the speed limit
but more or less matching the speed of the prevailing traffic (telling myself
this is a convenience born of experience rather than reflexive conformism),
giving a wide berth to the dinged-up 1998 Buick Regals that kind of make you
suspect that their drivers aren’t going to be just real careful about opening
their doors with great gusto when parked next to you in your E-Class, your 5
Series, your A6, your cherished suburbanite kale-powered gluten-free Volvo,
you, a man who once had so much promise and so many dreams of his own.
What do you do with the GMC Yukon XL?
It’s not for hauling stuff. Trucks are for hauling stuff.
I grew up in West Texas. I get trucks. And if you need to haul stuff around in
a professional to semiprofessional capacity — if you lug more than luggage —
then you get yourself a Ford F-Series truck, regular or Super Duty, with a
diesel engine if you actually tow something. The Ford F-Series is a modern design
masterpiece, an American icon right up there with the Timex Marlin, John
Browning’s M1911 .45ACP, and the Martin D-28. If you’re not transporting
construction materials or agricultural implements but you like to go off-road
from time to time, you get yourself a Jeep Wrangler, blessedly available in
pickup-truck configuration once again. If you’ve got two school-age kids with
lacrosse equipment and cellos and whatnot, you get a station wagon, a Volvo,
or, if you’re feeling rich and sexy and need to go nearly 200 mph, one of those
AMG station-wagon monstrosities from the Mercedes-Benz skunkworks in
Sindelfingen, which, at 850 horsepower, has damned near two and a half times
the juice of the Great White Whale.
Outside of the outlier Mormon or ultramontane-Catholic family with eight kids —
and more power to those lovely people! — what do you do with this
thing, this ginormous Cracker Barrel Godzilla of a vehicle that corners like
C-3PO and backs up like a beluga whale after a half-dozen happy-hour appletinis
and whose so-called maneuverability is really, honestly, let’s face it,
designed for the drive-thru, not the great vast wilderness up there in the
pristine snowy Yukon? What is its telos? I know what it makes you want
to do: chug an ice-cold domestic beer, go to Costco or Academy Sporting Goods
or Home Depot, own a hobby ranch, watch a televised sporting event, get all
worked up watching Fox News, awkwardly thank a soldier for his service . . .
the American Way.
Wisconsin cheddar. Fried to perfection. Branded for
Jesus.
Ye gods.
Come to think of it — I do need to go to Home Depot.
***
This is the golden age of the SUV. The truly modern
American SUV appeared in 1984 with the introduction of the Jeep Cherokee, which
was preceded by the more straightforwardly truckish Ford Bronco and Chevy
Blazer, among others, but the species’ genetic antecedents go back much further
than that. Like wristwatches and khaki pants, the SUV has its origins in the
military, which is probably why it still remains associated with a little jolt
of virile swag, even as its main purpose is cocooning suburban mommies in
aluminum and steel as they fetch a load of 2 percent and Honey Nut Cheerios
from Albertsons. After the Great War and its muddy horror of trench warfare,
the idea of mounting station-wagon bodies on four-wheel-drive chassis caught on
around the world — the utility end of “sport-utility” was obvious enough.
Chevrolet sold its first Carryall Suburban in 1935. It
was a commercial truck with three rows of bench seats surrounded by a big
squared-off body with windows, basically a cargo van for human cargo. As Dave
Cole of the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Mich., told Automotive
News, it was a people mover, “something to haul the miners to the mines.”
All utility, no sport. It cost $675, or under $13,000 adjusted for inflation —
not too bad, really. (No AC, no GPS, no USB port, no backup camera, no bumpers
. . .) The pieces were all there: the passenger-carrying capacity of the
station wagon, the off-road capabilities of the Willys military-derived
civilian vehicles, the shape and utility of a pickup truck with a camper shell
over the bed — that, and the great American delusion that we’re all just one
split-second decision away from lighting off for the territories, that we need
the capability to load up our vehicles with a half-dozen passengers and a whole
lot of gear — and any gear will do, really; it’s not the hobby that counts, but
the gear — and go off-roading to wherever it is we’re going on the other side
of where the asphalt ends.
The Jeep Cherokee quickly gave rise to that great delicious
contradiction, the luxury SUV — rough-’n’-ready, rustic, rebellious,
utilitarian, eminently capable, and swathed in fine Corinthian leather.
(Ricardo Montalbán, the man whose eminently refined Mexican accent made
Chrysler upholstery sound so very sexy, was a dedicated National Review
reader.) The luxury SUV was inevitable: Land Rover’s association with the fancy
English country-house set all but ensured its vehicles would end up with
London-club interiors, and Toyota’s Landcruiser — which began as a knockoff
Land Rover, right down to the name — was sure to follow suit, because that’s
what it did. In the United States, both Jeep and Lincoln have a claim for
pioneering the luxury SUV, though Bigasstruckus americanus as a species
reached its apex with the Cadillac Escalade. This is America — it had to be a
Cadillac.
And once the big Cadillac showed what could be done — and
how splendidly deep were the piles of money that could be made doing it — the
luxury marques were all-in. And now you can spend the better part of $1 million
or more on “off-road” vehicles you’d never dream of putting in a mall parking
garage for two hours, much less driving through the sticks and twigs and thorns
and brambles and ditches of an actual wilderness in. At the top of the current
heap is Rolls-Royce’s mighty Cullinan (“cullinan” supposedly means
approximately “handsome” in Irish), which boasts a twin-turbocharged
twelve-cylinder engine and a base price of $345,000. (As of the first quarter
of this year, no one had ever bought a base Cullinan.) The model first
was unveiled at Villa d’Este, in case you’re wondering whom this particular
truck is meant for. The carpet is lambswool, the standard leather seats are
handpicked bullhide (cowhide is not quite up to snuff), and you can get it
trimmed with everything from rare woods to diamonds. (Which people do.) Odell
Beckham Jr. ordered one in Dawg Pound orange when he signed with the Cleveland
Browns. Mini-refrigerator and champagne flutes? Of course.
Everybody else is in on that game: Lamborghini has its
Urus, Maserati its Levante, Bentley its splendid Bentayga. Mercedes-Benz has
recently refreshed its deathless “G Wagon” and the far superior GLS (a relative
bargain starting at $54,000 less than the cubic G Wagon but without the rock-star
appeal). Jaguar has its F-Pace, a quick and lovely little thing that is great
for, say, making a beer-and-fondue run in Verbier. (Unless there’s an
unexpected blizzard that you decide to go driving right into, anyway, in spite
of the whole blizzard-in-the-Swiss-Alps thing, in which case the “utility” in
that SUV is non-obvious and certain surly judgmental eye-rolling Swiss types
might shake their heads at your spinning the tires, cursing Hertz, blaming the
weather gods, even though there might have been some operator error involved.)
Prices have gone plumb nuts: You expect that big price tag on the Rolls or the
Mercedes, but a top-of-the-line Lincoln Navigator now runs $100,000. The
top-trim Escalade starts at $96,590.
But all of those SUVs are, essentially, limousines. When
your truck has lambswool carpeting, you don’t get in with muddy boots — you get
in with suede Ferragamo driving slippers. On the fun end of the market —
the sorts of SUVs you might take on a hunting trip more readily than to a
three-day weekend at Villa d’Este — there’s all sorts of awesome stuff to be
had. The Toyota Landcruiser has become a bloated luxury beast that starts at
around $90,000, but the wilder spirit of the original lives on in the 4Runner,
which is probably the closest thing to the classic off-roaders of the past as
one can get today. Ford’s soon-to-be-reintroduced Bronco, based on the Ranger
pickup truck, has great promise. The eternal Jeep Grand Cherokee, starting at
just over $30,000, is tons of fun. Nissan’s Pathfinder remains a go-to for the
REI set for good reason. The Ford Explorer soldiers on, the Honda CR-V holds
its own in the budget market, and even Kia has a pretty solid offering in the
Telluride. Dodge, being Dodge, has crammed a 485-horsepower Hemi into its
Durango, which is what you want if you’re looking to take six people zero–60 in
less than five seconds.
That will get you to Home Depot most ricky-tick.
***
Nobody needs the Great
White Whale, or a Rolls-Royce Cullinan, or a Jaguar F-PACE, or even a
Chevy Tahoe or a Ford Explorer. I made my trip to Home Depot, and loaded up my
GMC Yukon XL with bags of grass seed and Scott’s Turf Builder, a couple bags of
soil amendments, a couple of new 100-foot heavy-duty water hoses (because of course
you get heavy-duty; I don’t even know why they make the lesser kind), a couple
of sprinklers, some insecticide, a big plastic jug of Roundup for those weeds
creeping in my neighbor’s yard and the alley. It was by far the biggest haul
from Home Depot I’ve carted out in years, and it would all have fit pretty
easily into the truck of my respectable Republican neutral-colored midsized
European four-door sedan, with room left over for a couple boxes of La Croix
and the dehydrated self-respect of everybody fired by the Trump administration
in the most recent quarter. In the Great
White Whale, I could have had a pretty good go at smiting mine enemies
and stacking them up like cords of wood in the back, with plenty of room left
for the yard stuff. You can hear the little carping voice in your head: “Nobody needs that!” It’s always a voice
like Rachel Maddow’s or that of some other $7 million–a–year busybody. “Nobody needs that!”
Rich lefties love, love, love trains. Trains are for central planners, who decide
where the tracks will be and when the trains will run. Everybody goes where
they’re supposed to go, when they’re supposed to go. Orderly. Predictable.
“Rational,” they’ll say. And rich lefties hate SUVs.
Arianna Huffington, way back at the turn of the century,
when she was just very rich and not very famous, launched an anti-SUV campaign
on the theory that SUVs encourage terrorism. (Oil, don’t you know; this was
before the economic and geopolitical effects of the fracking boom were
understood; presumably, they’re still not understood by Arianna Huffington, who
is a world-beating top-shelf by-God champion at not understanding
stuff.) Do you remember the ads? “I helped hijack an airplane” . . . “I helped
blow up a nightclub” . . . “I sent our soldiers off to war” . . . “My life, my
SUV.”
These pudwhacking busybodies not only failed to foresee
developments in the oil industry — for example, the United States’ becoming a
leading producer and exporter of petroleum products — but they also failed to
foresee developments in the SUV business: The Great
White Whale, relying on cylinder-shutoff technology that turns the big
breathy V8 into a squiddly little four-banger when maximum horsepower is not called for, got just under 20
miles to the gallon over the course of one inter-city trip of about four hours,
a trip to the airport, a couple of Home Depot runs (because you always forget
something), and some general about-town stuff in the usual sprawling ugly toxic
mess of urban American traffic. That’s not a lot worse than a Toyota Avalon (22
city, 32 highway). It’s two Priuses, basically. Is that so bad? Not what
you’d call efficient, but pretty impressive, all dimensions considered. And
it’s flex-fuel, which means that if you really hate America, Jesus, bald
eagles, rock-’n’-roll, fun, babies, the ghost of Elvis, and everything that is
cool and wonderful and awesome, then you can fill the thing up with a tank full
of goddamned E85 ethanol, you monster.
I put in half a tank on the way to docking the
land-yacht. Yeah, it costs 50 bucks. For half a tank.
“Nobody needs that!”
Of course nobody needs that. This isn’t about need.
They say that about everything. Got an AR-15? “Nobody
needs that!” Nobody needs a giant wobbly American-made SUV, or a
high-capacity semiautomatic rifle, or Lucchese boots made out of bright-blue
sueded hornback alligator, or a box of 20 Chicken McNuggets, or the Ramones, or
an in-ground swimming pool in the back yard, or a billion dollars, or a country
house on 40 acres of rolling woods, or model trains, or baseball cards, or
nonstop service from DFW to Hong Kong, or a miniature dachshund, or a couple of
grass-fed strip steaks sizzling on the grill. Nobody needs Mark Twain or Tom
Wolfe or Hunter S. Thompson, or Brian Wilson or Jack Kerouac, or Texas or
Alaska. Nobody needs to shoot an elk, to climb Pikes Peak, to have six
children, to fly to the moon, to do a flawless Yurchenko vault. We could all
just put on our silver-colored unisex sci-fi onesies and quietly eat our
amino-acid soup like we’re those poor bastards who escaped from the Matrix only
to join another equally dreary one. We could get on the trains and go wherever
the central planners decide the trains are supposed to go. We could eat our
vegetables and our fiber supplements and be grateful for them.
Or we could go where we decide to go, and tell
those scheming busybodies to stick it right in their ears.
Maybe we’re just going to Home Depot. (Maybe we’re doing
the great American thing of running as fast and as hard as we can in both
directions at once.) Maybe, no matter what it says on the back of the SUV,
we’re not actually going to the Yukon, up there where it’s all pristine and
wide open and free and maybe technically Canadian but basically really
oorah U.S.A.-American in spirit, in its soul, there, where the Porcupine
caribou roam. Maybe we’re not just turning left and turning hard in this
mutant product of the General Goddamned Motors Corporation, bailed out and
limping and moribund as it is, and steering the Great
White Whale into the real and true wild and going off road, off the
grid, just off — way off, as off as we can get — and doing something else,
anything else, starting over, even if that means being out in the lonesome
wilderness and sleeping in the back of this SUV that is, like the United States
of America itself, a little bit ridiculous, maybe, but awfully roomy,
and lighting out and aiming for the point on the compass labeled “Further.”
But we could.
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