RDH - Silverado Bravado

Silverado Bravado

January 26, 2007

The Chevrolet Silverado—winner of Motor Trend's Truck of the Year award for 2007—is a burly, manly truck. And as everyone knows, American men are bigger and thicker than our counterparts in the rest of the world. We need a pickup truck that can handle our outsized nature. A truck that will be there with us as we go through hell and back or just through the Dunkin' Donuts drive-thru.

The rest of the world—unless you count Australia's little "utes"—doesn't drive pickup trucks. But then again, the rest of the world isn't in charge.

It all started—total American hegemony—with the actual American frontier. Imagine if France or England, tired of reformations, revolutions, restorations, and inter-Continental crises in a world made increasingly dangerous by ever more sophisticated firearms and explosives, got a chance to start over, from scratch, just like that. That is, of course, almost exactly what happened.

"If a pickup truck's bed is empty, is it carrying anything?" Technically, no. But a truck's a truck, with or without its payload.

As everybody knows, when the English and French started to offload their ambitious or disgruntled citizens to settlements in the New World, there was nothing but open space and a small, scattered population that didn't even seem to be interested in the principles of applied science. An exhaustive review of the growth and development of the United States is far beyond the scope of the present essay, but an outline is not:

The Birth and Rise of the United States, from the Beginning to the Climax: A Brief Outline

I. Acquire land.

A. Settle in the east.

B. Send parties westward and southward and northward.

1. Make nice places into states.

2. Encourage native population to shift to deserts or to the area now known as Mexico, where it is too hot.

3. Leave the territory to the north to be settled by friends who will be sure to found a nation that will feature safe, clean cities and excellent skiing.

II. Build up industry and agriculture.

A. Use the cooler North to build factories and to develop and perfect machines.

B. Acquire slave labor to work the hot fields of the South as an interim solution to bridge the gap until the mechanization of farming can be achieved.

C. Encourage emigration of top architects and engineers from the brightest countries in the world.

D. Encourage emigration from second-tier nations to help fill factory and service-industry jobs in an increasingly urban economy.

III. Demonstrate your power to the rest of the world.

A. Send overwhelming force to Europe and put an end to what would become known as the First World War and encourage Ivy League types to serve as ambulance drivers to ensure a proper literature of the war.

B. Send overwhelming force to Europe and the Far East to put an end to the Second World War; seal the victory with the help of scientists and engineers imported from among the world's elite minds.

IV. Sit tight and ride out a legacy that, after what we did in Japan, no one could realistically expect us to to significantly add to.

That's it, really. The only major bump along the rather astonishingly short road to empire was of course the Civil War. But since then, it's been pretty much smooth sailing. It would've been even smoother if Germany and Russia, jealous of all the fun, hadn't developed systems of totalitarianism to essentially enslave their best minds and prevent their citizens from enjoying the fruits of mankind's newfound mastery over the material world. Just think what the twentieth century could've been like if those two countries had been able to just go ahead and say, Fine, a mature U.S. culture is what we've all been waiting for, and no, none of us could've thought up anything precisely like Coca-Cola or the Barbie doll. (Then again, a movie like Dr. Strangelove would've been impossible without the Iron Curtain and perhaps also without the precedent of The Last Dictator, which in turn required the Third Reich. So take back what I said.)

Now what?

Since 1945, aside from a few prophylactic skirmishes in far-off places that are, to be blunt about it, way too hot to care about, the United States has increasingly chosen to sit by and watch as everybody in the rest of the world copies every last thing that we had the freedom to develop in the first place. What the United States really needs, if it's not going to sink into irrelevancy and become known only for the entertainment arts of the twentieth century (jazz, Hollywood movies, and television, in that order) in the way that France is known primarily to the rest of the world for its food, is another frontier. But is there one? Space certainly hasn't panned out. And okay, maybe it will be possible to one day build perfect human bodies from the ground up using a more detailed map of the human genome. But if that happens, what's the point of striving? Perfection cannot be topped.

"What about the French? Do they need pickup trucks?" No, the French do not need pickup trucks. All their buildings were built before 1800, so there's not much lumber or other materials to haul.

What about computers? Perhaps. But don't get ahead of yourself. There's a difference between, on the one hand, the computers that help organize the data that contributes to knowledge—speeding along advances in applied science to give us, for example, more fuel-efficient cars and less-invasive surgeries—and, on the other, what you and me think of as a computer. And make no mistake: computers are nothing that our grandparents didn't have. In fact, they are no more than an ingenious bundling of what's been around since at least the advent of the microgroove stereo LP in the 1950s. Remember the refrigerators from the 1970s that came with combination tape deck/radios mounted in the door? You may not. In any case, the computer is a more successful example of a product that's doing what those refrigerators did. That's right: computers take your typewriter/pen, telephone, television, stereo, record albums, address book, magazines, and books and put them all in one place. They're a flashy convenience and nothing more. For one thing, they'll never master the art of bringing plants and livestock to your dinner plate.

And that brings us back to the frontier. In an age when other countries play basketball and even baseball better than we do and are much better at math and at playing classical instruments and build better microchips and when even some backward countries are arming themselves with nuclear power, we've been naturally a little nervous. We're afraid, of course, of losing our international hegemony. There's nothing more natural, then, to rally behind a symbol of our quasi-agricultural frontier past. And if you count our president, we've rallied around two.

So the next time you see a full-size American pickup truck, remember that it's a balm to the bruised ego of not only its driver but of an entire nation.