Gazette Column.

The following is this week's offering to the Stillwater Gazette. Like I said earlier in the week, I'm hoping that within a couple days I'll have some interesting news regarding my writing "career." Stay tuned.

By the way, I posted a rather lengthy stream-of-consciousness blog last night, and it's located underneath the current one. If you care, that is.

Pay a visit to My buddy Leab over at Ironic Teachings. He's a little down these days and could use a friendly comment or two.

SPORT UTILITY VEHICLES
Sport Utility Vehicles, how do I hate thee? Let me count the ways.

Perhaps it’s unfair to channel vitriol towards inanimate objects. It might be more accurate, therefore, to express disdain for the folks who drive their SUVs according to a set of rules foreign to the rest of us; the “rest of us” meaning people who possess a modicum of courtesy, common sense, and who aren’t chomping at the bit for General Motors to unveil the new GMC Furrow, so named for its ability to chew ruts into pavement.

By the way, I’m pro choice when it comes to automobiles. If you have the dough and fragile self-esteem required to drive a vehicle that could traverse an active volcano, more power to you. Bear in mind, however, that you are the target of growing animosity among people whose automobiles are not comprised of half the steel harvested from the Iron Range.

SUV drivers are easily categorized into several camps. The worst offenders are young, professional women who require two tons of steel to cart their 98-pound frames (20 of which are comprised of silicon and collagen) to their next real estate closing. They weave from lane to lane, nattering incessantly into cell phones. Turn signals are optional equipment for these geniuses, and signs warning “LANE ENDS ½ MILE” are ignored. After all, the shoulder is always an option, right? These women exude so much moxie that some enterprising drug company should develop Amoxiecillin™ to quell the irrepressible urge to purchase smartly-tailored business suits and force children to play soccer.

Then there are elderly ladies for whom their husbands clearly purchased SUVs for safety reasons. Unfortunately, now no one else is safe. These women accelerate from zero to 15 in just under ten minutes and then white-knuckle their way into the passing lane. There they stay, driving 20 miles under the posted speed limit just in case the aforementioned volcano suddenly materializes in-between their assisted living complex in St. Paul and their cross-stitch club in Minneapolis, thus necessitating evasive action.

As if that weren’t enough, there’s a new breed of SUV owners becoming all too prevalent. These are the folks whose behemoths are “tricked out” with bling. Bling, for the uninitiated, means abundant chrome, hypnotic wheel accessories (“spinners”), stereos designed to keep everyone within a 50 mile radius apprised of the latest developments in gangsta’ rap, and windows tinted to the point of complete opacity. The latter is not for coolness’ sake, but for fear that other drivers might identify the idiot behind the wheel, who is often a 40-something businessman who uses his SUV as a middle-finger to “the man,” blissfully unaware that he is, in fact, “the man.”

Here’s a tip: When you can afford to invest in after-market accessories the value of which is roughly equivalent to the Gross National Product of many third-world nations, perhaps it’s time to bypass the diamond-studded windshield wipers and instead toss an extra light saber in the Toys for Tots bin.

The bling crowd is comprised of the same people who proudly display “Urinating Calvin” stickers on their SUVs, which was once a privilege reserved for monster truck drivers. “Urinating Calvin” stickers are a way for drivers loyal to a particular vehicle manufacturer to express their disdain for rival manufacturers without having to rely on pesky nouns and verbs. Bill Waterson, creator of Calvin and Hobbes, poured his heart and soul into his comic strip for a decade. He must be brimming with pride knowing that his creation is being used as the sole means of communication for Neanderthals who sign their SUV leases with a big, clumsy “X.”

It’s the height of irony that the United States possesses the best-engineered roads in the world yet a staggering number of people drive vehicles that could successfully navigate the Serengeti. When gas prices briefly surpassed three dollars per gallon, I foolishly hoped that the number of SUVs on the road might decline, or at least cause their owners to drive with some degree of sanity in order to conserve fuel. I couldn’t have been more wrong, and this stands to reason. An extra twenty bucks per week in gas is a pittance in a nation where earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes and a looming bird flu pandemic aren’t enough to make people see beyond their opaque windshields.