Drive-Thru Dreams - Adam Chandler Page 0,36

cardboard sleeves.* Built atop truck bases, the SUVs guzzled gas and eroded ozone, aided repressive petrostates, magically ka-thunked over curbs. They offered the promise of rugged, off-road capability for a consumer base that would overwhelmingly never go off road. SUVs also presented myriad hazards to their owners (fewer safety regulations and high rollover rates) as well as other drivers (high-set headlights and raised points of collision).

In his book, High and Mighty, Keith Bradsher discloses that internal industry research pegged many SUV drivers as “insecure, vain, self-centered and self-absorbed, who are frequently nervous about their marriages, and who lack confidence in their driving skills.”* Car companies marketed to these crowds accordingly, promising adventure and cashing in on the vehicles’ huge profit margins compared to those of smaller cars. For scolds and grunge rockers, the status-obsessed consumerism that wrought the popularity of Explorers and Expeditions and 4Runners and Navigators could be seen as shorthand diagnosis for what ailed America in the 1990s.

Strictly by the numbers, the 1990s were largely remembered as a time of wild affluence. Liebeck’s 1992 accident was a tiny footnote in a year in which the Mall of America debuted and super size entered the commercial lexicon. From 1992 until 1999, the US economy grew by about 4 percent each year, a furious, yet-to-be-duplicated rate. For most of the decade, an average of over 1.5 million jobs were added to the US economy each year, compared to about half that in the new millennium. Median household income grew by 10 percent, while rates of poverty, unemployment, and violence dropped. Stocks boomed, peace deals were brokered, technology seemed both manageable and exciting, and the federal government ended the decade with a surplus.

In truth, the golden gaze of the 1990s shined selectively, carrying over from a decade contoured by scandalous greed, shareholder demands, hostile takeovers, and exploding C-suite salaries. In the 1980s, corporate raiders and executives leaned on financial chicanery rather than innovation to make industries profitable and downsized at the expense of jobs, productivity, and investments in research. As union membership dropped from a quarter of the workforce in 1980 to 16 percent by 1989, worker pay and leverage sank. From 1980 to 1988, the minimum wage, relative to all wages, ebbed from 44 percent to 33 percent. In words and deeds, the American parties enthusiastically bludgeoned the Roosevelt Republic to death and hid the body. The 1990s—its politics anchored to Wall Street and organized money, and its policies fixed on welfare reform and crime bills and trade deals—kept the mayhem going. By several accounts, the twenty-five-year span from 1980 to 2005 saw more than 80 percent of income gains in the United States go to the top 1 percent, while household and credit-card debt soared and Americans became too time-stressed to eat meals at home.

It’s almost too perfect that SUVs became the official chariot of the nineties boom times. They channeled the militarism as well as the financial and culinary abundance of 1950s America, but now without the purpose offered by a foe. SUVs weren’t just safety hazards; they were isolation chambers, the logical symptoms of an undiagnosed identity crisis for a lone bulky superpower uncertainly throwing its weight around the road. “The S.U.V. boom represents, then, a shift in how we conceive of safety—from active to passive,” Malcolm Gladwell wrote of America’s unique SUV culture. “In Europe and Japan, people think of a safe car as a nimble car. That’s why they build cars like the Jetta and the Camry.”

Some posit that the allure of SUVs suggests that Americans unconsciously believed (perhaps as their institutions were fraying around them) that crashes were more inevitable than preventable. And that, in the event of a disaster, heft meant health. “There’s this notion that you need to be up high,” G. Clotaire Rapaille, a cultural anthropologist and mass-market whisperer, explained of SUVs. “That’s a contradiction, because the people who buy these SUVs know at the cortex level that if you are high, there is more chance of a rollover. But at the reptilian level they think that if I am bigger and taller, I’m safer. You feel secure because you are higher and dominate and look down. That you can look down is psychologically a very powerful notion.” According to Rapaille, cupholders served as linchpins to what soothed our fragile lizard brains: “What was the key element of safety when you were a child? It was that your mother fed you, and there was warm liquid. That’s why the cupholders are