Shaquille O'Neal allegedly has a round bed that is 20 feet in diameter. That's what The New Yorker said, anyway.
Shaquille O'Neal allegedly has a round bed that is 20 feet in diameter. That's what The New Yorker said, anyway. Most of the people I've told about this have the same reaction: "He's a big guy. He needs a big bed." They don't really pause to think about it until I question whether even someone of Shaq's dimensions needs a bed 12 feet longer than he is, and note that his bed has the same square footage as a decent-sized New York City studio apartment (and that's including the elfin bathroom and galley "kitchen"). That gives people pause. But what I find even more striking is that everyone around me is so inured to this country's much-debated super-size ethos that they don't blink an eye at the size of Shaq's bed. Balloon mansions, Big Gulps, Big Grabs, Super-size TV shows, the ever-expanding American waistline — we all know the drill but we still buy the venti latte without giving it a second thought. There's one jumbo trend, though, that hasn't been lost on any of them, even the friends unimpressed by Shaq's bed: those f#*!!*g SUVs.
The low grumble over the latest trend in American gas gluttony recently hit an amusingly hysterical roar with the one-two TV punch of ads equating SUV ownership with supporting terrorists and the Evangelical Christian PSAs that ponder, "What would Jesus drive?" The latter resulted in Jerry Falwell declaring proudly on CNN that he drives a Suburban and that the environment isn't a pressing issue anyway because the Earth might succumb to Armageddon and the Last Judgment by the middle of this century. Well, gosh, now I can sleep nights rather than worry about where I set the thermostat. Unfortunately, what gets lost in the cacophony are the valid reasons for protesting SUVs (they are dangerous, they do damage the environment, and you can't see around them), as well as the knottier issue concerning why the heck large numbers of Americans still feel it is their divine, or at least constitutional, right to drive enormous, gas-sucking cars they don't need.
It's an old issue, too. I remember the late 1970s oil anxiety attack and the accompanying spike in Honda sales. The great enemy then was those enormous station wagons and luxury sedans. And, wouldn't you know, they don't make them anymore. Yet, during the 1990s, it was as if everyone my age and older suddenly had a spell of fuel economy amnesia brought on by the siren song of V8 engines, four-wheel drive, and elevated driver's seats. It was a trend that I initially viewed with some detachment from my car-less perch in New York. A move two years ago necessitated my first-ever new car purchase and a return to daily driving, however, and my feelings about the new manifestation of American excess have solidified. I despise SUVs.
Don't get me wrong. I don't mind someone owning an SUV if he or she needs it. My parents were driving Jeeps and Subarus years before they were even called SUVs because they live at the bottom of a steep driveway in a region with snowy winters. I'm going to begrudge my parents or anyone else with terrain issues for wanting to get out of their driveway? No. Also, certain lines of work require an SUV or light truck. I don't have a problem with that, and I'll bet Jesus wouldn't either (as long as that livelihood didn't involve murder or usury). No, the evangelists, the greenies, and I have a colossal bone to pick with the thousands upon thousands of people who are seduced by flashy images of luxurious size and power, regardless of whether they'll ever actually use or need that size and power, and who think driving a Panzer tank down the interstate is "fun." You want fun? Drive a compact car with a four-cylinder, 1.8-liter, turbo five-speed manual transmission engine that provides a "kick" of power at the higher revs when you need it. That's fun. And you'll get 31 miles per gallon on the interstate. And you won't be 30 times more likely to kill some car-driving sap in a driver's-side collision.
Sometimes I think that maybe I'm just more predisposed to small cars because they match my diminutive scale. (Growing up, I learned to drive in a 1978 Chevy Impala boat/station wagon.) But shouldn't my smallness make me crave some sort of power substitute? Joining the SUV debate, 60 Minutes featured a psychologist, dubbed the "Freud Explorer" by Morley Safer, who specialized in consumer desire. According to this genius, no one can rationally articulate why they want such an excessive vehicle because the SUV appeals to our reptilian core. I had no idea the dinosaurs were worried their neighbors would think they were dorks if they drove a minivan. Anyway, he said it's precisely that T. Rex allure of power and heft which drives sales, with the wildly popular new Hummer H2 as the most obvious example. I thought, "Hey, I'm the target demographic in the H2's TV ads (young urban females who occasionally have cause to barrel across the frozen Arctic tundra, yet never seem to have to parallel park). Why not go test drive one of the behemoths?" I wanted to know how the Hummer folks were going to convince my inner gecko that she really wanted to be a Komodo dragon.
A trip to the H2 website underlined how the vehicle might satisfy my quest for automotive brawn. The product slogan provoked a sophomoric titter: "HUMMER: Like nothing else." Hummer may mean "lobster" in German, but it means something else in the frat house. I clicked on the H2 window. "In a world where SUVs have begun to look like their owners, complete with love handles and mushy seats," the site proclaimed, "the H2 proves that there is still one out there that can drop and give you 20." Not 20 miles per gallon, natch. Why would you want that when driving an H2 could replace going to the gym? I half-expected a spinach dispenser to be an in-dash option. I also discovered that if I ever needed to scale a 16-inch vertical wall, the H2 was the truck for me.
My equally petite female friend and I headed to the Hummer dealership, parking my compact car on the street. We wandered through the lot. Close up, the H2 is over a foot taller than I am and as wide as my family's old 1978 barge. On the sheet in each H2 listing the specs and price, there was a big blank space where the gas mileage usually is. Fine print directed us to a federal website if we really wanted to know. After we checked out the fully loaded showroom model of the H2 (no spinach dispenser), we were approached by a female salesperson. Nice move, I thought. Give it to us straight, woman to woman. We asked her about safety; we'd noticed the H2 has only two airbags. Her reply was essentially this: airbags, schmairbags — you'll crush anything you collide with and you won't even notice. Nice. She did take pains to point out that the H2 isn't prone to rolling over. We casually inquired about the fuel economy. Eight mpg city/12 mpg highway. But hey, the tank holds 32 gallons! She got the keys to show us the taxicab yellow H2 in the lot.
Then we hit the road. The view was tremendous, even if it was hard to gauge my distance from the curb, not to mention other cars. No wonder I can never see around these things. My saleswoman assured me that all of the other cars would make way for the gigantic block of metal cheese bearing down on them. (OK, maybe she didn't say "cheese.") She also said I could drive into the mountains without worrying about the weather. Dandy, but I could do that in any smaller four-wheel drive vehicle. We turned on to a side road that featured one of those dramatic dips. "OK, punch it," said the saleswoman. My friend paled. I floored it, and the dip that would have made a regular car momentarily airborne became just another bump. Cool. As we eased back into traffic on the main road, a Mercedes convertible didn't want to get out of my way. We bantered about how that driver needed to worry about pissing off the women in the Hummer. Heh heh, his ass is mine.
I could almost feel the adrenaline surge, but it wasn't enough to soothe my nerves. What if I did hit somebody? How could I live with that? I can't beat up on someone just because I can — that isn't right. Jesus the licensed driver might even say it's immoral, if one is so inclined to think that way. And how could I justify driving a car that can't go as far on 32 gallons of gas as my speedy compact can go on 14 1/2? Not only would it substantially cut into my shoe budget, but it would also be violating every lesson about conserving finite resources (like, oh say, oil) and curbing air pollution drilled into me in the 1970s. Sure, I could see the fun in feeling impervious to the world in my boorish, able-to-ascend-60-percent-grade and traverse-a-40-percent-side-slope vehicle. But I never, ever wanted to climb aboard one of those things again.
I checked the Web again to verify the H2's appalling gas mileage. Would you believe the Hummer site doesn't say a thing about fuel economy? Well, yes. Mpg is obviously not a priority to the Hummer consumer. Fueleconomy.gov, however, was equally unenlightening. Fueleconomy.gov didn't even have a listing for "Hummer" in the SUV category. Suddenly, the entire H2 phenomenon became exponentially more obnoxious. The Freud Explorer's statement on 60 Minutes that people would want one of these things now because they seem safe at a time of potential war with Iraq became even sillier. My inner reptile knows a pile of T. Rex dung when she hears it. And now that I've seen the view from the $65,000 suede-lined Panzer tank, and I know how unnecessary such a monster is, even if you do use four-wheel drive and you do need to haul around a ton of kids, I can say with even greater conviction that the Escalade/Navigator/Excursion/Suburban/Mercedes G500/Hummer H2/Tahoe/Expedition/Sequoia incarnation of the sport utility vehicle is a cultural blight worthy of the long and loud criticism from all quarters.
Incidentally, you could park two Hummer H2s in Shaq's bed and still have room to sleep quite comfortably.
