[Motoring, with Eleanor Roosevelt]
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Whatever happened to the family station wagon? They used to be everywhere, but now they’re almost a novelty. All because of the emergence of the high chassis, off-road vehicle. Acronyms abound: 4WDs (four wheel drive); AWDs (all wheel drives); SUVs (sport utility vehicles); and RVs (recreational vehicles). But let’s keep it simple, for one term accurately describes them all: Jerkosaurus. While most countries are experiencing exponential growth in Jerkosaurus sales, some have been particularly hard hit. In Australia, 20% of new vehicles are Jerkosauri, largely due to a tax loophole aimed at farmers, but exploited by city drivers. Jerkosaurus critics point out that the “increased ride height made 4WDs more dangerous than cars when reversing, and more likely to kill pedestrians and other drivers in an accident… If you want to drive them off-road, go and live in the country. These have no place in an urban environment”. |
Sociologists have traced the surge in divorce and child delinquency to the transition from wagons to the Jerkosaurus. Occupants, both drivers and passengers, ride tall and think they’re all high and mighty. But how wrong they are. Only truck drivers should ride tall, as my friends at the Teamsters Union frequently tell me, for they are the wheels of industry. Urban dwellers belong in sedans or wagons, which are ideally suited to city driving conditions. That is unless herds of cattle or open-cut mines abound in your suburb.
It has even been suggested that Jimmy Hoffa had to be ‘neutralised’ because he saw all this in advance. While he was no angel, I always found him to be something of a visionary. He once confided: “ma’am, you don’t want to think that he’s [Robert Kennedy] gunning for me on corruption and narcotics alone. He’s a Kennedy, and they’re always in Camelot, even on the open road.” Being so high and mighty, the Kennedy clan actively encouraged Detroit to design vehicles which suited their rural chic.
And poor old Jimmy disappeared one night in 1975. As one bystander stated: “my friend saw Hoffa get into a woody wagon. They made with the chin music, some gurgling, then it all went quiet. Anyways, that’s what my friend said. I wasn’t even there.” Of course, this was later rebutted by a Teamsters official, who told the FBI that Hoffa had “run off to Brazil with a black go-go dancer”.
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So, what is to be done about the ‘polluting caricature of a car’, as coined by one Paris councilor? Should ordinances be invoked to control the spread of the Jerkosaurus in cities? Or are they merely the physical manifestation of a much deeper malaise in society, where the average person has evolved into a ‘little Emperor’, requiring constant visual and aural exposure? It’s a conundrum, I know. But in my experience, people are harder to change than machines. Therefore, I propose the introduction of a substantial Jerkosaurus tax for city dwellers. Then we’ll see how many farmers work 9 to 5.