Sunday, July 25, 2021

First your gun, now your truck.

From my cold, dead, driveway. Assholes.

Pickup trucks are a plague on Canadian streets

Many things have changed in pandemic times. One that has not is North America's love affair with the pickup truck. Even in the midst of economic uncertainty, consumers lined up to buy these hulking, belching kings of the road. Once the vehicle of the cowboy, the contractor and the good old boy, pickups have become the continent's mainstream ride. Even city parking lots are simply full of them. In Canada, Ford's F-150 has been the best-selling auto for years.

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For heaven's sake, why? Most people no longer use pickups to haul bales of hay. They drive them to the mall to shop or the soccer field to drop off their kids. Why anyone thinks they need such a beast to do that is an abiding mystery.

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Even if they weren't polluting and dangerous, the parade of pickups would be a blight on the roadscape and a finger in the eye of other drivers – a way of saying to everyone else: I am bigger, badder and richer than you. A vehicle that started as a practical tool for hard-working people has become, for many, an obnoxious assertion of dominance and division.

This piece of soi-boi whining and metrosexual urban-dweller snobbery was written by Mr. Marcus Gee, a staff writer at the Globe and Mail. 
 
Mr. Marcus Gee, truck hater.

 
Now you can put a face to the name of the guy who thinks your frigging pickup truck is "an obnoxious assertion of dominance and division."

Personally, I drive the second biggest thing they make, an F-250 crew cab long box. The only thing bigger before you get into commercial vehicles is the F-450 crew cab dually.

For Heaven's sake why? (Yeah, Heaven is capitalized, you illiterate dickheads.)

Because I can shut the tailgate on a 4'x8' sheet of plywood. I can tow a 38' trailer. I can pull a Bobcat out of the mud or a tree stump out of the ground. I can buy 16' deck boards at Home Depot and take them home. I can move a motorcycle, a refrigerator, a doctor's exam table, a table saw, lumber, a tree or half a ton of firewood. I can jump in and drive from Hooterville to Toronto in a howling blizzard and not care a damn, because I have snow tires, four wheel drive, a foot of ground clearance and a locking diff front and back. It's a TRUCK. It can do lots of things.
 
But mostly because I get to choose what kind of vehicle I spend my money on. Not you, Mr. Gee. Not the government. Not the Globe and Mail. Me. I choose.

This is Canada, Mr. Gee. It's nice that you can go from your air conditioned apartment and take the air conditioned subway to your air conditioned office without ever going outside, and it's nice that you can hire people to screw in your lightbulbs and move your furniture for you.

But some of us have to do this type of thing for ourselves. We have to face the weather. We need to carry shit from one place to another. We can't buy station wagons and big sedans with TRUNK SPACE!!! anymore because effete urban simp environmentalist weenies made them illegal. So, obviously, we buy trucks. When you assholes finally make those illegal, we will buy whatever we can get that can pull a hen off a nest and burns furnace oil.

So, Mr. Gee, if you think pickup trucks are "an obnoxious assertion of dominance and division" then just you wait until the parking lots are full of delivery vans with dual rear axles. Go ahead, make pickups illegal. See what happens.

And by the way. Did you ever think that maybe guys in pickups tailgate you because you drive like an effete urban simp? If you don't want to go fast, don't be in the center lane. Go in the outside lane with all the other simps.

First seen at Small Dead Animals.

7 comments:

Jason said...

As a driver of a Subaru BRZ, the only reason I'm not a fan of pickup trucks is that the tops of their tires are even with my roofline. We could probably load my car in the back of your F250 and close the tailgate.

But, I don't care what other people drive. I know my car is anything but practical, yet I daily drive it even in the winter (Michigan.) Snow tires and cheap steel rims and I'm good (until the snow gets too deep, then I whine and complain about what I bought.)

The good *barf* Mr Gee probably also believes having more than one brand of shoe or one brand of soap is excessive and wasteful...

The Phantom said...

There are a lot of people out there who seem to think it's their job to make you do things their way. If they don't think you need a sports car, then they'll try to see to it that you don't have one.

Don't feel bad about the impracticality. I used to ride my motorcycle all year, in Toronto. Completely ridiculous, but that's what I did.

Orvan Taurus said...

It seems there has long been the idea to "kill the station wagon" but the reason for its existence (filling a need) is overlooked - and so the form factor simply changes. "No station wagon? Alright, SUV. Oh, screw up the SUV? Fine, I'll get a truck." Cue wailing...

The Phantom said...

Seeing a need and filling it is toxic Whiteness, Great Ox. Your needs are not important to Mr. Gee. He knows better than us lowly beasts of the field who only exist to chop his wood and carry his water.

How dare you have needs that do not fit into his grand scheme!

Jason said...

Orvan, the next step when pickup trucks get messed up?

Small box trucks with crew cabs.

Mess those up?

BIG box trucks with crew cabs.

Nature, uh, nature finds a way.

Jonathan H said...

Yet again, a person who thinks cities are the whole world ironically shows his ignorance...

Reziac said...

What, they aren't making the F-350 dually anymore??

That's me. 1991 F350 crew cab long box dually. Awesome truck for all sorts of heavy loads and serious towing, which is why I got it. And I use it that way often enough that it's not expendable. Tomorrow it's half a ton of feed, or about six trips for one of those urban roller skates. (Also a comfy long-distance highway truck that doubles as a motel room. Try driving 12 hours in that urban breadbox, sleep in the back seat, and see if you can do it again tomorrow.)

F150s are the top seller because they're a practical all-around vehicle, not because they stroke the owner.

Of course, everyone who's ever gotten their hands dirty already knows this.