SUV's (was "Re: mystery solved")

[Wojtek Sokolowski]

At 04:36 PM 5/22/01 -0700, John G. wrote:
>express this hegemonic ethic. As an empirical exercise, flip through the
pages
>of any of the house organs of the Big Green organizations (NRDC's _Amicus
>Journal_, for example) -- these pages are studded with SUV ad after SUV ad.
>What makes these ads work -- vindicating the manufacturers' decision to
target
>an upper middle-class liberal audience which forms the bedrock of Big Green's
>donor base -- is that they deeply resonate with this audience's highly
>ideological notion of what it means to be an environmentalist. 
>
>At the core of the average upper-middle class liberal's sense of cultural
>distinctiveness -- the all-important social identity that sets him/her apart
>from the teeming hordes of obnoxiously coarse average Amerrikuns (i.e. the
>working class with their professional wrestling, tabloid magazines, and
>monster trucks, and the country-club Republicans with their golf and their
>McMansions)
>is his/her enjoyment and appreciation of ostensibly "refined" experiences.

These two paragraphs seem to contradict each other, no?  SUC (sport utility
car) is a version of the monster truck, it even behaves like a monster
truck (in ads at least); it steamrolls everything else around it, other
cars, pristine environment, etc.  No wonder that SUCs are particularly
popular among rednecks/yo-boys with college degrees - basically a typical
petite nouveu riche element.  It is basically a more "upper"-class version
of the old trailer park habit of driving a truck rather than a car.  As
they say, you can take a person out of a trailer park, but it is not so
easy to take the trailer park out of a person.

Second- third- etc. generations of upper class-men/women have more refined
automobile tastes, such as MG.

wojtek