THESE ‘DUDE BRO’ OFFENCES MUST STOP,
What makes men do weird things to their vehicles? While I’m never going to understand women who put eyelashes on their car’s headlights or reindeer antlers on minivans, the most I’m going to do is shrug. But in some kind of testosterone-fuelled pissing match, men do things to their vehicles that defy belief, and sometimes make you wonder just how deep the dumb can go.
Let’s start at the bottom. Truck nuts. Or, TruckNutz. You’ve seen them and they’re gross. While I am not a fan of decorating cars at all, I appreciate it’s a personal choice and I’d hardly push it on someone else. You want to bumper sticker/stick figure/support-ribbon your car? Have at it. But the message behind trolling the highways with a decorative set of testicles dangling from your pickup truck eludes me. To tell everyone else you’re a man? Pretty sure we can figure that out. To declare your potency? Shakespeare had a line about protesting too much.
But apart from having to look at them, your danglers are simply that: visual pollution. Surely, the more manly men could find a better way to assert their dominance, and they did.
“Rolling coal” is a truly masculine flipping of the bird to that whole fake climate change thing. Who do governments and manufacturers and those goddamned environmental groups think they are, bleating about what the internal combustion engine does to our planet?
“Rolling coal” used to be something you’d see in competition, as diesel rigs battled it out in truck pulls. Owners would modify (read: remove) emission controls to purposely under-aspirate an engine, resulting in huge belches of sooty exhaust and increased power. It’s a circus trick, usually reserved for circuses, and it’s been around for years. If you’re sitting in an exhaustsaturated arena, you paid good money to be soaking your lungs in that crap, as you have every right to do.
But in the name of belligerent children everywhere yelling “you can’t tell me what to do,” the sport of upchucking toxic confetti has moved onto public roads. There is a whole movement of masculine coal rollers who leave their trucknut-bearing brethren swinging in the breeze. Nothing says “man” more than bathing passersby or cyclists in a cloud of your carbon flatulence.
As far as environmental impact goes, I can’t work up enough energy to care, quite frankly. It’s a noisy and obnoxious practice. Again, it’s the statement, and I wonder just what that statement really reveals. In the United States, where the practice has become entrenched, it’s taken on a definite tone that can’t be dismissed as club practice or enthusiast. The message is aimed at those seeking to advance the Environmental Protection Act rather than flout it; you can’t run over a dude on a bike or driving a hybrid, but you sure can drench him in your spume of soot, and hopefully, capture it and post it online for your fans.
Anti-establishment messages are important and need to be heard; yet statements like this one just make a narrow group of men look like idiots. What is it you’re trying to say? Increased horsepower? Buy a bigger engine. Emission controls have been around for decades, stop sulking. Many popular websites devoted to the practice are all about hating Priuses. Wow. There’s an opponent worthy of your venom. We all know the Prius will tap out.
Boys will be boys, right?