Suburbans

(Published in The State, Columbia, SC 12/8/97)

Today I turned onto the street alongside First Presbyterian church in Spartanburg and found myself, I kid you not, in a line of eight Suburbans, what a friend calls "suburban assault vehicles."

The Suburbans were all waiting to pick up children at the church kindergarten, blocking the thru-street. If the Union had built such huge tankers, Rhett Butler would never have gotten a single blockade runner through.

Each Suburban was piloted by a young mother on a cellular phone. All the vehicles had their windows up and the air on, though it was a blustery fall day; there were no repeat colors; I'm told the retail on these monsters can approach $50,000. I felt as if I had stalled right in the middle of the current zeitgeist.

Later in afternoon, after I had extracted myself from that snarl of petroleum pachyderms, I called a friend who lives in the upper middle class suburbs on the west side of Spartanburg. I asked her to explain about Suburbans and those ubiquitous cellular phones.

"Oh, it's the auto flavor of the month for the soccer moms," she said. "You know, in the 80s it was mini-vans; now it's the Suburbans."

But don't you think it goes deeper, I asked.

"Well, it might speak to this obsession I see out here with safety. The world is a hostile place."

Suburbs, Suburbans and safety, I say. Tell me more.

She laughed. "Actually, we buy these whales because we want to protect our kids. We surround them with as much metal as possible. You know, it's like a $30,000 child safety seat that could take a direct hit from a cruise missile."

How about the cellular phones? I ask. What are they about?

"We carry the phone so we're safe at all times. You know, flat tires, lost Visas. If you venture downtown, you're only a phone call away from the SWAT team."

But isn't it also a chatty thing? I asked. I told her I'd seen the soccer moms smiling while they talked.

"Oh yeah," she said. "It's a chatty thing; it's like having a $30,000 phone booth as well."

During the Sixties it was popular to talk about "conspicuous consumption," a term meant to heap shame on anyone with a hint of true social consciousness. It referred to the material excesses of the the successful capitalist. Surely just because you could buy did not mean you should.

I had plenty of time to think, sitting behind the eight Suburbans, and I don't have a cellular phone, so there was nobody to call. I propose that we create a new term for the 90s: "conspicuous security," and we reserve it for anyone who drives a Suburban, carries a cellular phone, and lives in a gated community.