(no subject)
This is a peice I wrote for a Slovenian journal edited by a friend of mine. The theme of the issue was "fear" and so I decided to take on the issue of fear as a cultural factor in the United States. I'm currently trying to revise it for a more general audience so any thoughts from any of you all would be much appreciated. It's in two parts as LJ wouldn't let me put the whole thing in one entry.
Snowed under with different writing projects right now, but the innocent immigrants are still on their way.
Fear and society in the United States: A quasi-ethnographic set of field notes
October 2005
published in Slovenian as
Strah in druzba v ZDA: Kvazi-etnografski zapisi s terena
in Emzin vol.15 no.s 3-4. 2005 pp. 51-55.
Growing up in England and later in New Zealand, during the 1960s and 1970s, the United States was mostly an object of ridicule: “Americans”(1), so we were told, were loud, stupid and pushy. Too consumed by their own sense of self-importance to have anything worth teaching the rest of the world except crass consumerism and selfishness raised to the status of high art. Much later, I realized that a great deal of this casual anti-Americanism was in fact the product of a particular historical moment: the occupation of both countries by large numbers of US servicemen during World War 2, and the accompanying demon that so often bedevils young, under-educated military men quartered in countries smaller and poorer than their own: the sense that they were the instruments of our liberation and so any resource (human, material or natural) of ours was also theirs by right.
Now, having lived and worked in the United States for almost 15 years, I find myself defending my adopted homeland, not because US aggression and arrogance do not exist, but because the lived reality of life in the United States is far more complex than these simple stereotypes allow. I have met people who manifested the very worst of the Ugly American stereotype: bigotry, selfishness, willful ignorance and religious fanaticism, and I have also met courageous people who struggle against those same evils with patience, creativity and stubborn outrage.
What all of these “Americans” share however is a certain haunted quality(2). For “Americans,” fear is a pervasive structure in the way they encounter the world around them (Glassner, 1999). Something which lurks beneath the surface and which impels people both to great acts of generosity and also to acts of equal poverty of spirit. This is not the only thing they share and “American culture” is far more complex than a single article such as this could ever hope to address. However, it is a thing that I have now seen in many different forms and it is a fitting subject for this volume. The same argument could doubtless be made for other “market democracies” and indeed in some other societies perhaps we could say that fear is much more present and justified than it might be on objective grounds in the United States.
What I present here are four ethnographic fragments drawn from the last ten years or so of my time in the United States. The unifying idea in each of these fragments is that these are all manifestations of the sense of insecurity and personal lack of control that pervades US society.
I argue that a good portion of this insecurity derives from the emphasis on individualism and self-actualization in modern US society. The ideology of the American Dream (most often associated with the late nineteenth century inspirational novelist Horatio Alger) argues that people are the authors of their own fates. Full personhood(3) in American society is therefore predicated on one’s ability to successfully carry out the dictates of the American Dream: self transformation and success. What haunts American culture then, is the specter of failure. The four ethnographic fragments I offer illustrate the consequences of several different responses to the possibility of failure. and the embeddedness of this fear within notions of personhood in US culture. I further argue that fear of the external other can best be understood as a response to this fear dictated at least in part by the cultural logic of the American Dream ideology.
Field note 1) No exit in St. Louis
In the summer of 1996 I visited a friend of mine who happened to live on the border zone between a “bad” neighborhood and a “good” one in St. Louis, Missouri. One evening we were out walking in the area around her house. We turned down Charteris Avenue and walked towards Lowell St (4), the houses on the right side of the street were noticeably larger and better built. There were well-kept gardens, scrubbed brickwork and large, leaded glass windows. The houses on the other side of the street were a mixture: some were smaller versions of the prosperous homes on the right side of the street, but most were shabbier, three-storey multi-family homes with vinyl siding and flat tar-paper roofs. On the street corners on the left hand side, there were boarded-up store fronts, or small take-out joints and convenience stores with heavy iron shutters and plexiglass partitions to separate the customer and the owner. We were walking right on the frontier. There was no no-mans land between us, just a wide two-lane road with featureless cement berms, and generally vacant square holes in the concrete sidewalks where occasional courageous homesteaders planted small flower gardens, but which were otherwise only occupied by the empty Miller Lite cans, broken glass and cigarette butts. It need not surprise anyone who knows St. Louis to know that the neighborhood on the left side of the street was predominantly black, while the residents of the neighborhood on the right side of the street were predominantly white (US Census Bureau 2000a, 2000b).
The closer we got to Florissant Avenue. The more the houses on the right hand side took on the look of gated communities. There were high walls (brick with ivy to be sure but topped with iron spikes or sometimes a hint of razor wire) running the length of the avenue, and now the houses were uniform in sporting the small white lawn signs that proclaimed: “Protected by Such-and-such Security. 24 Hour Armed Response”. Tasteful burglar alarms clung to the sides of houses about 8 feet from the ground and large wrought-iron gates with baroque-ish pillars stood guard at the side streets. In some cases (I counted 5 or 6 in a 10 block walk), the side streets themselves had been completely blocked by massive reinforced-concrete barriers of the kind used to divide highways. There was no way from the avenue we were walking on into these attractively manicured side streets with their large well-pruned shade trees. My friend and I walked up and down a couple of these side streets. They were certainly more pleasant to walk on than the concrete and asphalt-dominated left side of the avenue. But curiously quiet. Maybe a dog. Maybe someone walking to their car. But only very occasionally. It was evening and all good citizens I suppose should be inside with the TV on, the blinds drawn and (one equally supposes), 24 hour armed response a mere phone call away.
The home town of black icons like Miles Davis, and Katherine Dunham, St. Louis is now a
rustbelt town with a highly segregated population, a largely suburban middle class, a desperately poor, predominantly black inner city and no real prospects for general prosperity. Even after living for many years in Boston, a town where racial animus has been headline news since the 1970s, St. Louis was still more than a bit shocking: White people scurried past black people in the streets. Eyes averted, heads down. Black people guarded their turf with equal though culturally distinct vehemence: A certain gaze. A slight hardening of the shoulders. My friend was told by a young black man that she should “get with a real man” when walking down another street with me (she is Black and I am Asian). At the risk of sounding overly romantic about Boston, my subjective assessment of the situation is that in Boston, people consciously occupied the same space, whether they liked one another or not, but in St. Louis there was no “we”, only “us” and “them”. For the most part though, both blacks and whites seemed to contrive to avoid each other more than anything else. As in most parts of the West and Midwest, and anywhere suburban in the U.S., the car is the primary means of transport. Ensconced inside one’s vehicle one has no need to interact with others, and one can securely traverse “hostile” territory with windows up, a/c on and all doors firmly locked. There was an air of a city under siege about St. Louis, but the enemy the St. Louisans were in a constant state of readiness to oppose seemed to be one another.
White fear of black people is a phenomenon much commented upon by social analysts in the US (see for example, Dalton 1995, Haley 1965, hooks 1992, Hutchinson 1996; Williams 1991). In addition to its crucial role in preserving racial hierarchy and white privilege in the United States, fear plays an important role in defining black people as outside the body politic, for many white people (see the important historical work of authors such as Morgan, 1975, Ignatiev 1995, Roediger 1991, and Takaki 1990 for example). Black mistrust, distress and hostility towards white people has a similar lengthy history (see for example Du Bois 1989, Gates 1994, Scott 1990), though one could be forgiven for pointing out that black fear of whites was much more empirically justified.
Whatever his faults, the agitprop film maker Michael Moore (2002) has done a great deal to raise the level of public awareness about the role that fear plays in US society. For me, the most telling moment in the film “Bowling for Columbine” was an interview with a Canadian youth on the subject of why Canadians even in Toronto, do not lock their front doors:
Canadian: “You think as Americans (uh) the lock’s keeping people out of your place. We as Canadians (uh) see it more as (uh) when we lock the door, we’re imprisoning ourselves inside” (Moore 2002).
For “Americans”, Moore’s interviewee raises the issue of the nature of “security” and leads us persuasively to the conclusion that perception of threat is the key issue. In St. Louis, what I saw were wealthy people imprisoning themselves inside miniature “fortress Americas” (5) out of fear. That the fear of crime is bound up with race and class differences seemed at least to me, an indicator of the ongoing state of racial hierarchy in St. Louis and to a larger state of isolation and suspicion that has seriously damaged the idea of community in the United States.
Field note 2) The university’s quality of life survey
Just recently, my university did a survey which asked students and faculty about the quality of life at the institution. Notable among its findings was that campus security was the number one concern for both students and faculty. The university where I teach is primarily based at an urban campus. It is adjacent to Downtown, the central business district of Honolulu, and to Chinatown, an area traditionally associated with high crime, low income housing, and relatively high numbers of homeless people. Adjacent to the campus is a pedestrian mall where a relatively wide cross section of Honolulu residents (professionals who work in the Downtown area, local business people, local residents, college students, retired people and, yes, some homeless people) go about their respective lives in a relatively small area.
Crime statistics available for the last few years note that there have been relatively few assaults, muggings and other serious crimes in the immediate vicinity of the university (Honolulu Police Department, 2004). Hawaii as a state has one of the lowest rates for serious personal crime (excluding property crimes such as vehicle theft, burglary or petty theft) in the entire country (Honolulu Police Department 2004). As far as the university itself is concerned, the crime statistics made available on the web are quite extraordinarily low. For any community of several thousand in the US or anywhere else in the industrialized world, these statistics would be cause for celebration.
So why are the students and faculty at my university so worried about crime? The answer to this question, I believe, lies in the extent to which the personal has become fetishized in “American” culture. I have been struck again and again by the way in which people in the US display a personalized response to almost everything. When you are robbed, when your car is hit in the parking lot, when someone brings up an opinion that you do not agree with, it is a personal attack upon you (not your property, not your wealth, not your status in life, but you as an individual, well-meaning, respectable human being who loves his or her family and cares for small animals). In discussions with people both in the wake of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and at other places and times, I have been struck by the extent to which people’s responses to crisis were couched in terms of fears for personal safety despite the astronomically small likelihood that terrorist events would actually occur in most places in the United States (see similar points made by Brzezinski, 2004 with regard to Homeland Security policy). One of my colleagues relates an anecdote she heard from relatives in the city of Shreveport, Louisiana, a small industrial city of about 200,000 people whose economic mainstays include General Motors, Harrah’s Casino and an nearby US Airforce base. According to this story, the city government temporarily removed all the street-side US mail boxes in Shreveport in response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11, presumably to foil potential terrorist activity within the city. This story, if true illustrates the panic with which people will confront an unprecedented threat. If untrue, in my judgment it still represents an interesting commentary upon the perceptions of some Shreveport residents regarding the nature of city government (see also Turner 1994).
I would argue that fear of crime together now with fear of terrorism, serves as a way of marking the boundaries between the known and the unknown, and between the areas of life where people feel that they have control over their lives and the areas where they do not. That “Americans” should be so concerned with crime and security, particularly in places where crime is empirically not a great danger, suggests that the problem is internal to “American culture” rather than a response to genuine external threats, a point that Moore (2004) also makes in “Bowling for Columbine” (see also Glassner, 1999).
Field note 3) SUV ads: Security on the road
When four-wheel drive capable sport-utility vehicles (SUVs) first appeared on the US domestic car market about 10 years ago, the advertisements for these giant, fuel-inefficient trucks masquerading as passenger vehicles emphasized their rugged nature, their ability to go over any terrain and the size and power of their engines. For New Englanders trapped in several feet of snow each winter, the SUV seemed like a fantasy vehicle with real application. Four wheel drive and a high wheel-base were definitely useful for negotiating deep snow drifts and icy roads. However, for the vast majority of people in the United States who bought SUVs, there seemed to be little or no genuine application of these off-road capabilities. As Malcolm Gladwell has pointed out (Gladwell, 2004), the SUV was sold as a symbol for the fantasy of rugged individualism and personal safety. Interestingly, almost from the beginning, the safety aspects were more important to the consumers than the ones emphasizing the power to go anywhere.
“According to [the author Keith] Bradsher, internal industry market research concluded that SUVs tend to be bought by people who are insecure, vain, self-centered and self-absorbed, who are frequently nervous about their marriages and who lack confidence in their driving skills” (Gladwell 2004: ??)
Gladwell also points out that the features of SUV design that make SUV owners feel safe are often things that make the vehicles more dangerous rather than less so: the heavy steel frame of the truck chasis makes the vehicle hard to steer, the height of the cab above the road contributes to the SUV’s high center of gravity and thus its tendency to roll over, features such as cup-holders, and DVD players give the impression that the SUV is home-like thus contributing to a sense of security which may not be justified given the inexperienced nature of many first-time SUV drivers with the road-handling and steering capabilities of a truck. Moreover, the SUV’s high profile means that it negates many of the safety features found on ordinary cars. As Gladwell (2004) and others have noted, an SUV driver is far more likely to kill people in the other vehicle in a collision than would the driver of a conventional sedan.
This idea of security as the primary selling point of the SUV is now being exploited by a newer generation of television advertising in the US which stresses features primarily associated with family-friendly vehicles such as minivans: SUVs are now being marketed using side airbags, removable seats and of course, cup-holders and DVD players. Television advertisements currently feature families, or women driving their children around town, in addition to or even instead of the single men or young heterosexual couples in active wear who were the protagonists in earlier SUV advertisements.
As a symbol, the SUV probably represents a range of things, but the SUV buyer’s association of these vehicles with security is something which has clearly been embraced by manufacturers. I would argue that the SUV takes on an even more mythic significance in that it might represent the consumer’s ability to use technology to take on and overcome both metaphorical and symbolic rough terrain encountered in the course of middle-class suburban life. Driving to work in a huge, powerful truck, one might be able to imagine one’s self simultaneously out in the natural wilderness where the SUVs off-road capabilities would be an asset, but also that one is safe and secure inside a moving house which protects its occupants from a potentially dangerous actual urban wilderness outside the vehicle.
Technology here is deployed again to shield and protect the suburban and upwardly mobile against imagined predatory outsiders and competitors in the jungle of modern life
Snowed under with different writing projects right now, but the innocent immigrants are still on their way.
Fear and society in the United States: A quasi-ethnographic set of field notes
October 2005
published in Slovenian as
Strah in druzba v ZDA: Kvazi-etnografski zapisi s terena
in Emzin vol.15 no.s 3-4. 2005 pp. 51-55.
Growing up in England and later in New Zealand, during the 1960s and 1970s, the United States was mostly an object of ridicule: “Americans”(1), so we were told, were loud, stupid and pushy. Too consumed by their own sense of self-importance to have anything worth teaching the rest of the world except crass consumerism and selfishness raised to the status of high art. Much later, I realized that a great deal of this casual anti-Americanism was in fact the product of a particular historical moment: the occupation of both countries by large numbers of US servicemen during World War 2, and the accompanying demon that so often bedevils young, under-educated military men quartered in countries smaller and poorer than their own: the sense that they were the instruments of our liberation and so any resource (human, material or natural) of ours was also theirs by right.
Now, having lived and worked in the United States for almost 15 years, I find myself defending my adopted homeland, not because US aggression and arrogance do not exist, but because the lived reality of life in the United States is far more complex than these simple stereotypes allow. I have met people who manifested the very worst of the Ugly American stereotype: bigotry, selfishness, willful ignorance and religious fanaticism, and I have also met courageous people who struggle against those same evils with patience, creativity and stubborn outrage.
What all of these “Americans” share however is a certain haunted quality(2). For “Americans,” fear is a pervasive structure in the way they encounter the world around them (Glassner, 1999). Something which lurks beneath the surface and which impels people both to great acts of generosity and also to acts of equal poverty of spirit. This is not the only thing they share and “American culture” is far more complex than a single article such as this could ever hope to address. However, it is a thing that I have now seen in many different forms and it is a fitting subject for this volume. The same argument could doubtless be made for other “market democracies” and indeed in some other societies perhaps we could say that fear is much more present and justified than it might be on objective grounds in the United States.
What I present here are four ethnographic fragments drawn from the last ten years or so of my time in the United States. The unifying idea in each of these fragments is that these are all manifestations of the sense of insecurity and personal lack of control that pervades US society.
I argue that a good portion of this insecurity derives from the emphasis on individualism and self-actualization in modern US society. The ideology of the American Dream (most often associated with the late nineteenth century inspirational novelist Horatio Alger) argues that people are the authors of their own fates. Full personhood(3) in American society is therefore predicated on one’s ability to successfully carry out the dictates of the American Dream: self transformation and success. What haunts American culture then, is the specter of failure. The four ethnographic fragments I offer illustrate the consequences of several different responses to the possibility of failure. and the embeddedness of this fear within notions of personhood in US culture. I further argue that fear of the external other can best be understood as a response to this fear dictated at least in part by the cultural logic of the American Dream ideology.
Field note 1) No exit in St. Louis
In the summer of 1996 I visited a friend of mine who happened to live on the border zone between a “bad” neighborhood and a “good” one in St. Louis, Missouri. One evening we were out walking in the area around her house. We turned down Charteris Avenue and walked towards Lowell St (4), the houses on the right side of the street were noticeably larger and better built. There were well-kept gardens, scrubbed brickwork and large, leaded glass windows. The houses on the other side of the street were a mixture: some were smaller versions of the prosperous homes on the right side of the street, but most were shabbier, three-storey multi-family homes with vinyl siding and flat tar-paper roofs. On the street corners on the left hand side, there were boarded-up store fronts, or small take-out joints and convenience stores with heavy iron shutters and plexiglass partitions to separate the customer and the owner. We were walking right on the frontier. There was no no-mans land between us, just a wide two-lane road with featureless cement berms, and generally vacant square holes in the concrete sidewalks where occasional courageous homesteaders planted small flower gardens, but which were otherwise only occupied by the empty Miller Lite cans, broken glass and cigarette butts. It need not surprise anyone who knows St. Louis to know that the neighborhood on the left side of the street was predominantly black, while the residents of the neighborhood on the right side of the street were predominantly white (US Census Bureau 2000a, 2000b).
The closer we got to Florissant Avenue. The more the houses on the right hand side took on the look of gated communities. There were high walls (brick with ivy to be sure but topped with iron spikes or sometimes a hint of razor wire) running the length of the avenue, and now the houses were uniform in sporting the small white lawn signs that proclaimed: “Protected by Such-and-such Security. 24 Hour Armed Response”. Tasteful burglar alarms clung to the sides of houses about 8 feet from the ground and large wrought-iron gates with baroque-ish pillars stood guard at the side streets. In some cases (I counted 5 or 6 in a 10 block walk), the side streets themselves had been completely blocked by massive reinforced-concrete barriers of the kind used to divide highways. There was no way from the avenue we were walking on into these attractively manicured side streets with their large well-pruned shade trees. My friend and I walked up and down a couple of these side streets. They were certainly more pleasant to walk on than the concrete and asphalt-dominated left side of the avenue. But curiously quiet. Maybe a dog. Maybe someone walking to their car. But only very occasionally. It was evening and all good citizens I suppose should be inside with the TV on, the blinds drawn and (one equally supposes), 24 hour armed response a mere phone call away.
The home town of black icons like Miles Davis, and Katherine Dunham, St. Louis is now a
rustbelt town with a highly segregated population, a largely suburban middle class, a desperately poor, predominantly black inner city and no real prospects for general prosperity. Even after living for many years in Boston, a town where racial animus has been headline news since the 1970s, St. Louis was still more than a bit shocking: White people scurried past black people in the streets. Eyes averted, heads down. Black people guarded their turf with equal though culturally distinct vehemence: A certain gaze. A slight hardening of the shoulders. My friend was told by a young black man that she should “get with a real man” when walking down another street with me (she is Black and I am Asian). At the risk of sounding overly romantic about Boston, my subjective assessment of the situation is that in Boston, people consciously occupied the same space, whether they liked one another or not, but in St. Louis there was no “we”, only “us” and “them”. For the most part though, both blacks and whites seemed to contrive to avoid each other more than anything else. As in most parts of the West and Midwest, and anywhere suburban in the U.S., the car is the primary means of transport. Ensconced inside one’s vehicle one has no need to interact with others, and one can securely traverse “hostile” territory with windows up, a/c on and all doors firmly locked. There was an air of a city under siege about St. Louis, but the enemy the St. Louisans were in a constant state of readiness to oppose seemed to be one another.
White fear of black people is a phenomenon much commented upon by social analysts in the US (see for example, Dalton 1995, Haley 1965, hooks 1992, Hutchinson 1996; Williams 1991). In addition to its crucial role in preserving racial hierarchy and white privilege in the United States, fear plays an important role in defining black people as outside the body politic, for many white people (see the important historical work of authors such as Morgan, 1975, Ignatiev 1995, Roediger 1991, and Takaki 1990 for example). Black mistrust, distress and hostility towards white people has a similar lengthy history (see for example Du Bois 1989, Gates 1994, Scott 1990), though one could be forgiven for pointing out that black fear of whites was much more empirically justified.
Whatever his faults, the agitprop film maker Michael Moore (2002) has done a great deal to raise the level of public awareness about the role that fear plays in US society. For me, the most telling moment in the film “Bowling for Columbine” was an interview with a Canadian youth on the subject of why Canadians even in Toronto, do not lock their front doors:
Canadian: “You think as Americans (uh) the lock’s keeping people out of your place. We as Canadians (uh) see it more as (uh) when we lock the door, we’re imprisoning ourselves inside” (Moore 2002).
For “Americans”, Moore’s interviewee raises the issue of the nature of “security” and leads us persuasively to the conclusion that perception of threat is the key issue. In St. Louis, what I saw were wealthy people imprisoning themselves inside miniature “fortress Americas” (5) out of fear. That the fear of crime is bound up with race and class differences seemed at least to me, an indicator of the ongoing state of racial hierarchy in St. Louis and to a larger state of isolation and suspicion that has seriously damaged the idea of community in the United States.
Field note 2) The university’s quality of life survey
Just recently, my university did a survey which asked students and faculty about the quality of life at the institution. Notable among its findings was that campus security was the number one concern for both students and faculty. The university where I teach is primarily based at an urban campus. It is adjacent to Downtown, the central business district of Honolulu, and to Chinatown, an area traditionally associated with high crime, low income housing, and relatively high numbers of homeless people. Adjacent to the campus is a pedestrian mall where a relatively wide cross section of Honolulu residents (professionals who work in the Downtown area, local business people, local residents, college students, retired people and, yes, some homeless people) go about their respective lives in a relatively small area.
Crime statistics available for the last few years note that there have been relatively few assaults, muggings and other serious crimes in the immediate vicinity of the university (Honolulu Police Department, 2004). Hawaii as a state has one of the lowest rates for serious personal crime (excluding property crimes such as vehicle theft, burglary or petty theft) in the entire country (Honolulu Police Department 2004). As far as the university itself is concerned, the crime statistics made available on the web are quite extraordinarily low. For any community of several thousand in the US or anywhere else in the industrialized world, these statistics would be cause for celebration.
So why are the students and faculty at my university so worried about crime? The answer to this question, I believe, lies in the extent to which the personal has become fetishized in “American” culture. I have been struck again and again by the way in which people in the US display a personalized response to almost everything. When you are robbed, when your car is hit in the parking lot, when someone brings up an opinion that you do not agree with, it is a personal attack upon you (not your property, not your wealth, not your status in life, but you as an individual, well-meaning, respectable human being who loves his or her family and cares for small animals). In discussions with people both in the wake of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and at other places and times, I have been struck by the extent to which people’s responses to crisis were couched in terms of fears for personal safety despite the astronomically small likelihood that terrorist events would actually occur in most places in the United States (see similar points made by Brzezinski, 2004 with regard to Homeland Security policy). One of my colleagues relates an anecdote she heard from relatives in the city of Shreveport, Louisiana, a small industrial city of about 200,000 people whose economic mainstays include General Motors, Harrah’s Casino and an nearby US Airforce base. According to this story, the city government temporarily removed all the street-side US mail boxes in Shreveport in response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11, presumably to foil potential terrorist activity within the city. This story, if true illustrates the panic with which people will confront an unprecedented threat. If untrue, in my judgment it still represents an interesting commentary upon the perceptions of some Shreveport residents regarding the nature of city government (see also Turner 1994).
I would argue that fear of crime together now with fear of terrorism, serves as a way of marking the boundaries between the known and the unknown, and between the areas of life where people feel that they have control over their lives and the areas where they do not. That “Americans” should be so concerned with crime and security, particularly in places where crime is empirically not a great danger, suggests that the problem is internal to “American culture” rather than a response to genuine external threats, a point that Moore (2004) also makes in “Bowling for Columbine” (see also Glassner, 1999).
Field note 3) SUV ads: Security on the road
When four-wheel drive capable sport-utility vehicles (SUVs) first appeared on the US domestic car market about 10 years ago, the advertisements for these giant, fuel-inefficient trucks masquerading as passenger vehicles emphasized their rugged nature, their ability to go over any terrain and the size and power of their engines. For New Englanders trapped in several feet of snow each winter, the SUV seemed like a fantasy vehicle with real application. Four wheel drive and a high wheel-base were definitely useful for negotiating deep snow drifts and icy roads. However, for the vast majority of people in the United States who bought SUVs, there seemed to be little or no genuine application of these off-road capabilities. As Malcolm Gladwell has pointed out (Gladwell, 2004), the SUV was sold as a symbol for the fantasy of rugged individualism and personal safety. Interestingly, almost from the beginning, the safety aspects were more important to the consumers than the ones emphasizing the power to go anywhere.
“According to [the author Keith] Bradsher, internal industry market research concluded that SUVs tend to be bought by people who are insecure, vain, self-centered and self-absorbed, who are frequently nervous about their marriages and who lack confidence in their driving skills” (Gladwell 2004: ??)
Gladwell also points out that the features of SUV design that make SUV owners feel safe are often things that make the vehicles more dangerous rather than less so: the heavy steel frame of the truck chasis makes the vehicle hard to steer, the height of the cab above the road contributes to the SUV’s high center of gravity and thus its tendency to roll over, features such as cup-holders, and DVD players give the impression that the SUV is home-like thus contributing to a sense of security which may not be justified given the inexperienced nature of many first-time SUV drivers with the road-handling and steering capabilities of a truck. Moreover, the SUV’s high profile means that it negates many of the safety features found on ordinary cars. As Gladwell (2004) and others have noted, an SUV driver is far more likely to kill people in the other vehicle in a collision than would the driver of a conventional sedan.
This idea of security as the primary selling point of the SUV is now being exploited by a newer generation of television advertising in the US which stresses features primarily associated with family-friendly vehicles such as minivans: SUVs are now being marketed using side airbags, removable seats and of course, cup-holders and DVD players. Television advertisements currently feature families, or women driving their children around town, in addition to or even instead of the single men or young heterosexual couples in active wear who were the protagonists in earlier SUV advertisements.
As a symbol, the SUV probably represents a range of things, but the SUV buyer’s association of these vehicles with security is something which has clearly been embraced by manufacturers. I would argue that the SUV takes on an even more mythic significance in that it might represent the consumer’s ability to use technology to take on and overcome both metaphorical and symbolic rough terrain encountered in the course of middle-class suburban life. Driving to work in a huge, powerful truck, one might be able to imagine one’s self simultaneously out in the natural wilderness where the SUVs off-road capabilities would be an asset, but also that one is safe and secure inside a moving house which protects its occupants from a potentially dangerous actual urban wilderness outside the vehicle.
Technology here is deployed again to shield and protect the suburban and upwardly mobile against imagined predatory outsiders and competitors in the jungle of modern life