9 A Short Treatise on Pickup Trucks in American Culture

A pickup truck means you are a person with something that needs doing, something big that needs doing, something that needs hauling from one place to another, that needs loading and unloading, that needs to public and proud in the open bed.

A pickup truck means you are a person who is not too proud or too showy, a pickup truck gives you something to endlessly show off how much it can haul what kind of new spark plugs gives you amazing power to pull what kind of tires what kind of toolbox what you’ve done this week to the carburetor how you’ve tuned to have just a little more roar than is absolutely necessary.

A pickup truck is manly, is masculine, is butch, construction butch farm butch owner of store of heavy stuff butch, is proof you can do what needs doing.

A pickup truck is practical because every real job has stuff to haul.

While the car replaced the carriage horse, the pickup truck replaced the wagon hitched to two massive Belgians.

Pickup trucks come in two varieties: the show-off model and the working model. Many farms may have one or more of each.

The amount of rust on a pickup truck is in direct proportion to how it is has served its purpose.

Pickup trucks have hauled people and animals fleeing danger. Pickup trucks have hauled Black men to lynchings. Pickup trucks have moved hunters to the woods and animals home to eat. Pickup trucks have hauled new appliances home and hauled stolen goods away. The purpose of a pickup truck is to haul. To what use people put that purpose cannot be blamed on the truck.

A pickup truck is all about class. Is the Clampetts. Is Ma and Pa Kettle and Poppa Walton and Okies and Good Ole Boys.

Pickup trucks, when driven by white men, do seem oft to sport a confederate flag decal or four.

The bench seats of pickup trucks have been the holy lair of teenage sex since the pickup truck was invented. One can say of a pickup truck that it is has been in a family for three generations. One can say of three generations of a family that they have been in a pickup truck.