Why I Drive a Hate Crime.

Making your pals feel bad (but not so bad as to lose them) is a refined social skill
highly regarded in my neck of the political woods. It has roots, ironically enough,
in traditional class snobbery as well as in the consumer chauvinism that first spread
from the pages of Playboy and Esquire into the popular consciousness of the early
1970s — a belief that the kind of stereo speakers we own or the wine we drink are
not merely practical choices but statements of identity.

Evaluations of other people’s tastes tend to be political judgments issued from the
bench of one’s own private Nuremberg. No longer content to merely dismiss a
friend’s contrarian tastes as gauche, we detect in them nothing less than a threat to
the planet — implying that the offender is a kind of consumer criminal. In today’s
casual conversations, you run the constant risk of being made to feel guilty (as
opposed to merely stupid) for wearing, eating or driving the wrong product at the
wrong time.

A few months ago, for example, a friend commented on the base villainy of
sports-utility vehicles and their owners. I politely told him that I was an SUV
owner. He looked at me as though I had just admitted to collecting human-skin
lampshades. His response was not new. “That’s your car?” a horrified colleague
had once asked me in my company’s parking lot. “I’m so disappointed — that’s the
kind someone in advertising would buy.” I had my reasons for owning my
Pathfinder, not the least of which has to do with the fact that I actually use it to go
off-road camping. No matter — my choice of transportation was so heinous that, in
the morality of the left, it amounted to a hate crime. AlterNet