has anyone written about truck memorials, those custom vinyl decals that people put on the back windows of their trucks (or, less commonly, other vehicles) in honor of deceased friends & relatives? seems like a bizarre cultural practice to me. why a car, of all places? what's going on there? are you just like, acknowledging how you managed to get a nice truck without the traditionally exorbitant car payment which generally accompanies them?? (probably not, right?)
it occurs to me that it could also be a consequence of the ubiquity of lee brice's critically acclaimed (&, imo, deeply cringe) 'i drive your truck,' a song which i have just learned was inspired by the real dad of a medal of honor recipient who drove his dead son's truck & for some reason did interviews about this specific practice. 'i drive your truck' is a fascinating cultural object: it's about how you're sad about your dead friend, who would probably punch you in the arm for crying about it, so you drive his truck with his dog tags & his go army shirt in it, even though the truck has terrible gas mileage, to go 'tear up' back roads & a field [goin muddin, one surmises, but also it feels very pointed that driving & grief are presented as destructive]. i just find this complex like, hilariously on the nose: oh did your kid die in an imperialist war intended to, among other things, secure american access to oil? and you're so sad about it you go literally waste gas? bro. come on here bro. experience a scruple, or at least like, a moment of self-reflection here, bro
this song also feels like it's in continuity with another popular country song, david ball's 'riding with private malone,' which came out in august 2001 & reached its popular height in the wake of 9/11. it's about buying a vintage corvette from the mother of a guy who went off to die in vietnam (a note left in the car reads "if you're reading this then i didn't make it home / but for every dream that's shattered another one comes true / this car was once a dream of mine now it belongs to you"); the singer nearly dies in a car crash, but is saved by the ghost of the titular private malone. hilariously, wikipedia informs me that this song received critical acclaim for its 'subtlety' in expressing the american psyche after 9/11. the mind boggles, but then i suppose the bar was low
neither of these songs are the same flavor of vile, unabashed patriotism typified by, e.g., toby keith, but they're still making the same 'freedom isn't free' argument, centered on iconic cars: both vehicles are haunted by an american soldier, either with the ephemera of his life (brice lists dog tags, a dirty baseball cap, and a shirt, along with a radio station preset and a half-drunk bottle of gatorade, which one must assume is by now swollen with the noxious fumes of incidental fermentation) or more literally (ball notes that the radio picks up an oldies station, but also the speaker sees 'a soldier riding shotgun'). i'm fascinated by the way that cars are emotionally central, in these songs & in the memorial decal tradition. they're making a claim about what american soldiers are dying for (our ability to drive cars) & operating from the assumption that we all agree that this is a tragic but noble exchange, because cars are just like, so great. there's a sort of self-serving maneuver in both of the country songs in which they acknowledge the radio; as a person who spent a ton of time stuck in the back of other people's trucks listening against my will to the local country station, i can confirm that these songs both got a ton of play (chart data reflects this observation too). fascinating in a sick way, i think. there's some obvious stuff going on here about the narrow straits of country-star masculinity; trucks & vintage corvettes (especially ones which you fix up yourself, of course) are suitably cool & tough to cover for unmanly emotions like 'being sad.'
i know it's sort of popular currently to valorize some idea of american rural culture that is left-leaning or radical, and to imply if not insist that this culture is neatly separate from the toby keith of it all (consider, e.g., the popular 'ghost of dale earnhardt' page, which emphasizes the anti-police origins of NASCAR; needless to say, if you live in the deep south & know NASCAR fans, they are not a group of obvious commies. i picked this example because dale earnhardt jr. claimed that the ghost of senior saved him in a crash once & it felt thematically related, but others abound). the claim that there is a leftist rural history needs no defense because it is flatly true, but the idea that this legacy can be neatly disentangled from racist, reactionary, & imperialist tendencies is much more tenuous, in my opinion. american pickup truck culture (& to some extent other vehicles, which are treated metonymously with rural life; e.g. kenny chesney's deeply annoying tune 'she thinks my tractor's sexy') is so fuckin wild y'all
