The burning Cybertruck is a little too on the nose
2025 should be a doozy.
When I first saw a Cybertruck with my own eyes, it was equally startling and unsettling. Reading about this dorky truck and watching numerous videos of it was not sufficient preparation for seeing one stopped at a red light a few blocks from my apartment. It was janky and disproportionately long and upright compared to its amusingly normal-sized tires, and it drove away with the grace and dexterity generally associated with a mini-fridge doing burpees. It sucked in ways that had complete strangers on the sidewalk making Oh My God faces to each other. We froze and leered at a large vehicle that looked like someone peeled a potato with a knife instead of a peeler. The stupid, tacky future that our culture’s reigning mediocrities are making every day can feel abstract and almost poignant when encountered through a screen, but seeing what amounts to the MAGA hat of the highway in real-time is to confront how gaudy and cheap and patently unwantable that future looks when it tries and flails to seem like progress.
After a week of following the roiling intra-chud civil war between Elon Musk and rightoid gremlins over H1-B visas—in which Based Patriots learned it is logically untenable to be a capitalist and a nationalist, as well as realizing a billionaire CEO’s interests may not align with theirs—the new year began with an image of a Cybertruck exploding in front of the Trump Hotel in Las Vegas. Banksy, you’ve done it again. The fruits of Elon’s labors will be rendered to ash in front of Trump’s golden monument, or something to that effect. Maybe we can get a Haitian voodoo priest to tell us what this all really means.
According to the New York Times, “military officials identified the driver as an Army master sergeant who had been on leave from active duty.” Judging by his manifesto of incoherent dogshit, it is bleakly hilarious that everyone can tell that blowing up this Cybertruck in this particular location was a symbolic act, but the symbolism is so confusing that no one can discern what message he was trying to send. As a piece of digital art, the image is a bit too on-the-nose for my taste, given how nakedly oligarchic the relationship between Musk and Trump has already revealed itself to be. Maybe it portends a second Trump term marred by a willing inability to accomplish anything because Elon can’t quit trying to convince America’s most gormless dropship barnacles that he is an unparalleled genius. Trump is loathe to share attention and Elon has nearly completed his uncanny transition into the single most unfortunate middle-aged divorced dad outcome of Butt-Head. This should make for an interesting governing dynamic.
What also makes this such a viral moment is the perfect juxtaposition between the gilded golden decor of the Trump Hotel and the stark grey hideousness of what is the vehicle version of There is no such thing as bad press. The Cybertruck was made to not look like other cars and trucks, which is a statement that would seem like a compliment if you have never seen a Cybertruck. It is stiff and somewhat car-shaped and looks like a vehicle from a ‘90s Nintendo game that never finished loading. There is a lot of vertical space serving no evident purpose, which makes it goofy and imposing in equal measure. It ages like brass if left out overnight in the rain. The Cybertruck looks like it belongs in a 1985 movie called CYBERTRUCK that opens with a scene of it driving down a dusty road and a suicide door opens and Arnold Schwarzenegger leans out and says, “Get In.” It’s like if Hot Wheels made a VHS rewinder. The Cybertruck is the chrome balls on the back of a pickup truck. I once found myself on the astonishingly grim Cybertruck Owners Club Forum, which is surely one of the best places on the internet to find adult men posting things like, “I just want to thank Mr. Musk for creating a car door that’s both heavy and sharp enough to sever my leg below the knee, which mine did, and which was both entirely my fault and an experience for which I am very grateful.” Now I’m imagining parents childproofing their Cybertrucks by putting foam guards around the corners.
We kicked off 2024 with the Bass Pro Shop skinny dipping guy and tunnel Jews. This is a rather blunt start to 2025, so either Elon has lost the mandate of heaven or Making America Great Again, Part 2 will be a wild ride of daily brain degeneration and corrupt incompetence.