Have you heard of rolling coal? It’s “one of the Obama era’s great conservative subcultures,” says David Weigel in his article on coal rolling for Slate. It’s an antiliberal protest using diesel pick-up trucks modified so that the engine can be tricked into burping out a great sooty cloud of smoke on command.
Watching the videos online, you might be struck that it’s the automotive equivalent of beating your chest, shouting “yee-haw” and firing your guns into the air. Popular ones depict trucks slowing down by pedestrians and asking, “Do you smoke?”, and when they say, “Yes” (I haven’t seen anywhere they say ‘no’), the device is triggered as the truck accelerates away, actually hiding the walker in a black cloud, just like in the cartoons. Another video has a truck puffing smoke at every cyclist it passes. One, which I reluctantly found amusing, has a truck with its smokestacks labelled “Prius repellent”, and proceeds to cause a following Prius to drop away in alarm by emitting a huge cloud.
My learning about coal rolling came at a good time in our lives—just as we were about to leave India and move back to the US. It was a move we greatly looked forward to, for Southern California had become home. But we had to remind ourselves that this move wasn’t a panacea... while life in the US offers a lot of breathing room, it comes with its own set of problems.
An American might roll his or her eyes at this point, thinking, “Here we go again with some redneck super-conservative outliers being taken to stand for America as a whole.”
Removing friction
No, I’ve been in the country long enough to know that coal rolling would shock most Americans, even though, as Weigel begins his article with the sentence, “Forty-five second YouTube clips don’t come any more American than ‘Prius Repellent’”. In my two weeks here, it’s been as wonderful as I hoped: the space, the mountains, the parks, the orderliness and most of all, the ease of getting things done—from setting up phone lines to buying cars.
But after two years away, I find myself struck again by the excess that I’d been inured to during my previous stint here. And as for how easy it is to get hings done, the underlying edge it’s there to remove friction along paths on which money travels. Even so, it’s easy to be intoxicated by the idea that anything you think of is available—either at some shop up the road, or two days away online. If I want to administer my dog a pill, and don’t want to push my hand down his slimy throat, there’s a shop that’s bigger than all but the biggest hypermarkets back home devoted just to pet products, that sells a packaged dog food called a “pill pocket”. It’s essentially treat with a hole in it to let you hide a pill inside. In my head, rolling coal and this level of product specialisation aren’t too many worlds apart.
And so while I feel I’m back home in many ways, I’m glad of the opportunity to see the excess again through a little bit of the lens I had when I first came here (though back then it was unfairly weighted, as is common with so many first-time American visitors).
Coal rolling is shocking, but it makes you think about how much of our own cutbacks and savings are mere preening. We’re all coal rolling in some way or the other, it’s just that our smoke is coming from someone else’s smokestack.
Gautam Raja is a journalist based in Los Angeles, USA.
