ME TARZAN, YOU MINIVAN

By ANDREW FERGUSON

I mean to defend the minivan, for it is much maligned. It is not universally maligned, of course. I know of many women in particular who find the minivan the perfect vehicle for its intended purpose, which is the safe and efficient conveyance of half a dozen belligerent, sputtering children from home to soccer game to swim lesson to juvenile-detention center, where most of them belong. The people who malign the minivan--if the gender police will grant me this small observation--are almost exclusively men. And they are at last having their way. Sales of minivans are flat this year, while sales of larger sport-utility vehicles soar. As a commercial product, minivans may not be in crisis, but their troubles reflect the troubles of the American male, who is.

In middle-class and upper-middle-class homes the following scenario is played out daily. Wife and Husband have decided to buy a new family car, their last one having been rendered immobile by the accumulated weight of gum wads, empty juice boxes and broken plastic toys from McDonald's Happy Meals. Do they go with the stolid minivan or the racy sport-ute? They consult consumer guides. They compare prices. They make, if they have the stomach for it, a few desultory visits to a variety of reptilian car salesmen. And they gather promotional brochures.

The brochures for the minivans are bogus at first glance. Here is a Windstar--or is it a Previa? a Caravan?--parked in the circular drive of an Alpine castle, glistening after a spring shower. The image is idiotic: American marketing at its most cynical. But Husband lingers over the sport-utility brochures. The pages are heavy and slick, almost sensuous, like the leaves of some edible exotic plant. And the pictures! They are familiar to him from the thousands of commercials he saw during the N.B.A. finals. The Jeep Cherokee roars up the perilous incline of a desert mountain. Fearlessly the Land Rover grinds its way deep into a rain forest. A Dodge Durango perches at the very lip of the Grand Canyon, staring down upon a world of wusses. These sport-utility vehicles are rugged, invincible, built for the strenuous life...come to think of it, a lot like Husband himself. And so:

Wife: The minivan is much cheaper.

Husband: It's frumpy.

Wife: It seats more people.

Husband: I'd feel like a den mother driving that thing.

Wife: The gas mileage is better.

Husband: Why not just go the whole way and make me wear a muumuu?

More often than not, Husband is winning the argument, if we are to believe the sales figures. Bring together a group of professional men, and the disdain--the unmitigated contempt--for the minivan is palpable. But the minivan is so obviously inoffensive, and so clearly practical, that the contempt must be rooted in something deeper than mere taste. Part of it is the timeless lure of male fantasy. There were days when I myself refused to leave the house without my chaps, my six-gun and my ten-gallon hat. Or rather, my two-gallon hat. I was six years old. I thought I was Marshal Dillon. Nowadays a successful yuppie won't leave the house without his four-wheel-drive sport-utility vehicle boasting 225 lb.-ft. of torque. He's 40 years old, and he thinks he's Mark Trail.

But really he's just Mr. Peepers. The American male resists the minivan not because he fears he will be emasculated but because he knows he already has been. And of course he's right. His father fought off panzers in the Ardennes; Mr. Peepers gives money to Greenpeace, to protest nuclear testing. His father almost broke his back pouring molten steel eight hours a day; he does aerobics three times a week, in classes taught by a girl. His father drank boilermakers; he sips a nice double-decaf Frappaccino after a day pushing paper, designing software, filing briefs, nurturing children, in an economy we so delicately call "postindustrial."

What is left for our poor Mr. Peepers as a symbol of manly pride? The scenes would seem surreal if they weren't already so familiar. An investment banker braves the brutal terrain of Park Avenue in a vehicle built for climbing sand dunes under enemy fire. A claims adjuster clambers aboard a car designed to haul caribou carcasses, so he can pick up his wife's fuchsias at the suburban garden center. Did the old man flip his jeep on Omaha Beach? Then his son will have a Jeep too, to drop off the kids at the multiplex. Vroom-vroom.

I meant to defend the minivan, but I see I've only maligned the sport-ute. It's hard to avoid. A car, says the cliche, is indelibly an extension of self. With minivans the extension is straightforward and uncomplicated--a means of transportation for housewives and family men (family persons?). For the upper-middle-class American man circa 1997, the cliche is undone. The sport-utility vehicle is not an expression but a denial--a carapace, a hard shell concealing the soft center within.

Honk if you feel like Tarzan.