The Electron Pencil

A friend of mine just bought himself a shiny new Prius. He got it in a primary color and you can see it coming from a long ways away.

This friend — let’s call him Eli — had to jump through scads of hoops before he got his new ride. He lives out in the hinterlands, farm country, but regularly comes in to Bloomington for a variety of reasons. Mainly, I’d guess, because he wishes he could live here.

But his family owns a big farm and so he must help with all the things farmers do. Now, I haven’t the foggiest idea what most of those things are other than planting seeds, throwing a little water on the soil, waiting a few months, and then reaping what ever pops out of the ground. This farming business entails one hell of a lot more than that, Eli assures me, and I believe him. Some of the wheeled machines a large farmer must have carry six-figure price tags and are equipped with GPS devices that actually assist in the creation of those straight lines you see whenever you drive past corn or soy fields.

And, by the way, if aliens ever do visit the Earth and happen to pick this state to land in, they’ll come away certain that the only two flora on this planet are the aforementioned corn and soy. People rave about tomatoes and carrots and cucumbers and all other sorts of vegetation they’ve copped at the weekend farmers market, but I sure as hell have never seen fields rife with them. Indiana appears to be the center of the corn and soy universe.

Fittingly, Eli’s family’s farm grows corn and soy. And he drives a big air-conditioned tractor, with LCD readouts and video screens and navigation systems that can guide him to Neptune.

But that big tractor runs only in the fields. For road driving and the occasional drag race, he must hop into his shiny, new Prius. It took Eli about five or six months to get his Prius, mainly because the dealer he went to signed him to a deal and next thing anybody knew, there were no Priuses available. Something having to do with supply chains and cargo ships parked in the Pacific outside California’s ports. While boatloads of Priuses were waiting to be docked, the price of said hot rod jumped through the roof. A Prius that listed for at $35,000 last summer suddenly skyrocketed to nearly fifty Gs.

The way Eli figures it, the dealer felt loath to sell him his primary-color four-door at last year’s price. But that’s what Eli’s contract called for. Eli says the dealer likely kept telling him his Prius hadn’t arrived week after week, month after month, every time Eli called, in hopes Eli would say Hell with it, I’ll go somewhere else.

But Eli’s a determined fellow. A lot of Indiana farmers are. Making a living growing stuff in the ground demands a hard head and a stubborn nature. Eli was determined to get his Prius at last year’s price as his contract called for. Four months passed and the phone calls between Eli and his dealer became less than chummy. Eli eventually contacted Toyota’s corporate office and demanded satisfaction. Not even that worked.

Eli demanded his earnest money back and, at first, the dealer told him to take a hike but, as I say, Eli being stubborn, he insisted. Finally the dealer sent Eli a check for his money and implied he hoped never to see Eli again in this life or the next.

Eli called another dealer, asked for the same Prius and was told, mirabile dictu, that very model was sitting in the lot waiting for someone like him. So Eli hopped in his old clunker, dashed over, and bought the car in record time.

Eli was happy. His car gleamed. As indicated earlier, he lives out in the sticks and so can be seen coming down the road from miles away. Especially now that’s he’s driving a primary color car. And a Prius.

What Eli forgot is the Prius is more than just a hybrid import in this weird age. It’s s symbol, a bete noir for the MAGA set. And there are MAGA people galore in Eli’s neck of the woods.

Eli has been subjected to harassment from strangers since the day he drove his new car off the lot. Several times a week people flip the bird at him, shout insults, give him foul looks, and worse.

Last week, Eli was tooling down a country road at 60 mph and saw, far up ahead, a car pull up to the intersection. The car had plenty of time to either cross the road or make a turn but, oddly, it sat there, as if waiting for Eli’s Prius to pass. As soon as Eli went by, the car pulled out after him, caught up with him, and, overtaking him, tossed a big rock at his hood.

Eli’s shiny new paint was chipped all the way down to the primer. His hood was dented, too. Now he has to get his entire hood repainted and the dent lifted out. It’ll cost him real money for the repair.

“I knew the people around my farm wouldn’t be happy about my new car,” he says. “But, still, I didn’t think they’d go to such lengths to express themselves.”

See, the MAGA crowd has adopted the Prius as the new emblem of the commie, trans, fag, Black Lives Matter-loving, libtard, sicko Enemy of the People. Georgia congressbeing Marjorie Taylor Greene, for one, aired a campaign ad early on in this election cycle in which she, firing a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher, blew up a Prius.

The Prius had the word SOCIALISM in huge white block letters painted across its side. “In 2022,” she announced as she took aim, “I’m going to blow away the Democrats’ socialist agenda.”

We might give her the benefit of the doubt and say she intended the ad to be symbolic (although I wouldn’t).

Problem is, more than few MAGA types lack the cerebral capacity to grasp symbolism. To them, there’s a war going on and folks who want to drive eco-friendly hybrid vehicles are the enemy.