Bringing back a favorite from the archives, lightly edited for your pleasure.

Every great civilization eventually signals the exact moment it gives up. (See: bread and circuses; phrenology; Gérard Depardieu.)

I encountered what may be our surrender point at a red light.

While stopped, I was running through my usual litany of Big Thoughts (Did I turn off the stove? Did I accidentally Reply All? Will humanity survive the inevitable collapse of late-stage capitalism masked by hyper-niche consumer trends?)when my attention landed on the truck in front of me.

No. Truck implies mere conveyance. This was an iron colossus. One perhaps called The Dominator. Or The Reckoning. Or The Doom Hauler.

Being a lusty all-American vehicle large enough to have its own microclimate should have sufficed, BUT…

dangling from the hitch by paracord was a set of Truck Nuts.

If you are fortunate enough to be unfamiliar, Truck Nuts (or Truck Nutz) are plastic or rubber decorative testicles that people attach to the back of their automobiles.

The vehicular huevos festooning the back of the  —  I dunno, GMC Rumble Thumper? —  bobbed with needless enthusiasm as the engine idled.

These ornamental knackers weren’t even high-quality plastic, just the brittle material of cheap children’s toys that cracks on impact or warps in the sun. Bright blue unapologetic vulgarity.

I stared. I didn’t want to, but like Medusa, these marbles demanded eye contact.

Two questions came to mind:

1. Who is driving this be-nutted behemoth?

2. Just…why?

Naturally, I started profiling the driver. Cargo shorts despite wind chill. Thinks taxes are theft, turn signals are for betas, refers to women as “females,” owns at least two Tapout shirts, and once tried to fight a locker in high school.

When the light turned green, I pulled up next to the…let’s go with Chevy Thunder Tusk…and looked.

Stone-faced. Sunglasses. Holding large iced coffee.

A woman.

A woman who, I could tell with just a glance, has strong opinions about butter boards and somehow manages to be unbothered and deeply furious at the same time.

The Windows 95 error sound pinged in my head.

Question 2 came back. “Just…why?”

Clearly, there’s demand. Like it or not, an entire Truck Nut industrial complex exists, operating, presumably, within the legal parameters of commerce. There are factories and machinery. There is an entire logistics chain ensuring that no motor vehicle in America need remain ball-free. And of course, there are actual adults waking up, pouring coffee into World’s Best Dad mugs, and heading to a job where they debate proper ball-to-bumper ratios.

There was undoubtedly a prototype. Wind tunnel tests. Torque calculations. PowerPoints on market scalability. Some guy insisting, “We’re revolutionizing the industry!”

Enormous vats of melted plastic were poured into molds, cooled, popped free, and sent to a quality control specialist probably named Earl, who gave each a light tug to ensure structural integrity.

Then and only then were shrink-wrapped pallets of these faux family jewels distributed to gas stations, online marketplaces, and that one hardware store where someone’s always grilling hot dogs in the parking lot.

A marketing team surely worked on branding. Tough Nuts for Tough Trucks! Don’t Be a Ball-less Hitch! Freedom isn’t Free — And These Are Only $24.99!

All of this resulted in the owner of the Ford Fee-Fi-Fo-Fummer in front of me slapping down actual money. After purchase, they knelt behind their truck and tied these orbs of virility into place.

I remind you we once wrote the Constitution, built Chicago (twice!), and sent humans to the moon.

I remind myself that I used to write about civic responsibility, democracy, and motherhood.

And yet, here we are.

Still, was there meaning in these petrochemical gonads? Irony? Prank? Postmodern critique of gender norms? Radical rejection of patriarchal tropes through appropriation of male genitalia?

The social contract as envisioned by Rousseau was not designed for this. Democracy, human rights, collective dignity? Yes. Plastic testicles on the back of a Toyota Titan Howler? Absolutely not.

Hobbes believed life without government was “nasty, brutish, and short.” I generally agree, but argue that life with government has somehow produced a scenario where I’m stuck in traffic behind a Jeep Inferno Stallion, eyeball-to-clangers.

I cannot point to the exact section of the social contract that discourages such a thing, but I assume it’s located in the part about not making public spaces unbearable for everyone else. Or maybe tucked into an addendum called “This Should Really Go Without Saying.”

But if the driver in front of me didn’t care about the affixed Truck Nuts on her Honda Oblivion Rover, then the entire framework of cultural semiotics disintegrates. They mean nothing.

And if they aren’t anything, nothing is. Everything just sways pointlessly.

Perhaps material offers meaning. After all, there is something grotesquely poetic about the fact that the fake gonads are plastic. Plastic is eternal.

Glaciers will melt, cities will sink, and centuries from now when the Great Plains are waterfront property, an archaeologist —  probably also named Earl  —  will stumble upon slightly cracked, sun-bleached Truck Nuts. He’ll turn them in his hands and ask, “What god did these people worship?”

It’s not an unreasonable question. What else could they be other than an object of reverence? Is this who we are? Cheap, crass, oscillating as if to measure the time we have left before the entire country embraces hollow spectacle under the hazy guise of “I’m just asking questions”?

Or maybe we worship the in-your-face part.

The woman in the truck zipped off with the patriarchal baubles wobbling behind her, she and they blissfully unaware of my Big Thoughts.

I sat there, eating her proverbial dust, realizing two things:

1. You cannot parody a culture that’s already doing it for you.
2. At some point Truck Nuts will come factory-installed. Standard.

And only Earl will understand the horror.