If You Have To Ask . . .

Page One Sunday Times, albeit below the fold — They’re Soft and Cuddly, So Why Lash Them to the Front of a Truck? Tsk, tsk . . . if you have to ask:

A bear with a prominent grease spot on his little beige nose spends his days wedged behind the bumper guard of an ironworker’s pickup in the Gowanus section of Brooklyn. A fuzzy rabbit and a clown, garroted by a bungee cord, slump from the front of a Dodge van in Park Slope. Stewie, the evil baby from “Family Guy,” scowls from the grille of a Pepperidge Farm delivery truck in Brooklyn Heights, mold occasionally sprouting from his forehead.

All are soldiers in the tattered, scattered army of the stuffed: mostly discarded toys plucked from the trash and given new if punishing lives on the prows of large motor vehicles, their fluffy white guts flapping from burst seams and going gray in the soot-stream of a thousand exhaust pipes.

Grille-mounted stuffed animals form a compelling yet little-studied aspect of the urban streetscape, a traveling gallery of baldly transgressive public art. The time has come not just to praise them but to ask the big question. Why?

That is, why do a small percentage of trucks and vans have filthy plush toys lashed to their fronts, like prisoners at the mast? Are they someone’s idea of a joke? Parking aids? Talismans against summonses?

Don’t expect an easy answer.

Which is to say, expect one of those half-serious, unself-aware answers the Times loves to dredge up:

At the same time, [New York City Department of Sanitation artist in residence Mierle Laderman] Ukeles said, the trucker, perhaps uncomfortable with his soft side, may feel compelled to punish it.

“Binding a soft thing to a very powerful truck – there’s a kind of macho thing about that,” she said.

That double identification with both victim and agent of violence may reflect the driver’s frustrating position in society. Stuffed animals are found mostly on the trucks of men who perform hard, messy labor, which, despite the strength and bravery it demands, places them on the lower rungs of the ladder of occupational prestige.

The motley animal, then, can function as a badge of outsider status, a thumbed nose to the squares and suits. In that case, the cuter the mascot, the more meaningful its disintegration.

Thus, while Mr. [Dan] DiVittorio, of the Queens carting company, is quite fond of the red plastic skull that adorns his garbage truck, he will never forget its predecessor, a three-foot-high stuffed Scooby-Doo.

And it gets worse:

Scooby’s story lends credence to the theory of [School of Visual Arts art history lecturer Monroe] Denton . . . that the grille-mounted stuffed animal draws from the same well as the “abject art” movement that flourished in the 1990’s and trafficked heavily in images of filth and of distressed bodies.

“That is part of the abject,” he said, “this toy that is loved to death quite literally.”

The externalization of an indoor object is another abject trope, Mr. Denton said. “An important aspect of the abject is the informe, the lack of boundaries,” he said, using the French critical theory term, “the insides oozing out.”

Charlie Maixner, a steamfitter for Deacon Corp. in Jericho on Long Island, has taken the informe to its logical extreme.

On the dashboard of his Econoline van is an adorable and pristine white bear, a gift from his 5-year-old daughter. But the bear is not for the outside world. On the grille is Mr. Hankey, salvaged from a chef’s office during a kitchen renovation job.

Mr. Hankey, to the pop-culturally illiterate, appears to be a brown worm in a Santa hat. He is not. He is the carol-crooning excrement from “South Park,” where he is formally known as Mr. Hankey the Christmas Poo.