All right-thinking people did a smug little dance of joy this week when it was announced that the last Hummer H3 had finally rolled off the line in Louisiana. I almost feel bad for the Hummer, for the way it became the poster child for an entire Earth-destroying lifestyle. Did it really deserve all the hatred?
The early Hummer models were genuine military vehicles, repurposed and used as eye-catching displays of conspicuous consumption. Arnold Schwarzenegger drove one. You would have expected him to. The first Hummer (the H1) was released in 1992, right at the tantalizing edge of the Dot Com Boom. It was perfectly poised to capitalize on an unprecedented explosion of wealth. Within a few short years, "bragging about being wealthy" practically qualified as a hobby for a lot of people.
The Hummer's gas mileage has always hovered around 14 MPG city/18 MPG highway. That's not great, to be sure. But there are a lot of vehicles that get less. The Bentley Azure gets 9 MPG city/15 MPG highway, but it has never become the flashpoint of an entire political movement. The Toyota Tacoma pickup truck gets the exact same gas mileage as a Hummer, but no one (to my knowledge) has ever set fire to a Toyota Tacoma as a public statement.
The Hummer became everyone's favorite whipping boy by being ridiculously, ostentatiously useless. The owner of a Toyota Tacoma will tell you that they frequently haul around sacks of concrete. The person twirling the keys for a Cadillac Escalade (12 MPG city/19 MPG highway) will claim that they need a lot of room for ferrying the family around. These things may not be true, but that's what they will tell you.
But no Hummer owner even pretends that they take it off road. The very point of owning a Hummer is to keep it in pristine condition, always perfectly waxed, as a showy demonstration of wealth. In the same way that a wide expanse of perfect lawn started out as a display of wealth (because the landowner had no need to do anything useful with it).
As time went on, owning a Hummer became the ultimate statement of "eff you, eco-hippies!" It was the massive cigar being puffed in the non-smoking section, the thick bloody steak waved around a vegetarian restaurant. It was the Rush Limbaugh of cars.
In that sense, the Hummer deserved everything it got. The Hummer may not have been the worst car in the world, but it exemplified a lifestyle that became increasingly passé.
Of course, as Michael Pollan has observed, the carbon footprint of a vegetarian in a Hummer is lower than that of a meat eater in a Prius. Except that no one sees you not eating meat, while everyone sees you driving a hybrid car.
But if a hybrid is just another form of showing off, at least we feel it's showing off the right things. Hybrid owners put their money behind their backing political and philosophical beliefs. They wear their hearts on their sleeves, and they save a good deal of gas by doing so.
And so I have to say to the Hummer: Don't let the door hit your tailgate on the way out.
Creative Commons-licensed image courtesy of Flickr user ANATOLI AXELROD