Sunday, May 14, 2006

Old Fantasies Never Die, They Just Get Junked for Parts

GM announced this past week that it is discontinuing its Hummer H1 line of pimped-out faux-combat vehicles, which were all the rage a few years back when Arnold Schwarzenegger owned a whole fleet of them. Now he's down to just three, and he rarely drives them.

The last of the H1's will roll off the line next month. They haven't been selling well, probably because they get about ten miles to the gallon, can't squeeze into standard city parking spaces, and are too wide to fit on most car ramps.

But some of us cherish one destination above all others in our heart of hearts, and the H1 was the ultimate ride to Fantasy Land.

It breaks my heart to have to abandon my fantasy of owning one. I'll never be able to dress up in my camouflage gear, jump into my full-size Hummer, and pretend I'm on patrol somewhere between Baghdad and Anbar Province as I drive up the suitably desert-landscaped Long Canyon Hill at twilight, on the way to 7-11 to get a slurpee, all the while blasting corrido tunes through the H1's open windows with my in-board eight track, and thereby procuring the loud applause and admiring glances of all the cute Mexican girls who populate this corner of my fantasized mideast combat zone.

Too bad I don't have the money to realize this dream. But of course, I am planning to win the lottery one day.

As a sort of compensating, softer, gentler fantasy, GM will continue to produce the slightly smaller H2 and "midsize" H3, but those are only scale models, not the genuine article. The wanna-be's who buy them don't know how to display their pretensions with the requisite degree of arrogance and vulgarity. They're like the pseudo-collectors who are satisfied with having cheap Philadelphia Mint knock-offs of crossed Samurai swords over their fireplaces rather than the real thing.

The general manager of GM's Hummer Division noted that "H1 buyers typically have been less sensitive about gas prices than most other drivers," which is another way of saying that America is still a great place to live if you're a rich, white idiot. But he forgot to mention that there aren't many of those left, at least not enough baby plutocrats sufficiently committed to wretched excess to fork over the 130 to 140 thousand dollar H1 asking price, up from about $106,000 in 2004. GM sold 374 H1's this year, versus 447 in '04, a far cry from the glory days of 1992 when the line was introduced and Schwarzenegger decided to buy a bunch of them.

The H1's declining popularity also might be connected in some way with the public's diminished enthusiasm for the empire's policy of perpetual war.

It's a sad milestone, of sorts, and for the first time I feel a certain kinship with the Crawford brush-cutter-in chief. Our rich fantasy lives ain't what they used to be.

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