Washington Post Death Spiral Watch
This is the kind of thing they want us to pay to read?
Hummer, How We Need Thee: Matthew DeBord: When General Motors announced that it would subject its Hummer division to what in the automotive business is known as a "review," you could hear the tree huggers, the unreconstructed hippies, the postmodern Greens, Al Gore's organic peanut gallery, every single customer at the Pasadena Whole Foods and the United Prius Owners of America shove aside their alfalfa sprouts and commence clapping....
[I]t would be a mistake for GM, assisted by the raving grease-monkey CPAs of Citibank, to sell the brand to an upstart carmaker in India or China or to breed it as a hybrid, as some have suggested. GM desperately needs an obnoxious, attention-grabbing brand to keep from turning into a dreary shadow of its former self.... It takes a certain kind of man -- it's almost always the owner of a Y chromosome -- to take a gander at the Hummer, in all its broad, burly, paramilitary gas-guzzling glory, and see himself behind the wheel, striking fear and loathing in the hearts of ecologically sensitive motorists. Oprah does not drive a Hummer. But Arnold Schwarzenegger has been a proud owner. As has Sylvester Stallone....
GM has kept it in the portfolio because it's, well, cool. Just go to an auto show. People love to climb into Hummers and take in the sights from the driver's platform. While they're up there, indulging their visions of Norman Schwarzkopf.... [T]he Hummer is being picked to pieces by bean counters, an ignominious fate for a vehicle that's the street-legal version of the warrior class.....
[H]ere is where its symbolic fortitude is most threatened: For American life to work, the illusion of endless abundance must be maintained.... This is what GM owes us, and what the company owes itself -- a ridiculous machine crammed with emotional content, the sort of contraption that Detroit has always done well.... Here and there, the grandiose legacy of a country in love with freedom of movement must be celebrated, even as we figure out new and more efficient ways to get around. Now, more than ever, we need Hummer, in all its defiant, obnoxious, thoroughly American glory.
