The Life and Death of the Hummer

After reading about the news that the Hummer brand was going to be put out to pasture by GM after a sale to a Chinese company fell through, I decided to do a write up on the history of the Hummer, along with a little analysis about its place in the American psyche. You can read it in full here: The Life and Death of the Hummer

Here is a short excerpt:

Ever since the Hummer burst onto the scene in the early 1990s after its coming out party during Operation Desert Storm and the Persian Gulf War (and with a little help from then-Terminator, now-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger), the public has had a love-hate relationship with its super-sized combination of size, power, utility and consumption. More than any other car in the past two decades, the Hummer has come to represent the best and the worst aspects of American culture (depending on what political and cultural lens you happen to be looking through). To ecologically conscious progressives, the Hummer epitomized the bloated, overweight, aggressively militaristic characteristics of an empire whose citizens had become enamored with having the biggest toy on the block. To the right-leaning rugged individualist foreign policy hawks, it was a symbol of American ingenuity, military prowess and man's domination over nature and a harsh, unforgiving environment.