The Hummer and the US Addiction to Oil

by Ellen Gorman and Elaine Cardenas
co-editors, The Hummer: Myths and Consumer Culture

“The battered Hummer that symbolises a divided nation” screams a headline from Britain’s Independent in July 2007.  It is clear that, for those outside America at least, the inherently American Hummer symbolizes more than just machismo and proto-consumerism in a culture known for its emphasis on the automobile.  It seems that for Europeans and others around the world, the Hummer also represents a weakness, an addiction, which threatens to overwhelm attempts to curb consumption of oil and find a way out of the mire of addiction, such as the bill recently passed by the Senate requiring increased fuel efficiency for SUVs (which has stalled, perhaps permanently).  The Independent quotes The New Yorker magazine on the strange dichotomy currently apparent in America among consumers and voters: "We buy gas guzzlers, but we vote for gas sipping" and claims that “the vehicle has become the latest poster boy for America's failing attempts to grapple meaningfully with climate change.”

Do Americans concur that the Hummer symbolizes American greed and refusal to come to grips with the chokehold oil has on its future and potentially its safety?  Do the recent acts of eco-terrorism against the Hummer signify a shift in public response to the proliferation of sports utility vehicles and other large autos on American roads?   As Daniel Miller, sociologist and critic of material culture at the University of London claims in The Hummer: Myths and Consumer Culture (Lexington Books, 2007) about the Hummer’s “greed for fuel”:

Indeed the Hummer is about as 'in your face' as a vehicle can be without actually running you over.

What this book reveals is how far a car may become an instrument of something that is in direct repudiation of this internationalism by developing into a potent symbol of retrenched nationalism. The point about the Hummer is just how American it is. While these cars can be found as imports in the UK and known to the cognoscenti, so far I have only come across a single locally born Londoner, who in response to my questions, has actually heard of them. If the papers are seen as a collection they resonate with a particular aesthetic configuration that ranges from music, as in hip-hop, to the increasing prevalence of gated communities in the US, to one of the most successful exports - Grand Theft Auto, to an American popular culture that may fascinate the rest of the world but sometimes leads to greater distinction not greater global homogeneity.

The car is associated with a particular form of American individualism, one that was fostered by a long term and conspicuous association with the car itself as a generic object and all those road movies, and highways to the wide open spaces that make up the US. This spirit is found in an anti-establishment tradition that can be found both in the car owners and their critics. This is at one level a fighting book, by academics who don’t want to just roll over and become roadkill. The car is strongly associated with the power of the current political establishment that seems to enclose the US in jaws from Bush in the East to Schwarzenegger in the West. The papers are written as acts of exposure and thereby resistance. But the car owners too very likely come out of this same sense of anti-establishment (in this case liberal environmentalist establishment) which they believe remains the real power in the land contrary to all appearances. They too are fighting back with their gas-guzzling gung-ho vulgarity of the common man.

To watch the popular British car show, Top Gear, review the Hummer (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLOPzKrXohg) is to witness the disdain with which non-Americans view this vehicle, 'like nothing else' according to the famous advertising slogan from GM.   But is this a somewhat facile attack on an obvious target, an attempt to conflate a virtual toy with American greed and addiction?  Or not...

http://environment.independent.co.uk/climate_change/article2785468.ece