Thursday, December 29, 2005

The Noughts

An early assessment by Simon Schama.
The decade when coral reefs turned pallid and died; when Alaskan caribou butted their heads against pipelines; when what seemed like a marginal rise in oceanic temperatures translated into hurricanes that ate entire shorelines, was also the decade of the Hummer. Just as Paul Fussell identified the Jeep - light, speedy and tough - as the symbol of the war that America wanted to fight in the 1940s, so the Hummer will forever get remembered as the Supersize emblem of imperial hubris in the noughties: comical in its swaggering, pseudo-military fantasy; obese sheet-metal in denial; the self-dooming guzzler to end all guzzlers; blitzkrieg at the shopping mall - while the real thing - Humvees with teenagers in uniform - get taken out by rocket-propelled grenades in Falluja.

1 comment:

troutsky said...

They will be filling up at the Shopngo when I pull in and fill up my escort and Ill drive around for three days and when I stop for more gas they will still be there, just getting it topped off.I saw a guy getting a second mortgage just so he could drive into Missoula.