Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut by P. J. O'Rourke

Author:P. J. O'Rourke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 1995-04-05T04:00:00+00:00

The Ultimate Politically Incorrect Car

Automobile, 1992

AUTHOR’S NOTE: The following was part of an article in which Automobile’s writers picked their favorite excessively fast, unsafe, fuel-wasting motor vehicles with not enough trunk space to carry things to the recycling center.

If you’re looking for something to upset the multiculturizing tofu nibblers, something to scare the holistic eco-pests back into Biosphere 2, something that will tell the “Think Globally/Act Locally” crowd to “Eat My Shorts Totally,” I commend to you AM General Corporation’s High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle, the Hummer.

The Hummer is a regular Pat Buchanan on wheels. In the first place, it was developed for those notorious militarists, the military. They purchased it with wasteful defense appropriations that could have been spent on homeless dolphins. Then the Hummer was used to oppress innocent third-world victims of American imperialism such as Manuel Noriega. Plus, Arnold Schwarzenegger owns one.

So Phil Donahue and Sinéad O’Connor will not be double-dating in a Hummer soon. But the odd thing is that Phil and Baldy are—for the first time in their lives—right. The Hummer is one of those overconceived and underconsidered Pentagon whatchamajigs. It’s two-thirds muddle and three-fourths boondoggle and largely incapable of doing anything that couldn’t be done by a four-wheel-drive Toyota pickup with a .50-caliber machine gun mounted on its roof.

The Hummer is fifteen feet long, seven feet wide, and weighs 6,200 pounds. That is fifteen inches longer, fourteen inches wider, and 2,749 pounds heavier than a Jeep Cherokee. The civilian model Hummer seats four in profound discomfort and costs $44,000. It has a Brobdingnagian 6.2-liter diesel engine that produces a Lilliputian 150 base horsepower and gets—excuse the pun—a not too Swift 13.5 miles per gallon. And the Hummer’s sixteen inches of ground clearance and 60 percent grade capacity are nothing you can’t get by putting great big tires and a winch on your Buick.

But I love the thing. I’d be proud and happy to own it. And I’ll tell you why. I was an ABC radio correspondent in the Persian Gulf. When the ground war began, I went into Kuwait with a press convoy (mostly Mitsubishi Monteros, by the way) led by a group of affable but incompetent British officers. We called them the Desert Squirrels. We arrived in Kuwait City in the middle of the night, eight hours ahead of the Allied armies. Fortunately, the Iraqis had already retreated. But the city was in the hands of the “Kuwaiti Resistance”—armed high school kids who’d flunked their hunter safety courses. There was no electricity. We could hear small-arms fire nearby and large explosions in the distance, and we decided our little group ought to pull out of town until dawn at least, if not until next year.

The Desert Squirrels, however, had forgotten to bring maps. Thus I and about forty other people wound up utterly lost in the pitch-dark suburbs of Kuwait City. We’d been listening to our shortwave radios and had heard that a large tank battle was being fought at the Kuwait International Airport.

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