I was tooling around Green Lake last week in the amazingly consistent February sun (thank you, global warm-ing - I guess). My companion was a successful writer friend (if you judge success, as most Ameri-cans seem to do, by amount of money made) who has always been a much more strident environmentalist than little Midwestern Denny.
A huge Hummer with dark-tinted windows pulled into the main parking lot and stopped my friend dead in his tracks.
"I wanna see who gets out of that monstrosity," he said.
I expected a version of the sub-urban hip-hop wannabes I usually see driving similar rides along First Avenue on Friday night. Imagine my surprise to observe two old men - even older than this middle-aged witness - climb stiffly out, their sparse white hairs blowing softly in the breeze.
Both old coots were also decked from head to toe in University of Washington gear, from the purple baseball caps they put on once their aging flesh hit the air, to the purple sweat pants, although neither of these guys looked like they'd done anything more strenuous than count money for years.
Maybe they were friends of Barbie Hedges, or maybe they earned the purple by participating in betting pools with Crying Rick Neuheisel, who last week gave a weepy court-room performance unmatched in the public eye since televangelist Jimmy Swaggart admitted he had sinned.
Anyway, my writer friend went on and on about the environment, about the current war for oil, and about how the Hummer was the poster child for what was wrong with driving any of those big gas hogs.
Now, my first car in Cincinnati was an old V-8 Ford. When I was a kid, I always liked big cars that burned a lot of gas going fast. It wasn't until I was in my late 20s that I bought my first new car, a Gremlin, and started scaling back my lust for power and speed (at least in the cars I drove).
But those were different days.
I think the Sports Utility Vehicle craze, of which the Hummer is merely the most noticeable example, is a sign of the times. But even though my friend is probably right about the environmental damages being done by driving cars that are too big for our 50-years-and-older infrastructure, what I don't like about them is their bullying nature.
Study after study has shown that anyone driving a normal sedan who gets hit by one of these vehicular behemoths is facing serious injury and maybe death.
We all die eventually, but I hope not to perish just so some pathetic old upper-middle-class gent can feel bigger (and younger) than he is for a few moments of his day.
When I lived in the Idaho mountains 15 years ago, the rich from a nearby ski town almost all drove SUVs - Suburbans and Range Rovers mostly. But to give these folks their due, they needed big, road-worthy cars because they played in the backcountry. They had multiple dogs. They were, many of them, outdoorsy to a fault.
Driving an oversized vehicle to your office downtown and back to the Eastside (or the top of Queen Anne Hill) has nothing to do with utility. It has to do with a bullying, Trump-like pride in not your accomplishments but your disposable income.
America has gone (and Seattle is going) from a country of genuine accomplishment to a country big on display.
Political leaders who were afraid to fight for their country in their generation's war now lead us into conflict after conflict, talking tough from behind a wall of Secret Service agents. Granted that the Hummer is a big war machine now, although the units the powers-that-be let the poor who fight their wars drive evidently aren't really war-ready. Not fully armored. Not strong enough to protect the American boys and girls riding inside.
But hey, there's always a price to pay for glamour. Glitz and glitter is back. Conspicuous consumption, despite all the warnings about diminishing natural (and human) resources, is in.
Americans want to feel like nothing has changed from 1950.
We want to drive the biggest cars we can afford, and we want to ignore the fact that one in six of our own citizens doesn't even have health insurance.
We want to talk about Jesus without ever talking about His talk.
Blessed are the meek, He said.
Not "You're fired!"
We have become a culture led by folks that at least half of us claim to admire whose message is "Do as I say, not as I do." As anyone who parented children knows, you can't expect good results if you tell the little ones to do things they can see with their own eyes that you don't do.
Our deficits, trade and simple budgetary ones, are stratospheric.
The foreign bankers who hold the note on much of America's paper wealth are starting to make noises about calling in some of the chips.
America is starting to look like those overweight folks who eat themselves to the lip of the grave and then try to sue McDonald's.
I don't think of the thinning atmosphere when I see old boys who should know better in Hummers.
I think of those purple-faced folks waddling out of fast-food emporiums, breathless before they climb back into their sport utility (eating) vehicles.
It ain't a pretty image.
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