As goes the Hummer, so goes America?

Matthew DeBord defends the totemic Hummer as essential to the American Way of Life. Excerpt:

GM has hinted that, alternatively, it may convert the gas hog to hybrid status. But that would be like putting Rottweilers on a diet of celery and watermelon ("Let sip the dogs of war!"). The whole point of the Hummer is that it chugs fuel, and chugs it proudly, devoid of any sort of neurotic preoccupation with gloomy prophecies of Peak Oil or gas at 10 bucks a gallon.

And here is where its symbolic fortitude is most threatened: For American life to work, the illusion of endless abundance must be maintained. Sure, we must adapt to a future of less-abundant natural resources. Our vehicles will need to become radically more efficient. But we require vestiges of the old dream to sustain our national optimism, which in turn nourishes our national character.

This is what GM owes us, and what the company owes itself -- a ridiculous machine crammed with emotional content, the sort of contraption that Detroit has always done well but increasingly seems to have decided it is incapable of ever doing well again. What GM must remember is that, as much as competitors have altered they way we think about what we drive, it's depressing to contemplate a future filled with dreary transportation appliances. Here and there, the grandiose legacy of a country in love with freedom of movement must be celebrated, even as we figure out new and more efficient ways to get around. Now, more than ever, we need Hummer, in all its defiant, obnoxious, thoroughly American glory.

We have to live beyond our means, and obnoxiously so, in an F-U way, or we aren't truly American. Wow. I agree with C., the reader who sent me this link: "I know [this essay] is partly tongue in cheek, but boy does this guy show some of the problems with Americanism."