the timboucher experience

The latest from the President Schwarzenegger AntiChrist files: sometime earlier this month, the Governator created a high-profile publicity stunt wherein he drove around in a Humvee, trying to collect signatures for some set of reform initiatives he’s trying to push throught. Find out more from this LA Times article (here’s a login if you need it). [While we're at it, also check out this gallery of photos of Arnold with a bright red Hummer.]

I’m not particularly concerned with whatever law-wrangling he’s trying to accomplish. I’m more trying to keep my eye on the symbolic ball. Of even greater interest perhaps is Schwarzenegger’s instrumental role in convincing the manufacturer of the Humvee to create the H1, the first generation version of the military vehicle converted for civilian use. He saw it crushing Iraqis in the first Gulf War and decided he just had to have one.

After all, as Marty Padgett writes in Hummer: How a Little Truck Company Hit the Big Time, Thanks to Saddam, Schwarzenegger and GM

“Kids who can’t pick out their home state on a map can spot an H2 from blocks away,”

Whatever your opinion of SUV’s is - whether they are the bane of the earth or just a “pimp ride” - the Humvee is an inescapable symbol of the creeping militarization of America. Now, I recognize that the Jeep was also originally a military vehicle which was converted for civilian use. But the Jeep is also not an enormous monstrosity which is not only unnecessary, wasteful and doesn’t fit especially well in our established roadways, parking spaces and conventional drive-thrus. But as long as kids (American or Iraqi) who can’t find their home on a map can recognize it from blocks away as the soldiers patrol their suburban neighborhoods in them, who cares? Right?

But I’m not here to bash SUV’s. I’m here to add to the list of creepy things that Schwarzenegger is being associated with. After seeing that photo of him driving the olive green Hummer with the word “REFORM 1″ on the front of it, it makes me wonder how long until we see him driving through the flaming wreckage of downtown Washington, DC in a tank emblazoned with the words “WAR IS PEACE” and “FREEDOM IS SLAVERY” as we all crowd round the holographic tv set in the concentration camps, nodding our heads in solemn approval.

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