So far today we’ve had an earthquake and a tornado here in Michigan. One wonders what might be next. I’m tempted to come up from the basement and look out the window, but I’m afraid that I might find the Huron River on fire, or dogs and cats making love in the street… or, worse yet, it could very well be raining oil.
Today, as progressive groups from around the nation were massing in Detroit in preparation for tomorrow’s much anticipated U.S. Social Forum, the folks from Code Pink, together with Tyree Guyton and volunteers from the Heidelberg Project, came together to bury a burned-out Hummer. Here, from a May post on the Code Pink website, written on the occasion of GM’s decision to kill the Hummer brand, is their explanation for the art installation.
…What’s so bad about the Hummer? Everything. This vehicle, based on the military Humvee tank and first sold to civilians in 1992, is an energy sinkhole. Its dreadful gas mileage of 10 miles per gallon is less than half the mileage of the Model T Ford some 80 years ago! Hummers emit over 3 times more carbon dioxide than average cars, hastening global warming, and they give off substantially more smog-producing pollutants and dangerous particulates. But because they are categorized as light trucks, they are actually exempt from meeting emission or fuel-efficiency standards.
The hulking 8,400-pound H2 or the monstrous 10,000+-pound H1 are a massive waste of metal and their height, their weight and the stiffness of their frames make them killers on the road. If you’re unlucky enough to be in an accident with a Hummer, you’re 3-4 times more likely to be killed than if you were hit by another car.
For years, Hummer owners (an elite class in itself as the H1 starts at $100,000, the H2 at $50,000) took unfair advantage of a tax benefit originally meant to help farmers purchase tractors. Using this tax loophole for vehicles over 6,000 pounds, Hummer owners could get up to a $100,000 tax break! (Compare this to $2,000 for the Toyota Prius hybrid, which gets over 50 miles per gallon.) Taxpayers for Common Sense estimates that this outrageous subsidy for Hummers and heavy SUVs robbed the US Treasury of $800 million a year.
To the great dismay of peace activists, Hummers represented an increasing militarization of our society and the glorification of war. They blurred the lines between reality and fiction, beginning with the first promotion of the Hummer by action hero/Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.
While groups, including CODEPINK, raised awareness and tried to make people ashamed of driving a Hummer, the real blow came with the rise in oil prices. Sales plummeted when people started to cough up over $100 to fill the gas tank. The generalized economic crisis in the past two years put the nail in the grave.For years, CODEPINK protested the Hummer. At auto shows, we would climb on the vehicles and drape them with messages such as: “Real soldiers are dying in their Hummers so you can play soldier in yours.” We held anti-Hummer actions at auto dealers, handing out educational flyers and encouraging prospective buyers to choose other cars. We organized bicycle rides round and round the Hummer dealerships. We passed out Hummer tickets to people driving the monsters. Our Hummer campaign was an important way for us to merge our concern of ending war with our desire to protect the environment. That’s why it’s important for our community to celebrate this victory by bidding the Hummer farewell…
So the formal funeral was held today, in Detroit, on Heidelberg Street, where, if you drive by, you can now see the bright pink roof of a Hummer coming up from the soil, surrounded by flowers, which I’m told are meant to symbolize the green future before us…. Here’s footage of the event from Detroit’s WXYZ television:
The debate went pretty well on Friday night. The Dreamland Theater was full, and, from what I hear, people found the exchange between the two candidates informative. Personally, I wasn’t all that thrilled with the way things went, but I think that has more to do with the format than with either my performance or that of the candidates. It didn’t really hit me until about five minutes into the whole thing, but debates, by their very nature, are kind of cold, and not terribly informative. I’m still glad that we did it, but I think, in the future, if we ever do it again, I’d rather just interview the candidates back-to-back. I think that we would get better, more candid responses if we did it that way. Debates, I’m now convinced, just don’t allow for meaningful dialogue.
And that’s the thing that really bothered me about the debate. Every time one of the candidates responded to a question, I wanted to follow up, but I couldn’t. I wanted to press them for details, and maybe I could have, but I thought that my probing could be misconstrued as biased. In other words, I was afraid that, if I were to ask Candidate One to elaborate on something that he said, that his supporters might see it as an attack of some kind, or, worse yet, that Candidate Two might perceive it as though I were helping Candidate One to respond. So, I just asked my questions, which were pretty good, and kept my mouth shut. There were probably 50 times that I wanted to jump in and press for more, but didn’t. And I think that’s what kept eating at me. I knew that I could have done better, but the format, as we’d constructed it, wouldn’t allow me to.
But, even with that, I think that we gave people a good show. Folks seemed to particularly like the musical questions, which were delivered by local celebrity, Charlie Slick, and the “lightening round,” which came at the very end. And, hopefully, the rest of it was at least moderately tolerable, of not terribly informative.
Those of you who didn’t catch the debate, our hope is to have an edited version online soon, followed by a version for Ann Arbor Community Access Television. I’ll post details here when I have them.
[The above photo, taken by Tom Perkins, accompanied an article about the debate which ran on the AnnArbor.com site today. My hope is that they’re OK with my using the image here.]
As much as 2.52 million gallons of crude oil may be gushing into the Gulf each day, and, despite the claims of global climate change deniers, 2010 is shaping up to be the hottest year in recorded history. We are literally destroying our planet. The polar ice caps are melting, sea life is dying, species are migrating, and, all the while, the earth’s population continues to grow. And, distracted by the exaggerated threat of terrorism, and the ravings of Tea Partiers about Obama’s socialist agenda, we allow it to continue. We allow corporations to continue pumping money into the U.S. government, demanding that we aggressively pursue the campaign of deregulation which was set into motion so long ago. Despite what Glenn Beck may tell you, the threat to us today isn’t Obama, but the international corporations seeking to increase shareholder dividends at the expense our fragile ecosystem… And, here, on the subject of Obama’s threat to America, is a little clip from Glenn Beck’s show, in which Mr. Beck states that our President is actively seeking to murder 10% of our population.
