Don't know how I missed this, but I did. Must be losing my touch.

Anyways, the Comical ran a story about the Hummer 2, three tons of car and a whopping ten miles to the gallon. Turns out, the Hummer 2 is really popular in organic food eating, Johnny Walker breeding, Al Gore voting Marin. I know, I'm shocked! Shocked! by this revelation.

Despite the overwhelmingly Green sentiments of Marin, the Hummer is really popular. Kind of ironical, if you know what I mean. Or maybe not really.

Of course, the usual reasons are given for the popularity of the Hummer in Marin. People have kids to pick up from Soccer games, after all. And there's all the safety that comes with driving something built for combat. And don't forget about the whole rugged aspect that you get in owning one. As a Hummer salesman says, the popularity of the Hummer is because "…my clients like to know that if they had to get off Highway 101 and go over Mount Tam, they could. That's where it turns into a family insurance policy. Eighty percent of my clients are Marin couples with families." Which, by the way, is a really popular thing to do in Marin. Because families love nothing more than going off-roading.

(I've actually gone off-roading with a friend in his Range Rover. You know what? It was pretty frickin' boring. It's just driving around really slowly just to get jostled all over the place.)

The story actually quotes a member of the Sierra Party who owns one because he "and his wife like to go off-road to look at birds" (although how many birds would be around when someone drives one of those things into the woods is another story.) "I'm a Sierra Club member," said Bernstein, who noted that he avoids such disposables as paper cups. "You can be environmentally correct and drive a Hummer." That's a pretty typical San Franciscan/Marin County philosophy right there- the picking and choosing of your sanctimony

All of this, however, should prove conclusively that Marin County is just as Apple Pie American as everywhere else in the country. After all, what's more American than believing in self-sacrifice and serving a common good just as long as it's somebody else who gets to do it?

And what could be more American than the belief the gosh darnit, the environment is really important and doing what it takes to end the craziness in the Middle East is all fine and good, but What About the Children? Can't anybody save the children?

Sadly, I didn't come up with this brilliant insight, a letter to the editor in today's paper did, but I have to give it it's props. The writer thinks that the whole Hummer 2 is proof that this country needs a draft. Because while all those families that drive these gas-guzzling monster's do so because it's a way of shielding their children from harm, somebody else's kids are the one's who have to fight the ward the gas-guzzling cars lead us to. After all, it's easy to act out of a huge amount of safety for the children and buy a huge, armored truck. It's a whole other thing to actually send their kids off to die protecting the right to do so. And the chances of anyone one of those soccer playing kids joining the Military to fight in Iraq is roughly the same equivelant that some woman signed up to do Joe Millionaire because she was just looking for love, not for money.