The machinery that promised to set us free has imprisoned us.

In the process, the American Dream has become measured in units of separation from the system that allowed its achievement. When you've finally arrived, what is it that you do? You leave it all behind.

But if you can't leave it all just yet – and you know you're going to be chained to the gristmill for another twenty years before you can – there is nothing like a little instant gratification. If you can't afford that cabin in the mountains, perhaps you can afford the means to get there. And so weak-eyed prisoners of wall and street yearn for a symbol of their own freedom. Something that represents their potential to get away, even if it remains untapped. Something tangible. Something with 430 foot-pounds of torque.

For some time now, the graven SUV has been the rhetorical lightning rod of enlightened liberal resentment toward the short sighted, backward-thinking masses. The freshly waxed and ostensibly "sport-capable" vehicle that nonetheless never leaves the suburban puzzle has become a veritable symbol of ignorant consumption. It's a consumption pattern that spans demographics, however. The middle-aged day-trader plaything, once a target of yuppie-scorn, has made inroads into other market groups. The Lincoln Navigator that is a golden calf to the Hip Hop community, a prestigious snatch-wagon that transports Senior Executive Poozle Artists from crib to club, also serves as an armored kinder-carrier – a slightly less henpecked substitute for the minivan.

And it's unfortunate, because not for years has the Ralph Nader set chosen a more popular target to signify which side of the Earth issue you fall on. Even though the viability of our access to foreign fossil fuels remains questionable, and even though there is no class of vehicle that is less economic, the auto-buying public is clearly still in love with its urban assault vehicle. It's also unfortunate that a sizable percentage of those Durango-driving soccer moms would otherwise consider themselves progressive voters and responsible consumers.

The disdain aimed at SUV buyers hinges on vehicle weight and fuel inefficiency which is, in the all-wise and judgmental minds of the oat-bran set, deemed unnecessary for the tasks the vehicle will be called upon to perform day in and day out. GMC preemptively (and perhaps wisely) addresses this issue in their recent ad campaign for their 'Professional Grade' vehicles. Amidst shots of the Envoy XUV and Yukon XL Denali making muddy rooster tails and four-wheeled boulder-crawls, a voice-over soothes the potential truck-buyer's conscience: "it's not more than you need, its just more than you're used to." The implied question, then, is "have I been stifling my desires through unnecessarily practical buying patterns?" This is, of course, a question that advertisers are always willing to beg to those with the means to indulge.

While it would be easy to criticize the sport utility trend for being indulgent and wasteful, it is still important to remember that our economic well being – indeed our very way of life – is dependent upon not just sustained, but steadily increasing consumption. The market hiccup of 2002 might have hobbled automakers, and a vital sector of the economy along with it, had it not been for SUV-frenzy. Despite a full-on slouch in every other vehicle class, truck and SUV sales have allowed manufacturers to, however wounded, continue marching nonetheless. And once it became clear that the trend of the four-wheel drive luxury vehicle would illuminate a path through this lean period, auto manufacturers were not coy.

The market's middle and bottom ground has always been sport-friendly: the Semi-Disposable Korean Sport Utility Vehicle is a phenomenon almost as old as the Semi-Disposable Korean Vehicle. The beckoning of the leather-seat set is the true measure of how earnest the competition is. Even the most austere luxury manufacturers have entered an upsized upscale contender, if not retooled their line to cater to the prevailing climate. Cadillac is a perfect example.

Cadillac has occupied the luxury vehicle niche for as long as there has been one. In its first fifty years, Cadillac settled comfortably into its position as a maker of quietly humming plush sail barges for oldsters and pimps. The company's solid gold credential with the WWII generation began to wear thin in the eighties, and like Oldsmobile before it, Cadillac needed to sell itself to a less mortally advanced generation. Their great-fendered boats began to list toward "coupe." The Cadillac crest, an enduring emblem of mack-daddyhood (or grand-daddyhood), was streamlined, and the first new vehicle it appeared on was the 2002 Escalade. (If it didn't already mean, "to scale a rampart using ladders," the name itself would be a classic example of evocative word smashing, a fusion of "escalate" and "escapade" that for some reason, makes everyone I know think of sliding rocks.) Less of a barge and more of a P.O.S.H. ("port out, starboard home" for the less nautically-inclined) ice-cutter, the Escalade is riding Cadillac's new crest into the future: of the nine vehicles currently offered, four of them are some variety of truck.

If the luxury vehicle of the times has truly headed for the hills, then there must be new means to define the term 'luxury.' In a marketplace that has come to resemble an orgy of vehicle size and raw power, there is no other make of sport utility vehicle that has more sharply defined Western consumer vanity than the Hummer. Certainly no other make of vehicle has such opulent disparity between what it is capable of, and what it will likely be used for. It would be the preserve/forestry of choice vehicle were it not prohibitively expensive for most department budgets, and the fact that it has a military-borne nickname that is synonymous with an act of sexual subservience does not discourage this swaggering image. And let's face it: the fact of that nickname's other meaning did not prevent General Motors from using the de-facto name as the official brand.

There's a touch of hypocrisy in the derision of unused potential of a sport utility vehicle. Scorning the urban stockbroker with a Cadillac Escalade because he never leaves the metropolitan bubble seems to suggest that it would be okay if only he used that off-road enduro, remote-campsite-finding capacity. It's an argument similar to a condemnation of hunters that suggests that their practice would be justifiable "if they ate the meat." The implication is that it's not the killing that is wrong, but the wasting. At issue is the word Sport, sport as in killing for, and sport as in utility. The question is whether there is purity in its pursuit, and that is a question I won't be addressing here.

Regardless, if there is judgment to be passed on unused potential, then the Hummer is guilty of being extravagantly over the top of its urban owner's performance envelope. It is, after all, a modified military vehicle. As is often the case with conspicuous consumption, the fact of the Hummer's ridiculous over qualification is exactly the point of its prestige.

And what of the Hummer? We should know it, because like its most prominent unpaid spokesperson, it is if nothing else an impressive specimen. For the completely uninitiated, the "Hummer" that now appears on streets, advertisements, and (occasionally) rocky escarpments across the country is the commercial version of defense contractor AM General's winning bid for the for the 'High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle' (HMMWV), or "Humvee" as it came to be known. The Humvee is grandson of the first vehicle to make the transition from battlefield to parking lot -- and is manufactured by the same company that won a military contract in the 1940's for the "1/4 ton truck, General Purpose" which achieved popularity under the nickname given by the soldiers who used it -- the G.P. or "jeep."

The corporate lineage of the Humvee predates the first automobile, but following this history is a path that is erratic as the beginnings of American industry. In 1903, the Standard Wheel Company in Terre Haute, Indiana, expanded its bicycle operation to include the Overland Division, which would manufacture motor vehicles. Their first offering was the Overland Runabout. In 1908 a former bicycle manufacturer John North Willys bought the Overland Automotive Company and moved all operations to the Pope-Toledo manufacturing plant in Toledo, Ohio. Willys renamed the operation the Willys-Overland Company, which made its name producing the famous Willys-Knight series, and later the Willys-Overland Whippet. (Raise your hand if your grandfather had a Whippet.)

American auto manufacturers tended to grow into large companies, become part of large companies, or get crowded out by those large companies. In the late thirties the diminutive Willys had fallen on very hard times.

In 1940, the U.S. military was looking across an ocean, into the future of mechanized conflict. German Blitzkrieg tactics demanded that opposing forces would have to be nimble. The old model for weapons transport was certainly sure-footed. It also ate grass. Military planners needed a small, powerful, and fast machine to replace the mules and horses used in World War One.

What they envisioned was lightweight, 4-cylinder 4X4. They wanted it to weigh less than 1300 lbs, and they wanted it to be able to carry half its own weight. Design specifications were pitched to 135 companies for a bid contract, but the timeframe was so short and requirements so demanding few but the most very desperate companies could afford to apply. With most of America's automotive energies already being directed toward the manufacture of aircraft parts, the contract seemed designed to attract companies that couldn't afford not to apply.

The largest auto manufacturers had since moved on to the popular 6-cylinder engine, but the scrappy Willys-Overland retained special expertise in the manufacture of 4-cylinder vehicles. The company's future was secured by its having been a little behind the times. In 1941, Willys-Overland Motors, Inc. began producing the M-38 General Purpose vehicle for the United States military. The model and its many revisions would become a boon-bringer, and eventually the very identity, to the corporation over the next several decades. A 2002 Museum of Modern Art exhibit describes the M-38 as having "the combined appeal of an intelligent dog and a perfect gadget," and clearly there have been few vehicles, civilian or military, which have had such an indelible impact on the American consciousness.

The General Purpose Vehicle contract had hauled the struggling manufacturer from the brink of disaster during the war years, but the industrial climate at the close of World War Two posed many problems for Willys-Overland. The company had never made its own car bodies, and pent-up postwar industrial demand, along with diminished production capacity meant the small manufacturer was shut out of contention for the sought-after sheet stamping it required for its vehicle bodies.

A larger manufacturer, facing a changing commercial climate might have fallen back on the depth of its pre-war civilian product line to readjust to the postwar years. Willys-Overland had no such depth to speak of, and nothing to redefine itself with. Before the jeep, the company had just struggled back from the verge of bankruptcy – so it resorted to marketing its sole offering, a small, adaptable, and powerful vehicle suitable for "general purposes" – to a new clientele. It pitched the "jeep" to the commercial sector for industrial and farm use.

To do so, W-O found the stamping capacity it needed in the form of a company that manufactured household appliances. With some limitations to the depth of curve for parts like the fenders and hoods, jeep vehicle bodies would be made in an automatic dishwasher plant during the initial postwar period.

There were three companies that were involved with the manufacture of the General Purpose Vehicle. The tiny Bantam, instrumental in the jeep prototype development, was bought out. Ford's design was rejected in favor the Willy's model. Although Ford had been authorized by the military to mass-produce the vehicle from Willy's design specs, it had no claim to a postwar consumer product. Willys trademarked the G.I. colloquialism, and from then on the company's livelihood would be spelled with a capital "Jeep."

Willys-Overland hired a young firebrand freelance vehicle designer named Brooks Stevens to help design a line of modified Jeep vehicles for the commercial sector. America had already grown fond of the Jeep, and the once-struggling automaker began to gain footing in this slippery new battlefield, with a customer much more fickle than the U.S. Government: the American auto-buying public. Anything but unsentimental, Americans found it easy to imagine a Jeep pulling a plow or a camper on the long road back to normalcy. Before long Jeep was selling several variations of the versatile mite to working, recreating America.

The end of the 1940's was an unprecedented boom period for the automobile industry. Americans had been saving money and bottling demand during the entire war. Willys-Overland was enjoying brisk sales of its steadily broadening line of Jeep progeny, including a farm tractor, station wagon, pickup, and panel truck. Despite the company's keen desire to re-enter the lucrative postwar passenger car market, Willys had been unable to create a marketable update of its singular prewar offering, the economical 4-cyclinder "Americar." Funds for product development were often short in the Toledo-Pope manufacturing plant, and the tooling necessary to develop an entirely new passenger car was both scarce and expensive. One thing the design team was adept at was improvisation, and prototypes were often cobbled together from existing components. The beginning of 1949 found the company still without its coveted passenger car, and a need to offer something new to its customers. So they put the 4X4 drive train from a Jeep pickup into a stainless steel station wagon body. It had off-road capability, and it had wood paneling on the side. The first sport utility vehicle had been born.

Despite several corporate mergers and name changes, the company's fate remained financially braided to the adventures of the U.S. military. It remained a small player in the American truck market and had a very special relationship with the U.S. Postal Service, but its lifeblood was ongoing military truck manufacture for American endeavors in Korea and Viet Nam. The Jeep Corporation settled awkwardly into a forked niche as retail dwarf and military giant. In fact, it was the largest tactical truck manufacturer in the world.

By 1970 the company was divided into twin units. A Consumer Products Division manufactured the sideburn-friendly Wagoneer, Jeepster Commando, and the CJ line. On the other side of the market, a General Products Division continued to produce M38A1's and M151's for military customers worldwide. The following year, parent company American Motors acknowledged that the demands of the military and commercial sectors had become distinctly separate. The General Products Division was spun off into a wholly owned subsidiary called AM General. In 1983 American Motors sold its military product division to a single-minded defense contractor named LTV Corporation, which tucked AM General into its Aerospace and Defense Company.

In the late Seventies, the U.S. military was using a myriad of different vehicles to fulfill its varied automotive needs, from M-38 derivatives to Dodge Rams to an assortment of heavy trucks. Military planners desired one vehicle platform that could be modified and used for cargo, armament, troop and shelter transport, ambulance and rescue, heavy weapons mule, and up-armored personnel carrier. Also, it wanted something that would have a wider wheelbase with less of a rollover inclination than the Jeep had. The potential for this contract was enormous: it was as if the Fashion Police had opened bidding for the New Universal Pant. AM General won the first of several contracts to manufacture the High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle for the U.S. Armed Forces, in its first year as an LTV subsidiary.