It's not easy to find positive portents in the economic abyss that's yawning at our feet, but surely one tiny bright spot is this:

The love affair with the Hummer is now over.

The Hummer - the automotive apotheosis of American Grotesque. A vehicle so waddling humongous it constipates our roads, plugs up parking stalls and mainlines an insane amount of gasoline in a world running short of fossil fuels.

The Hummer. A vehicle that met its human match in Arnold Schwarzenegger, California politico and ex-bodybuilder who, like the Hummer, famously swanned about in an inflated body ("In a bathing suit," said one observer, "he looks like a walking bag of walnuts.")

Arnold meeting the Hummer was a match made in heaven. He immediately ordered six of them.

The Hummer, a.k.a. the HumVee or High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle, to give the brute its official military designation. It was originally created for the American armed forces back in 1991 to replace the aging Jeep.

With its body armour, re-enforced chassis and bullet-proof windows, the Hummer may have made some kind of sense on the battlefield. As a domestic vehicle lurching about on North American highways it was always just plain silly - not to mention pricey.

An H3 Hummer - that's the unSanforized, somewhat shrunken model - will set you back a little over $40,000. If you're looking for more you'll want to order the bigger, dumber H2 version, which will cost you closer to $70,000.

Of course, if you're expecting options like, oh . . . windshield wipers, mirrors, tires and such - well, that'll be extra.

Any gangster-chic cachet the Hummer might have enjoyed pretty much vaporized along with 40-cent-a-liter gasoline at the pump. Gradually, the Hummer image - even among the brain-dead - degraded from awesome to awful.

The automotive industry hadn't seen such a public relations about-face since the Edsel disaster of the 1960s.

What had been the voiture de choix for drug dealers and monosyllabic rap moguls became a magnet for consumer contempt - even among consumers who would never dream of owning one.

How contemptuous? Check out the latest anti-Hummer YouTube phenomenon - a site called Ihumpedyourhummer.com. It consists of encounters between parked Hummers and young male pedestrians.

The pedestrians simulate demonstrations of extreme affection for the vehicles. Said demonstrations are videotaped and then posted on the Internet for all the world to see.

It's pretty difficult to reverence a vehicle once you've seen it dry-humped on YouTube.

And the message appears to be getting through. Hummer sales have cratered. Rumour has it even Arnie's had one of his Hummer six-pack converted to run on bio-diesel.

But some folks, to paraphrase Steve Goodman, still ain't heard the news. There is an organization in the southern states called Pray at the Pump which has formally gathered to get down on its knees and entreat The Almighty to lower the price of gasoline on behalf of Hummers and their bulked-up ilk.

And further north, worshippers at the Greater Grace Temple were treated last month to a first-of-its-kind nativity scene - of sorts.

Just behind the pulpit and directly in front of the choir, three giant SUVs - a Ford Escape, a Chevy Tahoe and a Chrysler Aspen - were parked facing the congregation.

"We have never seen as midnight an hour as we face," intoned the Reverend Charles Ellis. The reverend vowed to pray and fast until the U.S. Congress voted on a bailout for that nation's embattled automakers.

Did I mention that Greater Grace Temple is in downtown Detroit?

Hindsight is 20-20, but the question bears asking: why did anybody ever imagine the average human driver needed such ridiculously huge vehicles with so many hundreds of needless horsepower under the hood?

I suppose some would argue "Hell, boy - it's the Amurrriken way!"

- Arthur Black is a longtime B.C. newspaper columnist. To comment, e-mail letters@abbotsfordtimes.com.