American testosterone: Hummers, carrots, and other things.(CULTURE WATCH)

IF you really want to know what's happening, go get another cup of coffee when the news comes on and get back in time for the commercials. They've always been revealing, but Hummer's "Restore Your Manhood" spot is a 30-second State of the Union.

In case you were bitten recently by the tsetse fly, it goes like this: Two young men are in a grocery checkout. The first is buying tofu, organic veggies, and skim milk. Directly behind him in the line is the second young man, whose basket is full of beef ribs, potato chips, and pizza. The sight of all that macho fare makes the first young man cringe in shame and sends him straight to the GM dealership where he buys a Hummer on the spot. As he's driving away in it, smiling proudly, the message "Restore Your Manhood" flashes on the screen.

Even I did a double-take the first time I saw it. My instant analysis, that it was a masterpiece of self-parody, lasted all of two seconds before I came to my senses. American automakers are so constitutionally incapable of self-parody that if their advertisers were foolish enough to bring it up, they probably would think it was a new cruise-control button for driving in parades; words like nuance and oblique have no meaning for them except as sexy-sounding names for new models.

Hummer must therefore have intended the pitch to be taken straight and had to have known how it would be received by the usual suspects. Did they deliberately set out to enrage feminists, gays, vegetarians, environmentalists, and PETAbears all at the same time? True, there are no Hummer buyers among them, but these are the people who throw things, burn things, and run naked through things. If real men like to confront obstacles, Hummer was supplying their customer base with a gantlet.

As the ad continued to air, my interpretive juices flowed. Next I decided that Hummer was appealing to the silent majority's seething resentment of political correctness. Most Americans agree that it's wrong to use outright slurs; what galls them is having to flag their vocabulary to avoid the landmines set to explode when someone trips over a subtle undercurrent. For example, it's okay to say "masculinity" because you might be getting ready to condemn it, but you can't say "manhood" because whatever you say next is bound to be something good.

What else? Well, Hummer might be appealing to political swagger, saying, in effect, that American might well conquer the Middle East and cause the oil wells to flow like milk and honey, and if it doesn't we'll dig up Alaska. Or maybe they were banking on the power of reverse psychology: "If the wusses keep telling me not to buy a gas-guzzler, I'll by-God buy one." Or maybe they were striving for a profitable combination of nostalgia and patriotism. The Hummer is copied from the Hum Vee combat vehicle used by American troops in Iraq, so the public might come to regard it with the same affection we felt for the WWII Jeep.

Or maybe they just wanted to get people talking and writing about the ad. To find out, I googled HUMMER MANHOOD AD, and sure enough, I was not alone. The bloggers and their hit men--there were almost no female respondents--had pounced on the subject with a vengeance but with a paucity of ideas. Of the several dozen I read, only a handful said anything interesting or even coherent. A vet challenged the tofu buyer, "Join the army and drive a real one!" A snob observed loftily, "The only kind of men this ad could persuade are those who can't afford the $48,000 sticker price." And an earnest family-values booster droned on about being a good husband and father in a tract consisting entirely of cliches.