Kill Your SUVs And Grow Your Own Weed

A campaign known as the Detroit Project is airing television commercials connecting SUV drivers to terrorism.

"This is George," a girl's voice says of an oblivious man at a gas station in the first ad. "This is the gas that George bought for his SUV." The screen then shows a map of the Middle East. "These are the countries where the executives bought the oil that made the gas that George bought for his SUV." The picture switches to a scene of armed terrorists in a desert. "And these are the terrorists who get money from those countries every time George fills up his SUV."

Wait a minute. Didn't the President's Insane Drug Posse just tell us, only one Super Bowl ago that buying drugs was helping to fund terrorism? Didn't they spend $3.5 million to drill this into our zonked and hopped-up, drug addled brains?

Yes, I seem to recall vaguely, through an admittedly unhinged, groggy haze that President Bush hit the same theme when he signed the Drug-Free Communities Act: “If you quit drugs, you join the fight against terror in America.”

Well, don't let anyone ever say I wasn't willing to join the fight against terrorism in America. In fact, in my great rush to join the fight against terror in America, I threw away my bongs and hash pipes that evening following the Super Bowl. Flushed my big stash of weed down the toilet along with all the pills, the dance drugs, charred foil paper wraps, the anabolic steroids, coca leaves and of course, the opium poppies. I certainly was not going to contribute to terrorism.

Once I'd stopped taking drugs, I became a successful, productive citizen. Instead of sitting around on the sofa all day, unemployed and shoving Ding Dongs and potato chips into my mouth while watching commercials for truck driver academies and Oprah's battleship weight fluctuate weeky, I decided to find work. And it wasn't hard, because this is America and anyone who wants a job in America can have one provided he isn't a lazy, terrorist-loving pot smoker. Without drugs fogging my head, it was only a matter of time before I became compulsively masculine, a venture capitalist, prosperous and blood thirsty in the boardroom like a good American, kicking people in the teeth on my way to the top and within weeks, was making my first millions.

Proud of my immediate success, I looked for different ways to show the rest of the world how rich and successful and important I was. So I watched more commercials because frankly, commercials tell every successful person what they need to know about being successful and staying successful. Through commercials I learned which credit cards to use, which investment bankers to consult, which beverages to drink to get all the hot beach bunnies, and most importantly, what kind of car to drive.

It wasn't an easy decision. There seemed to be so many automobiles out there that screamed "prestige" and "power" and "babes" that it was almost too confusing to make a choice. But there was only one vehicle out there that really fit the the protype of the athletic, powerful, sportsman-like, thrilling, staggering consumerist person I'd become and that was of course, the Sports Utility Vehicle. When I saw these commercials depicting happy, gas-guzzling Americans decked out in hipster hiking gear tearing around in the dirt, up mountains, or through snow, driving like Sherman tanks over any terrain, I fell in love. I just knew for certain that this was the vehicle for me because not ONLY does an SUV tell the world "hey, I've got enough money to buy a big, expensive car," it also says, "I, unlike those other drug-abused human carrion terrorist supports, can afford to spend thousands of dollars on something silly and frivolous like gasoline every time I want to drive up to the 7-11 for some more bottles of Mountain Dew to keep that great beach party in my back yard going strong."

So imagine my shock and horror when I turned my television on this weekend to watch more ads and found one depicting a series of ordinary SUV-Americans saying things like: "I helped hijack an airplane"; "I gave money to a terrorist training camp in a foreign country"; "What if I need to go off-road?", before closing ominously, as the screen is filled with the words: "What is your SUV doing to our national security?"

I don't know about the rest of you but I'm terror-stricken about where all this is going to end up. First it was drug users supporting terrorism, now it's SUV owners. Whose next? Catholic priests? Liberals? The NFL? How long before drinking Mountain Dew supports terrorism or Dr. Pepper becomes Dr. Osama, or Miller Light might have great taste or be less filling but pssst it also helps the terrorists run faster.

I don't want to support terrorists so I've decided to stop consuming altogether. After all, if I don't buy anything, my money won't support anything, not terrorists, not terrorism, not the roots of terrorism nor the guns and bombs of terrorism. So if I'm not going to buy anything, I guess I don't need money any more and if I don't need money anymore, there's certainly no point in working anymore. And if there's no point in working any more, I guess I'm free to go back to smoking pot and sitting around on my sofa all day long. Only THIS time, I've figured a way around supporting those pesky terrorists. This time around, I'm growing my OWN weed.