Lost in last week’s news amid a bevy of horrid economic reports, heightened tension in the health care debate, and Congressional hearings on Toyota’s acceleration problems, one overlooked story seems worthy of note this weekend – the demise of the Hummer.

With GM’s sale of the Hummer line of gargantuan SUVs to China’s Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery now scuttled, what served as a cultural icon during the middle of the last decade will now be relegated to history’s scrapheap. It is the final footnote to an era a half-decade ago when the U.S. housing bubble was at its maximum point of inflation and, not only would banks let you borrow money for virtually anything, but the government provided incentives for small businesses to purchase these monstrous vehicles.

It comes at a time of profound change for this country and there is more than a little irony in the Hummer being cast adrift in the same year that California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger will meet the same fate, eight years after both were embraced back in 2002 as noted in this report in today’s Washington Post.

General Motors’ decision last week to shut down its Hummer brand is not merely one more sour note in a car-industry chorus of bailouts and bad brakes. It also appears to be the final chapter of a star-crossed love story, an American marriage of one man and one machine that couldn’t endure because of a hard truth: Even the biggest things don’t stay big forever.

The man, Arnold Schwarzenegger, was responsible for bringing the machine, Hummer, to prominence.

The little-known history of the street-legal H3 is detailed in this fine story, then the phoenix like rise of both the Gubernator and the H2 are chronicled.

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