I Really Do Hate Bumper Stickers

After mass today a friend was promoting some sort of "Keep Christ in Christmas" bumper sticker. The things were tastefully designed, and I certainly support the statement. However, I am convinced that even bumper stickers with a good and proper message do more to hurt the common good than to better it.

The bumper sticker is a piss poor way of making an argument. At best it is a harangue, but one that offers no chance of response. I suppose you can go out and affix your own bumper sticker with a rebutal: "Saving the Whales is a Waste of Resources!"

But when it comes down to it, bumper stickers are nothing more than rallying the troops with assurances of their own strength in numbers. Oh well, some people must need that. I am more of a "damn the opposition and full speed ahead" sort. I really don't give two flips if the rest of the world believes some idiocy all the more fervently this year than they did last year. I am not going to be convinced by a slogan on the back of a Honda.

Bumper stickers represent reducing written debate to the level of television political discourse. And that is why I have no problem with the modification of, yes, even others' bumper stickers, provided that those others' bumper stickers are promoting things which are clearly evil.

Fer'instance: Remember when Chevron would print these wordy adds telling about how they were dumping special, high grade oil into pristine waters solely so wildlife could benefit by having shinier coats, and the penultimate line would be "do people care enough about the handsomeness of the Aquatic Wallabee to pour expensive hair treatments into the water?" And then you would get "People Do." Well, this eventually was simplified into just "People Do" which is brilliant.

People do what? Kill other people? Yes. Build ugly buildings? Vote for criminal knuckleheads like Ron Dellums? Yes. No one is claiming anything. People do.

Similarly, the homos used to have a slogan "SILENCE = DEATH" which wasn't quite true, insofar as it was making any real claim whatsoever. But it was a rallying cry. Of course it was, to be proper, done in a particular typeface with a particular color scheme.

Well, that has been reduced to "=". Fine! Wonderful!

All a creative editor would have to do is get some sticker paper and have fun on the computer:

"SODOMY" "DEATH"
"HOMOSEX" "DAMNATION"

etc.

Then he cuts them out, and, next time he sees a parked car, completes the statement for the people.

OF course you are not going to do anything like that. It would be vandalism. And my readers are not a bunch of vandals. Visigoths, maybe, but not vandals.

Posted by erik at December 3, 2006 9:38 PM