Bumpersticker Theology

I don't know about you, but I still notice cars driving around with Kerry/Edwards stickers on their cars. To me that's like holding the "L" sign up to your forehead and declaring yourself a loser. Scrape them off for Pete's sake and go on with your lives. Everytime I see one of those "Kedwards" stickers I have to fight off the urge to do a NASCAR bump-and-run on them and leave them wadded up on the side of the road. Anything to clean up the gene pool.

Because I spend a significant part of my life behind the wheel of a company car en route to or from clients in San Diego County, I see all kinds of positions and policies promoted or denounced on the back of cars. I've found that the basic rule of thumb is that more stickers = less brains. Every now and then I'll see some total piece of junk going down the road plastered with every kind of liberal sentiment you can think of. Those cars always seem to have an abundance of environmentally-themed stickers denouncing global warming or encouraging us to hug something. You want to clean up the environment? How about junking that piece of crap you're driving.

Those cars I'd gladly leave alone since they're the best possible advertising against the positions they support. After all, who wants to be lumped in with a nut who'd go out in public looking like that.

James Lileks takes his usual humorous shot at bumper stickers in today's Bleat:

I have no bumperstickers, for the same reason I do not paste editorials with which I agree on the seat of my pants. I’m always fascinated by people who load up the bumper with so many stickers the tailpipe scrapes on the pavement, and – correct me if I’m wrong – the more stickers you see, the more to the left the sentiment. The other day I saw a car whose owner had, shall we say, Issues. Sticker #1: “If ignorance is bliss, you must be orgasmic.” This seems rather presumptuous, no? Taken by itself, it’s innocuous, but then you note its brethren: “Born OK the First Time.” So the owner doesn’t like Born-Agains, obviously – but the sentiment is still rather naïve. No one’s born OK the first time, inasmuch as we come howling out of the womb as selfish ethically blank bundles of appetite whose nascent sociopathic character has to be shaped to deal with the human community. Then there’s the third sticker: “It’s your hell. YOU burn in it.”

Gee. And you’d put this on your car . . . why? Because you think that someone behind you might note the absence of a chrome fish emblem and assume you’re some godless swine destined to tumble down to hideous ruin and perdition, of course. How angry do you have to be to flip off people in a way that not only presumes the worst about their opinions, but assigns them to the very fate you think they want for you? GO TO HELL YOU IGNORANT BORN AGAINER!

The car was in the parking lot where Gnat goes to school. I haven’t matched it with a parent yet, but if I do I’m tempted to say “God bless!” Just to piss her off. I’m no Churchy LaFemme, as Homer (and Walt) might say, and I have no problem with the unchurched who pursue the Divine outside the buttressed confines. But nothing makes me choose a side like people who believe that the entirety of the theistic perspective can be adequately refuted by self-congratulatory slogans on adhesive-backed plastic.

As usual, he says it better than I ever could.