Good Reads

Bumper Stickers...

Bumper stickers, you gotta' love them.  They're a sort of the zeitgeist for our country, and, just when there wasn't a really good reason to plaster them on your SUV, along came the Iraq war which has led to a bonanza of vinyl statements - both pro and con.  By the way, if you're going to put one on your car, please, for the sake of those of us over 40 that want to be amused, please use ones whose lettering is at least 1" high.  It's very embarrassing to have to tailgate someone just to read the punch line.

Anyway, I thought it might be fun to see which bumper stickers are currently popular, so I went on the web, asked around, and did what passes for journalistic research to bloggers.  I give you the following somewhat amusing summary.  Take the truth of these findings for exactly the value of the one hour's worth of investigation that it took.  Also, in the spirit of being honest and open about any personal bias, I tend to lean toward wit and humor.

First, I did the old high level google stats thing.  If you put in 'Pro War Bumper Stickers' into Google's search box you get 283,000 search results.  If you put in 'Anti-war Bumper Stickers' in, you get 535,000 results.  So, this means that there are about twice as many web sites that talk about Anti War Bumper Stickers as there are sites that talk about 'Pro War Bumper Stickers.

This ratio held up when I went to the top bumper sticker sites themselves and did a rough count of the number of pro versus anti stickers.  Now, comes the hard part - try to figure out why.  You could rack up the disparity up to the 'it's always fun to pick on the big guy or status quo' syndrome (the big guy in this case being the government) but it seems more than that.  You could say that there are more anti war people on the web than pro - and there are a number of media types that would agree, but I don't think so.  I think it might be that the anti war crowd is just funnier.  I mean it's a little bit of a stretch to be funny if your pro war, not a lot of great humor there.

To check this idea out, I went back to the sticker sites and did a rough count of popular bumper stickers that I assumed were supposed to be amusing.  The test here was would I send this along to a friend.  If yes, then it was amusing, if no then it failed.  I found that in this case there were 4 times as many amusing anti-war stickers, as there were pro-war.  I'm guessing this is because if you're against the war, there are lots of potential areas you might go after - from funding, to cost, to incompetence etc.  The pro war, or support the war stickers, all seemed to share just a couple of themes - either it's just a patriotic thing to do, or your freedom depends on it.  There was a third theme which is a bit outside either of these - it's the kind of John Wayne, we're bigger than they are, we've got lots of power, so let's use it sort of thing.  But this, I don't think, fits into the normal pro or anti war camps, it's more of a long-standing American cultural sentiment, which reaches back to our nation's birth.  This is the 'Don't Tread On Me' or I'll blow the crap out of you idea.  This can be said anytime you can't think of a reasonable argument, and anyway you're pissing you off.

In the end, although there were times I felt like chuckling (and crying) I decided to leave my bumper naked.  I realized I'd have to put a good number of them on to represent all the feelings I had about the war, and besides, my son says that if I get to put a sticker on, there is some teenage rule that says he gets to add one for some Swedish DJ name Basshunter who sings about a robot named Anna.

oh, and by the way, the Santa Clause thing wasn't a bumper sticker, or about war, just seemed to fit in...