An argument against bumper stickers

Sure, I appear to be a normal, dependable, steady kind of guy, but in reality I like to look for those little quirks and flashes of hilarity that brighten a day and put a spring in one’s step. Many times I’ve found such material contained in bumper stickers.

Oh, there are tons of inane bumper stickers, of course. But there are a chosen few that have tickled me no end and caused me to smile. For instance, I saw one several years ago that made me laugh out loud, and I still remember it: “We don’t CARE how you did it up North.” Unexpected things like that just add spice to life.

But an incident on my way in to work this morning has soured me on bumper stickers. I will no longer look to them as a way to lighten my mood.

See, the problem is, bumper stickers always say the same thing. If you put a bumper sticker on your car that says “I got the crabs at Joe’s House of Seafood!”, a person will naturally assume you like to eat at Joe’s House of Seafood, since you’re advertising for them. If you subsequently get food poisoning at Joe’s House of Seafood so severe that you blow chunks of crab meat into orbit from the force of your anal convulsions, your bumper sticker still cheerfully implies to the world you thoroughly enjoy the experience of getting the crabs at Joe’s House of Seafood. An astronaut could see a crab chunk floating past his capsule, turn to his buddy, and say, “I wonder how that crab chunk got way up here. To my knowledge, crustaceans haven’t mastered space flight yet.” And his buddy would say, “I don’t know, but that reminds me – when we get back, let’s go eat at Joe’s House of Seafood. They must have great crabs there, because my neighbor put a bumper sticker on his car about them.”

So bumper stickers are not always to be trusted. I learned that, as I’ve said, to my chagrin this morning.

My standard route to work is the interstate; however, if it’s backed up by one of the accidents that are legally mandated to occur every morning just to piss me off, I take an alternate route. Two-lane, winding roads, through wooded hills. Fairly peaceful. Since I have to go to work anyway, it’s at least an idyllic, if longer, route.

I pull up to a stop sign, not too far from my office, right behind a minivan. In retrospect, I now realize the minivan had been stopped at the intersection for a longer-than-normal period of time. At the moment, though, I was lulled into a peaceful, mellow state by the serenity of my drive. And then I saw the bumper sticker.

Technically, “window sticker” would be a better description, for the owner of the van had eschewed the standard bumper placement for a higher-visibility location on the rear window of the van. The sticker read: “If you love Jesus, HONK.” The “honk” was centered on its own line, beneath the first part of the message.

Now, normally, I ignore these types of things. Not worth the effort to self-identify to another Christian. However, no one else was at the stop sign, and I was feeling peaceful and mellow and one with the world and generally happy, so I tapped my horn twice. This was not the single, long, loud blare that implies “Move your rustbucket before I drive right over it”; no, this was the cheerful, friendly, double-tap “toodle-oo”, which says “I see and agree with the message you have so prominently displayed on your vehicle, and am following the instructions thereon. Please do not shoot chunks of crab out of your anus at my car.”

The vehicle ahead of me lurches, briefly, as though I had somehow startled the minivan itself with my horn. Then, through the rear window, I can see the silhouette of the driver’s right arm as it leaves the steering wheel. I suppose I expect something like a “thumbs up” gesture of agreement with my honking. A digit is extended, yes; but it is not the thumb. Oh no. It is not the thumb at all.

I am flabbergasted. The van pulls out into the intersection. I am sure that if a minivan could burn rubber as it accelerated, this one would have done so.

As fate would have it, I pull up abreast of this van at a traffic signal a few minutes later. (The van is turning left; I am going straight.) Movement, seen out of the corner of my left eye, catches my attention, and I turn to look.

The passenger-side window of the van has been rolled down, and I am staring at a child who, judging by his actions, has obviously eaten several gallons of lead paint during those moments in his life when he’s not pursuing his favorite hobby of jamming his fingers into electrical sockets. He is flapping and gamboling around in his seat, and I stare at him a few seconds before I realize what he’s doing: He’s raising his right arm and waving the “stink” of his armpit at me with his left hand. His mother, who otherwise would appear to be a normal person, is raving at me, saying something about dropping her lipstick and trying to find it, and being late for school, and I should be more patient, and other spittle-flavored rantings.

Gone is the idyll of my morning. Gone is the peaceful commute to work. Gone is my patience with this idiot and her offspring.

I roll down my window, fill my lungs, and bellow "READ YOUR DAMN BUMPER STICKER, LADY!"

Realization dawns on her face, and it does my heart good to see the chagrin spread across her features. She grabs the arm of her spasmatic son and once again attempts to smoke her tires as she pulls away, but the best the underpowered minivan can to is grunt in its transmission as she turns through the intersection.

The bumper sticker is eternal. Your opinion or mood may change, but the message on the bumper sticker is eternal.

Think before you stick.

"Houston, we have a poo’d crab.’

HA! A girl I know who professes to be a Christian has a bunch of bumper-stickers to that effect on her car, but also a serious case of road rage.

She once told me “When I have someone else in the car, I have them flip the other cars off, because I can’t do that with the bumper stickers I’ve got.”

Love it when these sort of people give me and other Christians a bad name because of their stupidity… :dubious:

Once again, I reiterate the only bumper sticker I have ever placed on my car. ‘This Is Not An Abandoned Vehicle.’

Accurate and useful!

I’ve always wondered why someone would put a bumper sticker on their vehicle ASKING others to honk at them. Really, the way some of them drive, the invitation seems entirely unnecessary.

Unless you are a near-perfect driver with admirable self-control, it is a bad idea to have bumper stickers promoting a cause or product you believe in.

If I see a car with a “Joe’s Crab Shack” bumper sticker weaving between lanes as the driver dumps his ashtray out the window, it will not make me want to patronize that particular establishment.

That, and the fact that they serve crap.

My rule of thumb is that, if you see a car with more than three bumper stickers on it, 80% of the time it will be a grunchy-granola lefty type. For some reason, people who put “Visualize World Peace”, “Arms Not Bombs”, etc., on their cars are likely to put six similar stickers on.

The 20% on the other side, of course, are the Christian fundamentalist types, “Honk if you love Jesus”, etc.

You see a fair number of political bumper stickers, but it seems that conventional Democrats and Repubicans, if they put a political message type of sticker on at all, only put on one or at most two. Rabidly leftist types and the Christian right like to put on six (or more!). However, rabidly righty types (except for the fundamentalists) don’t seem to go for in for multiple stickers.

I am not making any comment upon the merits of the positions (at least in this post), I have just been struck by the division.

Perhaps the explanation is that the Christians are witnessing, the crunchy-granolas need the extra bumper stickers to hold their rustbucket Volvos together, whereas the whacko Right guys all drive new cars!

As my car is just to drive five minutes to work and back, I haven’t put anything on it.

My wife’s car on the other hand, has a few, one for a band made up of friends of ours, one that I can’t remember (if she didn’t take it off by now) and one small message in the back window, which reads:

ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US

Works for us. :smiley:

I saw an abandoned car on the side of Route 66 yesterday. ** ‘In Case of Rapture This Car Will Be Unmanned’**. I was a bit worried there for a second.

Crab. It’s Joe’s Crab Shack, not Joe’s…

I bought myself an “Impeach Clinton” bumper sticker during the height of the scandal. I figure I’ll wait another 15-20 years before applying it to my vehicle. The art of the bumper sticker is all in the timing…

Shit. There goes my plan to market the HONK IF YOU LIKE TO HONK bumper sticker.

I have a Grateful Dead Dancing Skeleton (with Tophat and Cane) on my BMW.

Drives my boss crazy! :smiley:

Brother, you forgot the “you don’t know this punk band but I do nyanya” cars.

My husband has an MIA sticker and a US Marines sticker on the vehicles. Drives me nuts. The whole concept of stating one’s opinion or passion on a bumper is just so…obnoxious. Harmless, but obnoxious. That goes double for flags.

What a brilliant idea. Perhaps I should have a sticker made up which says, “Impeach Nixon”. That should cause a few heads to turn.

I thought that cars with more than one sticker were trying to hide the ‘rust-through’ spots…

I was reading this rant, and thinking “This is as good as some of Sauron’s” Then I scrolled back up. Beautiful rant.

And if you were struck dead somewhere and your car became abandoned, you’d come and take it off, yes?

OK, fair enough. But no-one else would, so people will disbelieve your sticker.

Where does that leave me? I have a Wilkes-Barre Penguins sticker, a Syracuse 2003 National Champions sticker (and an alumni plate frame), and an R.E.M. sticker.

Great story, OP.

>“I got the crabs at Joe’s House of Seafood!”

Ah, they probably got the crabs at Lily’s House of Ill-Repute.
Best political bumper sticker joke I heard:

Hear about the bumper sticker selling to both Democrats and Republicans?

“Run, Hillary, Run!”

Democrats put it on their back bumper.

Republicans put it on the front.