I saw a car today, plastered with a bunch of idealistic bumper stickers hoping for world peace. Good. I hope for world peace, too. Most people do.
But what made me shake my head and laugh, was a big one: Grand Oil Party.
You have to be conversant with U.S. politics to get the attempted joke. The U.S. Republican Party is nicknamed the Grand Old Party. Who the heck knows why.
The irony of such a bumper sticker tickled me.
The driver apparently supports two propositions: Oil is evil. The Republican Party supports the protection of oil interests.
The driver is apparently an idiot.
Hey, I hate congestion, pollution and the cars that spew it as much as anybody. I hate the daily dead zoo of crushed animals I pass on my way to work. I hate putting money into the pockets of Chavez, Putin and other anti-democratic, oil-rich numbskulls around the world every time I fill up my tank. I walk when I can, where I can, and I drive a small, cheap car when I can't.
If I woke up tomorrow and some brilliant soul had found a practical and economically feasible way for all of us to get around, that involved none of the above, I'd celebrate. But I live in the Southern U.S. You wouldn't want to be around me on a summer day if I had only a bicycle to do my daily job and if I had to hike or bike the thirty miles to get to my office in the first place.
And in the meantime, somebody driving a gas-powered car (coated with a petroleum-based paint and no doubt loaded with various plastic components) looks awfully stupid sporting a bumper sticker proclaiming the evils of said product and mocking some political party for supposedly protecting the supply of said product.
What if he/she got his/her wish? What if they pulled into the gas station tomorrow with their needle on empty, only to be told that every Republican was in jail and the petroleum industry had collapsed?
Such a bumper sticker should only be sported by someone courageous enough to sell their car and move into the wilderness; or blessed enough to find a job where they didn't need a car to get around. And it belongs not on a bumper at all, but rather on a bicycle or a hiker's blue-jeaned backside.
Friday, April 20, 2007
New Bumper Sticker Suggestion: Idiot on Board
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2 comments:
I've been similarly annoyed by other simplistic or irrelevant political messages, and by walking hypocrites who can't practise what they preach. And don't realise that they're as much a part of the "problem" as anybody else. About the 'problem':
As if banning gas would solve more problems than it would create.
As if rationing electricity would solve more problems than it would create.
As though, as some chain email suggests, there is a way to reduce the petrol/gas price.
And for never, ever, suggesting constructive political measures.
People are very very bad at imagining what would actually happen if they got their wishes. This same problem causes people to overestimate how happy buying the product they want will make them, and for how long it will do so. I'm just going to lump it all under 'stupidity'
Cartoons, the best kind, not the moronic shoot-em-up slop, provide some of the most thought-provoking commentary on life.
There was an episode of The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy in which a magic skull provided its temporary owner with the fulfillment of one wish.
The irony was that each fulfilled wish proved to be very unpleasant, even deadly, for the wisher.
The only character above the fray was the sour little anti-heroine of the series, who made no wishes herself but used the greed of her neighbors to enrich herself with said skull.
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