Rants from the Hill: I brake for Rants

I've never been a fan of bumper stickers, though I’ve always thought the idea had potential. Done right, you’d think a bumper sticker could be a sort of ideological haiku, an elegant little distillation of a person’s unique perception of the world. Or, alternatively, that it could express genuine wit by being a joke that doesn’t take too long to tell. And even if a bumper sticker isn’t very likely to prompt people to act, it should at least make them imagine. As in, for example, “Visualize Whirled Peas.” Unfortunately, the problems with bumper stickers far outweigh their benefits, and so the potential of this unique genre remains for the most part unrealized. The first problem with bumper stickers is that they aren’t sufficiently site specific. Maybe that’s a good thing, if the point of the sticker is to demonstrate your commitment. So if your bumper sticker says “How Can You Be Pro-Life and Eat Dead Animals,” and your car breaks down in front of a cattle ranch or poultry farm, you’ll just have to stick to your values during the six days it’ll take for the local tow truck driver to help you out. Second, bumper stickers are usually so polemical as to be rhetorically ineffective. Time never moves more slowly than when we’re being preached at by somebody’s bumper at the Church of the Red Light. Besides, too many sticker sound bites are already threadbare and clichéd. It is far too late now to tell folks to “Be the Change You Want to See in the World” (could I somehow be colder beer?), “Simplify” (this turns out to be incredibly complicated), or “Love Your Mother” (which could be disturbingly ambiguous). As an environmentalist, I’ve observed than many “green” bumper stickers are factually incorrect (“Trees are People Too”), unintentionally ironic (“Question Consumption” on a Lexus), incredibly corny (“May the Forest Be With You”), or intolerably sappy (“Keep All of Nature Special!!”). Finally, environmental stickers rarely respond to issues usefully because they can’t afford to represent more than one point of view. You might see a bumper sticker that says “Save the Earth, Because You Can’t Eat Money,” but you won’t see one that says “You Can’t Eat Money, but You Can Use Money to Buy Food.” Once you get away from monolithic ideological pronouncements, bumperfied environmental sloganeering just loses its pop. Read the rest at High Country News