I noticed on a walk today a bumper sticker (on a car). This, in and of itself, is quite unusual as the bumper sticker has gone the way of fingerless gloves on young ladies. It seems that today the only folks that wear bumper stickers on their cars are ideologues who don’t mind getting stares and odd fingers pointing at them. Face it: it takes courage to have a bumper sticker. There’s nothing uglier, though, than a 1994 VW Jetta GLS sedan with rainbow stickers and an “I Love Clinton” bumper sticker. A few observations:
1. The “clean” aesthetic that we are all so fond of has essentially obliterated the possibility of the bumper sticker truly coming back. Cars these days just don’t have flat, black vinyl bumpers that look as if they need a decal of some sort or another.
2. On the other hand, I think a candidate for the upcoming elections should pioneer the peelable bumper sticker, which would temporarily be affixed to the car. This way, at the end of the election, you could say bye-bye to that red, white, and blue stripe and move on to other issues. In this way, too, bumper stickers might become slightly stylish again.
3. The bumper sticker I saw today read “God Bless America!!” I mistook the “!!” for “II,” thus thinking that we are now in America II, which maybe we now are what with no bumper stickers around and 9/11 being the new beginning of everything.