James Lileks gets it absolutely right, again

I have no bumperstickers, for the same reason I do not paste editorials with which I agree on the seat of my pants. I’m always fascinated by people who load up the bumper with so many stickers the tailpipe scrapes on the pavement, and – correct me if I’m wrong – the more stickers you see, the more to the left the sentiment. The other day I saw a car whose owner had, shall we say, Issues. Sticker #1: “If ignorance is bliss, you must be orgasmic.” This seems rather presumptuous, no? Taken by itself, it’s innocuous, but then you note its brethren: “Born OK the First Time.” So the owner doesn’t like Born-Agains, obviously – but the sentiment is still rather naïve. No one’s born OK the first time, inasmuch as we come howling out of the womb as selfish ethically blank bundles of appetite whose nascent sociopathic character has to be shaped to deal with the human community. Then there’s the third sticker: “It’s your hell. YOU burn in it.”

Gee. And you’d put this on your car . . . why? Because you think that someone behind you might note the absence of a chrome fish emblem and assume you’re some godless swine destined to tumble down to hideous ruin and perdition, of course. How angry do you have to be to flip off people in a way that not only presumes the worst about their opinions, but assigns them to the very fate you think they want for you? GO TO HELL YOU IGNORANT BORN AGAINER!

Bumper stickers made me a conservative, one bumper sticker in particular. Here I was, a war-hating liberal, demonstrating for abortion on the capitol steps in Albany, when I saw the bumper sticker: "War is bad for children and other living things." I believe it featured a flower decoration and appeared on a Volvo.

That enraged me against all reason. How self-righteous! How smarmy! Now lots of things are bad for children etc., like slavery, famine, insecticide, and nuclear fallout. And not brushing your teeth and flossing every day. I developed a loathing for people who put such things on their Volvos or brave, gas-saving little Volkswagens which has endured to this day.

And that was a relatively polite one, unlike some of those which portray Bush (President of the United States, remember) as a baboon. But never mind. C'est le premier pas qui coute. (Probably spelled that wrong.)