This is additional fine print. Fine-print may help you live a longer, more healthy and happy life (this statement neither examined nor endorsed by the FDA). The statements that follow are the opinion only of the author, and only most of the time. On alternate Tuesdays, he believes the USA is the last bastion of freedom and finely cultured taste in the world, but this is also the day the exhaust fumes tend to blow downwind from the beltway, and he usually ends these experiences light-headed and dizzy, and longing to spend the entire next day watching old Gilligan's Island reruns. The author is aware that forming such an impression as that described in this article after only a year and a half in this country, and then actually publishing it, is the height of unbridled arrogance, and not especially diplomatic for a guest within these borders. But he can't help himself. This is part of his therapy. Readers offended by this material are merely collateral damage in this war. Life is unjust.

Bumper stickers et le declin de l'empire Americain

An It's lonely here / there's no one left to torture* production

They really love their bumper stickers in Virginia.

Not long after arriving here, when an American citizen asked me my impressions of his homeland, I replied that so far, nothing had impressed me quite so much about the place as their bumper stickers. The apotheosis of American culture, was, I believe, the term I used (I like to try to sound well-read. And how many times do you get to work 'apotheosis' into a sentence anyway?). Take away the bumper stickers, and the next thing that's gonna come to mind about the U.S. of A. for me at least is probably bad, bad, BAD fast food in tacky plastic restaurants, so let's concentrate on the bumper stickers a while, shall we (I'll get to the fast food shortly anyway, I'm sure).

Bumper stickers. The advertising jingle as the acme of communication. This is the land God gave to Cain the PR guy. Zippy the Pinhead is rapidly becoming my personal hero. Used to read him before, but I don't think I ever really got him until I moved here and discovered that most of my neighbours have a drive-through window — and no, it's not to sell food — that's just how they do things here now. Wanna see your gramma? Haul yer Chevy up to her drive-through, hear her voice, crackling with both the stress-fracture lines of 78 years and the subtle harmonics of a three and a half inch speaker glued to the plastic board on this little winding drive-through lane outside her house. Roll down the window, make your order. You won't understand a word of course, but on the menu board there's a list — top line, in faded blue plastic letters is "Hear gramma ask whether you think you've met the right girl this time". Next line, green letters, before 11 am only, "Have gramma try to serve you more food at one sitting than anything outside class Cetecea could possibly consume in a lifetime". Finally, last line, the 99 cent special, "Hear gramma commiserate on how bad things are in these evil, dangerous times, when criminals roam the streets, and it's no one's business what else goes on". Truly, worth every penny. But do ask for it by the number on the board, or there's no way they're getting it right.

No, I mean it. Drive-throughs for everything. Churches. Save your soul without shutting off your engine. Grocery stores. Soon, we will have major surgery without leaving the driver's seat, sex with your significant other arranged at a plastic kiosk in a mall, where you'll book time by the half hour. Eventually, I have to assume, homes will become entirely obsolete, and we will live in a perpetual commute, stopping our vehicles only long enough to dump out the growing pile of fast food wrappers, and it won't matter where anymore (as if it does now) — we'll just shovel it into the ditch with the rest of it. Toss them out before they decompose to the point where they spontaneously combust. Periodically, people passing us in the next lane will forget this occasional but crucial duty, and we'll be reminded again by their sudden and untimely demise that it's time to pull over, as the stinking, growing heap of burger wrappers and fried chicken boxes in their back seat finally hits critical mass and goes nova, and their freakin' land zeppelin (eight wheel drive, the next big thing) for the first time in its life actually lifts a few inches off the asphalt, in a cheerily bright red, flaming cherry of Big Mac wrappers and waxy, oversize, disposable paper cups, the concussion taking down a few billboards, and giving the PR people excuses (as if they need them) to run new ones. A few chunks of cardboard from one of those soda trays will rain down on our hood, and we'll run the wipers just long enough to brush them away.

But back to Zippy and the bumper stickers. Who but Griffith's wondrous weirdo takes so much joy in the vacuous sloganeering that passes for communication at so many levels of this society now? (I mean Zippy's so great he's recursive — now himself an icon, so that you need say nothing but invoke his name, and people know what you mean, and I'm sure Zippy himself could ask for himself no finer fate than to become a mass-market advertising slogan himself). Who, that is, but those inspired souls who have discovered that a 3 by 12 inch strip of adhesive with letters just large enough to be visible to the driver immediately behind (assuming that driver's eyes are good enough that they should actually be driving, of course) can do all their talking for them?

(Memorable from this year: I feed on the flesh of the living — and I VOTE!. Yeah. I know what you mean.)

In the category of great social experiments — Virigina even seems to be carrying on its own equivalent to Middle-Eastern/Northern Ireland type sectarian strife through campaigns mounted on its bumpers, rather than letting things get too messy and physical, and this I have grudgingly to salute — the cost to my personal sense of aesthetics of acres of pink backgrounds behind yellow letters rather outweighed by the savings in spilled blood, I suppose. You'll see invocations to call upon Allah for guidance in one lane, next to the also memorable "Kali is my copilot" passing on the left. But there's no getting around it, it's the Christians who are truly the greatest menace to the average driver's sanity here — fragments of scripture and countless utterly revoltingly saccharine sweet variations on "Jesus loves you too" trundle along in any lane you might care to survey. There are so many license plates quoting bible chapter/verse references, I start to think I should dust off my own copy of that ancient heap of meandering prose of questionable provenance and literary value, bring it with me, so I can look them up when I'm stuck in rush hour, then harangue the drivers on why they chose that particular piece of mindless fluff outta John — I mean, look, stupid, here's something from Ecclesiastes that wasn't yet taken, according to the DMV — have you no sense of the age in which you live? Meaningless, meaningless, everything is meaningless, sayeth the teacher. Thinking, myself, of picking out one of the many 'begats' out of the early old testament and getting the chapter and verse stamped on a custom plate — something that would look up to "And Jehosaphat begat Nehemiah", just to see if anyone is really paying attention.

Yes, and against what seems like mere token resistance from a hopeless few still brave enough to carry Darwin's mantle in this mindless age (the tool-using fish remains one of my favourites), much noise from slack-jawed fundamentalists about evolution and all that suggests the earth may be a wee bit older than the 6,000 years some nameless scholastic thinks it's supposed to have taken for all those freakin' begats. In a parking lot, I read the immortal "Big bang theory: God spoke, and bang!, it happened." I mean, wow. Just how can you answer such reasoning. I'm calling Stephen Hawking this very moment and demanding a rewrite. What was he thinking?

Fact is, it's just finally and utterly logical. Decades of advances in mass communications have quite naturally come to this — an entire culture whose deepest thoughts fit onto those little adhesive strips. Further, an entire culture whose progress in thinking stratifies so readily around these little pearls of wisdom that it makes perfect sense to bind your credo to the back of your rusting Nova with crazy glue — you're not actually going to reconsider any single tenet of it any faster than it will take for the car to wend its way to the great wrecking yard in the sky or for the sticker to bleach to a neutral white on the question. Ultimately, an entire culture in which, yes, actually, that really is all anyone has to say. And why go to the trouble of actually composing sentences for yourself when you can just repeat a short string of commercial slogans culled from the endlessly ready and ceaselessly replenished reservoir of common experience supplied by prime time every night, and talk television every day? Just take any catchphrase from any overmarketed movie, garnish it with a few dribs and drabs of repeated dialogue from a syndicated sitcom, and move on with your day. Who needs a growing, evolving, living body of ideas and experience when a short list of Hallmark slogans tattooed to your forehead is so much easier to remember (as long as you tattoo them reversed, so you can read them in the mirror, when the ambient heavy metal levels start to reach the concentrations where your memory fails).

I can't help musing, pulling back into my parking spot, the commuter hell escaped for another meagre few hours, that somewhere in this, a cold light begins to shine on why the thousand-year old ravings of a few self-styled holy men of an ancient desert tribe on how it is this world actually got here are so much more comprehensible to such a surprising number of the people in the next lane than are evolution and natural selection. The thing is, "God spoke and bang! it happened" just fits so much more comfortably on a bumper sticker than does the modern synthesis. Neither Darwin nor Mayr ever particularly targeted the medium, but I can't imagine it going too easily for them if they had anyway — as elegantly simple as their ideas may be, I suspect they'd still adapt poorly to the format — the fundamental problem being that the very attitude of the bumper sticker — a static, solidified, congealed lump of stubbornly unchanging ideology — is so very counter to the spirit of investigation by which such theories are conceived and elaborated. Theories — especially beautiful, broadly unifying ones of exceptional explanatory power — are not glued to the bumper to die, their shrine and crypt a patch of peeling chrome hung a few inches from the crumbling concrete surfaces of the interstates, and bouncing in a hungover dream state from strip mall to strip mall. Their place is the world, as the living, fluid tools with which living, fluid minds work.

And then again, maybe there's just something counterintuitive to such people that the world might have ever looked any different than it does now. For all the apparent dynamism of the culture, change, gradual or otherwise, is anathema to them. The only place they're going is the next drive-through. And they're happiest if it looks just like the last one.

— 20 July, 2000 / AJM

* Leonard Cohen, from The Future. But you knew that.

— This rant inspired by the work of one Elizabeth Anne Kessick — and by that crazy old guy down the street who sits on his porch in his underwear, and rants about the New World Order — we love ya, Pat.