Bumper Sticker Wars
The Ottawa Citizen - Oct 16, 2006
Don Sawyer
A U.S. tradition that polarizes debate and reduces complex issues to simplistic slogans has made its way to Canada.
When I was returning from the United States a few weeks ago, I boarded a connecting flight in Las Vegas and noticed a big red decal on the side of the plane: "We Support our Troops in the Middle East." Even after being in the U.S. for two weeks, I was taken aback by this crass mix of patriotism and hucksterism. I was also taken back -- to the '60s and the Vietnam War.
As that conflict dragged on, the level of discourse deteriorated badly. While thousands of Americans and millions of Vietnamese were dying, debate at home was largely limited to what could fit on a bumper sticker. Besides the always popular appeal to mindless jingoism, "Support Our Troops in Vietnam" (on a field of waving red, white and blue), the Republican Pontiac bumper could sport "America: Love it Or Leave It," (after 1972) "Jane Fonda: America's Traitor Bitch," or (my favourite for unabashed commitment to ignorance) "America: My Country, Right or Wrong."
Now admittedly our slogans weren't a heck of a lot deeper ("Ho-Ho-Ho Chi Minh" and "Out Now" come to mind), but they did tend to be more fun ("Make Love, Not War," "What if They Gave a War and Nobody Came?")
In 1969 when I drove to Canada to stay, I crossed the U.S. border at Porthill, Idaho. Driving north I stopped at a light behind a battered blue pickup. I studied the bumper sticker plastered on the rear as I waited for the light to change. This one combined pictures and words, so it was a little challenging, but finally I figured it out: "Put your (picture of Valentine's Day heart) into this country or get your (picture of doleful looking donkey) out." I passed the truck, beeped my horn, and waved.
And then the bumper stickers stopped. I was in Canada. The stresses of living in a country locked in an immoral and disastrous war began to melt away like "the morning frost under the rising sun." Anne Coulter's idiotic claims to the contrary, my new country did not have troops napalming, orange-agenting and propping up corrupt regimes in Southeast Asia. The few bumper stickers I did see advocated support for the newly created Vancouver Canucks or suggested that the driver ahead of me stopped for animals, hallucinations or leprechauns.
I never put another bumper sticker on my car.
Now fast-forward to 2006. Americans are again embroiled in a war of arrogance and deception and fighting their ideological battles on their bumpers. The victims have changed, but not much else. For the more Neanderthal, there is "These Colours Don't Run!" (especially popular after Sept. 11) and (with a National Rifle Association emblem) "When In Doubt, Empty the Magazine." And parents with bewildered sons and daughters in Iraq and Afghanistan who thought joining the reserves meant a free college education have "Our Family Is Enduring for Your Family's Freedom."
For old-school hawks there's "Get Behind our Troops or Get in Front of 'em!" and "If You can Read This Thank a Teacher; If You Can Read It in English, Thank a Vet." And, as an example (I think) of Republican humour, how about "Fat People Are Harder to Kidnap"?
As always the left is cleverer -- and more trenchant. Two of my current favourites are "Be Nice to America or We'll Bring Democracy to Your Country," and "I Love my Country, but I Think we Should Start Seeing Other People." Then there's "Regime Change Starts at Home" and "We're Making Enemies Faster than We Can Kill Them." But falling prey as ever to the curse of the intelligentsia, there can be a tendency to wordiness and sermonizing: "Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety -- Ben Franklin." (It would have to be an awful long stop light to take all that in.)
More disturbing than this new spate of bumper stickers that polarizes and reduces complex issues to slogans is that the phenomenon is no longer confined south of the border. As Canada edges into a deepening war in Afghanistan and the casualties mount, we are beginning to see the same appeals to patriotism and stupidity pop up in Canadian papers and on Albertan bumper stickers. (I was shocked to see an SUV in the liquor store parking lot festooned with yellow ribbon magnets proclaiming "Support Our Troops.")
Meaningless slogans such as "Canada Doesn't Cut and Run" are showing up in the media from Halifax to Toronto to Winnipeg. Canadian chief of defence staff Gen. Rick Hillier tells us we are in Afghanistan because we have a responsibility "as the rich and luxurious caring nation that we are to help other places around the world where the populations don't have any of those benefits or advantages or rights." This despite the fact that the situation in a hundred other countries, from Algeria to Zimbabwe, is as bad or worse.
Perhaps the most telling comment I heard was from a newly returned Canadian soldier interviewed on CBC about troop morale in Afghanistan: "We'll just have to suck it up," he said. "Canadian values are worth fighting for." (To paraphrase Dorothy, "Gosh, corporal, I don't think we're in Saskatchewan anymore.")
Writing in the London Review of Books, Anatol Lieven remarks, "Historians of the future will perhaps see preaching 'freedom' at the point of an American rifle no less morally and intellectually absurd than 'voluntary' conversion to Christianity at the point of a Spanish harquebus." And now we can, sadly, insert "Canadian" for American.
I'm thinking about ordering a magnet from the U.S. for my car. It's a black ribbon with "Support Our Troops. Bring Them Home Now."
It looks like it's come to that.
Don Sawyer immigrated from the U.S.in 1969. He is a writer, educator and aid worker with 15 years of experience in West Africa and currently lives in in Salmon Arm, B.C.
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