Speaking my mind at 65 MPH
Dec. 21st, 2002 09:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beetigerMixed in with the holiday cards from old friends, and the requests for money from charities, and the thousands of catalogs in my mailbox, I got a package of stuff I ordered several months ago from the Bisexual Resource Center in Boston, we after I'd given up that $20 as a lost cause. In it was, among other things, a round black bumper sticker with the most standard of the bisexual pride glyphs, a pink triangle with a pale blue triangle offset, but in the same orientation (point down), forming a lavender triangle in the middle. I put it on my car.
I like bumper stickers. If nothing else, they help this scatterbrained kitty find her car in parking lots after she's been away from it a few hours, since it's hard to identify on rather generic looking Toyota from antoher at a distance. I wasn't brought up with them. My father always just drove solid high-end cars; Volvos and Audis and the like. My mother always expressed clear messages with hers, though not with stickers. I remember watching her drive around in her red Corvette, hair blowing in the breeze, when I was a teen. Now she buys off-lease Cadillacs in weird colors, silver and lavender , that the dealer saves for her when they come in. That's a statement, certainly; a bumper sticker would be almost superfluous.
I started seeing a lot of bumper stickers on cars when I started hanging around at folk festivals, near the end of college. My first one went on my black Corolla. "Eat Bertha's Mussels", blocky white letters on green. It's a reference to a folk song which is a reference to a restaurant in New England somewhere, the tune to which I can't recall right now. Several people on my Morris dance team had it; one gave the sticker to me and cajoled me until I put it on my car. I lost that one when my neighbor rear-ended me in my driveway and I had to have my bumper replaced. I remember being profoundly disappointed, but not actually searching out a replacement.
It's a funny kind of self-labeling. Most people only have one or two of them - more than that sends an implied message that you are some sort of a hippy slob. In order to really do their job, they really can't be more than a few words, or they won't be readable at highway speeds. Visual sound bites. You can't really assess their impact, since you won't generally interact directly with the people who see them. Most of the ones you see are political -candidate endorsements, pro-life or pro-choice statements, gun control statements,enivironmental statements. Around here, you see a lot of "My kid is an Honors Student at Flicklendorf High School". Lots of pink triangles and rainbow flags, lots of Pagan or Christian identfiiers. You can't change the statement too often, unless you've got one of those magnetic bumper sticker holders or you like scraping.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sythyry's yellow and black "Weird Load" wore on me after a while.
My favorite bumper sticker ever had a line from the Dar Williams song "The Christians and the Pagans", about a Christmas eve reconciliation between two chunks of a familiy with different philosophies. It said "We find magic everywhere". It worked as a pagan identfier and a folkie indetifier, and it was pretty - black with moons and stars on it. I lost that one to the body work after the big accident when I mistakenly turned my car directly into oncoming traffic at a local intersection with hideous sight lines. Perhaps it protected me, I don't know. Dar Williams doesn't sell it anymore, so I can't replace it.
I'm going to be more out at my workplace now, since the parking lot's small, and I think everyone knows everyone else's car. I'm not too worried about that, and in fact it's probably helpful to me. But I do worry about helping people build some incorrect stereotpyes. Will I inadvertently help convince people that bisexuals are lousy drivers? Or will they merely shake their heads and say: "She's so queer, she can't even park straight?"
I like bumper stickers. If nothing else, they help this scatterbrained kitty find her car in parking lots after she's been away from it a few hours, since it's hard to identify on rather generic looking Toyota from antoher at a distance. I wasn't brought up with them. My father always just drove solid high-end cars; Volvos and Audis and the like. My mother always expressed clear messages with hers, though not with stickers. I remember watching her drive around in her red Corvette, hair blowing in the breeze, when I was a teen. Now she buys off-lease Cadillacs in weird colors, silver and lavender , that the dealer saves for her when they come in. That's a statement, certainly; a bumper sticker would be almost superfluous.
I started seeing a lot of bumper stickers on cars when I started hanging around at folk festivals, near the end of college. My first one went on my black Corolla. "Eat Bertha's Mussels", blocky white letters on green. It's a reference to a folk song which is a reference to a restaurant in New England somewhere, the tune to which I can't recall right now. Several people on my Morris dance team had it; one gave the sticker to me and cajoled me until I put it on my car. I lost that one when my neighbor rear-ended me in my driveway and I had to have my bumper replaced. I remember being profoundly disappointed, but not actually searching out a replacement.
It's a funny kind of self-labeling. Most people only have one or two of them - more than that sends an implied message that you are some sort of a hippy slob. In order to really do their job, they really can't be more than a few words, or they won't be readable at highway speeds. Visual sound bites. You can't really assess their impact, since you won't generally interact directly with the people who see them. Most of the ones you see are political -candidate endorsements, pro-life or pro-choice statements, gun control statements,enivironmental statements. Around here, you see a lot of "My kid is an Honors Student at Flicklendorf High School". Lots of pink triangles and rainbow flags, lots of Pagan or Christian identfiiers. You can't change the statement too often, unless you've got one of those magnetic bumper sticker holders or you like scraping.
sythyry's yellow and black "Weird Load" wore on me after a while.My favorite bumper sticker ever had a line from the Dar Williams song "The Christians and the Pagans", about a Christmas eve reconciliation between two chunks of a familiy with different philosophies. It said "We find magic everywhere". It worked as a pagan identfier and a folkie indetifier, and it was pretty - black with moons and stars on it. I lost that one to the body work after the big accident when I mistakenly turned my car directly into oncoming traffic at a local intersection with hideous sight lines. Perhaps it protected me, I don't know. Dar Williams doesn't sell it anymore, so I can't replace it.
I'm going to be more out at my workplace now, since the parking lot's small, and I think everyone knows everyone else's car. I'm not too worried about that, and in fact it's probably helpful to me. But I do worry about helping people build some incorrect stereotpyes. Will I inadvertently help convince people that bisexuals are lousy drivers? Or will they merely shake their heads and say: "She's so queer, she can't even park straight?"
