Is Your Bumper Picking Up the Slack from Your Brain?

Portland, Oregon suffers from "bumper sticker mentality." This means that anyone possessing the lethal combination of a car and an opinion seemingly anoints the back of their Volkswagen as a public forum of information. The most common stickers are relatively benign. Meaningless quotes and worthless musings, most not attributed, are pasted on every thing with wheels here in southeast Portland. Tolkien's "Not All Who Wander Are Lost" is particularly frequent, as is the humorously obvious "Well Behaved Women Rarely Make History." What important historical figure, male or female, can be accurately described as "well-behaved?"

The first inclinations that some of these people might have agendas they don't mind pushing are Ghandi's "An Eye for an Eye Makes the Whole World Blind," and "Equal Rights are not Special Rights." It also seems that every car that even comes within a twenty mile radius of Portland mysteriously develops the ubiquitous blue sticker proclaiming, "Attack Iraq? NO!" Perhaps the most confusing is the strange, but obviously pointed, "Question Gender." What the hell does that mean? How does one question gender? To what does this questioning lead?

Delving deeper into the fray, the statements get dicier. A personal favorite is "Why do we kill people who kill people to show that killing people is wrong?" This guy's obviously not a golfer. I saw a Ford Aspire last week with the intellectually elitist phrase, "If You're Not Outraged, You're Not Paying Attention!" The insinuation there, of course, is that if I don't agree with him, then I'm simply uninformed and need to be re-educated. Does this mentality sound familiar? Oh yeah, I think that I was very successfully employed by such not-so-well-behaved historical figures as Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler!

But I digress.

Since coming to this city, I have been amused, enraged, and experienced odd combinations of the two. Generally, however, I have been able to shrug off most of this intellectual laziness thinly veiled with ideological elitism. (I really love to see the tattered remnants of "Dean for America" stickers having been hastily scraped off the back of the family Volvo.)

This Friday, however, was a different story.

I have succumbed to the habit of reading all the bumper stickers I see, not so much out of curiosity anymore, but mostly because I am a glutton for punishment. On Friday, I was biking to work and saw the holy grail itself pasted to the tail of a ninety-six Honda Civic. I squeezed the brakes on my bike and slowly backtracked a few feet just make sure I read it correctly. I was flabbergasted. The heavens opened and angels harked and a warm fuzzy feeling washed over my body. This was it. This was the Mother of All Bumper-stickers, let us call it the MOAB. The words on this sticker seemed to perfectly condense my difficult opinions on the whole tasteless mess into a bite sized chunk of truth.

It read, "Reality is For Those Who Lack Imagination."

The question remains, however, can mental masturbation make you blind?