How Do Bumper Stickers Matter?
How can bumper stickers make a difference in a nation’s politics? Let’s count the ways: • Bumper Stickers can provide the punchline to an implicit argument. One popular knock against bumper stickers is that they’re anti-intellectual. “We need a foreign policy that doesn’t fit on a bumper sticker,” is a typical dig at the form in policy circles, implying that an expression of few words is not sufficient to grasp the complexities of a situation. I think that such criticisms are not only wrong, but also underestimate the intellectual challenge implicit in some bumper stickers. A 30-page policy tract lays out an entire argument, step-by-step, for a reader to passively digest. Bumper stickers, on the other hand, may require the viewer to make an active, re-creative interpretation of an entire argument. For instance, the bumper sticker to the right is really the lynchpin in a long argument that assumes the reader has been following American politics over the past decade. Fully expressed, the
