Jonathan Todd

Given how self-absorbed Americans are supposed to be as people and a country, it may surprise that I have heard quite a few Americans berate their fellow citizens and country. I asked the latest one what annoys him most about their country. “Bumper stickers.” I expected some kind of reflection on the American character, zeitgeist or, at least, Fox News and Republicans. Bumper stickers seem too trivial a concern to damn a whole people by. But, apparently, they “are really annoying when you are stuck in traffic”.

This intrigued me sufficiently that when I next found myself in an American car park, which was later the same day in Rehoboth, Delaware, I took the pictures below of what bumper stickers confronted me. What conclusions can be drawn? The owners of these cars have strong views on their pets, politics and country. Anything else?

Jack Bowen might think so. He’s written a book called The Philosophy of Bumper Stickers. It was recently put to him that the Peanuts creator, cartoonist Charles Schultz, once said there’s a difference between a philosophy and a bumper sticker, but his book seems to deny this. Why?

“I, in my mind, I sort of take that quote you just gave by our Peanuts creator and combine it with a quote that I like from Rick Shenkman, who’s a social commentarian who writes that if your thoughts can’t be portrayed on a bumper sticker, there’s very little chance they’ll ever be accepted. So I think there’s a really nice middle ground there where, clearly, if we take the – you know, the average bumper sticker being 8.1 words, which I took the time to average one afternoon, and we take these 8.1 words and combine it with this idea that you just gave from Charles Schultz that an entire philosophy cannot be contained in 8 to 10 words, we have a nice middle ground where the bumper sticker grabs our attention typically with some sort of nice rhetoric or sarcasm and then allows us to delve deeper into it.”

So, the bumper sticker is more “workers of the world, unite!” than Das Kapital. Similarly, Gideon Rachman was once advised of a book that he was planning, ”it won’t work unless you can summarise the argument in a single sentence that can fit on Twitter.” Rachman reflected upon this and concluded:

“The Communist Manifesto is often summarised by the very twitterable: “Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains.” (Marx’s original version was less succinct.) Bentham, the father of utilitarianism, would also have been a natural on Twitter. “The greatest happiness of the greatest number” is fewer than 50 characters. Kant is a bit more long-winded. But even the categorical imperative makes it under Twitter’s limbo bar: ‘Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law’, is fewer than 140 characters.”

Simplicity is not only the stuff of footballing genius, as Ron Greenwood implored his players, but the stuff of powerful ideas. And the power of ideas is often underestimated. “Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air”, Lord Keynes famously told us, ”are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.” Well, it seems, they are so long as the academic scribbler scribbled an idea that can be distilled to fewer than 140 characters.

Bumper stickers, like twitter, are also able to transmit the essence of complex ideas. But, as the examples below attest, a complex idea doesn’t lie behind every bumper sticker. Usually, however, some assertion of identity is to be found. And, perhaps, this does tell us something about the American character, after all.