Put Your Bumper Stickers on Your Fridge, Where I Can't See Them

From the July 2017 issue

Back in the days when I had the courage to board a commercial aircraft, I remember a few trans-atlantic trips where I was given a little bumper sticker that could be affixed to the side of my seat. It said, “Wake me for meals.” Wow. Really? Wake me for belching, too. That was during an era when you daily saw bumper stickers that read, “America: Love it or leave it!” At the time, plenty of us wanted to commission our own that read, “America: Love it and fix it.”

Speaking of using your car as a bio­graphical information center, I’ve recently seen five or six bumper stickers—all on pickup trucks—that read, “If you take my guns, this is my weapon.” It’s a little hard to fathom the message. Does it mean that, during holdups, the truck will be brandished for drive-through capers? What’s more, if your vehicle bears a message that maybe establishes a deadly threat, won’t you ensure an increase in roadside chitchats with nervous patrolmen?

At the hardware store, I met a Californian in a gray Nissan GT-R who’d purchased one of those license-plate covers promising to foil red-light cameras. As usual, the plastic had turned nicotine-stain yellow, and the plate was incomprehensible to both cameras and eyeballs. “Never got a ticket in the mail,” Mr. California boasted, “but I got pulled over twice for having an obscured plate.”

And now, guess what’s back? “Buy Ameri­can” bumper stickers are what’s back. I thought they had dried up and peeled off in the Nixon administration. I recall a trio of cars we were taking to the Chrysler proving grounds: a Honda Accord, a Subaru Legacy, and a Toyota Camry. When we stopped at a convenience store en route, a customer grabbed my arm and said: “Why don’tcha test cars made in America?” The tat on his neck looked like recent prison work, so I gave him a smile instead of a snappy comeback, which I didn’t have anyway. But then I remembered that all three of our test speci­mens—plus our Toyota Sienna photo van—had been built in America. If you’re a cheerleader for “Buy American,” please attach to your pompoms a chart advising where stuff is made. Plus, I’ll bet you $20 your pompoms came from China.

You may have heard UAW president Dennis Williams proposing a “Buy American” ad campaign. The last time we stirred that mixed stew, it gave the Big Three carte blanche to relax on quality control and on R&D and on their future ability to wake me for meals. If you’re blindly loyal to “Buy American,” don’t you undermine capitalism’s essential better-mousetrap foun­dation? I don’t know, either. My parents ­overdid it a little on my fluoride treatments. And not that it’s important or anything, but why resurrect this xenophobia just as Fiat Chrysler, Ford, and GM are, if not exactly rolling in profits, at least having trouble counting them?

Well, the reason, I’m told, is that America is desperate to regain lost jobs. Which is odd, because our unemployment rate right now is hovering between a classically low 4.5 and 4.9 percent. What jobs, exactly, are we talking about? Our president says 94 million Americans are out of the workforce. The Department of Labor—who, you know, studies these things—says that 88 million folks who did not have a job in 2016 did not want a job. They’re coagulated-gravy semiretired boomers, like me, with a happy hour that begins right after the prunes and poached eggs.

“No, no, no,” they say. “We mean high-paying jobs.” I’ve yet to see a dollar figure attached to that utterance, but I assume it refers to something beyond mini­mum wage at Burger King. What happens if we do slap a 20 percent tariff on, say, a Mexico-built Ford Fusion? If you bought your Fusion for $25,000, would you now pay $30,000 to replace it? How does an overpriced and thus poor-selling Fusion make Ford more competitive against Germany, Japan, and Korea? For some reason, I smiled the other day when Mexico’s econo­my ­minister said: “The moment that they say, ‘We’re going to put a 20 percent tariff on cars,’ I get up from the table. Bye-bye.”

And now I’m seeing “America First” bumper stickers, whose message in part means banning selected immigrants. Be careful about that, too. The Center for Automotive Research’s Richard Wallace recently complained to Automotive News, “There’s not enough [automotive engineers] to start with.”

I don’t have the mental equipment to comprehend trade issues, but I do recall that America had already lost half its ­manu­facturing jobs before NAFTA took effect, and that was 23 years ago. So all of this feels as if we’re just chasing our own tails until we’ve gnawed off all the fur. I like what Saul Bellow said: “A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.”

So paste your bumper stickers on your fridge, where I can’t see them. Bumper stickers don’t inform; they incite, they discombobulate. We need to be bobulated.