A MOUNTAIN VIEW: Bumper Snickers

By LIZA FIELD/Columnist

If you’ve pulled off your campaign stickers and need to cover up old gummy-marks, check out the famous Northern Sun company from Minnesota. Long before they had a Web site, their catalog was the kind that would lie open for days in households across the U.S., provoking gales of laughter, squabbles, new thoughts and vexation.
“Every page gives me a snicker-fit,” said someone I’d seen pulling this catalog out of a post office box last year.
“I laughed so hard at one of mine, I slid down the chair and fell on the floor,” I agreed, remembering a prolonged spasm on the gritty linoleum, ha-ha’ing so hard it was impossible to inhale.
This company doesn’t offer comedy routines or gag gifts. Just a benign, harmless collection of weird small-farm coffee beans in dusty-looking wrappers, canvas grocery bags, stationery-made-from-old-topo-maps, Tibetan prayer flags, rough little Peruvian clay flutes shaped like turtles, and T-shirts.
But turn to the “bumpersnicker” section, and you’re in for a ride.
“Ask me about the conspiracy!” one suggests eagerly.
Another reads in bewilderment, “Where are we going? And why am I in this handbasket?”
“Dogs are family,” insists another. “Would you chain your grandma outside?”
“Kill your television,” one frankly recommends.
One stern sticker warns, “I brake—SUDDENLY—for tailgaters.”
An official-looking sticker declares in bold block letters, “UNMARKED POLICE CAR!”
A few stickers irreverently respond to the religious-right messages that tend to proliferate in election years.
“Jesus called,” one announces. “He wants his religion back.”
“God wants spiritual fruits—not religious nuts,” another suggests.
“I’m for the separation of church and hate,” one declares.
“Jesus is coming,” another solemnly warns, adding in an all-cap whisper, “LOOK BUSY.”
Another humble, happy-go-lucky query asks, “Come the rapture, can I have your car?”
One sticker suggests, in dignified, ecclesiastical script, “HONK if you think I’m Jesus.”
One year, I ordered some of these for April Fool’s day, and enjoyed followup stories, throughout the month, from bewildered friends who’d driven around in oblivion for days, amid tootings of horns, honkings, waves, and a few glares.
“I just kept waving back at everybody,” one told me, after finally noticing his bumper’s accoutrement. “I wondered why people were being so friendly. I didn’t realize they were waving at Jesus.”
My banjo-playing neighbor-from-Maine and his wife-the-nurse-from-Germany have sported an array of Northern Sun stickers that have definitely “stuck out” around our town. In 2004, one of theirs posed the blank-faced question, “Who would Jesus bomb?”
Another quoted Gandhi, “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.”
Other Northern Sun peace stickers are more traditional, like the dove-adorned, biblical blessing my mother wears on her truck, “Peace be with you.”
Another comments, with a cheerful shrug, “I’m already against the next war!”
The environmental stickers are more somber. One depicts the outline of a polar bear plodding along. “Extinct is Forever.”
One I plan to add to my bumper reads, “Environmental Protection IS a family value.”
Another cheerfully announces in green, “At least the war on the environment is going well!”
Another quotes Ansel Adams. His long-ago words align with recent news that the Chesapeake Bay Foundation is (the latest conservation group forced into) suing the EPA to enforce its own water quality regulations, so that we actually stop increasing the Bay’s dead zone. “It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save our environment,” Adams observes.
Various stickers comment on other government priorities. “Our National Health Care Plan: Don’t Get Sick!”
An old education sticker I look forward to stripping off my own bumper reads, “The Bush Legacy: Leave No Child A Dime!”
Left-leaners get their share of ribbing. “Save plants! Eat vegetarians!”
One that my land trust director stuck beside her Episcopal church sticker reads, “Tree-hugging Dirt-Worshipper!”—perhaps to keep the Chuck Colson followers busy accusing ecologists of heresy.
Luckily, it’s been unfashionable in recent years to ornament car bumpers with anything but a Wal-Mart flag. Otherwise, Northern Sun stickers might so proliferate, they’d be causing Interstate wrecks as people inched closer to read and puzzle over these cryptic, mobile comments.
Bearing this in mind, I glanced at the T-shirts. It was hard to imagine walking around wearing a block-letter announcement: “Doing My Best to P— Off the Religious Right!”
Maybe, instead, “Blessed Are the Peacemakers”? —Not as funny, I realize, but appropriate for the front of oneself, not just the bumper. After all, these are times that called for a greeting, perhaps even more than a driving-off.
Liza Field lives, teaches and plants trees in Wytheville. Contact her at .