Badge of Honor

It’s been a little over a month since the election, and all the yard signs are gone. I think it’s a law. Vote, get your sticker, and throw both it and your yard sign away on Wednesday morning. Unless you leave the sticker on the front of your Bruce Springsteen t-shirt; then you peel it off the dryer wall on laundry day.

You still see bumper stickers though. Obama08. McCain/Palin. Maybe a Ron Paul. People don’t remove stickers from their cars, I’ve noticed. It’s pretty obvious why campaign supporters keep the stickers on their cars. They’d probably keep the yard signs, too, if the boys downtown would let them. One side is proclaiming that they voted for the victor, and the others are praying that things go to pot so they can say “I told you so” without actually saying “I told you so”.

These signs and stickers are a little like tattoos. People get so hepped up on a candidate that they want to hang it out there for all to see, just like the biker who professes that Mama didn’t love him. In a strange melding of worlds, a couple people got Obama tattoos, giving up epidermal real estate for ink they could believe in.

I never got into either the bumper sticker or the yard sign thing. Some might say it’s due to my lack of commitment, and perhaps they’re right. I don’t have a tattoo because an artist in Wisconsin refused to lay needle to my skin because I couldn’t give him a really good reason for why I wanted a particular design. I guess “’cause it’s kick ass” didn’t quite cut it. Anyway, he tied spirituality to every one of his tattoos; every drop of ink meant something to him. His words took hold, and to this day, I’ve never set foot in a tattoo parlor. I’m not saying I’ll never get one. Rather, I’ve never been able to find anything that defines me within enough to put markings without.

The same goes for political festoonery. I just can’t get behind a political party enough to make any kind of public commitment. Sure, I’ll vote one way or the other on Super Tuesday (and even the not-so-super ones), but so far, I have found no candidate to be “kick ass” enough to warrant a tattoo on my lawn and/or car (although the pre-freakout Ross Perot had potential; I kinda liked the little guy).

As it turns out, lack of commitment has its upside: Zero to little embarrassment when your candidate either loses the race or mucks up after winning. It’s also handy when tattoos of Chinese symbols go out of fashion. No ink means not having to make up some lame story about how drunk you were that time you got a tattoo.

Makes me wonder: are people with McCain/Palin stickers on their Expeditions now standing around the water cooler, spinning their yarns? “Dude, we were so wasted. OK, check it: Spring break, Ft. Lauderdale, and this hot chick from Alaska was handing out bumper stickers…”

–Ant.