"Every so often, I find myself, for the umpteenth time, driving behind a Vermont granolamobile whose bumper not only proclaims the driver’s enduring post-2004 support for Kerry/Edwards but also bears the slogan 'FREE TIBET.'
It must be great to be the guy with the printing contract for the 'FREE TIBET' stickers. Not so good to be the guy back in Tibet wondering when the freeing thereof will actually get under way. Are you in favor of a Free Tibet? It’s hard to find anyone who isn’t. […]"
"Everyone’s for a free Tibet, but no one’s for freeing Tibet. So Tibet will stay unfree—as unfree now as it was when the first Free Tibet campaigner slapped the very first 'FREE TIBET' sticker onto the back of his Edsel. Idealism as inertia is the hallmark of the movement. Well, not entirely inertia: it must be a pain in the neck when you trade in the Volvo for a Subaru and have to bend down and paste on a new 'FREE TIBET' sticker. For a while, my otherwise not terribly political wife got extremely irritated by the Free Tibet schtick, demanding to know at a pancake breakfast at the local church what precisely some harmless hippy-dippy old neighbor of ours meant by the sticker he’d been proudly displaying decade in, decade out: 'But what exactly are you doing to free Tibet?' she insisted. 'You’re not doing anything, are you?'"
"'Give the guy a break,' I said when we got back home. 'He’s advertising his moral superiority, not calling for action. If Rumsfeld were to say, ‘Free Tibet? Jiminy, what a swell idea! The Third Infantry Division goes in on Thursday,’ the bumper-sticker crowd would be aghast. They’d have to bend down and peel off the ‘FREE TIBET’ stickers and replace them with ‘WAR IS NOT THE ANSWER.’”
"But there’ll never be a Free Tibet—because, through all the decades Americans were riding around with the bumper stickers, the Chinese were moving populations, torturing Tibetans, imposing inter-marriage until Tibet was altered beyond recognition. By the time the guys with the Free Tibet stickers get around to freeing Tibet there’ll be no Tibet left to free."
--Mark Steyn, America Alone, pp.131-132.
1 comment:
Bravo! Charlottesville has got to be the capital of liberal bumper stickers. I'm wondering what the "carbon footprint" might be of all those stickers, hovering over their respective exhaust pipes? From the fish, to the fish with legs, to Free Tibet, bumper stickers are an easy way to absolve ourselves of any real action. My favorite is "stop sprawl," parked in a driveway of a sub-division.
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