"Spill Baby Spill! How's that whole offshore drilling thing working out for ya?"
Now, I have never been a fan of Sarah Palin's whole Tea Party cadre of angry conservatives, and this bumper sticker is obviously a direct jab at her "Drill Baby Drill" catch phrase refracted through the lens of the tragedy of the Gulf oil spill disaster...but there is one other salient fact about this bumper sticker that has driven me from the grumbling depths to tap words to blog...that being that this particular bumper sticker was slapped on the rear of one of the many SUVs crowding the busy Marin parking lot that I was carrying my groceries through.
Marin County, along with being one of the wealthiest counties in the country, is also a heavily liberal place. Election results regularly run 60-80% Democrat, with the Progressive arm of the party being strongly represented.
So it is not surprising that a Marinite would feel compelled to take a bumperstickered shot at Sarah Palin. The problem is that this self-same Marinite seems to be oblivious to the irony of placing that bumperskicker on the back of a vehicle that desperately relies upon the whole "Drill Baby Drill" ethos, regardless of how many carbon offsets the owner may smugly wave about in their own defense.
The fact is that we: me, you, the smug Marinite in the stickered SUV, and the wingnuts from the Westboro Baptist Church, all share an addiction to refined crude that is only increasing. Sure, that shiney new Lexus Hybrid SUV sucks less of the stuff...but it still sucks...and sucks and sucks and lord knows you need the thing to run Aiden to his soccer practice after your Yoga class and before you pick up little Courtney from her jr. Pilates program.
So I say to you Mr or Mrs Smugginess, learn the meaning of "irony" and recognize that leveraging a horrific ecological disaster to make a weak political point (to an audience that mostly gets it already) is not clever or enlightened or any of the other qualities that I am sure that you embrace over tapas and Merlot with your friends.
Be smarter than that and realize that complex problems, especially those that you are contributing to, require far more thought that a snappy bumper sticker.
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