Bumper Sticker Mentality

Ever see those cars plastered with stickers all over the back?  Not the ones with an amusing quip about your favorite pastime, spoiling your grandkids, supporting a favorite team or being proud of your kid who made the honor role, but the political/cultural ones that supposedly communicate a simple but profound concept that even a child could understand if he wasn’t an idiot with differing political views.   “Books Not Bombs” is an example that makes us scratch our heads, but not in the way the driver intended when he slapped it on his car.  When has anyone had to choose one or the other?  Could we have expected the same outcome to WW2 or Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait if we dropped thousands of dictionaries out of B52s? 

Along the same lines, consider “Give Peace a Chance”, as if this John Lennon proverb never occurred to world leaders, who start wars as a first option to satisfy bloodlust rather than a last option when all else fails. ‘After reading the bumper sticker, I had the epiphany that maybe we shouldn’t be fighting people trying to kill us’.  Because common sense says if America disbands their armed forces every other country will too. 

Or the classic “Bush Lied, People Died”, which is an admission that ‘the dumbest President in history’ managed to dupe the entire world - including your favorite congressman and the United Nations - into believing a made-up threat was real so he could wage war because he felt grouchy.  Is that easier than admitting your Senator saw the same data and reached the same conclusions?  Or that your Senator knew better but didn’t have the balls to speak up?

I suppose it seems clever to some to encapsulate an entire world philosophy into a collection of 8 inch stickers, but maybe that says something about the depth of thinking that goes generates them.  “If it can’t be said in less than 5 words it’s too complex for the electorate to grasp”.  Kind of insulting, no?

But it doesn’t have to actually be a bumper sticker to fit the 4-5 word rule. The most popular 3... (OK, 4) word phrase for the past 20 months has been “Russia Hacked the Election”.  I’m bewildered how people think this communicates anything of substance, but it is a splendid meme to vent but disguise animus.  Let’s break it down:

Russia:  The same people who scream racism at any suggestion of a border policy with Mexico or a government agency to enforce immigration laws are willing to brand the entire country of Russia as criminals.  Not just Vladimir Putin or some bad actors with a political agenda, nope –anyone whose last name ends with the letters ‘sky’ is guilty.  Those evil Russians are the spawn of Satan and share a common identity.  Isn’t xenophobia a Russian word anyway?  Well it should be!

Hacked:  I wouldn’t classify myself as a cyber security expert but I have learned something about the topic in my 30 years in the computer and communications industry.  The word ‘hacked’ can be used in many contexts.  You can hack a security system, meaning you found a way through the safeguards implemented to keep you out.  This is usually illegal because you access something you aren’t authorized to access, but it doesn’t necessarily mean you have altered anything or stolen data. 

You can ‘hack’ a database, which usually refers to stealing information that was intended to be kept secure.  This happens more often than you realize because large institutions like banks don’t advertise that they paid money to extortionists who threaten to expose their security vulnerabilities. 

You can ‘hack’ another’s program to do something self-serving  like deposit a bank’s daily rounding change into your account, erase your parking tickets or fix your high school grade like Ferris Bueller, although these stories are usually apocryphal.

In the legitimate software industry, a ‘hack’ is a quick and dirty way to fix a program but lacks the elegance or rigorous testing required to make it production worthy.  Hacks are not necessarily bad. In fact Facebook has made ‘hackathons’ much anticipated events to attract developers, offering prizes to the ‘hackers’ that produce solutions to complex problems in a short time frame. 

Perhaps the most sinister definition of ‘hack’ implies bypassing security AND altering data, usually going undetected until much damage has been done.  In the ‘Russians Hacked the Election’ bumper sticker context we presume this is the implied definition, although any generally harmful connotation seems to be acceptable.   Synonyms in this context include Ruined, Rigged, Invalidated, Corrupted, Delegitimized, Stole and a host of other despicable terms.

The Election:  Again, ambiguity is a friend to the simple minded.  The obvious suggestion is that the US 2016 presidential election results were altered by those nasty Russians, illegitimately awarding Donald Trump the most powerful office in the world. But what does this mean – the (entire world population of) Russians insidiously infiltrated US voting machines and punched ballots remotely?  Or maybe they messed with the ballot counting machines and fiddled with the vote counts?  Or did they just intercept information on the US National Election Results Network to change the numbers while in transit to ‘the mainframe’?  Never mind there is absolutely no evidence that a single vote was changed, in fact every investigation shows this is not even possible because the voting machines are not electronically connected.  Or is the argument that Russian actors disseminated fake news that altered perspectives on the candidates?  Heaven forbid!!  Does this mean we can no longer blindly believe everything we read on social media like we do on broadcast and cable new outlets?  It’s getting so voters almost have to exercise some discernment to filter information and form a position.  What’s America coming to?

So what is the profundity of ‘Russia Hacked the Election’?  Is the outrage about ensuring integrity of our democratic process?  If so we see far more evidence of voter fraud influencing results in every election cycle. But resistance is strong against voter ID measures to stop it, some branding as racist the notion that voters should have to show some form of identification to participate in US elections (unless they sound Russian, in which case they should be imprisoned and immediately and water boarded continuously until they give us some juicy details about Trump).    It begs the question whether there really is a policy concern here or just another desperate effort to invalidate election results that didn’t go as expected. 

The 4 word phrase makes no sense. But apparently that is not a prerequisite to wallpapering your car with simple minded phrases to justify your hatred.