Bumper Stickers As Antidotes To Mass Media

Pundits are apt to deride "bumper-sticker slogans" as beneath the serious consideration of political leaders and journalists alike. But sometimes a bumper sticker can be much more to the point than the vast numbers of printed pages and hours of cable television that dominate our nation's political discourse.

For instance, a red-white-and-blue bumper sticker says: "These colors don't run … the world."

What a concept. Rather than leave intact the traditional vision of the mighty Uncle Sam — who, with the Pentagon under his command, never backs down from even the toughest fight — this bumper sticker turns the conventional posturing of the star-spangled avuncular Mr. America on its head.

True, these days even the most jingoistic media commentator is apt to concede that the U.S. can't call the shots in every corner of the globe. But the aspiration is commonly there in medialand.

Limits are acknowledged with regret. Even the world's only superpower can't work its will in each nook and cranny on planet Earth — but the quest should be pursued, according to implicit U.S. media messaging, like a curving line on a graph that moves ever nearer to a vertical axis.

In contrast to erudite media sources, we're led to understand bumper stickers lack sophistication. And they run a gamut from insights to idiocies. But the same could be said every day for the bylined essays that appear in newsprint or the talk-radio soliloquies that waft across the airwaves through millions of car radios during drive time.

Here's another bumper sticker that recently grabbed my attention: "I love my country, but we have to start seeing other people."

To annotate that one, I'd suggest "The Limits of Power," the recent book by former U.S. Army colonel and present-day college professor Andrew Bacevich. He presents a devastating critique of the unmoored belief in the United States as a nation so exceptional that it can skip past inconvenient realities affecting other countries.

In the process, he contends that "the imperative of the moment is to examine the possibility of devising a non-imperial foreign policy."

Published last year in hardcover (and due out this spring in paperback), "The Limits of Power" looks past the particularly horrific arrogance of the eight-year Bush administration to examine the continuities of militarized hubris from the White House.

Though the presidency of George W. Bush was an extreme case, Bacevich points out, many of the same assumptions were actively invoked beforehand and will predictably affect Bush's successor in the Oval Office.

The author notes some of the financial costs of such assumptions. For instance: "The Pentagon is currently planning to expand U.S. ground forces by 92,000 over the next several years. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the price tag for this modest increase at $108 billion."

Like bumper stickers, the pronouncements from presidents may range from the perceptive to the preposterous. At the same time, the role of news media is never far from the dynamics of American political power.

The underlying precepts of media discourse often seem to accept the presumption that the U.S. government's global reach should inspire continued efforts to run the world. Red, white and blue are colors that don't run from a fight when the American "national interest" is deemed to hang in the balance. And routinely the U.S. media are doing the deeming.

As for seeing other people, beyond the limited view from inside U.S. borders — well, that's where news media should come in. Few of us can travel the world or even a substantial portion of it. We depend on the news media to be our eyes and ears. Frequently, that's almost as much of a mistake as depending on the news media to be our brain.

Maybe we ought to spend a little less time looking at mass media and a bit more time devising some cogent bumper stickers.

Norman Solomon is the author of "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death," which has been adapted into a documentary film of the same name. For information, go to: www.normansolomon.com.

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