It's no good if you have to explain it

Well, it's official. I have withdrawn a custom bumper sticker because my Mom didn't get it right away.

"It's no good if you have to explain it." That is the ancient adage for jokes, and certainly it also applies to bumper stickers. Recently, I was struck with the ingenuity of this "New Adventures of Queen Victoria" cartoon from June 1 (2020):

and I wanted to make a bumper sticker out of it. For legibility, I edited it down a bit, and this was the result, which I originally thought preserved the clever sarcasm:

The day I described it to my Mom, she proceeded to give me a lecture about how "all lives matter" is not what the "black lives matter" people want to hear, because it's like telling you unhelpfully at a hospital that your sickness doesn't matter as much as you think it does because everyone's matters. Which analogy is quite true, if you read the sticker in a way that wasn't intended, but I cringed, and realized that if I have to explain it everywhere I go, it's best not to display it at all.

A similar situation a number of years ago caused me to drop a custom license plate of which I was particularly fond:

My thought was, any fan of John Lennon would instantly recognize the reference, from the song "Give Peace a Chance." One day, someone came to me and asked "I SM, I SM, does that mean you're one of those sexual fetish people?" That killed it for me.

So what has happened to the sticker? For now, anyway, it's in storage with the rest of my odd-ball artifacts.

June 13, 2020


The Circular File