Someone's writing, Lord

Plaisted, that is, and it's a classic.

Definitive, even.

And one more summing up for the road, from the Brawler.

A law professor, unsurprisingly, thinks the original bumper sticker should have had a footnote: “The desire to coexist is the right instinct, but it alone won't get us very far.”

Did anybody suggest it would? And, as the folks at Whallah! pointed out about a week ago, “They weren't saying we could sing Kumbaya with Hitler in the first place.” Which is one of the reasons the “parody” fails utterly.

The “coexist” bumper sticker is nothing but an idealist, pacifist message. So in the same breath that “lefties” are getting castigated for lacking in civility, so-called conservatives — many of whom describe themselves as followers of Jesus, one of the ultimate pacifist idealist figureheads — are marshaling themselves in strenuous defense of some pre-Thanksgiving turkey's deliberate provocation of pacifist idealists as “smug little twerps”?

And equating Islam with Nazism? Aren't these the same characters who flew off the handle when Ward Churchill, in the context of Hannah Arendt's technocrats, referred to employees at the World Trade Center as “little Eichmanns”? Now all of a sudden there are nuanced, rationally defensible justifications for playing the Nazi card?

Suddenly it's all about context, is it? How absolutely fascinating and instructive. Gee, I'll have to remember that.

Apparently they're pretty selective when it comes to whom they allow to get called Nazis, or any other epithets, for that matter.

But the main reason this so-called parody fails is the same folks most likely to slap the coexist bumper sticker on their cars are also the least likely to pay any attention to the “satirists” and their little cadre of apologists.

They're also far more likely to be actually doing things to promote coexistence, rather than hammering out eleventeen blog posts per day laden with manufactured outrage and cognitive dissonance, which doesn't get anyone anywhere.

The bumper sticker Nazis

I couldn't resist having a peek at the apologia pursuant to the purportedly parodic defacement of this bumper sticker after reading Milwaukee journalist James Rowen's interesting post here.

Among the apologists is Rick Esenberg of Marquette Law School, who writes:

But appropriating the symbols of these traditions and assembling them into a command that is probably most often expressed by people who do not follow (or follow loosely) any of them strikes me as patronizing.

And this suggestion isn't?

Like an addendum to a construction contract that both deletes and adds an equal number of Allen-Bradley limit switches, I'd say the patronizing v. patronizing here is what we call “a wash.”

It's funny, because I know a lot of, for example, non-Christians who conduct themselves in a manner more in accordance with the admonitions of the founder of said religion than most of the ones who parade their alleged Christianity like a Macy's balloon.

Personally I prefer less hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance and more intellectual honesty in a bumper sticker: