Yesterday marked the 5th anniversary of President Bush’s ill-executed “Mission Accomplished” speech aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, and of course the anti-Bush/anti-Iraq press were very quick to use it as another opportunity to label Iraq (and Bush) as a failure.
For all the polls and statistics, though, something occurred to me as I was driving home from work yesterday. Where have all the patriotic “Support Our Troops” yellow ribbon magnets gone? It used to be not so long ago that maybe every fourth or fifth car you saw had some variant of these magnets on them, either the traditional yellow variety or maybe the red, white, and blue version, perhaps even a camouflage version. There were also a lot patriotic bumper stickers or other stickers on car windows. Today? Very few.
Yesterday I began watching other cars (in addition to watching the road), looking for a patriotic sticker or magnet on the back of cars. Out of the maybe couple thousand cars I saw during my hour-plus drive home, I saw two cars with a “Support Our Troops” magnet. Two.
Now, I know that’s nowhere near a scientific survey, and that’s not to say that a driver without a patriotic sticker isn’t patriotic. (Full disclosure: My car’s only external decoration is a UT Longhorns emblem.) But I can tell you for a fact that the number of patriotic magnets a year ago was way higher.
So what’s the deal? Are people really expressing their frustration and exhaustion with the war? Are we, in fact, as “bitter” as Barack Obama says we are? Or has the obnoxious car magnet fad just played itself out, as the Livestong bracelets did and as Crocs will surely do? I don’t know. But I should also point out that I also didn’t see any political bumper stickers during the same trek home, which seems odd being a presidential election year. Maybe that fad has played itself out, too.
