What Is It With the Dr. Bronner-Style Tirades Painted On Cars?
When you need to get your message through to the ignorant hypnotized masses, what do you do? Why, paint that message in small shaky painted type on your Dodge Aspen!
Those of you who are not familiar with the tiny-print rantings printed on every possible space on bottles of Dr. Bronner’s Magic All-One liquid soap should probably head over to the Straight Dope’s explanation. The example cited by Cecil goes like this: “Replace half-true Socialist-fluoride poison & tax-slavery with full-truth, work-speech-press & profitsharing Socialaction! All-One! So, help build 4 billion Hannibal wind-power plants, charging 96 billion battery-banks, powering every car-factory-farm-home-monorail & pump, watering Babylon-roof-gardens & 800 billion Israel-Milorganite fruit trees, guarded by Swiss 6000 year Universal Military Training.”
Dr. Bronner has an important message, and so does the owner of this Aspen in Denver. Cars are very popular canvases for lengthy and complex manifestos, no doubt because they move around and have a lot of square feet to work with. I’m going to start photographing each one that I see.
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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Those rolling obits on back windows or trunk lids kind of annoy me especially the gang related ones. Just morn in peace and leave the rest of us be. Besides we need to keep our eyes on the road ensuring ours as well as other families safety is not compromised so none of us end up as a casuality. Yes, we really sympathize but enough already.
I've seen quite a few text cars over the years, which I define as largely covered in hand-painted messages, as opposed to bumper stickers or other ready-made graphics. I love running across them out in the wild, it's like finding a random folk art exhibit out on the street! Political and religious screeds are the most common, along with the indecipherable scrawling of raving nutters, those airing their beef with foes real or imagined, and the grievances of those who've been wronged. You can occasionally see some forms of literature or poetry, too. Contrast is important, as is small print, available surface area and a willingness to use any available space. To my eye, continuing in black text is the obvious choice for the Aspen. While the message behind text cars is not always clear, seeing them makes me feel better, a sign that at least for the moment, the country I live in still protects everyone's speech. As it should be. That's freedom parked out on that snowy side street in Colorado,my friends.