Say, brother, can I borrow a thin brother You know, a dime?
Say, say, say, Sirs
I sure would like to have this old dime for me
So I can get this cup of coffee, cop me a snack or something
I guess I’d better stop trying to be hip and get on down – James Brown (Down and Out in New York City)
During a recent commute into work one morning, I noticed a bumper sticker on a nice little Japanese sports car that read, “Too Poor to Vote Republican”. The driver, a young girl, was chatting on her cell phone as she weaved through traffic, presumably on her way to work or school.
I pondered the epigram for a few moments in order to determine its meaning. Was this girl under the impression that Republicans were charging some kind of poll tax on its voters? Does she think there is a membership fee to be a Republican?
Of course, I soon figured out the meaning of the slogan: She was poor therefore the Republicans could do nothing for her.
It is an interesting theory although the bumper sticker would have been more effective on a homeless man’s cardboard sign rather than the shiny bumper of a new Mitsubishi Eclipse.
Proclaiming one’s poverty may be the popular thing to do these days. But, poverty seems to be a quickly moving target in America. Not only did this young girl manage to acquire a $19,149 sports car, a car that Mitsubishi claims is “the physical embodiment of a lifestyle that demands form and function, beauty and technology”, but she also paid an extra $4.48 for an adornment that proclaimed her poorness.
I suppose she could be poor after buying the sports car. And perhaps her mobile phone calling plan just does not provide enough free minutes each month. But, if she were truly poor, would she really spend precious dollars on a useless bumper sticker? After all, $4.48 buys about four or five cheeseburgers from McDonalds; or a gallon and a half of gasoline (which equals about 42 highway miles for an Eclipse); or a few loaves of bread; or four big jugs of filtered water; or two bottles of delicious mineral water imported from the Fiji Islands; it will even buy a bottle of aspirin to ease your poverty-induced pain.
Telling people how poor you are is not cheap. An ad on EBay calls the stickers “super cool” and “clever and savvy” and charges $2.99 per sticker plus $1.49 for shipping and handling. Amazon.com sells Too Poor to Vote Republican coffee mugs for $9.99 each. It even states that the coffee mugs are “dishwasher-safe and microwave-safe” just in case you are poor enough to own those appliances. Amazon also sells a Too Poor to Vote Republican T-shirt for around $22. And, in case you were worried, Amazon states that the shirts are “preshrunk” so there is no need to worry about the shirts shrinking in your dryer (if you are poor enough to own a dryer).
Not sure if you are poor? Head over to TooPoorToVoteRepublican.com; that is, if you are poor enough to own a computer and able to pay for an Internet subscription. This website will convince you of your poorness with colorful charts, spurious data, and comparisons to the Golden Age of the Clinton years. After you are convinced of how poor you are, click on the Buy a Bumper Sticker link to purchase your very own sticker. The website states that its stickers are “perfect for expressing yourself while cruising down the highway…” But, beware; the checkout page will warn you that this sticker only applies to you if you are not in the top two percent of wage earners. No sticker for you George Soros.
In these days of such widespread poverty and hunger in America, it is comforting to know that there are super cool, clever and savvy products out there that allow the poor to express themselves at a reasonable price. And we should all be thankful that most of us are poor enough to buy the cars, dishwashers, microwaves, dryers, computers and Internet subscriptions that allow us to express our poorness so effectively. God bless America!
