STOP

 

I went back to the flood wall yesterday afternoon. Monday was the Labor Day national holiday (nowadays sometimes a bitter irony) and Paint Louis was officially to run through the afternoon. Almost everything had been wrapped up by the time I arrived. Without crowds, I could cruise up and down, looking for what caught my eye.

An awful lot of it to my old eyes was, as usual, elaborate, illegible tagging. A new trend seems to be block capital letters, three to six to them, that might be initials or acronyms but never with an explanation. Lost on me. A few sections had strong imagery, some blunt, some subtle. That's what I stopped to record.

And this one? Well, this is the United States.         

OUT THERE POLITICS, PART 2 OF 2

I pulled up behind this big SUV at a stoplight and happened to have my camera on the seat beside me. There's more to it than you can see in this low-res version. The red sticker in the bottom center of the window has an outline of Santa and two reindeer with the words Sleighin' Libs. The upper left has a cartoon of an elephant, a symbol of the Republican Party with an assault rifle in its trunk and the words Raised Right. Upper right is a cartoon of Trump in red, white and blue with both middle fingers raised. Lower right has a sticker that says Republicans - Working Like Crazy To Support The Lazy (!). The sticker in the lower left is mostly illegible but has the words We The People, the opening phrase of the U.S. Constitution, in its iconic script.

 

It frightened me. I was not about to cut this person off on the road.