On the road…again!!!
Essays, Stories, Adventures, Dreams
Chronicles of a Footloose Forester
By Dick Pellek

Clichés, Memes, and Bumper Stickers

Old Ben and the Footloose Forester were pretty close because Ben was a veteran of the World War II air war against Japan and he might have some stories to tell.  And he had an eager listener as a colleague and workmate.  Ben was a crew member in a B-29 who spent 6 months in a military hospital after being shot in the buttocks by an unseen Japanese airplane in the skies over the Pacific.

The pilot of the B-29 was not so lucky, he was killed in the strafing and Ben and the Co-pilot had to nurse the damaged aircraft back to their base on some unnamed island in the Pacific.  At least Ben did not give it a name.  It might have been Tinian because Ben recalled seeing Colonel Paul Tibbets taking a leak on a tire of one of the bombers on the flightline, one night shortly after he had arrived in another B-29 a couple of days before. He didn’t know Colonel Tibbits at the time, but circumstances fit into subsequent recollections.

The best memory of Ben that keeps coming up was his fondness of clichés and although his were limited, the one that was somewhat antagonistic to the Footloose Forester was “paralysis by analysis.”   He was prone to take the lumpers view on many issues and interjected that favorite cliché to styme the arguments of the Footloose Forester whose inclination was just the opposite, to analyze all manner of things.  Splitters like the Footloose Forester are hopelessly wedded to analytical thinking.

Perhaps the overarching reason for this nascent chronicle is the increasing popularity of memes and bumper stickers that plant ideas into the minds of people who may not have heretofore had strong opinions, or many opinions at all.   Some meme creators operate web sites where they regularly publish ideas as longish memes that are literally proselyting its readers by suggesting attitudes and points of view that may not previously have been part of the self-view of the readers.   Bumper stickers, of course, are somewhat limited in terms of the number of words that can readily be seen, read, and comprehended at traffic stops or in crowded parking lots.  Needless to say, the most effective bumper stickers may draw on clichés, meme materials, or recent slogans to implant into our minds things we don’t usually have as priorities in our everyday lives.