PST series Bumper Stinkers…a.k.a…BS

Bumper stickers…buttons too…are insidious. They are iconic and viral bites of political and cultural manipulation. As forms of speech, they are free, but not freeing. Their messages frame debate in rigid and narrow ways…that stunted debate in turn sets the mind in rigid and narrow ways, and keeps public discourse in bondage.

The BS series is intended to point out the absurdity of stunted speech and thought, especially by inverting it…to document examples……to show how thought is framed…to question the internal authority of the statements…to have fun.

PST:BS: I

“=” is a bold declarative statement, but what…exactly…is being boldly declared here? This work aims to encourage people to be critical of the implications and inferences of the original HRC bumper sticker. What are the differences in meaning between equality, equal, equivalent…sameness? What is being declared as “the same as”…innate humanity, subjective identities, objective behaviors…being versus doing? The ontological and anthropological debate gets framed inversely, and a questioning of the results of that is then framed as a shutting down thought and expression instead of the opening up that it is. Is there a correct answer to "="? Is that answer a dogma? How are dissenters to this dogma misunderstood, marginalized, and demonized? In a larger Dadaist exposition, any combination of mathematical operators and/or punctuation marks will do…more or less…