Dear George,

When the jingoistic bumper sticker, "Don't tread on US," adorned with a spectacularly aggressive eagle fell out of my morning Daily Progress shortly after the bombings began, I thought it was a casualty of tasteless timing. After all, we had already begun pounding Afghanistan daily with powerful bombs, so what was the new clarion call for? I also wondered nostalgically what had happened to the rattlesnake featured in the older version, "Don't Tread on Me." Guess there's not much market for identifying our country with a rattlesnake, but who treads on eagles?

Then, still pondering, I noticed that the aesthetically and metaphorically challenged sticker was paid for with, guess what, our tax money. Yes, the $6,000 cost was patriotically shared with the County of Albemarle and the City of Charlottesville through its gas company's budget. Well, we all pay taxes for things we don't necessarily put at the top of our lists, so I decided to concentrate on looking at our return on investment. Driving around town for a week, I'd seen only three of the stickers attached to bumpers, so I went where the cars from both city and county were likely to be: Fashion/Fascist Square Mall.

Wasting newly cheap gas ($1.04 a gallon at Etna that morning) I cruised slowly down every lane of patriotically parked cars, their occupants following Bushite advice to boost the economy with those over-extended charge cards, no matter how dire the warnings of doom-saying economists.

The returns from the scrutiny are in: seven bumper stickers for George W. Bush, three with "God Bless America," four with U.S. flags on bumpers or windows, one for Clinton-Gore, and two of the ones we've communally paid for. Only one on a car, one on a Charlottesville Transit Bus. Unless the stickers quickly proliferate, I wonder who thinks they were worth $6,000.

To me, it's especially galling, as my yearly gas bill in Charlottesville comes to just over $2500, and doesn't offer a welcome location for the bumper stickers' bill. Putting aside that detail, how could Council with such decisive speed fund the bellicose sticker when in previous political debates it has moved slowly and contemplatively, debating for months, for example, before making its excellent decision to support the living wage for its employees and those of its sub-contractors?

Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but does the bumper sticker I find so ugly lift other spirits? Does the scent of more blood make other hearts race? Would some super-patriot like to show his support by funding the City's or County's contribution to this cause? I surely didn't want to.

Virginia Germino (electronic mail, October 19, 2001).