Skip to main content

The Blossoming of the Lawn Signs

Here in the Detroit suburbs — where people wear their hearts on their lawns — the front yards are only now starting to blossom with signs.

Full disclosure, after spending most of my adult life in New York City apartments, I am not fully attuned to lawn sign culture. For all I know, what I’m seeing is typical of other suburbs, or completely anomalous. But my perception is that there aren’t nearly as many signs as there were, even in 2018, a mid-term year.

So what gives? I can ride my bike several blocks without seeing a single lawn sign. Will they proliferate as the election gets closer? Or is this an election where people are reluctant to declare their intentions? Michigan is an open carry state, after all.

There are certainly fewer Trump/Pence signs than I thought there would be, but I’m guessing it’s getting hard for people to come out as Trump voters. Not that they won’t vote for him, just that they don’t want to advertise it.

Some of these people instead put out John James signs, which doesn’t fool anyone. James is running for the Senate — he ran once before in 2018 and lost handily to Debbie Stabenow. He’s a tall, handsome Black Republican — a walking oxymoron — and he’s every bit as creepy as every other Republican in public life. But he makes Trump voters feel better about their racism.

I don’t mean to imply that there are no Trump signs. There is indeed a smattering, but there are far more Biden/Harris signs. Not that you can read much into that, either — this is Oakland County, reliably blue.

If I were to drive half an hour east to Macomb County — which famously went for Trump after going twice for Obama — the signage, I suspect, would be quite different.

An hour north, I’d be in Saginaw County — the heart of militia country — where Trump held a mask-free rally just last week. We’re all looking forward to the Covid spike.

But around here, the dominant lawn sign is “Black Lives Matter” — both surprising and gratifying for an area that’s mostly white — and these signs are often seen alone, with no presidential choice accompanying them.

Another well-distributed sign reads “We Love and Respect Our Police,” which appears, at first, to be some sort of half-assed backlash to BLM, but it’s not that simple. While I’ve seen it alongside the occasional Trump signs, I’ve also seen it with Biden signs, and even with BLM signs. Let’s just pause to acknowledge that solidarity with both the local police and people of color need not be mutually exclusive.

There are other signs that are more eccentric. One says “Anyone But Trump 2020.” Another says “Any Functioning Adult in 2020.” Then there’s the one lawn that sports, among its Trump and James signs, the words “My governor is a MORON,” an echo of Trump’s “Half-Whitmer” knee-slapper. This is not a natural Biden voter.

So the mix is interesting. I guess the very variety is what makes Michigan a “battleground” state. But the battle of the lawns is, so far, inconclusive.

One sign, however, took my breath away. It was well printed — not handwritten — which made me wonder if there were multiple copies somewhere, though I’ve not seen it anywhere else. It read:

This is not an election about politics.

We are on the verge of losing this country.

We are in a culture war with
those who want to destroy this country.

I know many of you dislike or hate Donald Trump.
But he is the only one standing between us
and the groups that want to take down
our constitutional republic.
 

This guy — and I’m quite sure it’s a guy, not that brainwashed ignoramuses can’t be female — has formulated a worldview that is from a dark and dismal place. A proud product of Fox News propaganda, his brain has been conditioned to intercept and reject all fact-based information.

I picture him as a hulking skinhead, profusely tattooed in swastika chic, but I’m guessing that’s not the case. More likely, he’s just an old white guy with a paunch, a Weber grill, and a wife who doesn’t like him much. I could be wrong.

In my mind, I have debates with this guy, in which I patiently skewer all his Fox-addled arguments, one by one. But even in these imaginary fights, I inevitably lose. Because no matter how deft my rhetoric, how on-point my insights, how rapier-like my wit, this guy is impervious to reason. There is simply no way I can penetrate the mind of a guy who thinks Donald Trump and the Constitution belong in the same sentence.

Which makes me both angry and sad, because Trump voters of this kind — and there are shockingly many — must, by necessity, lack the intellectual bandwidth to see how Trump is fucking them over. How he mesmerizes them with shiny objects in one hand, while fleecing them with the other. How their own interests are the exact opposite of his.

These are not the fat cats, who see Trump as their ticket to a corrupt payday. Nor are they the true believers, pining for a police state with His and Her concentration camps. Mostly they’re just plain people, cynically manipulated and misguided.

If only they weren’t so mindlessly complicit in destroying my country, I might sympathize. But they are, so I don’t.

Berkley MI

Friday 09/18/20

Comments

  1. I called an NP yesterday. I always hold my breath when I call the No Party people and there are too may of them. Thankfully, amongst the ones who answer, most are voting for Biden. But, this guy was very agitated by my call. He said he voted for Hillary but no way would he vote for Biden. He seemed to like Trump but insisted he wasn’t going to vote. He cited his military background for reasons he didn’t make clear and would not engage in any real dialogue with me. In the end, I thanked him for not voting. It takes a special person to get that statement out of me.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks for sharing this article here about the Yard Sign. Your article is very informative and I will share it with my other friends as the information is really very useful. Keep sharing your excellent work. Online Yard Sign Shop In USA

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Joe Biden Isn’t Even Breathing Hard

Joe Biden hit it out of the park last week. His State of the Union speech, most agree, was pitch perfect. Even some Republicans, even some Fox pundits, even a toxic tool like Rick Santorum had to stretch to find something to quibble with, though not for lack of trying. Biden eviscerated Trump without once mentioning him by name. He castigated the Supreme Court, with all the due respect they weren’t due. He finessed the Middle East. He stood up for reproductive rights that his Catholic upbringing never allowed for. He taunted Republicans for their naked hypocrisy on immigration, called them out for their betrayal of Ukraine, and got righteously pissed off at what he’s too polite to call an attempted Christo-fascist coup. All this while demonstrating, quite convincingly, that eighty is the new sixty. What came through for me, most of all, was how much he gets off on this. You could see it in that stroll through the very venue that was his workplace for most of hi

The Trouble with Being Born

  In a red state, it’s no great privilege to be born. Certainly not from a legal standpoint. Republican-run governments are highly protective of the unborn, and are now extending legal protection to frozen embryos, at least in Alabama. If you happen to be one of those far-from-born organisms, you now enjoy all the rights of a living child. It’s when you get yourself born that things get complicated. Not that you would then lose those rights, just that they’d be widely ignored, poorly enforced, and cynically violated. But as long as you stay unborn, you’ve got lots of rights you don’t need. In Alabama — a theocracy-in-waiting — the entire nine months of your gestation are now protected by law, and violations of that law will be subject to investigation and enforcement. Logic would now say that if you, a formerly frozen embryo, were to die anywhere along that timeline, a charge of murder could be brought against anyone who might be seen as responsible. The crime

The Golden Age of Both-Siderism is Upon Us

Two things to consider going forward: One, Biden is way more popular than the mainstream media would have you believe. Two, Trump is way less popular than the mainstream media would have you believe. The common denominator here is the mainstream media, who seem bent on ushering the well-honed “both sides are bad” narrative into a golden age. The more Trump descends into a Shakespearean sort of madness, and the more the Republican party follows him into the abyss, the more the press will strain to find something, anything, that makes Democrats look equally bad. It isn’t easy, but this is their formula and they’re sticking to it. They stuck to it all through the 2022 midterms — remember the Red Wave? — and ended up looking like inept fools. There is no sign that they’ve learned anything from that. And it’s not just about their stories, or the deceptive spin they put on their headlines. It’s also about their dishonest use of polls. When The New York Times releases a poll sho