Actually, what is worrying me more these days is Hilary. With her win in Pennsylvania, she now has blunted Obama’s momentum. She will continue to chip away at him. The race for the Democratic nomination has gone on far too long already, and if it continues to the convention, you can then, indeed, count on McCain to beat whichever nominee comes out of that futile exercise.

If the Democrats do lose to the Republicans this time because they aren’t able to unite behind the right candidate to beat him, then as I’ve said before, it’s time to disband the party. There is no place in a 2-party system for a party whose sole purpose seems to be to lose elections and give the impression of choice. If Democrats can’t win after the most horrendous presidency in history led by the opposition, then they don’t deserve to exist. Hilary couldn’t beat McCain now, and it’s even less likely she could do so after limping to her own finish line — or worse, by getting the nomination through the fiat of a smoke-filled room in a brokered convention that feels like the Supreme Court Florida decision of 2000 all over again.

Now about those awesome bumper stickers, where can I get one?

I’m Gen J too.:-), but I don’t remember Whacky Packages – maybe it was only in America. My favourite agitprop was an ad found in National Lampoon [a most cynical humour magazine of the times.] It was a sticker with a picture screw on it. You would peel off the backing and put it on the bumper stickers that read: “I ‘heart’ my dog.” I’m not sure if it was from the 70′s but matches the sentiment. I never bought the package but it made me laugh out loud when I saw it for the first time.

Today it would be cheap enough to make them at home but I don’t see many bumper stickers like that anymore…. Pity.

I know what Marc Cooper means about being disappointed so many times. I too have been disappointed, but usually it’s more by the American electorate than by the candidates. It will be a long time before I forgive the US for their votes of 2000 and 2004 (even if it was merely for not producing a majority great enough to overcome ‘the cheat factor’ that the the Republicans employed in order to claim victory).

The O-Boomer reference reminded me that I recently found out ‘Generation’ I am a part of; I am definitely not a ‘Baby Boomer’ as the experiences of the vast majority of Boomer’s are not mine; I was too young to participate or even identify with Woodstock, the Sexual Revolution, the Beatles or the Vietnam War, and I don’t quite identify with the cultural landmarks of Generation X, as Vancouver’s own Douglas Copland so aptly coined in his book of the same name. Instead, I am a part of Generation Jones. The Jones part is a common name that evokes the sense of a large, unknown group, but is also a reference to having a “jones,” or craving, for the ideals put forth in the ‘60s. As someone who came of age in the 1970s, a decade known for Watergate, bad clothes (polyester shirts with busy prints, side-burns) and the Nixon presidency. Generation Jones (born between 1954 and 1964), I can relate to how it started out optimistic like the 60′s, only to see idealism shattered by the financial hardships and Senate Hearings of the ‘70s. The character of that generation became a mixture of idealistic yearning and cynical alienation. It was the generation of ‘Whacky Packages‘ (Remember those, anybody my age? They were bubble gum with sets of stickers portraying disgusting parodies of popular consumer items. Instead of Skippy peanut butter, you saw a sticker for ‘Skimpy‘. Instead of Cap’n Crunch cereal, there was ‘Cap’n Crud‘. It was our way of equating everything we saw with decay, corruption and disappointment).

So I know what you mean by having to battle with your ‘inner cynic’. We’ve all got that big-time.