There are a few relatively harmless conspiracy theories that I embrace, one of which hinges around the proliferation of “Student Driver—Please be Patient!” bumper stickers I see around town, usually on cars that are driving way too aggressively to be neophytes. It’s rare that I don’t see at least two on my commute to work and it contrasts oddly with my own experience, some twenty years removed, of getting the “student driver” phase over with as quickly as possible in order to be a proficient driver.
It makes sense, though, as bumper stickers are crucial to the American mode of self-expression. Invented post-World War II, when civilian materials science caught up with military innovation, bumper stickers became commonplace in the 1950’s as motor culture fully took hold in the United States. They spread and became a kind of mimetic slanguage as the Interstate system established under Eisenhower carried viral bits of imagery and advertising car-by-car across the country. Bumper stickers are a combination advertising tool, conversation starter, and warning, and are quintessentially American in that confluence of function.
The humble bumper sticker has mutated in recent decades, like everything in the combination crucible/cesspool that is our modern culture. A trip to Whole Foods or Target in my mid-sized Southern city is a minefield of cognitohazards from “Let Me Merge or I’ll Kill Myself” to “Pardon My Weird Driving, I’m Thinking About Centipedes Again” to variants on “Baby On Board” that range from the profane to the unhinged. My personal favorite bumper sticker I’ve seen in the wild is still “Men Have Made a Lot of Bad Art,” an inarguable truism that nonetheless really pisses people off.
But recently–as in, since the pandemic–I’ve noticed a trend towards self-infantilization in bumper stickers. It ranges from self-deprecatory stickers like “Hot Girls Hit Curbs,” which is designed to indemnify the driver against minor breaches of etiquette, to stickers like “Don’t Honk at Me, I’m Just a Baby,” which traps the driver in an existentialist nightmare. In Charleston last week, I saw two cars next to each other in a parking deck with “Don’t Honk at Me, My Dad is Dead” bumper stickers (one of which was the car I arrived in, for the record). We are asked not just to consider the actions of our fellow drivers, but their emotional state and origin story.
The Student Drivers stickers are the apotheosis of this trend. They simultaneously defray accountability from the driver and shift it to other motorists, making every possible interaction a complex power dynamic. It preempts the usual tension of driving, reducing the complicated chains of autobahn etiquette into a kind of cringing defensiveness and embodying a kind of learned powerlessness that raises my hackles.
Maybe I’m overly sensitive this week; while I was in Charleston, a driver totaled our family car, slamming into it while it was safely parked on Ashley Avenue. No sticker can exculpate that driver, no chuckle long enough to counteract the nuisances of trips to the impound lot and the rental agency or the time spent on the phone with cops and insurance agents in the last two days. My daughter, a much less anxious person than I am, and one who was infatuated with the horse-drawn carriages of the Holy City summed it up: “Maybe a horsie killed our car, dad.”
Needless to say, cars and their imperfect pilots were on my mind the day after, as I met up with some friends at our local vegan pub for a few rounds of Commander. We were just getting into our first game when an archeologist came up to our table, introduced himself, and asked to be our fourth. We did the standard introductory conversation of “who’s your favorite Commander and when did you pick up Magic;” he was piloting an Arthur, Marigold Knight deck and said he started playing with Bloomburrow. We had an enjoyable couple of games, one of which he won, and I was impressed by both the caliber of his play and his deck, which wasn’t the modified preconstructed deck I expected.
That’s one of my favorite aspects of Magic: reading another player’s vibe and seeing how that expectation is confirmed or disproven by their play. We have player stereotypes, which range from mildly amusing to thought-terminating, and we have built-in psychographics for various playstyles. Whether this is fair or not is up to you, but we do make assumptions based on Commanders, color combinations, and longevity.
Personally, while I want everyone to have a great time, I don’t conceal my power level. I have invested too much in this game, both financially and intellectually, to want to seem like anything but an expert. Magic is part of my identity, and I think it’s foolish and self-defeating to hide your identity (huge caveat here, of course, based on personal safety). I’m proud of playing Magic, and I’m prouder still of writing for Hipsters of the Coast and my other gigs as a professional Magic writer. This also means that I get visibly embarrassed when I make a mistake or a misplay and have failed many on-board skill checks. At the end of a long game of Commander, I have swung with a 3/3 into a 3/4. I have attacked into a tapped-out opponent who has a Masako the Humorless out. I have had to roll back combats, main phases, and even entire turns when I realize that my Smothering Abomination would have been sacrificed to itself. In these situations, my immediate response is generally to apologize to my opponent and say “sorry—you have to understand: I’m bad at Magic.”
It’s a great phrase, as it both lets you off the hook for your mistakes and elicits a chuckle from your opponent. I deployed it on Sunday, after the second pint of coffee porter was downed and my car accident story shared with the table in dudgeon that ramped faster than a Gwenna deck. I attacked with a massive creature into a Tinybones, the Pickpocket with the expected results, and then followed it up with: “You know why I made that play, right? (pause) It’s because I’m bad at Magic.” It’s a good bit, but I realized that, unlike the other two players, who have played with and against me for years, our new friend was meeting me for the very first time, and here I was, casting myself–inaccurately–as being a poor player. In that moment, the panicked feeling of a totaled car fresh in my mind, I realized that I wasn’t much different from a twenty-something purchasing a “Student Driver–Please Be Patient” sticker off Etsy to give myself some rush-hour breathing room.
The thing about conspiracy theories that makes them risible is that they’re often arrived at because the theorist is mistaking their personal experience for something universal. Are there actually more “Student Driver” stickers out there, or do I notice them more because they annoy me? Are they increasing in frequency, or am I just driving more recently, and thus see more? Or is it even simpler: do I only see so many because I live in a college town? Hell, even if I’m right that they’re mendacious, is that worth commenting on, or is it simply an irritating but innocent trend emerging from a youth culture that is alternately infantilized and portrayed as villains by the older generations?
Likewise, is the alliteration that annoys me so in Marvel’s Super Heroes symbolic of a trend in Magic that could pollute the Universe Within sets, or am I just primed to believe that because of my disdain for superhero and comics culture? Basically, what I’ve learned as I approach forty is to assume that any fault I see in the world is probably a fault of perception first and foremost. The way I play Magic is not any more correct or laudable just because I have a familiarity with the arcane rules and hundreds more cards memorized than someone who started last year because they wanted to play with Aang and friends.
We’re each under a lot of scrutiny right now. The surveillance technology that is embedded in our communication devices, the self-reinforcing identity panopticon of social media, the constant friction of having to be surrounded by others–I understand why someone would want to lead with defensiveness in that environment. But there’s validation in being perceived, too, and in the courage it takes to come up to a table of three strangers and ask to play with them. You may not share much in common with a random opponent, but they may hate Rhystic Study just as intently as you do. Give everyone the grace they deserve, but no matter how they come off initially, also don’t assume they’re a student driver.
Rob Bockman (he/him) is a native of South Carolina who has been playing Magic: the Gathering since Tempest block. A writer of fiction and stage plays, he loves the emergent comedy of Magic and the drama of high-level play. He’s been a Golgari player since before that had an official name and is never happier than when he’s able to say “Overgrown Tomb into Thoughtseize,” no matter the format.