NEW YORK -- Ken Nash glances up one row of the Macy's parking lot in Queens and then another. And another. Suddenly, he is gripped by a brutal truth: His car is an outcast.
"I can't believe this! Not a single other car with a bumper sticker?!" says Nash, whose gray Hyundai sports a mildly ribald message to Ken Starr."We're becoming a nation of drones," says the 41-year-old sculptor, still shaking his head as he gets in to drive home.
Nash's theory is debatable, but at least it's one way of explaining the noticeable decline of the bumper sticker.
Major sticker companies say the rectangular text-bites have faded over the last few years, victims of the new breed of painted bumpers and an increase in leased cars that people are loath to blemish. But Nash isn't the only one who sees a deeper meaning.
From the executives who produce the stickers to the car mechanics who scrape them off, from seasoned collectors to laymen, the popular explanation is that Americans have lost their passion.
"Everyone's moving toward the center, and what's happened to our outrage?" says Carol Gardner, who spent two years trailing cars on the nation's highways for her 1995 book, "Bumper Sticker Wisdom: America's Pulpit Above the Tailpipe."
Issues such as the White House sex scandal, or America's continuing abortion wars, would seem a ready source of new sticker-wisdom. Yet it isn't happening.
"I'm surprised there weren't a gazillion Monica bumper stickers -- and I don't even see pro-life and pro-choice stickers," Gardner says. "It seems like everyone wants to be left alone."
Bumper sticker sales are down 9 percent since 1996 at the Kansas-based Gill Studios, one of the nation's biggest sticker makers with 15 million a year. The most popular now are the least controversial, says president Mark Gilman -- stickers boasting about a child on the honor roll, or promoting a local fund-raising drive.
"I went to a luncheon at the height of the political campaigns this year, and out of 100 cars in the lot, I was the only one with a bumper sticker," says Gilman. "I think people are a little less willing to take a stand in public. We're all worn out from confrontation."
Road rage is out, Gilman says, and with it stickers he sold in the late 1980s and early 1990s that read "Don't bother me, I'm reloading" and "Hang up and drive."
That new cars are being made without a separate bumper is no small factor. Since the early 1990s, most bumpers flow down from the back of the car and are painted, leaving drivers unsure about where to put the sticker and worried about blemishing the paintwork. Before, bumpers were coated in rubber or chrome.
On the Volkswagen Beetle, a peaceloving bumper sticker seemed to come as an optional accessory in the 1960s and 1970s. The new model doesn't even have a bumper.
"Why would you want to put one on a cute little thing like that?" says Kay Hughes, who works in catalog production for the Omaha, Neb.-based Lancer Label Inc., where sticker sales are down 5 percent.
Sonny Chiavone has noticed fewer stickers at his body and repair shop, Sonny's Collision Specialist in Queens. He thought -- wrongly -- that they had been outlawed.
"Aren't they against the law? Because people read them and get in accidents?" he says. "If I see a bunch of stickers, it's a headache. I don't want to get involved."
If bumper stickers are becoming passe, a new trend is already taking over: window decals.
Young people, especially males, have taken to decals that celebrate racing cars and rock bands in screaming colors and shapes no bumper could ever cope with, says Bill Groak, spokesman for the Speciality Equipment Market Association, a trade group for car accessory makers.
"Bumper stickers are the cheapy thing. Decals are more cool," he says.
Still fighting the good fight is Phred Bishop of Phresh Stickers in Portland, Ore. Among those he considers his greatest hits: "Nixon in '98: He's rested, he's ready, he's dead," and "Honk if you see parts fall off."
"I say, if you don't like this sticker and don't want to put it on your car, put it on someone else's," Bishop says.
Even if the decline of bumper stickers does reveal something about society, maybe it's something good, says Bob Finn, president of mega-stickermaker Finn Graphics Inc., of Cincinnati.
"I don't think you're into that rebellious attitude anymore where everyone wanted to get their two cents in," he says. "You haven't got that much to complain about."