Stickers: Potluck

A toy-company icon is threatened by the deeds of an unusual homegrown American bully!

One final capitalism vignette about modern American angst that can breed possible forms of everyday terrorism...or confusion!

Thanks so much (signing off),



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Tim liked to collect stickers. Ever since he was 10, he collected all kinds of stickers --- stickers of boats, toys, superheroes, unicorns, fairies, robots, angels, you name it! He believed and continues to believe stickers represent some mysterious magic about imagining the tangibility of the unattainable. Tim had collected over 5000 stickers by the time he was 20, and he considered every sticker and sticker-set he obtained was an idealized trophy of human intelligence. It's no surprise Tim became a student of social psychology, an education he hoped to apply in his eventual professional work as a toy psychology consultant at a major American toy company.

Tim would go to work everyday in Seattle (Washington) and measure and evaluate and report on the psycho-sociological symbolism of the sets of toys his company, Atco Toys, would present him as the new batch of potential consumer-market items. Tim took notes on the functionality, aesthetics, and user-friendly aspects of the toys he analyzed and presented his reports on the marketability of the toys. Tim really loved his job at Atco Toys, and he sometimes took photos of his toy-sets with his handy-dandy Apple iPhone. Tim also kept in his office-desk drawer hundreds of his collected sticker-sets, which he'd sometimes peruse while performing his Atco toy-set evaluations, to remind himself of the intrinsic human value of casting 'sacred objects' as symbols of sanity!

Tim was a very respected Atco toy-analyst and his evaluations helped his company achieve incredible market successes, and Atco now rivaled the monumental toy company Mattel. Tim's boss informed Tim that Forbes Magazine wished to do a special feature article on the symbolic contributions Tim made to American toy consumerism in the 21st Century. Tim was thrilled about this small-time celebrity and happily agreed to be interviewed by Forbes, during the landmark 21st Century consumerism-symbolic interview, Tim showcased to Forbes the brilliant and splendid stickers he'd collected since childhood and explained how the stickers inspired his current work as a psycho-sociological imaginarium engineer. Forbes praisingly labeled Tim the Sticker-Man!

All was not well in paradise, for when a deranged anti-capitalism homegrown American terrorist named Richard Jem, who went by the lunacy-alias Dump-Man, read the Forbes article about 'Sticker-Man' (Tim!), insanity began to brew! Dump-Man (Jem!) decided to send numerous D.C. politicians mailed packages containing stickers of Richie Rich cartoon figurines laced with anthrax, the deadly poison! Richie Rich (Harvey Comics) was a beloved capitalism-idealistic fictional American character, a rich young boy who used wealth and ingenious toys to fight evil-doers with maniacal schemes! Dump-Man showcased this 21st Century 'Richie Rich sarcasm' to send the message that America would not be ruled by the naive hand of consumerism engineers such as Tim (Sticker-Man)!

JEM: How'd you catch me?
FBI: We were following package mailing trails to Washington.
JEM: I'm a prophet.
FBI: You're a sociopath, Richard.
JEM: At least I'm not Sticker-Man!
FBI: What's your problem with Sticker-Man, Jem?
JEM: He smelled like Burger King.

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"Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth" (Matthew 5)