The Whole Damn Bus is Cheering

Stuck in horrible traffic on the New Jersey Turnpike last weekend, I didn’t have much to look at other than the other slowly moving cars. Then I started noticing them, everywhere: those ribbon stickers.

While they come in different colors, the most popular is yellow. While they bear different messages, the most common is “Support Our Troops.” And while the sentiments they espouse are noble, the design of these things is just plain awful.

The history of the yellow ribbon is sometimes traced back to a Civil War legend or a 1940s John Wayne movie, but for most of us it started with a 1973 pop song of excruciating banality: “Tie A Yellow Ribbon” by the ludicrous Tony Orlando and Dawn. Written by Irwin Levine and L. Russell Brown, the song combined a cloying, maddeningly unforgettable melody with lyrics no one would mistake for Cole Porter:

I’m coming home, I’ve done my time
And I have to know what is or isn’t mine
If you received my letter
Telling you I’d soon be free
Then you’d know just what to do
If you still want me
If you still want me

Oh, tie a yellow ribbon
‘Round the old oak tree
It’s been three long years
Do you still want me
If I don’t see a yellow ribbon
‘Round the old oak tree
I’ll stay on the bus, forget about us
Put the blame on me
If I don’t see a yellow ribbon
‘Round the old oak tree

Note that the first two lines don’t even rhyme. The concluding stanza brings it all home:

Now the whole damn bus is cheering
And I can’t believe I see…
A hundred yellow ribbons ’round the old, the old oak tree!

Particularly unnerving to me, along with the cheesiness of the fermata before the climactic line, was the implication that the narrator managed to tell “the whole damn bus” about the pre-arranged signal. I mean, shut up already. I also thought, as did most of my friends, that the singer was a newly-released prisoner, rather than a returning hero.

The 1980 capture of 52 American hostages in Iran provided the yellow ribbon with its first entree into mainstream culture. The ribbon, literally tied around trees, became a way of signaling support for the hostages and faith that they would be safely returned. The advent of the AIDS crisis in the mid 80s enabled the next transition, from literal ribbon to symbolic ribbon. Folded back upon itself and pinned to a lapel, the simple red ribbon was a grass roots creation, a wearable symbol of concern for the AIDS/HIV crisis and of solidarity with its victims. There was no “official” version, so anyone could make one. Then the folded-over-ribbon form got a further boost, and its final codification, when jewelry designer Margo Manhattan created the “official” red enamel ribbon lapel pin for AmFAR in 1991.

This basic form is the progenitor for the dozens of bewildering variations that have sprung up in recent years. Design Observer reader Chester has pointed out that there are now ribbons for and against virtually everything. Often, one colored ribbon can stand for (or against) several things. Green, for example, is connected to bone marrow donation, childhood depression, regular depression, “the environment,” eye injury prevention, glaucoma, kidney cancer, kidney disease, kidney transplantation, leukemia, lyme disease, mental retardation, missing children, organ donation, tissue donation, and worker safety. Whew! If it helps, the alternate color for leukemia is orange, and the alternate color for missing children is yellow.

So comes, at last, the deluge: the transfiguration of the folded-over-ribbon into ubiquitous bumper sticker, coming full circle to serve as a signal of support, a heartfelt one to be sure, for American servicemen and women in Iraq and Afganistan. In my six-hour drive on Sunday (this was New York to Philly, with flooding on the Garden State and the NJ Turnpike closed south of Exit 4 due to “congestion,” traffic fans) I saw dozens, if not hundreds, of them. There were a few pink ones (signifying concern about breast cancer, I hesitantly assume), more red, white and blue ones (general patriotism). But of course the overwhelming majority were yellow, just like the song. And the most common design? A doggedly literal drawing of that crossed and folded-over ribbon, enhanced with some crappy Photoshop effects straight out of the Hallmark cardboard birthday-party decoration playbook, squashed as flat as a pancake on the fender of every other Honda Odyssey and Lincoln Navigator. A metaphor? A symbol? Exactly! But just to make sure, let’s add “Support Our Troops” in case anyone misses the point. And in a world of nearly infinite choices, what typeface would be better to signal our steadfastness than…what is that, anyway? Nuptial Script?

Graphic designers used to know how to develop beautiful, simple, universal symbols capable of rallying millions of people to a cause. Regardless of how you feel about this war, or about war in general, the men and women who fight deserve our support. They also deserve a better symbol.