Hope, Nope, Dope, Pope - Knockoff Bumper Sticker found in the wild!

Understatement
By Andrew Davidson
on August 30, 2010

I'll start with a pertinent quote that I think applies to this situation:

“Everything you love, everything meaningful with depth and history, all passionate authentic experiences will be appropriated, mishandled, watered down, cheapened, repackaged, marketed and sold to the people you hate.”

If imitation is the sincerest form of Flattery, then, consider me flattered. Below, my version of this 2008-era grass-roots campaign sticker, as documented (and downloadable) from my server. I printed up a handful and gave them to friends and family, where surprisingly, it has been trainspotted on Flickr. Riffing off the famous Shepard Fairey's Obama Hope Poster, I imagined it as a longer list of suspects:

The Poor Knockoff

Seen in 2010 on a car in my neighborhood. They've mixed the order, and the players, and used the last version of the Pope (lazy!), but I think the inspiration is clear. After a bit of searching, I found the ripoff on Flickr, and more importantly, the crappy site selling the design applied to all sorts of garbage.