Emissions: "Somebody, somewhere, please tell me this is a joke," I muttered in disbelief while reading of the new motoring craze sweeping across the US. But then again, considering this is a country where you can buy sub-machineguns over the counter, I realised nobody was going to.
The latest fashion accessory for every motorised wannabe gangsta from Boston to San Diego is the fake bullet hole.
You can buy stickers or magnets of single shots or lines of bullets in any calibre. According to people who've got them, they're so realistic that strangers come up and stick their fingers in them to check. (The holes, that is, not the drivers.)
Dozens of websites advertising these things, in scores of shapes and sizes. Want to look like the windscreen of your pick-up truck has been strafed by a gang of Uzi-wielding crack dealers? No problem - that'll be $2.99, sir.
Trying to impress the girl working in your local drive-thru McDonald's? Why not roll up to the window with a .44 Magnum bullet hole through the driver's door of your Pontiac Firebird? Only four bucks for the privilege.
Or stick one on the back of your helmet, so it looks like you just outran the police in a high speed chase. Cool.
You can even buy - although God knows why you'd bother - fake scratch stickers, which make your car look like it's been "keyed." Perhaps tellingly, an employee from one shop in Florida that sells thousands of these things notes that they also sell a lot of fake bird poop. This is the level of people we're dealing with.
So, what kind of muppet buys them? Primarily subnormal white suburban wiggas with too many Eminem CDs, one imagines. Associated Press interviewed one of these spas: 21-year-old Daniel Morton, who has 10 decals on his 1994 Honda Accord. "A lot of people ask me about them and think my car got shot up," he said proudly.
"I just try to be different." Different from someone with a brain, evidently.
But it's not just kids. Ken D has plastered his family saloon with them. "I've had some looks, I'll tell you, and that's worth it," he chortled. He's 56. Can you imagine how much of a Homer Simpson he is? Ken is from the peaceful little 'burb of Dundalk, Maryland. It's not that long ago he could have come over to his hometown's namesake here and got the real thing for free.
US police are none-too-impressed with the fad. They don't have the right to stop cars that have bullet holes - fake or real - unless they're investigating a shooting.
Sadly, they can't arrest people just for being idiots either. (Which, when you think about it, is lucky for the US penal system, or they'd have to build a great big wall around the whole country. There's a lot of 'em about. )
I'm sorry for being so condemning here. It's only a joke, right? Lena Pause of Hardley Dangerous Illusions, one of first people to start making these things, claims there's no harm in it. "I'm not selling guns to kids here," she said. "Most people realise it's a novelty." (Note the "most people")
"We started getting calls from Northern Ireland, Kuwait, Israel," she said. "I said, 'These people got to be crazy. What do they want with more bullet holes?'"
Look around you, lady. The good ole' US has more bullet holes in it than any of these countries. Thousands of people are shot dead there every year.
Is it not a tragic reflection of a country's society where dolling your car up to look like you've been shot at is seen as funny, where gun deaths are so commonplace they are to be laughed at? And they've got nuclear weapons? Lord save us all.
