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Opinion

Boston bomb scare kills sense of humor

Monica Granger
Opinion Columnist

Code yellow, ladies and gentlemen! Yellow as in yellow-bellied, that is. That was the Boston Police Department's reaction toward the Cartoon Network's advertising campaign for an Adult Swim show, Aqua Teen Hunger Force. 

The promotional displays are an LED-update version of the popular 1980s Lite-Brite toy and feature a square, pixilated character from the show "flipping the bird" at passersby. Boards were hung in nine cities across the country, including New York City, however only Boston reacted adversely.

Boston officials are rigidly maintaining and defending their victim status, citing a changed world and greater terrorist threats after 9/11. Boston's Mayor Thomas Menino said in a statement in the New York Times, "It is outrageous, in a post-9/11 world, that a company would use this type of marketing scheme." 

The idea that Americans should have less freedom to live because of a terrorist act is the real threat exposed in the Boston bomb scare. Government amasses totalitarian power incrementally by this process, eventually creating a leviathan, like in Terry Gilliam's prescient 1985 movie Brazil.

Six years and military action in two countries have done little to curtail the government's use of the protection argument to grab power.

Menino also called the marketing stunt a product of "corporate greed" and has asked the Federal Communications Commission to pull Cartoon Network's parent company, Turner's broadcasting's license.

The campaign is part of a guerilla marketing strategy first developed for small businesses by Jay Levinson in 1982. It uses unexpected, unconventional and inexpensive ways to market to consumers, sometimes so stealthily that consumers are unaware of the marketing. 

Officials in Boston were aware to the point of neurosis, shutting down several highways and bridges along with part of the Charles River and calling out police and bomb squads.

Peter Berdovsky and Sean Stevens, two performance artists hired by Interference, Inc. to hang the devices in Boston, are paying for their role in the campaign with charges of "placing a hoax device in a way that results in panic, as well as one count of disorderly conduct," a CNN news article reported. They were released on $2,500 bail each and face up to five years in prison. The hoax charge is a felony.

Advised by their lawyer to refrain from speaking on the matter, Berdovsky and Stevens opted instead to discuss 1970s hairstyles at the post-arraignment press conference, refusing to answer any non-hair related questions and eliciting criticisms of trivializing the incident.

The incident deserves some trivialization, however, as do Boston officials' claims that the marketing tactic was a malicious act worthy of punishment. Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley explained that "[the LED displays] had a very sinister appearance . . . It had a battery behind it, and wires." A layperson's knowledge of bombs (common sense) can tell that it takes more than a battery, some flashing lights and a few wires to make a bomb capable of wreaking havoc on a city. Boston is a wealthy city, though, with lots of educated individuals. So if they are not stupid, they must simply be timorous.

Last week this writer reported on the negative reaction, with possible legal action, of a Princeton professor to an article satirizing his actively publicized political views. This nation appears to have lost all sense of humor and replaced it with a quivering fear of everything not sanctioned and sanitized by government regulation.

Well, not entirely. Some enterprising individuals have commandeered the displays and are selling them on the Internet auction site eBay at prices between about $500 and $2,000.

The reaction of the Boston Police Department and city officials should be a warning to freedom-oriented individuals across the nation. Laugh loudly, laugh often and use the process of jury nullification to overturn inane laws and convictions.

Granger, an economics/political science senior, 
can be reached via dccampus@mail.uh.edu