Large scale public stupidity in Boston leads to arrest
I’m embarrassed for my city tonight. Police overreact to a set of Lite-Brites set up around town, and now, because they can’t tell a bomb from a Lite-Brite, a 27-year-old man is under arrest for placing the devices and may be charged with a felony that carries a five-year prison sentence. If you missed it, here’s what the devices looked like:
They feature a character from a Cartoon Network show, and the devices were part of a unorthodox advertising campaign typical of CN’s “Adult Swim” cartoon series. The devices were in place for more than two weeks in more than ten cities without complaint. Then today, Boston police utterly freak out and shut down the city.
The stupidity involved is overwhelming. Gov. Patrick called it an unfunny “hoax”—it was never a hoax…no one ever claimed the devices were bombs. The local news has been going further, calling the devices a stunt that was threat to public safety—it was never a stunt…it was a very small-scale, low-budget reminder to a TV show’s core fans. There was no hope or intention that this would generate widespread attention.
The only threat here is the reaction of law enforcement in shutting down the city for something so patently harmless. What happens if, say, a guitarist drops a distortion pedal on the subway and passengers trample each other in panic? Should the guitarist be arrested? Or if the Boston Islamic Society leases a billboard that reads “Happy New Year” in Arabic and blocks are cordoned off because people think it’s a terrorist message? Should the Islamic Society be held responsible for public stupidity?
Think that’s unlikely? Heck, it already happened. A passenger was barred from a JetBlue flight last August because his t-shirt—reading “We will not be silent” in both English and Arabic—made other passengers uncomfortable.
Is this what we want of our society? To be so scared—or to so allow our police to be our proxy scaredycats—that we irrationally reduce the amount of public space we feel safe in to nill? To let a real terrorist know that all you have to do to destroy a local economy is duct tape some batteries together in public once a week? To be so pathetically cautious that we can shut down our own city just because of some Lite-Brites?
Update: Wonkette captures it better…
Stoners, Media Conglomerate Responsible for Boston Bomb Hoax
A cartoon watched only by college students who smoke marijuana set off a huge terrorism scare in Boston, a city still reeling from the Patriots’ loss at the hands of al-Qaeda. Suspicious objects were found planted across the city in a mysterious and ominous pattern, leading to the calling in of bomb squads, the shutdown of train stations, and the closing of the Charles River to traffic.
The objects were all, as filthy hackey-sack-playing Wonkette readers surely know, Mooninites from the Cartoon Network program Aqua Teen Hunger Force. They were all Time Warner billboards, in other words, in what has been the most embarrassing response by a city to a nerdy cult tv show since Minneapolis called in the National Guard to fight the robot menace posed by Mystery Science Theater 3000.
