Fungible Convictions

Again, totally embarrassed of my town and especially of my mayor. From Daily Kos in a post called “Morons in Boston”:

Let’s get a few facts straight on the Aqua Teen Hunger Force sign fiasco:

1. Attorney General Martha Coakley needs to shut up and stop using the word “hoax.” There was no hoax. Hoax implies Turner Networks and the ATHF people were trying to defraud or confuse people as to what they were doing. Hoax implies they were trying to make their signs look like bombs. They weren’t. They made Lite-Brite signs of a cartoon character giving the finger.

2. It bears repeating again that Turner, and especially Berdovsky, did absolutely nothing illegal. The devices were not bombs. They did not look like bombs. They were all placed in public spaces and caused no obstruction to traffic or commerce. At most, Berdovsky is guilty of littering or illegal flyering.

3. The “devices” were placed in ten cities, and have been there for over two weeks. No other city managed to freak out and commit an entire platoon of police officers to scaring their own city claiming they might be bombs. No other mayor agreed to talk to Fox News with any statement beyond “no comment” when spending the day asking if this was a “terrorist dry run.”

4. There is nothing, not a single thing, remotely suggesting that Turner or the guerilla marketing firm they hired intended to cause a public disturbance. Many have claimed the signs were “like saying ‘fire’ in a crowded theater.” Wrong. This was like taping a picture of a fire to the wall of a theater and someone freaked out and called the fire department.

5. The FCC can’t pull a private cable network’s license, Mayor Hyperbole McFuckwit.

More on the Aqua Team Hunger Force case/overreaction:

In a news conference, Rich told reporters he had advised his clients not to discuss the incident. Stevens and Berdovsky took the podium and said they were taking questions only about haircuts in the 1970s.

When a reporter accused them of not taking the situation seriously, Stevens responded, “We’re taking it very seriously.” Asked another question about the case, Stevens reiterated they were answering questions only about hair and accused the reporter of not taking him and Berdovsky seriously.

Reporters did not relent and as they continued, Berdovsky disregarded their queries, saying, “That’s not a hair question. I’m sorry.”

Brilliant.

Some good news for the defendants:

Judge Paul K. Leary told Grossman that, according to law, the suspects must intend to create a panic to be charged with placing hoax devices.

It appears the suspects had no such intent, the judge said, but the question should be discussed in a later hearing.

CNN

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.