ibis:
I would love it if we could stop calling these signs public art... they're not public art, they're corporate advertising.
I think the line between the two is pretty blurry, to be honest, but I see the argument for the other side. Either way, it's not important. Whoever is footing the bill for it, however much bohemian street cred it has or does not have, it's covered under freedom of expression and needs to be treated as such.
And to that end, I wonder, if they weren't supposed to resemble weird computery mystery devices, what on earth were they supposed to resemble?
Lite Brites.
No Lite Bright I ever had as a child had large batteries and wire hanging out of it.
No, they had wires hanging out of them that plugged into wall outlets. In the absence of convenient wall outlets, I think the purpose of the batteries is pretty easy to intuit.
Furthermore, how many bombs have flashing LED lights in the patterns of cartoon characters on them? Even when they're not powered up, the lights are visible, and even if you make the entirely reasonable presumption that most people outside of ATHF's demographic wouldn't get the reference, what possible purpose would such a thing have on a bomb?
Let's put it this way. If the average person saw one of these things in a store, or in someone's home, which do you think would pop into hir brain first: "Lite Brite" or "bomb?" Or, alternately, if they had the Coca-Cola logo on them instead of the Mooninites, would this have been an issue at all?
If they were some other sort of mysterious package, I could easily imagine a big public outcry about how NYC, for example, didn't do anything, and omigod what if was really a bomb???!!
Yes, there would have been an outcry, and the people making the outcry would have been idiots worthy of scorn and mockery.
City officials just can't win, it seems.
City officials have the opportunity to be the voice of reason in unreasonable times, which they seem intent on squandering in the interest of pandering to the irrational fears of their constituents. Real leadership would be to tell people to stop freaking out over every weird package and every stranger's face, to put the relatively minor threat of terrorism into perspective and to get on with their lives. They have no sympathy from me when they give into the fear-mongering instead of standing up to it.
Jati no Rei:
I personally find this an overreaction (what else do you call shutting down an entire city before making a cursory examination of the device, to determine if it is, in fact, a bomb?), but sort of understandable, given the "post 9/11 atmosphere"
Ultimately, though, the "post 9/11 atmosphere" is itself the underlying problem. The problem is that people in the US currently have totally unreasonable fears about terrorism, which is leading them to do stupid and irrational things and to cultivate a really bad attitude towards any form of public expression. It's ridiculous and completely detrimental to the most fundamental needs of a free and open society to expect everyone to filter their expression through the paradigm of post-9/11 paranoia and self-censor anything which might, conceivably, alarm someone, somewhere, who's been so bombarded with propaganda that they're prone to be unreasonably alarmed by reasonable things.
Still, demanding restitution from Turner Broadcasting and (especially) arresting the peons who put these up seems especially petty, in fact. I think it was done mainly to assuage their red-faced shame at being made a fool of, especially on accident.
I think you're 100% on the money about that. Authority can't handle being mocked. |
