1000 Days of Theory

February, 8th 2007

Fear and Loathing in the Bay State
===================================

~Dion Dennis~

Prologue
——–

Over the last six years, at midnight, six times per week, the
dadaist fifteen-minute cartoon series, ~Aqua Teen Hunger Force~
chronicles the absurdist adventures of its three anthropomorphized
leads: Frylock (a goateed McDonaldesque sleeve of French fries),
Master Shake (a self-absorbed generic milk shake outfitted with a
bent pink straw) and Meatwad (a smallish, speckled, and decidedly
unappetizing specimen). ~Aqua Teen~ is popular with the 18-34 year
old demographic.

With an ~Aqua Teen Hunger Force~ film due for release in early ‘07,
Cartoon Network’s corporate parent, Turner Broadcasting, hired New
York-based marketing firm, Interference Inc., to produce a viral
marketing campaign in eleven U.S. cities. In late 2006, Interference
Inc. hired two young Boston-area artists, Belorussian immigrant
Peter Berdovsky and Sean Stevens to place 38 LED signs (of one of
two villains of the show, either Ignignokt or Err, defiantly
gesturing with the middle finger) in the Boston area. By January
29th, all of these quasi “lite brites” (the ensemble consisted of
printed circuit boards and other easily accessible electronic
components, with LEDs and a pack of D-Cell batteries to power these
2.5 sq ft. signs) had been installed around high-traffic sites in
the metroplex.

During the January 31, 2007 rush hour, a transit employee spotted
one of these signs on a supporting beam of I-93, near Downtown
Boston. Mistaking the “Mooninite” for an explosive device, the
Boston Police Department closed the northbound lanes of I-93. By the
early afternoon, other “Mooninite” sightings led to two major bridge
closures, and boat traffic on the Charles River was banned. It
wasn’t until the late afternoon that the public knew that these were
part of a benign viral marketing campaign. Turner issued a press
release, and soon after, Berdovsky and Stevens were arrested.

So this is what it has come to: Two young artists (their demeanor an
echo of 1960s creative expressiveness), paid a pittance to playfully
market a surrealist cartoon movie starring several talking
base-level consumer commodities, have been labeled semiotic
terrorists and criminals by official reality. What does this
political panic reflex, played out in the gerontocratic and the
politically correct Commonwealth of Massachusetts, tell us? [1] What
are the object lessons that can be drawn from this emotive, mediated
and bureaucratic externalization of early 21st Century nightmares
and demons? According to the criminal statute applied, these crude
LED “Mooninites” that literally flipped Boston “the Bird” were
legally defined as “infernal machines.” [2] Among the eleven cities
targeted by this particular guerilla marketing campaign, only in
Boston were these innocuous “lite brites” perceived to be objects of
terror. Only in Boston did official reality shut down major parts of
the city, deploy the Bomb Squad, and make ritualistic arrests and
arraignments. Therefore, the question can, and should, be asked:
What does this say about the current ~conscience collectif~ in the
land of the Puritans, Kerouac, and Kennedy? What is going on in this
stubborn bastion of a once optimistic state-centered liberalism, as
it reacts to signs that oddly refract images of a Vietnam-era
collective self? Official and local media reactions constitute a
classic case of what psychologists call “hostile attributional
syndrome.” In this syndrome, subjects inappropriately react to
neutral stimuli as if such stimuli were signals of real hostility.
Appropriately decoded, these reactions have significant diagnostic
value. As a public event, the response of official organs displays
complex patterns of displacement and condensation, as befits such a
symbolic event and product. Below are some (hopefully) heuristic
disentanglements of a couple of these very complex threads.

Puritan Remix
————————–

First, we can see the historical and hysterical echoes of the 17th
Century Salem witch trials. The two artists, the long-haired, bearded
Belorussian immigrant Berdovsky and his sidekick, Stevens, stand
publicly accused of producing, as defined by Massachusetts General
Law, Chapter 266, Section 102, an “infernal machine.”
(Etymologically, the term “infernal” refers to Hell and the
identities and products of the demons of said residence). So, like
Arthur Miller’s John Proctor, they will undoubtedly be asked to “make
a deal” with official reality, to acknowledge their “infernal”
(demonic) specific intent (as defined by the statute) and, in doing
so, externalize the demons of the populace as they reaffirm the
dominant symbolic order. [3] Contemporary ritual exorcisms will be
performed in court, press conferences and press releases, and remixed
and expanded by local and 24 hour news media, as they are archived
for subsequent use.

Like the Puritans, such forms of punishment have a public and
semiotic function, through a display of overt signs of stigma and
discredited identity. Rituals of moral condemnation and public
shunning no longer take the form of the stocks and the wearing of a
Scarlet “A.” Rituals of exclusion and continuous surveillance replace
public shaming and shunning. They take multiple forms, these days:
Electronic monitoring, voter disenfranchisement for felons, the
presence of names on “no fly” lists, the posting of discrediting
billboards outside of homes as court-ordered punishment, and, in the
case of the most notorious, real-time GPS tracking, available to a
hyper-vigilant public via Google maps, and so on. And, there is
always the potential for ubiquitous and sensationalized media
attention, given the insatiable appetite for stories of deviance.

The absurd (and unfounded) criminalization of Berdovsky and Stevens
is part of an ~uber~ moral tale with a discernible target: General
deterrence, as rationale and goal. Here, it takes the form of overtly
sending a signal about policing the speech and conduct of the
Millennial Generation; speech and conduct that is a palpable
behavioral and expressive remix of the deterritorializing ~elan~ of
the 1960s. Injecting a self-policing function deeper into the psyche
of the children and grandchildren of the Boomers is one use for this
LED scare. “We prohibit unauthorized echoes of what we did. You play
and you express yourself at your own risk.” Certainly this is one of
the covert messages of the Zeitgeist police, newly installed State’s
Attorney General, Martha Coakley, as exemplified by her actions
(arrest warrants) and her February 2, 2007 press release. [4]

Coakley’s means and ends are not so very different than the goal of
17th and 18th Century Puritans: They, too, intended to deeply inject
a self-policing function into the congregation. Then, the push was to
restrict the psyches and social expression of women, as well as of
those men less committed to a patriarchal fundamentalist order.

Social, technical, demographic and cultural transformations over
three centuries have repositioned the Puritan impulse. The rush to an
~ersatz~ criminalization of two young artists all-too-accurately
exemplifies Richard Ericson’s recent (and plaintive) summary of the
pathologies of early 21st Century life:

[There’s] an alarming trend across Western countries of treating
every imaginable source of harm as a crime… This urge to
criminalize is rooted in neo-liberal political cultures that are
obsessed with uncertainty… Catastrophic imaginations are
fueled, precautionary logics become pervasive, and extreme
security measures are invoked in frantic efforts to preempt
imagined sources of harm. [5]

Apparently, key points of the local social imaginary include
criminalizing the placement of child-like and benign “lite brites” in
locations proximate to Massachusetts Bay. While Ericson’s insights
constitute a critical element for understanding the root causes of
this particular event, one other element, I believe, is required to
make fuller sense as to why such media-fed, institutionally expressed
hysteria occurred in Boston and not in other locations across the
U.S.

The Generational Warfare Strategies of a Greying Populace
———————————————————

This remix of Puritanism and the neo-liberal imaginary (obsessed with
what Ericson dubs “the myth of certainty and security”) is a
necessary but not sufficient set of conditions for declaring this
peculiar “state of emergency.” [6] The remaining variable is
demographic. It pits an aging, declining and reactive population (the
third or fourth generation descendants of Irish, Italian, German, and
English immigrants) straining to secure the slipping remnants of a
mid-20th Century state-centered set of expected benefits, against a
more vigorous and adaptable creative subculture within the Millennial
Generation. Not surprisingly, there’s been a steady outflow of
educated Millennials from the Bay State to points South and West,
where a younger, educated demographic is welcomed and treated with
greater public courtesy. [7] The Bay State response to a benign set
of LED graphics, when compared to how these crudely drawn Mooninites
were viewed in other venues across the U.S., makes the point
unusually clear. [8]

The fear and loathing doled out to Berdovsky and Stevens is a vivid
displacement and condensation of the fears of a vocal and local
demographic convergence. There’s an entire archeology of cultural
ghosts. These “John Proctors” of the moment, Berdovsky and Stevens,
serve as a projection screen. [9] As icons, the many ghosts of the
collective past merge with a palpable fear of the present and the
future. So clearly discernible, behind all the self-congratulatory
“politically correct” rhetoric that so freely and routinely floats
across the Bay State, is a deep distrust, a distrust that damages
spontaneous practices of freedom, practices that are so necessary for
growth.

Notes:
——

[1] “Suspicious objects found throughout Boston after morning bomb
scare,” in the January 31, 2007 online edition of the ~Boston
Globe’s~ website, John R. Ellement, Mac Daniel, and Andrew Ryan,
byline.
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/city_region/breaking_news/2007/01/
suspicious_obje_1.html

[2] See “The General Laws of Massachusetts,” Crimes Against Property,
Chapter 266, Section Section 102A1/2, Subsection B, that legally
defines such “infernal machines” as a constitutive element of the
crime. http://www.mass.gov/legis/laws/mgl/266-102a.5.htm

[3] Miller, Arthur. _The Crucible_. New York: Dramatists Play Service
Inc., 1998.

[4] See Mark Frauenfelder’s repost at BoingBoing.net: “State of
Massachusetts insists on calling ATHF ads ‘hoax devices’,” February
2, 2007.
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/02/02/state_of_massachuset.html

[5] Richard V. Ericson. _Crime in an Insecure World_. Malden, MA.
Polity Press. 2007. The excerpt is from the Introduction on p. 1.

[6] Ericson, p, 219.

[7] “Most Who Left State Don’t Plan to Return,” in the May 14, 2006
online edition of the ~Boston Globe’s~ website, Michael Levinson,
byline.
<a href=”http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2006/05/14/
most_who_left_state_dont_plan_to_return/”>http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2006/05/14/
most_who_left_state_dont_plan_to_return/

[8] See these “suspicious objects” on BoingBoing.net: “Boston Channel
photoshops Mooninite LED signs,” Mark Frauenfelder’s post, on January
31, 2007.
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/01/31/boston_channel_photo.html

[9] To see a video of Berdovsky and Stephens, discussing hairstyles
at their initial news conference, see the Alternet Media site:
Pranksters Give finger to the Media

——————–
Dion Dennis is Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at
Bridgewater State College (MA). He teaches courses on emerging
technology, new forms of property and equally new forms of social
control; neo-liberalism and 21st Century policing and corrections;
and justice, media and crime. Dennis’ essays have regularly appeared
in _CTHEORY_. His essays and reviews have also appeared in
_Postmodern Culture_, _The Education Policy Analysis Archives_, _the
Academic Exchange Quarterly_, _Rhizomes_, _Culture and Agriculture_,
_Fast Capitalism_, and _First Monday_, as well as in new and
reprinted form in several print anthologies.

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