Aiii! Anarchists! Head for...Embarrassment!
By now, almost everybody knows that Boston's city government made total idiots of themselves by whipping the city into a panic over a handful of LED flashers in the shape of a "Space Invaders" alien flipping them the bird, hung up here and there by a third-shelf TV show.
Mission accomplished. Duhh.
The flashers, which were circuit boards full of LEDs plus a few batteries, were hung up a couple of weeks ago in several large cities including Chicago, New York, LA, Seattle, and Philadelphia. Only Boston flipped out, fortunately. And it took them two weeks to do it. (Serious panic attacks take government planning and time to execute, heh.)
Now everybody is asking, "WTF is going on here?" Michael Covington had a clue when he pointed out that the aliens were making an aggressive gesture. An LED smiley face wouldn't have had quite the same visceral effect.
I have a theory, and though it seems obvious to me I haven't seen anybody else put it forth. The late-night TV cartoon show responsible for placing the LED blinkers is called "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" and by sheer chance I watched a few episodes over my nephews' shoulders the last time we were in Chicago. The show itself is hard to describe. It's a Dadaist sitcom starring an anthropomorphic Happy Meal: A milkshake, a box of fries, and a naked hamburger patty live together in a rundown house in one of NYC's rattier suburbs. And that's just the premise; the story lines are archetypal Dada: Master Shake digs up a submarine sandwich composed of pure evil, including a pair of little red horns, and when bitten, the sandwich transports you to a vision of Hell as seen by Joan Miró.
Oi veh. The anarchists are back.
I think this is some kind of a physical law: The twitchier society gets, the more anarchists come forward to tweak it. Back in the WWI era there were real anarchists, and they threw real bombs to get attention because that was the only way they could. At the height of the Cold War, the anarchists emerged as well, and they didn't have to throw bombs to get attention; they just made sure the local TV cameras were rolling. (I'm old enough to remember seeing Abbie Hoffman and various other Yippees on TV.) Today we are so exquisitely twitchy that we don't need bombs, and we don't even need TV. We have LEDs, and we have the Internet. The rest we can leave to the fools we elected to run our cities.
In truth, the anarchists are always down there in the noise somewhere, and they remain in the noise until we get ourselves into such a panic that we're jumping at shadows. The twitchier we get, the less the anarchists have to do to get our attention, and the sillier we all look when we overreact. Saying, "B..b..b..but it could have been a bomb!" is absurd. So could almost anything else. And generally speaking, real time bombs don't have flashing LEDs calling attention to themselves.
The Boston case is the whole thing gone to its natural extreme. In a sense, the Aqua Teen people aren't anarchists, and they don't even play them on TV; they're just drawing obnoxious pictures. We created the anarchists ourselves. In the process, government lost even more credibility. The next time Boston says that a terrorist attack is underway, people will likely roll their eyes and ask, "So which TV show is it this time?"
When security theater makes people assume that all security is just theater, we have created a whole new species of trouble to be in.