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Aqua Teen Hunger Farce
By Matthew Quane
mquane@mscd.edu

Disclaimer to the ignorant: This editorial is not a bomb. Please do not mistake it for one.

The city of Boston was a mess for a day last week due to the guerilla marketing placement of “Mooninites,” prankish characters from Cartoon Network’s Aqua Teen Hunger Force, in random visible places throughout the city.

The ads, LED boards that resemble Lite-Brite toys, were placed not only in Boston, but nine other major American cities. Unfortunately, Denver was not in the mix. Otherwise, I would have spent my weekend hunting them down in order to claim them as my own, and would have never got around to writing this column.

Ignignokt and Err, the Mooninites, are silhouetted on the now-infamous ads, flipping the bird indiscriminately at passers-by.

In a similar incident back in April 2006, a group of five teenage girls placed 17 handcrafted “question mark blocks” from the video game Super Mario Bros. around their hometown of Ravenna, Ohio. The bomb squad was called in to “disarm” the packages, and charges were pressed against the girls.

When terrorists strike the United States again, I guarantee they will not use bombs hidden in shiny gold packages or decorated with bright flashing lights. They may be suicidal, but they are not stupid.

The state of unwavering hypervigilance that U.S. citizens have taken up has destroyed what was once a great American sense of humor.

Turner Broadcasting System, the company that ultimately owns Aqua Teen Hunger Force, and its marketing company have agreed to pay $2 million in reimbursement to the city, because the ignorant (and poorly versed in pop culture) officials of Boston closed down a highway, bridges, subway stations and parts of the Charles River due to the implied “threat.”

I can only assume the government and I have very differing views as to how our country should respond to terrorism.

Politics have forced leaders into erring on the side of caution. While the populace is afraid of the terrorists, the leaders are afraid of being caught reading a children’s book when the next big terror attack goes down.

The solution? Simple. Overreact to every possible threat and ensure the possibility of re-election.
By instilling a state of fear and irrational, oversensitive reactions, the “real terrorists” (read: the misinformative and fear-mongering heads of state) have succeeded yet again. I can only hope that someone other than myself has realized that the frightened state of our union means that the terrorists have already won.

The exploding terrorists may be scary, but the information terrorists frighten me even more.

I prefer the bold approach. Forget the terrorists. Stop being scared. Ignore the reminders all over the light rail and airport that remind you to keep an extra eye on suspicious people. Every time we tighten up our security and unfairly suspect people, we die a little inside.

Remember, there is no such thing as terror insurance. To quote Ignignokt, “Our liability coverage is zero. Our balls, however, are enormous.”