Saturday, February 05, 2005

Praise the Lord and pass the Wal-Mart circular

It didn’t occur to me until we were driving home from Louisville’s recently remodeled “international” airport that at no time during the past week’s Maine sojourn did I find myself doing what I usually do while riding in a car, which is viciously mock the insipid messages on those immense billboards looming above our highways.

That’s because in Maine, there aren’t any billboards.

But back home in Lou-a-vull, mine eyes hath freshly seen the glory of the Gutter Helmet, and somebody’s news team, and the University of Louisville’s move to the Big East …

We interrupt this rant for a strange interlude.

“Have we got a college? Have we got a football team? ... Well, we can't afford both. Tomorrow we start tearing down the college.”

Groucho Marx (as Prof. Quincy Adams Wagstaff) in the movie “Horse Feathers.”

… and my favorite of all, the anti-abortion billboards on I-64 westbound just before the Sherman Minton Bridge, which embarrassingly marks us as fundamentalist savages to anyone driving through town who isn’t from the Deep South.

As a society, exactly how is it that we manage to preserve any semblance of intelligence at all, when we’ve consented to surround ourselves 24/7 with all manner of visual and verbal attacks on what’s left of that same intelligence?

In this vein, here’s something to mull over whilst enjoying the morning java:

First Amendment No Big Deal, Students Say

2 comments:

edward parish said...

I find the "Right to life" billboards very offensive and most tasteless.

Dan and Denise said...

I like anti-abortion advertising. Especially, bumperstickers and t-shirts. I can then easily identify those people w/o talking to them.