Four Stages of a Media Event

How is it that I don’t even own a tele­vi­sion and I know what the Mooninites are? (Well, I couldn’t remem­ber their names before read­ing it, but I knew what they were and where the ref­er­ence came from). I think the whole sit­u­a­tion is really an emo­tional onion.

First there’s the laugh­ter when you real­ize that parts of the Boston gov­ern­ment were com­pletely freaked out by Lite-brites. Then comes the reac­tion from the Mayor and the Chief of Police when they real­ize it’s a mar­ket­ing cam­paign. They had only two real courses to fol­low — laugh it off and let the story dis­ap­pear, or double-down on blus­ter — and chose the over-the-top response of arrest­ing the kids who put the things up. The moti­va­tion for it is obvi­ous: They hung up these lights just to make me look redicu­lous! And a man in my posi­tion can’t afford to be made to look ridiculous!

Then you get angry, since it’s obvi­ously a case of the city gov­ern­ment abus­ing it’s power and hurt­ing the peo­ple who’s job it was to hang lighted plaques at ran­dom high-traffic spots around the city. There’s no way those peo­ple deserve jail time — let alone five years in jail — for what they did, and even the judge in the case knew it. So the mar­keters hold a press con­fer­ence and dis­cuss 70s hair­styles.

Absolutely bril­liant. Watching that press con­fer­ence brought back mem­o­ries of Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies to those old enough to remem­ber it (or have seen tapes of it). To those of us who aren’t (or haven’t), we got the a com­plete under­stand­ing of the gen­er­a­tion gap, and how redicu­lous an older gen­er­a­tion can seem to the younger one. The corol­lary to that is the thought that the baby boomers have grown into the tyran­i­cal, self-important fuddy-duddies they used to enjoy piss­ing off. That they have col­lec­tively become Richard M. Nixon. (Of course, that’s not really fair, since it’s doubt­ful that most boomers thought too deeply about the 1960s beyond just the fashions.)

After the glow of enlight­en­ment wears off, I remem­ber one other thing: the kids hang­ing the Mooninite devices are out there shilling for AOL-Time Warner, try­ing to sell movie tick­ets for one ten­ta­cle of a multi­na­tional enter­tain­ment con­glom­er­ate. So yes, I under­stand the six­ties now — it’s been pack­aged and sold back to me.