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Deconstructing Boston’s idiotic over reaction to the Aqua Teen ad campaign: 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? According to the criminal statute applied, these crude LED “Mooninites” that literally flipped Boston “the Bird” were legally defined as “infernal machines.” 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? 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.

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