Boston Has Terror Panic over Cartoon Network Promo

Boston, Massachusetts, closed down on Wednesday when a few “suspicious” packages were reported. Security personnel swung into action to protect the citizenry. One of the packages was detonated by the bomb squad. Within a few hours, the city was safe again. Homeland security at its finest had just saved Boston from a promotional campaign by Cartoon Network promoting “Aqua Teen Hunger Force,” a rather amusing adult animated show. This journal’s loathing of the city on the Charles seems vindicated.

In fairness, the episode illustrates just how lousy the American authorities at all levels have been at educating the public about terrorist threats. The little signs looked like the old “Lite Brite” toys and showed an alien character from the show giving the viewer the finger. Precisely why a terrorist would opt for such rather than a simple duffle bag full of C4 is hard to imagine, but no one in Boston considered that. They merely saw a few wires and decided panic was the order of the day.

While it is true that one is better safe than sorry, security can actually be overdone. Mailboxes, for example, are a huge convenience but also make a good place to stash explosives. However, getting rid of mailboxes is a silly response to a general threat. Gasoline makes a decent bomb, but America isn’t about to stop selling the stuff. Somewhere along the line, the experts need to explain the situation, and Americans have to accept the fact that murder happens sometimes. It is amazing that the nation worries about an al-Qaeda attack, when school children in the US have shot more of their fellows than Usama bin Laden has in the last 5 years.

Phil Kent, CEO and chairman of Turner Broadcasting System Inc. which owns the Cartoon Network, issued a statement that said, “We apologize to the citizens of Boston that part of a marketing campaign was mistaken for a public danger. As soon as we realized that an element of the campaign was being mistaken for something potentially dangerous, appropriate law enforcement officials were notified and through federal law enforcement channels, we identified the specific locations of the advertisements in all 10 cities in which they are posted. We also directed the third-party marketing firm who posted the advertisements to take them down immediately.”

So now, Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley is filing charges against Peter Berdovsky, 27, a freelance video artist from Arlington, Massachusetts, and Sean Stevens, 28, for placing a hoax device in a way that results in panic and disorderly conduct. However, in the other 9 cities where these devices had been placed (in some cases for weeks), no one wet themselves in terror. New York’s Daily News reported, “An NYPD source said 41 of the devices were placed around the city, mostly in Brooklyn, and were removed last night. Police here had not received any calls of concern about the battery-powered devices.” Boston, a burg that never ceases to live down to expectations.

© Copyright 2007 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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