GOTTA HAVE 'EM??
My most beloved billboard has been defaced.
My most beloved billboard lies between Hopland and Ukiah, just South of the Nelson Vineyards, on the East side of 101. Looking out over the highway and a field of grapes, my beloved billboard was a true gem. Unbridled capitalism at it’s finest. My beloved is a McDonalds french fries advertisement.
Generally, billboards disgust me. Advertising gnaws at my soul – trying to convince us that we are not perfect just the way we are and that we need something we don’t. One evening at Al’s Redwood Room in Willits, a man who looked an awful lot like David Bowie summed it up well: “if it can’t sell by word of mouth, it ain’t worth squat.” And billboards offend me most - marring and disrupting landscapes, so behemoth and obnoxious. They distract! I would like to look at trees if zooming about in an automobile, but over and over I find my eyes drawn to billboard after billboard…
This billboard, though. This billboard was different. I could not bring myself to despise this billboard. It was a platonic ideal, the billboard all other billboards aspire to be. It seeped into the viewer’s brain like a subliminal message and washed over them like a tidal wave of sugar water, so simply and insidiously telling us that we need something we clearly do not. It stood loud and proud and proclaimed: “I am a billboard. I lie and manipulate for profit and I pretend to be nothing else! But I look darn good doing it.”
My favorite billboard was awash in red and yellow. On the right: a French fry carton taller than a tall man, exploding with those perennially enticing Mcdonalds french fries and awash in Jesus light. To the left of the fries, a giant hand reaches out of nowhere, straining for but painfully separated from those golden delectables. And to the far left, for the majority of the billboard, loom the words “GOTTA HAVE ‘EM.” It was plain and simple. It was short and sweet. It was aesthetically pleasing brainwash that made no pretence to be anything but exactly what it was.
But this charming example of advertising has been blighted. Our platonic ideal has been dethroned. Some nefarious trickster with a spray can has defaced the greatest billboard in all of Mendocino County by adding a question mark. Two question marks, in fact. The billboard now reads “GOTTA HAVE ‘EM??”. This changes everything.
Now, instead of looking at this billboard and unconsciously being told and accepting what to consume and how to live my life, I will have to ask questions. Do I gotta have ‘em? Do I gotta have those fries? It’s not so easy, now! Before, I wouldn’t have even asked – I would have just known that I gotta have ‘em. But now that I cannot ignore the question, the sneaking suspicion creeps into my mind that, no, I don’t gotta have ‘em. I don’t gotta have those fries. In fact, I think I’m gonna go to the garden and have some carrots and strawberries instead. What? Where am I? Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore. We’ve landed in the strange land of critical, conscious consumption and the tomatoes here are tastier than any I’ve had before.
That dastardly trickster! Leaving me with these questions that beg answers and lived life to understand and explore them. The trickster’s execution was even poor! Penning question marks with ragged edges, not in line with the rest of the text. And two question marks? Really? I think one would have sufficed, and still left us with the haunting question: “gotta have ‘em?” It’s definitely something to chew on.
yours truly,
No comments:
Post a Comment