Let's Ban the Boards

~ In the Land of the Blind it’s Already Hard Enough for the Man with One Eye to Drive without the Added Distraction of Having to Look at Billboards ~

Advertising is everywhere. Professions and organizations that never had to advertise before, or thought that it was undignified, or just wouldn’t have even thought to advertise, now make commercials. Doctors have web pages. Churches put LED display signs on their lawns. Concepts advertise now. Jesus has a lot of billboards. “Kindness” has billboards. So does the idea of not littering. Personal automobiles have corporate sponsorship in the form of ads on their doors. It’s ridiculous, but I’ve already blogged way too much on the lunacy of advertising. It’s time to turn back the clock, roll up my sleeves and do something about it.

Here’s a modest suggestion---LET’S BAN ALL BILLBOARDS.

I’m going to try and six-paragraph essay my reasons on this. First, billboards aren’t necessary in 2014. Secondly, they hurt the act of driving. Finally, they’re so tacky that they reinforce the worst stereotypes about America.

Come on, McDonald’s! Do we really need to read about your latest attempt to jump on whatever culinary trend you’re trying to co-opt. You already proudly brag that you’ve snowed us into buying over a billion hamburgers. Now you want us to buy your yogurt parfaits, too? You bastards. Yes, the Chick-fil-A cow billboard campaign was clever…fifteen years ago. Now they just reinforce the idea that cows can’t spell. They can write in English, just not very well. We get it, cows are dumb, but that doesn’t mean that chickens are intelligent. Have you ever tried to talk about macroeconomics with a chicken? You’ll wind up disappointed. Highway billboards aren’t even necessary to get off to stop when we’re on the road. The little blue “this is what we’ve got at this exit” reminders tell us if overpriced gas and nutrition-free food are going to be available at the next off-ramp. Fast food joints, gas stations, hotels, tourist attractions, even concepts all now have many, many other means of getting their message heard. Internet pop-up ads and impossible-to-skip-for-the-first-seven-seconds YouTube lead-in ads are equally as annoying as billboards. Why can’t Cracker Barrel try that marketing strategy and save us from yet another thing for drivers to look at instead of the road? Isn’t the root cause of texting and driving being illegalized the same idea as banning billboards?

Billboards destroy the beauty of driving. They’re not the only thing that accomplishes that end. Rush hour traffic, ranty radio and your whining kids do it, too, but those are harder to ban. I’d love to make child muzzles mandatory, but we’ll start with banning billboards. I do have a good experiential example we can use to make our case. Drive up I-75, or most other Eastern interstates, and count the billboards you pass. I did it the other day on a one-and-a-half hour car ride, and I reached triple digits. I started from an arbitrary place and counted over a hundred floating nonsense signs. When I got so disgusted that I had to stop counting, I tried to look around, behind and below the billboards. What I saw amazed me. Georgia is beautiful. This state is scenic as hell. But we can barely see it because of the billboards. Go to a western state some time and count the billboards out there. They exist. They’re fewer in number, and they don’t take away from the hauntingly lonely desert sunsets or the glorious feeling of being comfortably small that you get when you drive through vast expanses of Montana or North Dakota. I’m for banning the boards everywhere, but we’ve got the get this idea rolling. Let’s follow Vermont’s lead. They’ve been billboard-free for almost fifty years. Hawaii, Alaska, and Maine also think billboards are bogus.

You can experience this, too--just count the billboards. Notice how you feel when you’re driving on a billboard-heavy road, and compare it to how you feel when you’re on a back road. In the early days of the automobile, families would don their Sunday best and go for a drive in the country. Would this romantic idea have even happened if your great-grandfather had to put up with seeing a giant ad for Brylcreem in the sky? Theirs was a crotchety generation. Would they even have had the proper motivation to win World War II if they had to come home to roads lined with commercials for denture gel? Driving is as linked to the idea of America as baseball and picnic tables. Let’s try and get some of that romance back. We could even start selling driving goggles again. Why not? Dumber fashion trends have come back around.

Tackiness has rarely stopped us from doing anything in America. We’ve added blinking lights to tennis shoes, propellers to yarmulkes, and injected cheddar cheese into pretty much everything we can think of. We’ve sacrificed natural beauty on the altar of giving oil companies the right to destroy our beaches. More recently, we’ve allowed natural gas companies to frack their way into turning our backyards into potential earthquake fault lines. We produced Perez Hilton. We’re cool with tackiness. The problem with our tackiness, from a geo-political standpoint, is that it reinforces the ugly American stereotype in the minds of everyone in the rest of the world. As much as I’d like to claim otherwise, it’s not all Texas’ fault (mainly, but Arkansas did its part, too). As long as we’re a superpower, the world has tolerated our blaring, neon tackiness, but we’re clearly not the only superpower in the world anymore. China, India, Brazil, and even Russia (Seriously, Vladimir Putin? What is wrong with you, dude?) are major players on the world stage now, even if the US doesn’t yet acknowledge it. If things continue as they have been, we’ll be Second World in a generation. And then what will we be left with? A bunch of fading billboards and a Grand Canyon filled with old Red Bull cans. France used to be a conquering power, and, even now that they’re just the folks that the other permanent Security Council members make fun of, they still have their Riviera, their properly-aged wine, and their tasty cheeses. Our cheese, American cheese, or its kept-out-of-sight-by-the-family “developmentally-challenged” cousin, Velveeta, isn’t something we can hang our hat of pride on. All our cheese is doing is keeping Lipitor in the black.

BUT, here’s the thing. We’ve also got a lot of stuff that isn’t tacky. We’ve got block parties, cemetery cleanings, church pot-luck dinners, roaring rivers, mountain ranges so logic-defyingly big that explorers who get stranded have to eat each other, romantic bayous, and ocean waves lapping on sandy shores. All of our down-home good stuff gets drowned out by the blinding glare of our tackiness addiction. But, it doesn’t have to. A small step would be to BAN THE BOARD. Billboards aren’t the only tacky thing we do. They’re not even in the top five on the tackiness rankings. But they are something we can easily get rid of. Advertisers would adjust. When we banned liquor ads from magazines, advertisers adjusted. When we (stupidly) allowed prescription drug ads on TV, advertisers adjusted, quickly. We may not be the best country on Earth when it comes to preserving natural beauty, but we’re damn good at adapting to new scenarios. Georgia has over 9,500 billboards on state and federal highways alone with 30,000 on all roads. The line needs to be drawn.

We CAN ban billboards. We don’t need them. ScenicGA.org has the right idea. We can tell advertisers to look to one of the three hundred other ways available to them to market their crap. It won’t be easy. Corporate monsters have more political power than the idea of scenic beauty. Billboards have been around for a while, and so people think that they’ve always been and will always be with us, but that’s not true. They started off as cute, helpful and pleasing. The early ones are so archaic as to be adorable piece of history. Burma-Shave, anyone? But, as with so many other human inventions, cute turned to pestilence so fast that we didn’t even notice. Some pre-existing groups would readily jump on board with this idea. Let’s get the car companies on board with this idea. Let’s get the environmentalists to back it. We can accomplish banning the billboard with another oh-so-American idea, the coalition of strange bedfellows. And crash statistics will go down once people are no longer distracted by horrid, info-overloaded Clear Channel digital billboards.

Once we do ban the boards, I want to have a baseball-bat-wielding smashing party and give everyone a chance to beat the crap out of a Chick-fil-A cow.