Some more details about the Mooninite Terrorist Attack that drove fear into the great heart of the city of Boston yesterday at the pointy end of one extended middle finger held aloft by a video game character and entirely made up of disused Christmas tree lights.
Despite the fact that initial reports indicated that Adult Swim was taking full responsibility for the advertising campaign that caused an entire city to scramble the bomb squads, two arrests have now been made by Boston police: Peter Berdovsky and Sean Stevens, both of whom are charged with 'placing a hoax device in a way that results in a panic.' It's a felony.
It's unclear at this point what the relation between Adult Swim and these guys is, but Berdovsky, at least, is a freelance video artist, rock musician and somewhat accomplished street artist. It seems reasonable to believe that these guys were actually hired by Adult Swim to place the boxes around Boston.
Adult Swim has issued an apology, but the wording of it is so tricky that you can tell they think this thing is absolutely frickin' retarded. "We apologize to the citizens of Boston that part of a marketing campaign was mistaken for a public danger." For people like me who are experts in making insincere apologies, it's easy to translate this wording. Note they aren't apologizing for the campaign itself, or admitting they did anything wrong as judged by people who don't cross-inhabit both our world and Dodoland. They're apologizing for the fact that the citizens of Boston are idiots.
This entire thing was very funny and wonderful up until the point that freelance artists hired to do an advertising campaign started being arrested. Then, it just became disgusting. There's no other way to say this: the City of Boston had a panic attack over something that was just obviously innocuous and meant in good fun. The 'potential explosives' the Bomb Squad scrambled around the city to blow up were essentially Lite-Brites. This is a fantastically absurd example of how the highly politicized paranoia of September 11th has come at the cost of any degree of common sense, let alone a sense of fun. Peter Berdovsky is in jail right now because politicans have so terrorized their own constituencies that pictures of cartoon characters are now considered genuine terrorist threats.
We really do need to show some solidarity with Peter. At worst, he was simply an artist fulfilling a contract with Adult Swim: if anyone should be held accountable, it should be them. I suggest everyone go over to his MySpace page and leave him an encouraging note: this guy's gonna need all the support he can get.
