Boston Crucible

As a follow up to my earlier Boston's attack on Lite-Brights rant.

This is a wonderful analysis of the increasingly embarassing security paranoia and cultural/generational disconnect of Boston powers-that-be.

From CTheory

Fear and Loathing in the Bay State
By Dion Dennis

excerpt:

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? What are the object lessons that can be drawn from this emotive, mediated and bureaucratic externalization of early 21st Century nightmares and demons? 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?

In this syndrome, subjects inappropriately react to neutral stimuli as if such stimuli were signals of real hostility.

What is going on in this stubborn bastion of a once optimistic state-centered liberalism, as it reacts to signs that oddly refract images of a Vietnam-era collective self? 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. As a public event, the response of official organs displays complex patterns of displacement and condensation, as befits such a symbolic event and product. Below are some (hopefully) heuristic disentanglements of a couple of these very complex threads.

...

First, we can see the historical and hysterical echoes of the 17th Century Salem witch trials. The two artists, the long-haired, bearded Belorussian immigrant Berdovsky and his sidekick, Stevens, stand publicly accused of producing, as defined by Massachusetts General Law, Chapter 266, Section 102, an "infernal machine." (Etymologically, the term "infernal" refers to Hell and the identities and products of the demons of said residence). So, like Arthur Miller's John Proctor, they will undoubtedly be asked to "make a deal" with official reality, to acknowledge their "infernal" (demonic) specific intent (as defined by the statute) and, in doing so, externalize the demons of the populace as they reaffirm the dominant symbolic order. Contemporary ritual exorcisms will be performed in court, press conferences and press releases, and remixed and expanded by local and 24 hour news media, as they are archived for subsequent use.