Friday, May 14, 2004

Beer, Billboards, and Activism

Perhaps you’ve noticed the Bud Light billboard on the way to the South Bend Airport, or maybe there’s another like it near you. This one is above the roof line on Lincolnway, just west of Bendix, and you can see it for a good distance among the other billboards and various restaurant and shop signs on that stretch of road. There are two people in the picture, each one lifting a bottle of beer, and there’s a blue background that carries the beer’s logo. On the right side, a handsome young man holds his bottle toward the viewer, with the label turned so there’s no doubt about the brand. He’s dressed casually, has collar-length shaggy hair, and confidently projects something between a smirk and a smile. We’re supposed to see him as a rascally middle-class guy.

His torso is turned toward the left side of the picture, and over there we find a slender young woman in a white tank top and an orange cap. She’s leaning back with her bare legs hoisted in the air, a posture we never see around the office, in church, or at the grocery store. In this unlikely pose, she still manages to raise her beer and give a “Come hither” look straight at the camera, the way models in certain glossy magazines do. By some marvel of artistic ingenuity, even though the billboard shows almost her entire body, you have to look carefully to discover whether the woman is wearing anything below the waist. When we see her, we’re supposed to think about beery sex. That much is clear.

It’s easy to tell that the image is crude and demeaning – after all, how would you feel if someone tried to photograph your sister or your daughter in that pose? But is it obscene? By courtroom standards, it may not be, or someone from the mayor’s office would have given the billboard company a call months ago. By dictionary standards, however, I’d say the image is as close to obscene as the beer company thought it could get away with.

And “get away with” is the operative phrase. Advertisers are powerful players in our country and have been for a long time. Back in the 1960’s, when Lady Bird Johnson tried to undo a blight of billboards on American highways, advertising lobbyists successfully removed most of the teeth from the legislation before it passed through Congress. Today, affluent Americans usually don’t have to live in neighborhoods with offensive billboards, because if one sprung up they’d probably be able to have it changed. Other folks, however, may not have the connections and the political skills to protect their neighborhood against smutty images. Most of us are vulnerable to whatever beer and billboard companies want to do.

Why is that? Why don’t our public schools and universities teach the citizenship skills necessary to build community groups that can protect and improve our lives? I suspect that this is because educators and school boards fear anything political happening in the schools. But this attitude is misbegotten. It confuses supporting a particular political candidate or issue with teaching the skills of active citizenship. What’s missing from the required course list at American high schools and colleges is a class called Citizenship and Activism 101.

For without activism skills, citizens are too often at a loss when faced with the decay of their city or neighborhood. I can point to my own lack of skills as an example. For several years I saw offensive graffiti on a railroad overpass each day on my way to work. There was a horrible cartoon drawing of a lynching, and below it was scrawled the slogan, “The good old days.” Because I didn’t have a clear set of activism skills, I did little more than quietly disapprove of this terrible image. It never occurred to me to write a letter to the railroad or the mayor’s office and ask for the overpass to be repainted. I could have encouraged the local newspaper to send out a photographer and a reporter. For that matter, I could have asked a few area businesses to donate some paint and brushes so volunteers from our neighborhood could obliterate the image ourselves. But to do any of those things I would have to think of myself as an activist. For many of us, that’s a new kind of citizenship, and not the kind we learned in school.

So the offensive beer billboard endures on South Bend’s west side for months and months, unchallenged, strengthening our fatalism about an ugly urban landscape. We lose track somehow of our own freedom to protest. While capitalism creates our prosperity, activism challenges its excesses and preserves the values and the qualities that make life good. When it comes to offensive billboard advertising, it should be the people in the neighborhood, rather than the corporate sponsors, who get to decide whether or not this Bud’s for you. 

Broadcast by Ken Smith on May 14, 2004
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