There was some surprise around town last week when the Minneapolis Fire Department said they’d already started selling advertising on city fire trucks. They’ll begin with hose covers promoting an unimpeachably responsible product: a smoking cessation program called Quit Plan. Still, thoughtful people were alarmed, and we were intrigued. When times are tough, our city leaders need to think creatively about funding liberal indulgences like putting out fires, right? We should be applauding Chief Rocco Forte for what may be the most creative funding solution ever applied in the public sector. So what’s the big whoop?
There are several big whoops. One is that we can’t escape the feeling that virtually everything is for sale, including our most necessary civil services. When Budweiser offers to buy the university a new swimming pool, with, you know, a custom tile job—what will our answer be?
Then too, we’re reminded of Lady Bird Johnson’s prescient campaign in the sixties to check billboard advertising. It resulted in the National Highway Beautification Act of 1965, which limited billboards to commercial and industrial zones as well as empowered states to decide how degraded they wished to be. (To this day, billboards are prohibited in Vermont. Oddly, no one complains.) Still, we fear hers was ultimately a futile effort lost to another century. The present one has so far been dominated by Reliant stadiums and Pepsi halftimes.
It probably doesn’t get said enough that this is a form of visual pollution. (Graffiti is illegal not because it assaults the eyes, but because it is advertising for which no one has paid.) We admit this for selfish reasons. When one becomes inured to advertising, it stops working, and ad-underwritten media (like, say, a nice little city magazine) begin to go away.
Besides, we actually like good advertisements, and we confess that an ad-free society wouldn’t be one we’d like very much—and not just because we’d be out of a job. One of the most depressing pilgrimages we ever made was to prelapsarian East Berlin. It took us days to realize that our vague feeling of desperation was being fed by something very specific: the complete absence of color, light, visual stimulation. On the other side of the wall, this was provided by good-old fashioned capitalist hucksterism—in a word, advertising.
Of course, there may be more serious reasons to worry about selling the hose covers to the highest bidders. We think the MFD is wise to take baby steps in these untested areas. Quit Plan offers an irresistible symmetry to the relationship: Most fatal fires in Minnesota are caused by reckless smoking. And even though the majority of calls to which the fire department responds are “medicals,” one could certainly make a case that the larger share of these, too, are health-related problems caused or complicated by smoking cigarettes. In other words, if this particular ad campaign works, our fire department will have less work to do, with more money in hand.
We should be so lucky.
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