A couple years back, you often heard things like, “who cares what foreigners think about the US?” The answer is, me. Even if you’re not from Mass., you must know my boy John Winthrop:

“For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.”

I’m pissed off that the government has done so much to knock down the good name of my country. Today, I saw an article by travel writer Jan Morris that sums up the idea perfectly. Check it out.

Heathrow! Chicago! LA! Boston! Boston? Yes, Boston, now in the long line of places that were attacked by terrorists, only they weren’t. The Mayor and police in Boston, you may have seen, are in a tizzy because they blew 500,000 dollars checking out 38 “bombs” that turned out to be guerrilla advertisements for a Cartoon Network show. The devices were clipped on to bridges and buildings around the city, and had a character called a Mooninite flipping you off in lights. When the story broke and the city went bonkers, the devices had already been in place for two weeks. So, you may ask, was the city justified in its mock political outrage? We have two options:

1) The devices were obviously not bombs. Seeing as the same campaign had been going on in New York, Atlanta and a number of other cities, without incident, and that the so-called bomb looks like a cartoon character, you might agree. That said, if the mayor wasted half a million destroying 38 clearly-not-bombs, he’d been eating some humble pie (or humble chowdah, as it were). He also wouldn’t be able to use his reputation as a terrorist fighter to get reelected.

2) The devices did, in fact, look like bombs. Now if this were true, and the media weren’t distracted by the smoke-and-mirrors mock outrage, it might be pointed out that the bombs were in the city for two weeks without anyone noticing. Now, I’m of the opinion that you really can’t do anything about low-level terrorism such as small bombs, but the government maintains otherwise. Clearly, if these were actually bombs, they all would have gone off long before anyone swept them away.

(Note: I’m not picking on Mayor Menino just because he’s a Menino and not a Kelly or an O’Callahan or a Shannon. Then again, if it were a Kelly, I might be praising the good work done by a competent, non-Italian Boston mayor! I feel like I have a natural duty to continue the strangest ethnic feud in America this side of “Korean-Black in LA”.)

(Note 2: Far more worrying for Boston partisans is that Consumer Reports is going to report not only that Starbucks coffee is better than Dunkin Donuts, but that McDonalds coffee is as well. We call that blasphemy. I bet Atlantic Monthly and Yankee Magazine score them in reverse.)