#406 Capitation

In my hometown of Olympia there’s this place on the main drag that the city uses to display banners. It’s quite the learning experience. The banners used to be for major events like Harbor Days or Arbor Days and it was good to see the pictures on the banners because that way I could figure out which festival to bring a tree to. It was also kind of a passive way to keep up on community events. There’s no way every semi-festival, read-a-thon, food drive and craft bazaar can get total exposure in all the other media so the over-the-street banner is a nice supplement. Or at least it was until the city realized what a social engineering goldmine it had on the end of its poles. So, a little while back, banners started to appear of a decidedly less-than-community-festival ilk. The city can certainly qualify as a non-profit so why shouldn’t they too use the public venue to advertise things for the public good? And as the traffic on the street in question is the densest in town, and as that same traffic often finds itself standing still, what better way to cram a message down the gridlocked throat of the semi-literate. So soon we were seeing signs about sharing the road with bicyclists, and helping the city with raking out storm drains during the falling-leave, street-flooding season. And occasionally we’d learn to give road-workers a brake, and get screened for cancer and stuff. And lately there’s this new banner. It’s kind of clever and it comes with visual aids. I think it’s important to have international graphics just in case the possible offenders haven’t yet mastered elementary English enough to get the message. Especially since the message has a pun in it, (that was the clever part) and the last thing foreign language speakers learn is how to pun in their adopted language. The banner is for an anti-tree topping campaign and the slogan says: “You can’t top a healthy tree.” Get it? Like you can’t do better than a healthy tree—you can’t top a healthy tree and you can’t cut the top off a healthy tree either. The follow-up line “and still have it stay healthy” is implied. But with the picture of a tree being brutally decapitated compared to the picture of a tree fully rounded with vegitile pulchritude you get the implication. Apparently all the power workers and asplundh folks out there know what they’re doing and so are exempt from this banner. The message here is, don’t just top your own tree, call an arborist. On one note, it’s nice to see government getting out of our bedroom and into our gardens where it belongs. On another, I’m not sure about the tag line on the banner in question. It says: “Prune Responsibly.” Right. Prune responsibly. I’ll add that to my wish list: World peace, feed the starving children, prune responsibly. Prune it? I’m still trying to figure out where to buy the stuff. What is this responsibly stuff? My friend tells me all the TV ads say he should drink it.
America, ya gotta love it.