Well, yesterday was a good news and bad news day.
We are now running a $500,000 ad campaign that implores tourists to come, “Find Your Happy Place in Baltimore.” It features a logo design that only a 5th grade teacher just discovering clip art could love. And within 24 hours, Happy has become synonymous with “trigger-happy” or high-as-a-kite-happy–as in just the place for a “thrill-seeking junkie,” as one person posted on the Baltimore Sun web site. The crime columnist Peter Hermann gathered a slew of spot-on comments about the new slogan, including from the former police commander Buz Busnuk:
[Buz] mentioned… The drug dealer named Don Papa who boasted three years ago that he made $180,000 in one night selling drugs on Pennsylvania Avenue. He called the street “a freaking gold mine,” and according to a transcript in a federal court file, told detectives: “This is the heroin capital of America, ain’t no more dope sold nowhere than right there on Pennsylvania Avenue.”
“He thought this place was Nirvana,” Busnuk said. “Wasn’t he in a happy place?”
A man responding to the slogan on the Sun site to this campaign slogan explained why he objected to the slogan: ”We need our potholes fixed, and a decent subway system. We don’t need marketing. Marketing is the job of trying to make something look better than it really is.”
Continuing this line of reasoning, someone else commented, “is it really necessary to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a campaign that can be as much of a failure as “the city that reads” or “BELIEVE”. I never could figure out “Believe” was suppose to mean.”
Yeah, we were the City that Reads (The City that Bleeds/Breeds), then the Greatest City in American, then the city of BELIEVE. I had no idea what Believe meant either.
Hermann’s column referred to the sexual innuendo of Happy Place. He gestured figuratively to the ubiquitous Preakness ads which have been reminding folks that it’s time to get wasted and make out with strangers in a muddy field. The “Get Your Preak On” campaign features a man dressed as a 70s porn star complete with a fake handlebar mustache boasting that “I get my preak on for 8 straight hours.” It’s a great campaign (what sells better than freak) and let’s be honest, last year’s BYOB-booze-free fest was not freaking lucrative enough.
Finally, the last unrelated news item that is definitely more uplifting that being told we are now being dubbed the Happy Place of America: Baltimore got its very own Food Czar yesterday, a woman named Holly Freishat. She is planning to expand Community Supported Agriculture programs, equip farmers markets to accept food stamps, and change zoning to end food deserts. Food deserts are public health-speak for areas like East Baltimore where residents are hard-pressed to find a fresh apple for two square miles.
While Baltimore has its, er, quirks, city leaders have become quick to adopt new progressive approaches to dealing with complicated quality of life issues like obesity. With the expansion of bike lanes and bike safety, Baltimore could prove to be our happy place after all.
