Letter to President Obama #29 | Subject: Presidential Public Service Announcements

Dear President Obama,

I’ve got a question about public service announcements. Every once in a while, I drive by this billboard with this strange public service announcement on it—it says Leadership: Pass it On. I don’t like this billboard. Every time I drive past it I immediately signal the wrong way with my blinker and begin swerving.

I’ve seen others like it, and I’d like to know, is the government responsible for these? If so, can we please stop funding them? I saw one a while back that essentially told me not to swear, and I never wanted to swear more in my life! And boy can I swear! (For a while, looking up swear words was my job. Really! I researched swear words in about 30 languages for a multinational corporation to make sure that those bad words didn’t appear in their products.) In the process, I learned how to tell someone to “have no cow!” and to “get blind at celebration time” in Rwandan. Anyway, so I drove past this sign and I started swearing, and the guy in the car next to me did too, and I think the school bus driver behind me did as well (though that probably just comes with the territory.) It was sort of like that movie Pay it Forward, but with curse words.

And it’s not just that these billboards are pretentious, they seem to indicate that the “negative” emotions are totally worthless, but I couldn’t disagree more. Every emotion has its place and time. For instance, I think a giant advertisement featuring Marvin the Martian with the tagline, Anger: Sometimes it’s funny would be a great fit!

Anyway, I’m not just angry about the weird values billboards. There’s another sign just off the highway by my apartment that bothers me too, but I don’t know if it’s by the same people—it’s a little blue highway sign that just reads, “Concentrate on Driving.” Let me tell you, I’ve never wanted to hit anything with a car more in my life! Every time I drive past it, I want to start texting and swerving and playing chicken with oncoming traffic. Mr. President, can you please call the Isanti County Department of Transportation and tell them to change this sign? If I call, they’ll probably hang up on me. But you could probably make it happen.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not against Public Service Announcements, generally. I just think we could be doing a better job. I think the current ads are ineffective and self-defeating. I’d like to encourage you to create Public Service Announcements based upon various U.S. Presidents. To be sure, the presidents represent all sorts of virtues as well as a variety of cautionary tales.

For instance, we could feature William Henry Harrison in an ad for the National Institutes of Health or the Centers for Disease Control. You know, he was the 9^th president and the one who gave that really long inauguration speech (two hours!) in the rain without wearing a hat or a coat. Then he died of pneumonia on his 32^nd day in office. That PSA has already written itself—we’d just need a picture of Henry Harrison looking deathly ill with one of those speech bubbles: If it rains, don’t forget a coat!

And of course we could feature President Taft in anti-obesity PSA. We could show a picture of his giant bathtub along with the tagline: Don’t eat that burger! Or you might need a bathtub like mine—and it could hold six people!

If we really got into the swing of things, we could even co-opt the likenesses of various presidents to support various contemporary causes that didn’t exist during their time. For instance, we could feature George Washington in a PSA for climate-change awareness, but the tagline would be a little more esoteric. Something like: Turn off that wood-burning stove you young lad! It’ll pollute the phlogiston or whatever it was they thought the air was made up of back then.

Of course, this might be going a little too far. But you get the general idea. In any case, I think the Presidential PSAs would be far more effective than the current approaches.

Thanks for reading.

Brett Ortler