A thirty-second public service ad currently running on TV:
Urban night. Close-up of white urban youth, presumably teenagers, congregating around the open car window of a drug pusher. Suddenly, light floods the scene. Low-angle shot of police helicopter beaming powerful searchlight onto ground. Friendly male voice-over explaining that light drives away unwanted pests. Shot of cockroaches scampering away from light. “So turn on your lights,” the voice-over affably advises over shot of elderly black woman turning on her porch lights. Title card: PA Department of Health, Partnership for a Drug-free America.
Every time America goes to war, the same thing happens. The government dehumanizes its enemy du jour, and the mainstream (i.e., respectable—i.e., conservative corporate) media follow suit. Thus the above drug war propaganda comparing anyone involved in drugs, both buyers and sellers, to cockroaches. The Nazis, whose propaganda compared Jews to vermin, would have liked everything about this ad (except its shot of the black woman, of course, cannily included to disguise the drug war’s unrelenting attack on black people).
March 7, 1999
DAVID V. MATTHEWS 