Теория Рекламы :: RE: Общая Теория Рекламы: «Дураки» и «Дороги».
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A city’s ‘no cursing’ signs are being sold. People have spent thousands.
The signs hung in Virginia Beach for decades, reminding visitors and locals alike of the family-friendly atmosphere the city’s leaders wanted to foster. Tourists Kolette Schneyder, left, and Kaylie Heintzelman, right, are told about the “no swearing” ordinance in Virginia Beach by volunteers in June 2000. (Bob Brown/Richmond Times-Dispatch/AP) ... Antigoni Savvides wanted one of Virginia Beach’s famous “no cursing” signs and was prepared to spend a lot of money to get one. Savvides, 65, was among dozens of bidders vying to own the six street signs that the Virginia Beach Police Foundation auctioned off this week. Only a handful of people emerged victorious to claim some of the quirkier pieces of the city’s history. For decades, the signs hung in the touristy Oceanfront district, reminding visitors and locals alike of the family-friendly atmosphere the city’s leaders wanted to foster inside their crown jewel. Officials removed them five years ago and put them in storage until May, when they decided to donate them to the foundation. Now, you can buy one, although you’ll have to compete with bidders like Savvides who are willing to spend hundreds — or even thousands — of dollars to take them home. The first batch of six sold for just over $9,000. “There’s an attachment to the history,” foundation president Jake Jacocks said, adding that he knows of no other city that tried to curb cursing through city signage. “There’s an awful lot of people, and not just Virginia Beach residents, who spent a lot of time at the Oceanfront growing up in their teens and 20s and 30s, and they like to remember those times.” Virginia once had a legal prohibition against cursing that grew out of George Washington’s 1776 “Order Against Profanity,” which was used to keep soldiers from engaging in “the foolish and wicked practice of profane cursing and swearing,” according to the First Amendment Watch project at New York University. In 1792, the state formally outlawed “profane swearing [or] cursing,” punishing offenders with a fine of 83 cents “for every such offense.” A version of that law stayed on the books for more than two centuries, and by the end of last decade, “profane swearing in public” was a misdemeanor punishable by a fine of up to $250. In 2020, however, state legislators repealed the law. Virginia Beach’s version of that statute had already been defanged. In 1989, the Virginia Court of Appeals ruled it was unconstitutional, overturning a man’s conviction under the law for sticking his head out a car window while driving by police officers and cursing at them. The city installed the signs shortly after the appeals court’s decision, and there they remained for about a quarter-century. In 2019, officials removed more than 100 of the signs at the behest of business leaders who wanted to be more welcoming to tourists and declutter the cityscape ahead of native son Pharrell Williams’s inaugural Something in the Water music festival, according to the Virginian-Pilot. Almost overnight, one of the more distinctive aspects of Virginia Beach vanished. For more than four years, the signs sat in storage. Then, in May, they shot back into the public consciousness when the city council voted to give them to the police foundation, a private nonprofit that supports the Virginia Beach Police Department by buying ballistic vests for police dogs, maintaining a memorial for officers and helping officers financially when they’re in crisis. Jacocks, who served as Virginia Beach’s police chief from 2000 to 2010, said this week’s auction was something of a test run. That included three of both kinds of signs that used to hang at the Oceanfront: The more recognizable, in-your-face one features a red circle with a diagonal line slashing through symbols representing profanity: @$#!! Those were accompanied by rectangular ones explaining to visitors that they were discouraged from cursing, making obscene gestures, wearing “revealing attire which is inappropriate in a public setting,” intimidating or harassing others, and breaking the law. Savvides has spent her entire life in Virginia Beach, a good chunk of it in the Oceanfront. Her parents migrated from Cyprus, a country in the Mediterranean Sea, and in the 1950s, her father opened the family’s first business — the Holiday House Restaurant, a classic American dinner house — on Atlantic Avenue, one of the Oceanfront’s main drags. In the ensuing decades, the Savvideses bought more land, opened other businesses and made their livelihoods catering to tourists, whether it was feeding them in their restaurants, housing them at their motels or providing them a place to park their cars while they strolled the boardwalk and lazed on the beach. Savvides was a big fan of the no-cursing signs when they went up in the 1990s. The Oceanfront had fallen off a bit from its heyday, she said, and the signs were a tangible attempt to halt the slide or even recapture some of the area’s charm and innocence that Savvides remembered from her childhood. “The signs represented trying to go back to a family-orientated beach where everybody respected families and nobody wanted to curse in front of kids, use obscene gestures in front of kids,” she said. Savvides recalled then-Mayor Meyera Oberndorf handing out half-dollar-sized imitation buttons of the signs that people could pin to their shirts. Savvides said she hoarded them in a Ziploc bag and has occasionally worn them over the past three decades. Those in the know are tickled with recognition, while the uninitiated are curious. Either way, it gets people talking. “It’s a conversation piece,” Savvides said. Jacocks was a captain or lieutenant — he doesn’t remember which — in the 1990s when the signs went up. He said it was part of a multipronged strategy to control the noncriminal but undesirable behavior of the large influx of young tourists who didn’t always comport themselves in a “family-friendly” way. Other efforts included shining bright lights and pumping brass band music from heavy-duty speakers starting at 1:30 a.m. to encourage those stumbling out of the bars to go home, instead of hanging outside and continuing to drink for hours. Both of the latter strategies worked, but Jacocks said he’s not sure if the no-cursing signs made much of a difference in curbing expletives. But, he added, they did spur conversations between police and people confused about the signs’ meaning who sought out officers for more information. Those talks led to pleasant chats that improved relations between police and the public. When Jacocks learned the signs had been taken down, he knew there would be interest in owning them. He had heard through contacts in the city government that officials were getting a lot of inquiries about them, and over the years, he kept asking whether the city would consider donating them to the foundation. Savvides was interested immediately when news broke in May that the city was going to do just that and that the police foundation would then auction them off. She was so eager that she tried to circumvent the process. She called the foundation, which she has supported for years, to ask whether she could buy one of them outright. She was told that she would have to try to win one at auction like everyone else, and that’s exactly what she set out to do. For Peter Van Winkle, getting one of the signs was less about historical connection and more about his personal struggles as a parent. Although he grew up in Virginia Beach and still visits every couple weeks because he owns property there, Van Winkle said he wanted a sign because he’s “a big no-cursing person” in contrast to his four grown children, who cursed a lot growing up. Van Winkle, a 59-year-old accountant who lives in Richmond, pushed them over the years to think of a more creative way to express their emotions — like his Norfolk high school football coach who, when frustrated, used to eviscerate his players with a “cheese and crackers!” epithet that drew its power from its tone, volume and the gravitas of the person delivering it. Both Savvides and Van Winkle aren’t done. While they won signs at the first auction, both want to complete their sets by getting their sign’s mate. For Savvides, that means winning the more recognizable, in-your-face circular sign that she was outbid on. The foundation plans to auction off the 27 circular signs and 57 rectangular ones that it has left. This weekend, it plans to start its second auction, which will run for about a week. If Savvides gets one, she’ll hang both of her no-swearing signs on a wall in her house, already adorned with mementos from a multigenerational string of businesses: an old Rolodex from the family’s Golden Sands Motel, a fire alarm pull station from the Windjammer Motel, bricks from the Golden Sands with holes that she uses like tiny cubbies to hold pens. “I’ve been at the Oceanfront all my life,” she said. “It’s part of my history.” |
На самом деле, страсть либералов к артефактам своей эпохи своей страны это более сложная конструкция, чем просто туризм во времени.
Дело в том, что как Вы помните, у либералов своего прошлого нет. Все их помыслы всегда устремлены из своего прошлого в чужое будущее (в отличии от патриотов, взоры которых устремлены из чужого будущего в свое прошлое).
Так вот, со своим прошлым у либералов всегда были проблемы.
История своей страны их всегда раздражала.
По этому граждане такой страны всегда относились к коллекционированию сувениров своей страны с огромным интересом, стремясь создать свое именное личное прошлое, в которому можно довериться, в котором можно спрятаться и отдохнуть от вечных грядущих невзгод неспокойного будущего.
В этом смысле такую страсть к сувенирам в своем времени можно сравнить с механизмом выбора при голосовании ИСО>ЕСО, когда потенциальный патриотично настроенный избиратель сравнивает не «Путина» и Иванова, Петрова, Сидорова, а «Путина» и «Путина» – «Путина» сейчас и «Путина» 5, 10, 20 лет тому.
Другими словами, гражданам Систем ИСО>ЕСО, такие дорожные сувениры нужны для персональной безопасной рефлексии, свободном выборе между собой сейчас и собой 5, 10, 20 лет назад.
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С интересом и понятными пожеланиями, Dimitriy.