A Government Safety Campaign Hits a Bumpy Road
With gasoline above $3 a gallon, the number of midnight gasoline thieves severely burned when they light matches to monitor their illicit activity has jumped dramatically. Government public health officials want do something about it, and thereby hangs a tale of the latest mini-cultural war to engulf Congress and the Washington bureaucracy.
A task force of education specialists from several agencies mapped out an advertising campaign that urges thieves to use flashlights instead of matches to check the gasoline level in their syphon bottle in the dark of night.
A prototype ad features a silhouetted figure crouched by the side of a car shining a flashlight on a bottle. The slogan: “Flash some light on your siphon bottle.”
But some Republican lawmakers attacked the campaign, saying it encourages thievery. Rep. Alfonse Gruver from Amarillo, Texas famously summed up the opposition’s sentiments: “If gas thieves are so stupid that they light a match, let ‘em burn. That’ll educate ‘em soon enough.”
The remark enraged Rep. Marge Dione, a five-term Democrat from San Francisco.
“Let’s line up anyone who steals gasoline and shoot them,” she said. “The distinguished red neck from Texas should fire the first volley.”
Cooler heads prevailed and the Republicans eventually agreed it might be cheaper to educate a thief about the dangers of lighting a match near an open container of gasoline than to hospitalize him for several months treating life-threatening burns.
The result was a new team of education specialists supervised by two senior congressional staffers, one Republican and one Democrat. The group quickly agreed that they would retain the original artwork, the figure crouched by the side of the car with the syphon bottle.
Next, they debated whether the existing drawing suggested that the thief was an African American, or at least a Puerto Rican. The Republican argued that such artwork represented the real world. “Why sugar coat it?” he asked.
After some rancorous debate about whether white people also steal gas, the group settled on a uni-racial drawing, though it seemed quite evident that the resulting thief wasn’t lily white.
Then came debate about the sex of the thief. Some team members argued that women should be represented along with men. They settled on retaining a male thief after some polling data from Gallup showed that more than 90 percent of the thieves who syphon gasoline are male.
Finally, they were left to argue about the slogan.
A faction that had emerged as the group’s liberal wing preferred: “Please don’t steal gasoline. But if you must, think of your family and use a flashlight.”
The centrists preferred: “Safety is as safety does. When you steal gasoline, use a flashlight.” (They also wanted to add artwork depicting a lighted match with a large X through it.)
The conservatives proposed: “Only an idiot steals gas. Only a stupid idiot lights a match to watch.”
At that point, they deadlocked. No one would give ground. Eventually, the problem was kicked upstairs to an assistant deputy assistant secretary of Health and Human Services. No one knows what deliberations went on behind closed doors at the secretarial level. At length, the official slogan was handed down.
“Hey! Dumbass stealing the gas. Use a flashlight, you moron, not a match. You want to toast your ass like a marshmallow?”
Look for the campaign in libraries and mass transit advertising kiosks sometime in the summer of 2006 or early 2007.