Field Notes Inside an Integrated Communications Agency

My family visited Acid Park last weekend. These ginormous whirligigs in an overgrown field near rural Wilson, N.C. are masterful works of passion. They are pure, honest and heartfelt. A little trippy and deeply knotted in folklore, too. Driving away, my wife told me the origin. I found other explanations online that matched her tale.

One story starts, “Legend has it, a girl was on her way home from the prom where she had dropped a little acid. At the final turn, she ran off the road, wrapping the car around a tree.” Another account goes on to say, “She suffered severe head injuries, and trapped by flames she burned to death.” A decaying car on site appears to authenticate the stories.

So why giant whirligigs?

“The girl's grieving father nailed reflectors to every surface around his home,” says one visitor. Adding more color, another tells, “When her father heard ofher death, he went insane. He made 60–foot towers of steel and old cars near the area of her death. He also made statues with weird objects like forks and spoons.”

Evidently, this is spectacular at night. “I stopped in the middle of the road,” says one circumspect visitor. “There were millions of reflectors everywhere, even in the trees. Without going further, we turned tail and ran.” A jauntier visitor believes, “It's supposedly the greatest place in the east to trip on acid because the way the reflectors blow in the wind.”

I guess reflectors also attract paranormal activity, too. “If you visit Acid Park around 2:00 AM on prom night you can hear screams,” reads one site. Another recounts,“…my car shut off twice, my radio changed stations by itself, and my navigation system told me I was in Mexico. Then floating leaves wrapped around my car like a tornado. We came back later and saw white haze in the middle of the road. It got closer, called out ‘Johnathan’ and disappeared. I'll never go back!”

“You can come to your own conclusion…” declares a visitor, “but there is definitely something out there.”

Well, what’s out there is a legend chalked up to good ole fashioned word of mouth. Social media sites – where I learned all this – are modern gossip fences. Tales grow taller, faster and go further. While the hoopla around AcidPark is completely fabricated, the art is very special. The creator, 80-something-year-old Vollis Simpson, is a lean man of few words who has likely not heard of social media or even acid. His pieces have been exhibited at major national art museums so please don’t call it Junk Art. "I buy all the material I use,”bristles Mr. Simpson. “If you start with junk, all you're gonna build is junk.” As many of us learn news through social media channels, that sounds like good advice. Obviously, he’s done something right.

Whether or not you believe in urban legends, Acid Park must be seen and definitely talked about.

In a great review in Slate, Dahlia Lithwick looks at Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, by Cass R. Sunstein and Richard H. Thaler.  The pair argue that we -- all of us, yes, you, too -- make a lot of foolish choices throughout out lives. We do this in large part because we are overly influenced by our non-logical "reptilian" parts of our brains. Like Homer Simpson, we binge on doughnuts even though we know without a doubt that such behavior is wildly unhealthy. 

Now, I have always been leery of government policy that tries to keep us from being responsible for our own choices.  I thought it was ridiculous, for example, that so many life insurers were sued when "interest sensitive" or stock-price-influenced products didn't do so well in a bear market. "We were duped, screamed the public.  "We didn't know taking on some risk was so risky! My agent lied to me."  Oblivious to the 20 pages of "watch out, there are risks" information that each policyholder had to read and sign before buying, politicians and lawyers rushed to reverse the logical consequences of these fully informed choices.  Hundreds of millions of dollars were paid out in class action settlements, most of the money of course going to lawyers.

And I hate having to pull off a thousand warning stickers from every consumer product.  "Warning, hitting yourself in the head with this hammer might cause injury."  Okay, I made that one up, but there really are asinine warnings on ladders (don't stand on the top step) and extension cords (don't use under water, don't plug in ten space heaters, etc.).

I can see that there are cases where protecting people from themselves does make sense. Seat belt laws.  Limits on payday lending that preys on the poorest and least educated among us. Controls on handguns.

The authors suggest that perhaps there are more of these situations than crusty old self-reliant types like me want to admit.  They argue that wise public policy driven by "choice architects" should gently guide us to make better selections in various aspects of our lives.  That's gently, mind you. No coercion, no doors knocked down in the middle on the night. No nagging, just a... nudge.

I'm still a bit suspicious of ceding so much influence to a new and unelected class of über-nags, but I plan to read this book. 

Or maybe I'll just get a box of doughnuts and watch cartoons.....