Billboards: the detritus of American dreams

Signs, symbols, and the litter of the sky

Timeline
Timeline
Published in
7 min readAug 5, 2016

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Tattered billboard, Minneapolis. (John Vachon, Library of Congress)

by Robert Zaretsky

Like hundreds of thousands of other Houstonians, I commute to work along Interstate 45. This dense traffic corridor is a concrete Ganges — ten lanes and counting — whose traffic congeals southward towards Galveston, ending in the boggy badlands just north of the Gulf of Mexico.

I-45 is a Texas-sized highway: an interstate that has no need of other states. It is an inner-state, a winding exhibit of sun-blasted blight, lined by decaying strip malls and dismal strip halls, grim storefronts of fly by night lawyers and serve by night bondmen, all day buffets and a dizzying array of nail salons. But there is also beauty to be found, in the batches of billboards that cling to the cement banks of the road like barnacles. In a Texan-sized irony, these billboards blossom in the very state whose most famous native son and daughter — Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson — did their very best, through the Highway Beautification Act of 1965, to cut them down and cart them off.

Highways have always been an important part of the American cultural psyche, oftening proclaiming their sense of possibility — the “too huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies,” wrote Jack Kerouac in On the Road. Nature writer and radical environmentalist Edward Abbey, on the other hand, agreed with Lady Bird Johnson wholeheartedly and bemoaned the blight of billboards: the only good billboard, he said, was a smoking billboard. As he declared while the House of Representatives was legislating the Highway Beautification Act: “Keep America beautiful: burn a billboard.” President Johnson no doubt sympathized with Abbey’s incendiary approach. Even Johnson’s vaunted powers of persuasion could not at first overcome the lobbying efforts of the Outdoor Advertising Association of America. But he was determined to realize Lady Bird’s vision of a more pristine countryside. As he told his cabinet, “I love that woman and, by God, we’re going to get it for her.”

Tarrant County, TX (Bruce Harms, Library of Congress)

The journey down I-45 is a daily reminder that the act did not fully succeed — a result which is perhaps not to be fully mourned. The billboard is not a complex rhetorical tool. Slap a few pointed words over a single image, stretch it nearly 50 feet wide, hoist it a hundred feet above the ground: this is the essence of a billboard. With the target audience barreling past at 70 miles an hour — the standard speed outside of rush hours and biblical rains — complexity is catastrophic. But there is surprising depth to the signs’ superficiality. The Lone Star state’s signage is particularly self-referential: when we talk about billboards, we talk about Texas. From Texas-tough trucks and Texas-big tacos to Texas-raised cattle and Texas-brewed beer, the adjective, not the noun, comes first.

This is particularly true for Texan religion. Billboards tower over the many mega-churches that line I-45. Several years ago, the evangelical Grace Community Church (franchises already established in San Diego and north Houston) opened a vast new center not too far from my highway exit. With its glass-walled chapel, sprawling lots, and football field-sized American flags, the church literally mirrors the Lexus dealership right next door. But the 18,000-member organization was determined to out-advertise its neighbor with a pair of sky scraping, 200-foot high crosses. The crosses were eventually taken down when nearby Ellington Airfield intervened in protest, concerned that the crosses, they informed the church elders, might impale their planes.

We certainly do not lack the more traditional brimstone billboards, bellowing questions such as, “If You Die Today, Will You Go To Heaven Or Hell?” (A question I especially like to chew on when my car idles for an hour or two in traffic.) Others take a more light-hearted approach to faith; a local Christian radio station reassures me simply that “God listens,” while a nearby church once invited me to “Strip for Jesus.” (As the minister explained, he meant for commuters to strip themselves of worldly concerns, not their clothing.)

A “Texas-big” highway interchange in Dallas. (Twitter)

Mega-churches rise along I-45 not just because land here is dirt cheap, but because, in their eyes of their flocks, it is plain dirty. Where better to trumpet their faith than on these polluted arteries lined with pole dance lollapaloozas, tattoo parlors, 24-hour video stores, and Thai massage spas? While the billboards for “gentleman clubs” are frequently as binary and brutal as those for religion clubs, an occasional sign makes a feeble effort at wit. On the digital billboard rising above one such establishment flashes the message: “Your wife called: it’s okay.” The moment for creative exegesis comes when your eleven year old daughter asks — as mine did, “What’s okay, Dad?”

“All of this,” I could reply. I could recite to her Stephen Spender’s poem, “The Pylons,” in which he hails the electricity towers peppering rural England. The pylons, he writes, are “bare like nude giant girls,” are “tall with prophecy.” Or I could describe the art of Stephen Shore, who over the last several decades has photographed, like a biologist collecting samples from the shores of brackish swamps, the flotsam and jetsam of life along these great traffic arteries. I could remind her of that great ur-pylon, the Eiffel Tower. Roland Barthes called the Eiffel Tower the world’s greatest billboard, broadcasting a multitude of messages. Meant to be as temporary as the world expo it crowned, time has made it as natural a part of the cityscape as the Seine; once scorned as a hideous edifice that would deface Paris, it was instead embraced by the city it has come to define. Like thousands of miniature towers, the billboards that line I-45 are perhaps more native to the city than the sporadic copses of limp and languishing palm trees planted alongside it.

It is another Parisian writer, Victor Hugo, who best explains why we should embrace billboards, and the tumultuous, indiscriminate life that teems under their long shadows. In Les Misérables, Hugo makes dozens of narrative pit stops along the literary highway of the novel. The most celebrated is in Paris’ sewers. It is in the city’s uncharted intestines, dating from antiquity, that Jean Valjean, covered in human muck, undergoes an epiphany. For Hugo, this miasmal sewer system was the moral center of Parisians, its sludge the detritus of generations of human ambitions and aspirations. The sewers, he declared, were the “conscience of the city.” In its depths, there are no secrets: “No false appearance, no whitewashing, is possible.”

Until, that is, the city’s great modernizer (and Hugo’s nemesis) Georges Haussmann got his hands on it. Given carte blanche by his boss, Emperor Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, Haussmann razed entire neighborhoods and replaced the city’s antique bowels with a vast (and vastly improved) sewer system. For Haussmann, wide boulevards and wide sewers laid out with geometric rigor were what made for an imperial city. For Hugo, though, they made for an impersonal city. The sublimity of subterranean Paris was sacrificed for homogenization and standardization.

Billboard on U.S. Highway 99 (Dorothea Lange, Library of Congress)

Perhaps our billboards are the civic sludge, the highway litter, of America’s ambitions and aspirations — literally writ large. One wonders how Hugo, who rarely had a good word for sanitation, would react to the billboard campaign of Buc-cee’s, a convenience chain that makes much ado over their clean restrooms. (Among their many classics are “Don’t worry, P happy” and “You Have to Pee to Believe.”) I suspect the novelist would frown at the news that an increasing number of Texas cities and towns are now outlawing the installation of new billboards. The Highway Beautification Act has prompted more than 400 Texas cities and towns to outlaw over the course of half a century the raising of new billboards. As a result, the number of billboards in Texas alone has dropped from 15,000 to 1,500. The urban corridors of I-45 are today a kind of urban preserve, one of the last places in Texas where the now-endangered billboard still flourishes.

A handful of other states have since also outlawed billboards, and still others have made halfhearted efforts to control “sky trash” or “litter on a stick” to some degree. But along with the dreary doughnut shops and convenience stores, mysterious martial arts schools and ethnic groceries clustering at their feet, billboards, Hugo and I would argue, also have a touch of the sublime. Like the unfiltered slime Jean Valjean slogs through in his subterranean escape, these banal human creations in fact reflect the chaotic and complex creativity of society.

Even without considering them a particular window into America’s primal, unfiltered soul, billboards serve their banality well. As with most large, interstate highways, some stretches are so bleak that — were it not for this particular sky trash — tedium would be the only message. In the right context, litter on a stick catalyzes into letters on a stick, signifiers in dreary and dismal places. To paraphrase Kerouac (someone who knew a thing or two about driving), the road — and its billboards — eventually lead to the whole world.

Robert Zaretsky is professor of world cultures and literatures in the Honors College, University of Houston. His latest book is Boswell’s Enlightenment (Harvard, 2015). He is a frequent contributor to the New York Times, Foreign Policy, Los Angeles Times, International Herald Tribune, Le Monde Diplomatique, and many others. He is the history editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books.

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