Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 31, 1991 TAG: 9104010180
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: D-2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
As general manager of an advertising company, he would understandably be upset at a bill prohibiting new billboards on federal primary and interstate highways. Although I am not familiar with Chaffee/Lewis, I would wholeheartedly support any bill that discourages new billboard construction, and indeed I would be overjoyed if they demolished all of them outright. Regulation of billboards along highways amounts to a type of federal zoning ordinance. Property owners are not free to "keep and use" their land with complete impunity, such as when the zoning commission prevents the installation of a toxic-waste dump next to an elementary school.
But more to the heart of the matter, billboards are ugly. They turn our "purple mountains' majesty" into one unending, insipid commercial. In Maine, known for its raw, unspoiled beauty, there is almost none of the cheap, smarmy billboard hucksterism that curses the highways of states like Florida or Missouri. In these otherwise beautiful states, the landscape is garishly commercialized, a long, nauseatingly tiresome facade of "Motel Something 10 miles" and "See the Wonderful Whatever, Take the Whole Family, Open Year Round."
Instead of rolling hills, forests, farmland, "amber waves of grain," the roadside is soiled with huge gap-toothed hillbillies shilling handmade beaded Indian belts and authentic curios, or cheerful admonitions that you just missed the last exit to Tourist Trap Alligator Farm Glass-Bottom Boat Gardens.
Mr. Anderson's heartfelt plea to protect his personal pork barrel notwithstanding, I hope that most Americans, and Virginians, would rather look at the magnificent Blue Ridge Mountains than at big billboards directing us to the next Exxon station. KEITH H. FORD RADFORD
by CNB