By CHRIS POWELL
Trends in television and radio advertising in Connecticut give a distressing impression of the state.
No one can watch TV or listen to radio for an hour without hearing from one tax delinquency resolution agency or another. Their clients claim to have evaded huge amounts of federal taxes only to have had them largely forgiven by the Internal Revenue Service after engaging a tax relief agency. Who knew that Connecticut had so many tax cheats?
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Commercials for casinos, internet gambling, and state lottery games are just as ubiquitous. One on TV shows a pretty young woman sitting on a couch at home, mesmerized by her mobile phone, before bouncing up, running outside, and jumping exuberantly and fully clothed into a swimming pool because she just won $25,000 at an internet casino. Maybe the casino has devised that commercial in the hope of reversing what used to be meant by “taking a bath,” which is what most casino patrons usually do. Public-service commercials warning about the gambling addiction increasingly suffered by young people have little effect.
Then there are the commercials for new prescription drugs, some targeting ailments most people have never heard of, including new drugs that are said to be safe even for people also taking “mental health medication.” The mentally ill apparently are now numerous enough to be profitable to advertise to. Some of these commercials spend less time citing the new drug’s benefits than they spend hurriedly warning about its dangerous potential side-effects. By the end of the side-effects viewers may have forgotten what the drug is meant for.
Maybe most boisterous are the commercials of the personal injury law firms, including a firm that claims a national reach and boasts that it can sue anybody for anything any time and recover huge damages. Viewers might start looking forward to a collision with a tractor-trailer.
Another law firm commercial depicts insurance company executives as grizzled old grifters as if Connecticut isn’t a center of the insurance business and as if insurance isn’t a great boon, crucial to nearly every aspect of life.
Some law firms stress in their commercials that they never charge a fee in personal injury cases unless their clients win, as if this is the firm’s special humane practice and hasn’t actually long been standard procedure in the personal-injury law business.
These commercials imply that Connecticut is full of people who evaded taxes but got away with it because a fixer pulled some strings; that the state is also full of casino jackpot winners, since the losers at the casinos never appear in commercials; that Connecticut residents are contracting strange new afflictions all the time on top of their longstanding psychological troubles and that the pharmaceutical industry is ready to cure them if it doesn’t kill them first; and that whatever bad stuff happens, it will be the fault of someone else, preferably someone covered by an insurance company that will be terrified by a chest-thumping personal-injury lawyer.
At least now that summer is here people can get a completely different impression of the state just by turning off the TV and radio and going outside on a warm and sunny day. At this time of year Connecticut may be the most beautiful place in the world. But hurry — election campaigns for governor, Congress, and the General Assembly have begun and soon will be flooding the airwaves with their own hyperbolic commercials.
When their campaigns rev up state legislators will be able to boast that their main wildlife policy is working well. For the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection says bears are steadily expanding their range in the state.
“Reports of home entries, livestock attacks, beehive and other agricultural damage, damage to vehicles and structures, as well as physical altercations with pets and people are following a long-term upward trend,” the department says.
Yes, soon every town will have at least several bears disrupting daily life, since legislators think that’s better than having a bear-hunting season.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
Chris Powell column 