When I was in college I concocted a harebrained scheme to steal a statue of Ronald McDonald from his home in a McDonald’s in Davis Square, Somerville. As harebrained schemes go, it was pretty well-conceived - we had a getaway vehicle (a clearly-labeled van from the Tufts Arena Theater), a foolproof Distraction (Kristen was a talented actress and more than a bit of a hottie, so when she showed the staff the real actual cockroach she’d “found” on her burger, well, all work would cease and all eyes would be on Kristin and her roach. Mostly Kristen), and we had an anagrammatic code name for the mission so anvil-headedly obvious that no self-respecting investigator would even dream that a group of conspirators would choose it, let alone write it on the tops of their planning documents (the name was “TORMS, for “Theft Of…” & etc.).

Best yet, our plan did not involve keeping Ronald for long. There were two schools of thought: 1) Hold him for ransom while sending out amusing notes, some from Ronald himself (”They’re violating me repeatedly, but I like it”). 2) Hang him from a highway overpass to greet commuters the next morning. We were leaning towards doing both.

We never got around to actually stealing the statue. It was a scheduling nightmare: When’s the van available? What’s Kristen’s rehearsal schedule like? When does Mickey D’s close, anyway? Would this increase or decrease the chances of any of us actually dating Kristen, and when the hell was she going to dump that stupid boyfriend of hers, who’s like four feet tall and doesn’t even live here? Hey, who would you rather do - …. organization and focus were problems for us. It was all far too complicated. Other, more spontaneous bits of lawlessness, like breaking into the Massachusetts Ear and Eye Infirmary one night when we found ourselves accidentally on their fire escape, were more our speed.

But it would’ve been great, we all still agree.

Which is why its so sad that if we were to try it today, we’d be terrorists.

As the above link and many other news reports indicate, Boston, alone among the several cities that involuntarily hosted this marketing campaign, freaked out. And Boston should know better. Like our stillborn TORMS and all sophomoric pranks, what is satisfying about the Lite-Brite finger-waving alien prankvertisement (for a very funny show, by the way) is the image of some old fuddy-duddy shaking his fist impotently at the receding sight of those Damned Kids. And Boston is the ultimate college town, where the fuddy-duddy/damned kids ratio is so perilously low that fuddy-duddies can charge extortionate prices for the simple service of shaking their fists impotently at some damned kid or another.

So the fact that those damned kids are now under arrest and that entire streets and bridges were shut down and the Coast Guard activated while the police chief lectured us about 9/11… is tragic. One of America’s greatest prank cities has been wiped off the map. In the name of security, our freedom to break the law, a little, in the service of Funny, has been greatly curtailed. We are living in a Fuddyduddocracy.

There is only one appropriate response.

Hi, Boston!