T reversal on booze ads is sick

Ads are meant to encourage use of the products they glamorize, so let there be no doubt the MBTA’s decision to end its five-year ban on advertisements pushing alcohol is as venal as it gets.

In pointing out such ads could garner as much as

$2.5 million annually for the poorly run agency, proponents direct our attention to what that $2.5 million can buy.

“The additional revenue will fund the wages of dozens of employees in critical positions necessary for maintenance” of the system, spokesman Joe Pesaturo declared, doing what he’s paid to do, i.e., singing whatever song his masters request.

It’s called rationalization, which means finding a good reason for doing something you know is wrong, and coming into the Christmas season nothing could be more wrong than pocketing blood money from advertisers whose goods have been known to destroy families and careers.

Indeed, the only justification for ending the T’s five-year moratorium on such ads is the argument Pesaturo advances, which is completely void of civic responsibility.

We’re told our government cares about our well-being.

If you don’t buckle up, you’ll be fined.

And don’t even think of having a cigarette; there’s no quicker way to become a pariah.

And yet it spends millions trying to lure you into state-sponsored gambling which, like alcohol, has led to the ruination of so many lives.

Make no mistake, ads and images are seductive.

The late Celtics broadcaster Johnny Most, whose chain-smoking contributed to his inimitable gravelly voice, remembered getting hooked. “I was 17 and it was a peer thing,” he said. “In those days you were nothing if you didn’t smoke. That’s how you showed you’d become a man!”

Well, the T wants you to know that drinking’s pretty cool, too.

To his credit Mayor Marty Walsh, a selfprofessed recovering alcoholic who, in his 21st year of sobriety, still fights that battle one day at a time, blasted the T’s decision to begin promoting drinking again.

“Those ads aren’t targeting adults,” he said. “They’re targeting little kids, just like the cigarette ads were in the ’80s and ’90s.”

Those kids, then and now, are known as entrylevel drinkers. Think about that. It brings to mind satirist Tom Lehrer’s ditty on how rocket scientist Wernher von Braun rationalized the bloody mayhem caused by his creation:

“‘Once the rockets go up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department,’ says Wernher von Braun.”

It was funny when Lehrer sang it, but there’s nothing funny about what the MBTA is doing now.

It is unconscionable.