Remember the Audi “Green Police” ad from the Super Bowl in February of 2010? When “armed Environmental Police officers” and a “state Environmental Police truck” (an SUV, to add to the Gorewellian levels of irony) appear in a Massachusetts* newspaper article, what was fiction only a couple of years ago has now become reality. But then, as President Zelig Lemon Mood Ring demonstrates, reality is entirely fungible these days:
Looking to hit the spot with a savory ice cream at Great Brook Farm State Park this week?
You may be out of luck.
The park’s popular ice-cream stand was unexpectedly shut down by state officials over the weekend, after the stand’s operator made building improvements at the site without getting permission first.
Mark Duffy, who has operated the dairy farm at the state-owned park for 26 years and has a lease with the state to run the stand, said armed Environmental Police officers showed up at stand on Friday evening and stood guard throughout the weekend, turning away customers craving delectable sundaes and frappes.
To make matters worse, said Duffy, the shutdown happened right before the sunny Mother’s Day weekend.
Good thing he didn’t try to open a lemonade stand — that’s a capital offense these days.
* I knew it had to be Massachusetts or California as soon as I saw the story on the Drudge Report.
Related: At the Corner, Peter Kirsanow dubs America “Oceania Light,” a reminder that George Orwell wrote 1984 as a warning, not as a user’s guide, which is what it’s morphed into over the last 20 years — with more than a little touch of the Weimar Republic, of course.
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