Down With Billboards

Billboards should not exist. They block views of neat pastoral cows, hills and barns in the country and fine old brickwork in the city. They seldom have a vocabulary of more than six words. And they entice you to buy whiskey when you’re really just in the neighborhood to buy bail bonds.

No, billboards are blunt, simpleminded and loud—blights on the landscape, visual and intellectual pollutants.

So, just when you’ve decided that in a saner world, billboards would be banished, you spot from a block away a lime-green iPod board —and you immediately congratulate yourself on being a connoisseur of both industrial design and music (are 10,000 songs really enough to reflect my protean tastes?), and then comes the second thought: Is my iPod charged?

Or perhaps you’re driving in Sonoma, and while it would be good for you spiritually to drink in the photogenic vineyards, you don’t mind seeing...