Sorry, Smokey: Woodsy's the winner

I don't know why Smokey Bear didn't take his pension a couple decades ago, move back to the woods and write his memoirs.

I doubt he needs either notoriety or money. Smokey's wardrobe, after all, epitomizes simple and cheap: blue jeans, belt and buckle, and a hat. Also he gets by without a shirt or a jacket, so he's at least a hundred bucks ahead right there.

Smokey's forever lugging around that round-point shovel, but I imagine the Forest Service would at least throw in one of those as a retirement gift.

I sort of pity Smokey because for a good number of years now he's reminded me of a particular brand of aging celebrity. You know the kind I mean — the star whose every exploit once dazzled the public and the media but who now, with the pinnacle of his fame a generation past, is deemed worthy of a headline only when he crashes a Bentley or pitches a cell phone at the paparazzi.

Smokey's stature hasn't plummeted to that pathetic level — he owns neither a Bentley nor a cell phone, luckily — but it seems to me that most of his recent pronouncements have annoyed more people than they've inspired.

Even Smokey's signature stance — rousing every American into a frenzy over the looming threat of forest fires — has been stripped of most of its once considerable moral authority.

Scientists today brand Smokey's anti-fire campaign as narrow-minded jingoism which, by ignoring fire's invaluable role in keeping forests healthy, probably has contributed to more acres being charred by flames than saved from them.

Smokey sought to parry the ecologists' thrust by tweaking his mantra some years ago — the bear now exhorts us to prevent "wildfires" as opposed to the all-inclusive "forest fires" — but he's never really gained back the lost ground, it seems to me.

Although Smokey still makes it onto an occasional parade float, and he has a Web site.

Until this week I still believed that Smokey, despite his dwindling reputation, might at the least manage to remain relevant, in the manner of a doddering uncle who has told the same jokes for decades but who can yet get the kids giggling because he retains a shred of the natural storyteller's charm.

But now, having read the latest dispatch from Forest Service headquarters in Washington, D.C., I feel compelled to implore Smokey to surrender his shovel before the desiccated remnants of his legacy dissolve altogether.

What happened is Smokey, apparently intent on reinventing himself, unveiled a campaign in which he warns ATV riders that their machines' mufflers can eject sparks that turn forests into infernos.

The off-roaders, who tend to get cranky when someone suggests their hobby is anything but the most innocuous sort of family fun, went right after Smokey.

The new ads "incorrectly conveyed to the ATV rider that the best way for them to prevent wildfires was to stay at home," said Don Amador, the Western representative for the Blue Ribbon Coalition, an Idaho outfit that lobbies for off-road riders. "Instead, the ad should have encouraged the use of Forest Service-approved spark arresters and limiting travel to approved routes and areas."

Amador makes a valid point. I expected Smokey would tinker with his message so as to allay the Coalition's concerns, yet still convey the unimpeachable fact that ATVs can start fires.

Instead, Smokey capitulated.

The Forest Service, in a shameful display of just how flaccid its convictions have become, asked TV stations and other media to pull Smokey's ads.

It's as if Paul McCartney's record company had yanked his latest album from the shelves because, in its estimation, the former Beatle has finally plumbed the depths which he almost grasped in that duet with Michael Jackson.

It seems obvious to me that Smokey has crossed that threshold beyond which his every effort from here on can only tarnish his noble work from the past.

The sad truth, dear bruin, is that your message, which in another era almost every American child could recite, lacks the timeless appeal which Woodsy, that diminutive owl who horned in on your territory, captured.

"Give a hoot, don't pollute!" and "Lend a hand — care for the land!" — now those are slogans with legs. And exclamation points.

Better still, neither one offends ecologists or mentions ATVs.

Jayson Jacoby is the editor of the Baker City Herald.