I don’t want to be like you Donald Trump. I especially don’t want to pay money to take a course on how to be more like you. But every time I ride over the Manhattan Bridge you insist that New York commuters need to attend a seminar at the Javits Center so we can be millionaires just like yourself. It doesn’t scare me (very much) that you are twenty feet tall and forty feet wide.

If you are lucky enough to have become anesthetized to the commercial pollution floating around you, congratulations. Stop reading. The rest of us have to deal with a carcinogen more tangibly suffocating than motorized emissions. Billboards, like the one of Donald Trump, are just large representations of garbage. Prostitutes of three dimensions, billboards have ruined more skylines than any Muslim.

The billboard is a modern monster haunting us from its impossibly enormous dimensions. Advertising is an unfortunate byproduct of the comfortable economic conservatism that most of us have come to accept. Capitalism has committed many crimes. Maybe the aesthetic murder carried out in her name is a notch below strategically starving Bantu Farmers, but it doesn’t make it right.

In a rural or urban setting, the billboard is equally abusive. Flat charms of the middle country are just as blighted with overcooked commercial pallets as your favorite borough. Billboards seem even more sinister in natural spaces. New York was built by commercials. A certain degree of market radiation is to be expected in the city where wealth was perfected. But the long stretch of horizon between Kansas City and Omaha didn’t ask for the diseased limbs of salesmen.

Loud and explosive were techniques of the twentieth century. The primitives of that bloody century were awed by the spectacle of the large. Between the Titanic and the Moon, they wrecked some impressive enormity back then. Today, I like to think, we are more turned on by subtlety. All the forces that run your life are becoming more invisible by the second. Wireless. Silicon. Vibrations? Advertisers of the massive should try observing this trend and save us their visual waste.

Scale is an important, if underrated, consideration in most daily decisions. Billboards scream their mantra of ‘Bigger products! Bigger materialism! Bigger commerce!’ at our obese society. Our country is in a crisis of scale. We are the bloated kings of a malnourished world. America is like the universe, expanding into infinity. And like the universe we’re all going to die cold, disconnected deaths unless gravity saves us.