By the time you read this, Ben Franklin will have been dead nearly 216 years. Not that you'd know it 'round here. I don't think Ben got this much ink back when he was alive. And he ran the only friggin' newspaper in town.

Here at the City Paper, we fought it for a while. We took those stacks of "Ben Franklin 300" press kits the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation kept sending us, sprayed them down, reshaped the pulp and used them to mold new intern cubicles. (They'll get used to the smell.)

But the relentless viral assault wore down our defenses; we succumbed. In these pages you'll find an interview with Franklin's slightly obsessive biographer in Naked City (p. 16) and a roundup of still more events, salons, parties, séances and charettes in honor of Big Ben (p. 64). Because God forbid we don't mark the solemn occasion of lending fictitious importance to events that happened exactly [10, 25, 50, 300] years ago.*

Still, all of this Franklin fetishizing bugs me more than usual. Maybe that's because I think the Ben Franklin 300 "celebration" is really a statement to the world: "Philadelphia: We Don't Make Stuff Anymore; We Just Market It."

If you don't believe that this whole "Benergy" thing has gone amok like King Kong on a banana martini bender, look no further than the front page of this past Tuesday's Inquirer. All news was pushed off the front page—what, did nothing happen on Monday?—to feature a goofy, blurry, oooh, look at the 3-D sailboat-type photo collage of Ben Franklin's face, and a rah rah, but really we're not buying into this hype, wink wink essay by Tom Ferrick. The only other "news" on the page: an MLK day wrap-up. Gerald Ford's sick. Golden Globes. Weather. And those weren't even full stories. They were little refers to full stories inside the paper.

And I thought you couldn't buy the front page of the Inky.

Then there's this dipshit idea of renaming 30th Street Station "Ben Station." I guess the big blue bridge, the parkway, the museum, the mint, the mall, the apartment building, et al weren't enough. We've gotta give 'em the train station, too.

Well, no, Marketers of Philadelphia. You can't have the fucking train station.

You can't have the city, either. There are still people who create stuff, and those are the people we should be celebrating. Like the people in our Arts Preview this week. You want to market something, market those guys. Support them. Celebrate history, certainly learn it, but don't pretend it's news. Or lend ridiculous importance to it.

* Don't forget: City Paper turns 25 this year! (GPTMC, you can expect 1,783 copies of our press kit shortly.)