RATS, RITZ, and POLITICS
Just when you think this campaign can’t get any sillier, it does.
The latest fooforaw has occurred over a George Bush ad that
supposedly contains “subliminal messages.” The ad features
a female announcer who sounds like she has the world’s worst case
of PMS talking trash about Al Gore’s prescription drug plan for the
elderly. “Under Clinton Gore,
drug prices have skyrocketed,” the ad intones. (Somebody needs to get over
to the Republican National Committee and let tem know that Gore’s first
name is Al or Albert, not Clinton). But then the real
grim news appears: “The Gore plan will let Washington bureaucrats
interfere with what the doctors prescribe.”
As opposed to the insurance company bureaucrats who do the
interfering now, I suppose.
The flap, however, is not
about the issue at hand, namely prescription drug coverage for the elderly.
That would actually make some sense. What’s raised the lunacy level
is the claim that the ad contains a “subliminal message”.
Supposedly, right before the word “bureaucrats” appears on the screen,
you see a brief flash in the form of the word “RATS”.
For those of you who don’t know, “subliminal advertising” was a
big scare a few years ago incited by people who claimed that the evil
wizards of Madison Avenue were using sophisticated mind-control techniques
to influence American
consumers. The technique supposedly involved flashing messages across the
screen--such as “buy this”--at a speed quicker than the conscious mind can comprehend. The
subconscious mind, however, apparently being quicker on the draw than the
boring old conscious, picks up the messages and compels the viewer,
zombie-like, to get up, go out, and buy the product. It was a theory that
fed perfectly into the paranoia of the sixties and seventies, a theory which reached its peak of hysteria in the work of a crackpot
named Wilson Bryan Key, whose 1973 book “Subliminal Seduction” claimed
that there were hidden sexual messages embedded everywhere. And I do mean
everywhere, even engraved on
the lowly Ritz cracker. The idea, I suppose, being that being subconsciously
reminded of sex while looking
at a Ritz makes the cracker
more appealing.
I have to confess, when I first read Key’s books in college, I was
mightily impressed. I spent an hour staring at a Ritz cracker to see if I
could see SEX written in it. (This is the sort of the thing you have time to do when you’re
in college. It also explains why I didn’t date much.) Sad to say, I got no sexual charge out of it at all. Same
thing with Oreos. I did get a powerful erotic feeling one time out of a bag
of Chips Ahoys, but I’m
pretty sure that was a fluke brought on by a severe case of the munchies.
Despite the utter lack of evidence that subliminal advertising even
works, however, the Democrats, always happy for a chance to distract the
easily distractible Bush, were quick to seize on the issue, pronouncing it a “dirty
trick”. Dubbya, of
course, denies that there’s any subliminal message, or as he pronounces
it, “subliminable.”
I decided to find out for myself. With the same spirit of
experimentation (not to mention
shameless goofing off) that I showed in college, I downloaded the ad from
CNN’s website and looked at it, frame by frame, over and over. And you
know what? I felt an overpowering urge to get up and go eat Ritz crackers.
When I got back from the kitchen,
I did indeed find that, just as the word “bureaucrat” seems to
fall onto the screen, the word “rat” is the first thing that pops in.
But so what? Are we supposed to associate the word “rats” with
government bureaucrats? I hate to tell you,
but that horse left the barn a while ago.
The problem with the ad, and the problem with the Democrats’
reaction to it, are different facets of the
same problem: neither side is bothering to tell us what the
plans of the candidates really are and how they differ from one
another. The Republican ad just uses a lot of facile buzzwords like “bureaucrat”,
but doesn’t tell us squat about what George W. Bush plans to do
about prescription drugs for the elderly, only that they’ll be
somehow available. As for the Democrats: well, it’s a time-honored
political strategy to knock your opponent off of his message and force him
to deny the most bizarre allegations, and
the Bush campaign seems more than happy to oblige by issuing repeated
denials on things that are really non-issues.
But the American people need more than buzzwords or political gamesmanship:
they need answers to the question of who’s going to pay for Grandma’s
medicine when Grandma can’t do it anymore. And these are answers we’re
not getting.
Dusty Rhoades is a Southern Pines lawyer, and he swears that any sudden and inexplicable urges you may have to BUY MORE COPIES OF THE PILOT as a result of reading this article are entirely a coincidence.
OUR
GRACIOUS HOST (BOOKS-N-BYTES)
COPYRIGHT 2000 BY JERRY D. RHOADES, JR.