I See Red People

Back in the 70s, right about the time that Americans were submitting by the thousands to the toxic combination of meta-physical horseshit by the likes of Edgar Cayce and any and all warnings about evil multifarious conspiracies in the wake of Watergate, a writer and thinker emerged on the scene named Wilson Bryan Key.

For the uninitiated, Key held a Ph.D. in communications, was a professor and lecturer at various universities around the country, and was a member of Mensa. Oh yeah, he was also completely out to fucking lunch. Wilson Bryan Key's real claim to fame is that he wrote a series of books warning consumers about the dangers of subliminal advertising, basically making himself the foremost authority on a subject which, one would imagine, was a real talker at parties attended by 70s pseudo-intellectual suburbanites -- just before all involved threw their keys into a bowl to see who'd go home with whom.

Some of what Key said wasn't crazy (and for the record, he did have a certain amount of highbrow street-cred simply because he was friends with Marshall McLuhan). He wasn't lying about ad agencies and clever merchants using "subliminal" suggestions to influence buying habits. The trouble was, as with anyone who chases ghosts long enough -- and tries to convince others of their existence -- Key eventually began seeing the scourge he wanted so badly to warn the world about everywhere. As in, the guy would put up pictures of Ritz Crackers -- the actual crackers themselves -- and ask his audience how many people could spot the word "SEX" scrawled on the them. He'd hold up an photo of a glass of Smirnoff Vodka from an ad, then go into frighteningly obsessive detail about how it was so obvious that in the ice cubes you could see an eagle which represented virility, and a sun which of course was the sun god Ra which would lead your mind to make the archetypal connection to eternal life, then in the liquid itself was an airbrushed image of two people having sex while a snake coils around them and six dwarves in pointy hats dance nearby and Brett Somers and Charles Nelson Reilly hit each other with cue cards, all of which plants a suggestion in your subconscious mind that Smirnoff Vodka will fuck you up good.

You think I'm kidding about this kind of thing.

In the end, Key's paranoid lunacy made him little more than a bad joke. His feverish, delusional belief that the threat was real and around every corner, even if you couldn't see it, ensured that only the True Believers or the equally mad among his audience would buy into anything he was spouting.

So why is Wilson Bryan Key on my mind right now?

Oh, no reason.