Subliminal Seduction; Ad Media's Manipulation of a Not So Innocent America. Book

There’s a great mystery about this book. It isn’t the mystery of why the Illuminati allowed it to be published when it gives away all their secrets. It’s not the mystery of who’s really controlling the messages that are secretly beamed to consumers. Nor is it the mystery of what techniques you can use to protect yourself from their thought-control.

The mystery is why a serious media researcher like Marshall McLuhan would allow his name to be associated with this crap. More than that, in his introduction to the book, McLuhan repeatedly praises the author as a genius who has made an important contribution to our understanding of advertising. He retained his personal copyright on the Intro, incidentally, so he could have pulled it at any time (maybe the moment where Key was supporting the Fundamentalist assault against reason by testifying in the famous Judas Priest suicide case would have been a good point?). But, for some reason, he allowed his reputation to be tarnished by this book, and I will never see him in the same way again.

I have stared at the illustrations in this book for hours, trying to find the evidence Key claims “proves” that subliminal images are used in magazine advertisements, and all I see are blurry smudges that don’t prove a thing. Even in cases where he has magnified the image until the grains from the photograph are clearly visible (is he claiming that we all carry around unconscious microscopes behind our eyes?), it still doesn’t look like he says it does. Apparently, I am immune from his particular form of hypnotism, because at one time there were thousands of Americans who DID see those images, just as he told them to.

There is an interesting section in this book, in which he offers up an anti-feminist analysis of the messages contained in Playboy, Vogue, and Cosmopolitan, but any validity that argument may have had in the 70s would be negated by the changes in publishing since that time. Basically, the value of this book is as an example of how nobody goes broke by underestimating the intelligence of the American people, or even its leading intellectuals.