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06961_Field_TCUM T526.txt
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1996-04-10
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accumulations of material about the shared experience and
feelings of the entire community. Of course, if ads were to
depart from the centre of this shared experience, they would
collapse at once, by losing all hold on our feelings.
It is true, of course, that ads use the most basic and
tested human experience of a community in grotesque ways.
They are as incongruous, if looked at consciously, as the
playing of “Silver Threads among the Gold” as music for a strip-
tease act. But ads are carefully designed by the Madison
Avenue frogmen-of-the-mind for semiconscious exposure. Their
mere existence is a testimony, as well as a contribution, to the
somnambulistic state of a tired metropolis.
After the Second War, an ad-conscious American army
officer in Italy noted with misgiving that Italians could tell you