From: jda%cs.brown.edu@brownvm.brown.edu (Jeff Achter) Subject: Frightening story Date: Sun, 10 Nov 91 17:00:05 -0500 There was a high school debate tournament here this weekend, and I saw Les, my debate coach from way back when. He told me the following kind of scary story: He was at some bigdeal speech convention in Atlanta, where Kathleen Jameson (sp?) gave a talk. She is a hot shot on campaign rhetoric. She showed a copy of the somewhat infamous campaign ad which Helms ran against Gantt. I don't know how much you remember of it. Basically, it showed some kind of big white guy at home, opening up a letter. He reads the letter, becomes disgusted, and crumples it up. A voice-over explains how his job has been taken away by some black guy, who got the job only because of affirmative action. There's a shot of Ted Kennedy and Harvey Gantt, in which it explains that, like Kennedy, Gannt believe in racial quotas. The shot focuses in on Gantt as the narrator explains that Gannt believes that the color of your skin is more important than your ability to do the job. All in all, a sickening ad, right? Then, Jameson played it again, a little slower, this time. A couple people in the audience went slightly ashen. She played it again, slower. Several more jaws dropped. She asked if people wanted to see it again, and everybody said yes. She then played it back _very_ slowly, sometimes freezing on individual frames. When the big white guy is angrily crumpling up the letter, there are a couple of frames in which the letter is replaced with Gantt's head. There's a random ink blob on the envelope. Normally, it looks like just a regular blob. But sometimes it looks like Gantt, holding a gun. Something to think about.