I know it's probably not the best idea to be typing yet another one right now. Am I truly cracking up? Let's find out.

Millions and millions of people, myself included, eat and drink poison every day. We do so willingly. It comes in pretty packages. They have labels and logos. It makes us feel good to buy them. We are proud of our patronage, as it adds to our sense of security and happiness.

I'll just name a few. Pepsi. McDonalds. Burger King. (There are more, but my wiring is shorting out.)

Consciously, or not, Pepsi makes us think of Britney Spears, and before that, Michael Jackson (back when he was considered cool). McDonalds makes us think of cute cartoons and clowns. Burger King made even the music of our parents' generation sound cool again.

Despite all conscious awareness to the contrary, to the forebrain, it is literally impossible to separate the icons from the logos from the products. The products which make us sick and kill us, while their production starves and poisons (in a much more direct way) people on other continents. (Oh yeah, don't forget Coca Cola.)

Yet still, even I (and others I know) continue to frequently waste our dollars in perpetuating the machine of our own demise. Why?

Because our senses, unaccustomed to the very recent onslaught of modern advertising, are not evolutionarily equipped to defend against this predator. We are helpless. But that does not necessarily infer that we need be hopeless.

Several years ago -- around a decade back -- when brief snippets of primitave downloadable video was first becoming possible, and I was running MS-DOS 6 on my computer, I downloaded whatever I could, from wherever I could via modem, as long I had some free space to put it on my 80 megabyte hard drive.

One of the videos I downloaded had been termed a piece of art in the description. I don't remember exactly where I got it; I think it may have been one of CompuServe's forums, although it could have been one of the local BBSes. Purportedly, the reputed artist and author of the <1 minute video clip was considered quite a cultural innovator by some.

The clip consisted mostly of footage from an AT&T commercial that had been playing a lot on television at the time. It featured pictures of family members hugging, children on the phone with their parents smiling, and you know the drill. At the end the AT&T logo would appear.

But the version created by this artist was slightly different. Every few seconds, interspersed with the warm fuzzy cheeziness, the screen (err, viewing window, since it was postage stamp size even at 640x480 resolution) would briefly be filled with a picture zoomed in on a man's hairy ass. Just a few frames, but enough to see.

As the commercial went on, other odd images would appear very briefly. I don't remember exactly what all of them were, but they were yucky looking. The AT&T logo, intended to punctuate the original version of the ad, was followed by more ugly asshair before it faded out and was over.

I thought, "what an odd thing to call art." After watching it a couple times, I deleted it. Who would want to see that? Besides, it didn't really make much sense.

But for some reason, the memory stuck around in the back of my mind. After years of witnessing and participating in the consumer culture, I can better understand and appreciate the artistic quality of that I couldn't all those years ago.

The doctored commercial exposed the fallacy of the real ad, and of advertising in general. It wasn't just making an intellectual argument (i.e. identifying the non sequitur, as in a college lecture), but appealing to the same base emotional part of the brain that the corporations target with their weapons of mass deception. This "art" planted a few seeds for a defense mechanism.

When your mind sees some guy's ugly ass on the screen next to the company logo, maybe it can begin to realize that the images of happy families and communities are no more real, in terms of what a corporation creates, than a big stinking pile of shit.

Thus, the path has been lit. Culture jamming is the way out. This is why so many corporations have reached to increasingly absurd lengths to defend their "intellectual property", in some cases going so far as to accuse those who simply state their opinion. Those who use the name of a company (without even copying the logo) to talk about it in a negative manner online are considered trademark infringers.

But here's a commercial I'd like to see. Let's have some sexy footage of the Pepsi logo, interspersed with just a few examples of the clinically obese people in America. At least there would be more truth in that than in the Britney commercial video from a couple years ago that still gets passed around in abundance on P2P networks. (I must confess a copy exists on my hard drive as well.)

Or how about a Chrysler commercial featuring the coughs and wheezes of asthma patients, whose lungs are unable to function properly after years of inhaling polluted air. The opportunities are endless, really.

Am I so nuts that I'm mad? You bet I am. God willing, maybe my madness might be able to do a little good before it destroys me.

This is the last one for tonight, I swear.