March 11 - A Little Crazy

About ten or twelve years ago I found conspiracy theories to be very interesting. It was the era of Ruby Ridge and the Branch Davidians. People saw black helicopters everywhere. Over time, I came to see that politicians are too fractious and, well, apparently incompetent to be so well organized. However, there is always that old saying about paranoia, "Just because you are paranoid does not mean they aren't really out to get you." The fact is there are large and very secretive organizations where the world's policy makers meet and what they decide or discuss at these meetings is not transparent to the rest of us.

Old habits die hard. I saw a black helicopter yesterday. Not really, that's just a metaphor. What I saw was a Chase Bank advertisement on TV and something just clicked. In the ad the sides of their squarish logo rotate and as they come together I was very strongly reminded of a swastika. How odd. Why, I thought, would a company intentionally use a logo that reminds a person of a swastika? We are not so over our collective guilt for what the Nazis did in W.W. II that this symbol does not evoke very strong emotions.

I was so strongly reminded that I decide to see if I was not alone. I did what anyone would do today, Google! I searched on "Chase swastika" and immediately got a hit with a fairly straightforward link. Chase, the claim is, is run by the Rockefellers. For those that remember their pre-W.W. II history, the Rockefellers were like many families that made their fortune during the industrial age, they were Nazi sympathizers. Like Ford. Like Hearst. Like Mellon. Like DuPont. Many of these folks believed in eugenics and utopia and saw the Nazis as an organization striving for those ideals.

So today you have this Rockefeller controlled bank displaying a swastika embedded in it's logo? This is clearly a subversive plot to get us all to think like Nazis, right? Because that is what smart people do, right? Advertise their subversive intentions? Maybe not.

Ten years ago, Motorola proudly introduced a new ad campaign with the tag line "Motorola gives you wings." The T.V. ad had this beautiful dove winging it's way through a city with a voice over and, I think, the Rolling Stones tune "You Can't Always Get What You Want" playing. At the end the dove morphed into the Motorola logo which is known as the bat-wing.

Those of us who were treated to an early view of this ad sat stunned. It was so completely clueless on three main points. 1) feminine products were being marketed at that time as having "wings". This might not be a positive association. 2) bats are not usually considered a good thing by the general public. Morphing a dove into a bat, less so. 3) The Rolling Stones never thought they'd get a single penny in ad revenue for that song. The point is that the management of a large company can be so disconnected from general society that they may and probably will miss something like a swastika embedded in a logo if you look at it the right way.

The most probable reason I saw a swastika is because the mind is an incredible pattern matching machine and the swastika is a powerful symbol with strong emotional content imprinted in us. Much like we see a face on the moon, or Virgin Marys in, well, just about everything. Most likely the folks who created and vetted the ad didn't form the same connection. In the immortal words of Jack, "You are so fired."