there.” He made a goofy face of someone stultified, and the congregation laughed.
“In the back of your eye, in a part of the retina called the macula, there’s a tiny spot containing the receptors that give you color vision. There are as many as six million cones. Did you know that the signal induced from these sensors travels along the optic nerve—a bundle of one million nerve fibers—into the vision center of your brain’s cerebral cortex? This is the same place where your ability to hear and understand and sleep are located.” Scuppy whipped the mic cord authoritatively. “Now, do you think that way back in the 1960s—in the middle of the Cold War—it was a coincidence—”
“No way!” someone testified from the audience.
“I don’t think so,” someone else added.
“—that the scientists at the Broadcast Standards Institute—an organization, mind you, rife with German, ex-Nazi scientists, and funded at least in part by the CIA—decided to have the red, blue, and green electron guns fire sixty scans a second in a frequency that sent waves along the optic nerve to the cerebrum and induced a kind of seizure? Now, I’m not talking about spazzing out.” Scuppy acted like a spaz to get a chuckle, and got it.
“You know how flashing red lights can cause epileptics to have a seizure?” Folks in the first row were nodding. “They know what I’m talking about. And how about this?” Scuppy pulled out a news clipping and held it up. “There’s a copy of this in your program. In Japan, a cartoon show caused children all over that country to go into seizures, to vomit. From flashing colored lights. And what happened? Did they pull the show? Did anybody even try to find out what that cartoon did to their brains? Or did our government look into the possibility that terrorists might be able to use this on Americans?”
Scuppy froze, a look of wonder on his face. The congregation hushed. Slowly, Scuppy pulled from his jacket a handful of clippings, holding them out for everyone to see. “Well, gee. Guess what, people?”
“What!”
“Speak!”
“Give us the word!”
“It has happened in America. It happens all the time in America, in fact.” He plucked an article from his hand like the petal from a daisy. “May 1994 issue of
The Medical Journal of Sciences
. Says here that kids all over the United States of America have been experiencing seizures from video games. Repetitive, high-intensity, multicolored flashes caused what they call complex partial and absence seizures. No spazzing, just”—he squinted at the article, as if reading—“impaired consciousness, intense memory recall, déjà vu, confusional episodes, and audible and visual hallucinations. Well . . .” Scuppy let that article fall to the floor, and pulled another. “July eleventh, 1995,
Mid-Atlantic Bulletin of Medicine
. A woman has blackouts and acts strangely when she sees a certain talk-show host.” He let that one drop. “September 1996, a study by the Hecklen Neurology Institute reports someone who smelled bacon every time she saw a local TV sign-off video of the Stars and Stripes waving in the wind.” That one dropped. “
River City Times
, 1999, residents black out after a local TV broadcast of
Oklahoma!
” He let the rest of the clippings fall to the stage. “And these are just the cases we know about. The government is all jazzed up over terrorism, over the prospect that someone is going to get us with poison gas or a thermonuclear weapon. Tell me: Why, then, haven’t they gotten to this? Could be some foreign government, some towelheads, perpetrating this, practicing on small segments of the population before they go for New York. Tell, me: Why?”
He paused, letting the question hang long enough that the audience began to squirm. Then he put a finger to his enormous forehead. “But you see, our government already knows what it is. After all, they invented it. It’s called color television, and they made
“In the back of your eye, in a part of the retina called the macula, there’s a tiny spot containing the receptors that give you color vision. There are as many as six million cones. Did you know that the signal induced from these sensors travels along the optic nerve—a bundle of one million nerve fibers—into the vision center of your brain’s cerebral cortex? This is the same place where your ability to hear and understand and sleep are located.” Scuppy whipped the mic cord authoritatively. “Now, do you think that way back in the 1960s—in the middle of the Cold War—it was a coincidence—”
“No way!” someone testified from the audience.
“I don’t think so,” someone else added.
“—that the scientists at the Broadcast Standards Institute—an organization, mind you, rife with German, ex-Nazi scientists, and funded at least in part by the CIA—decided to have the red, blue, and green electron guns fire sixty scans a second in a frequency that sent waves along the optic nerve to the cerebrum and induced a kind of seizure? Now, I’m not talking about spazzing out.” Scuppy acted like a spaz to get a chuckle, and got it.
“You know how flashing red lights can cause epileptics to have a seizure?” Folks in the first row were nodding. “They know what I’m talking about. And how about this?” Scuppy pulled out a news clipping and held it up. “There’s a copy of this in your program. In Japan, a cartoon show caused children all over that country to go into seizures, to vomit. From flashing colored lights. And what happened? Did they pull the show? Did anybody even try to find out what that cartoon did to their brains? Or did our government look into the possibility that terrorists might be able to use this on Americans?”
Scuppy froze, a look of wonder on his face. The congregation hushed. Slowly, Scuppy pulled from his jacket a handful of clippings, holding them out for everyone to see. “Well, gee. Guess what, people?”
“What!”
“Speak!”
“Give us the word!”
“It has happened in America. It happens all the time in America, in fact.” He plucked an article from his hand like the petal from a daisy. “May 1994 issue of
The Medical Journal of Sciences
. Says here that kids all over the United States of America have been experiencing seizures from video games. Repetitive, high-intensity, multicolored flashes caused what they call complex partial and absence seizures. No spazzing, just”—he squinted at the article, as if reading—“impaired consciousness, intense memory recall, déjà vu, confusional episodes, and audible and visual hallucinations. Well . . .” Scuppy let that article fall to the floor, and pulled another. “July eleventh, 1995,
Mid-Atlantic Bulletin of Medicine
. A woman has blackouts and acts strangely when she sees a certain talk-show host.” He let that one drop. “September 1996, a study by the Hecklen Neurology Institute reports someone who smelled bacon every time she saw a local TV sign-off video of the Stars and Stripes waving in the wind.” That one dropped. “
River City Times
, 1999, residents black out after a local TV broadcast of
Oklahoma!
” He let the rest of the clippings fall to the stage. “And these are just the cases we know about. The government is all jazzed up over terrorism, over the prospect that someone is going to get us with poison gas or a thermonuclear weapon. Tell me: Why, then, haven’t they gotten to this? Could be some foreign government, some towelheads, perpetrating this, practicing on small segments of the population before they go for New York. Tell, me: Why?”
He paused, letting the question hang long enough that the audience began to squirm. Then he put a finger to his enormous forehead. “But you see, our government already knows what it is. After all, they invented it. It’s called color television, and they made
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