A captured audience

     I had been entrenched in World War I. I had just finished The Eye In the Door, the second book in Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy, and while there were many thoughts and images ricochetting in my head, there was this one particular sentence about the poetry sparked by that war – by Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke, Robert Graves – that emerged from the smoke: "What had intrigued Rivers most was that human beings should respond to the highest mental and spiritual achievements of their culture with the same reflex that raises the hairs on a dog's back."
   Those poets, known now as the 'War Poets,' have become towering figures in literature, certainly in Britain. Their poems hit home and they stay with us. They capture the doom of the soldiers, driven by the remorseless generals into the welter of mud and slaughter. They make you feel the same horror that the soldiers experienced. Listen to this. It's by Wilfred Owen.

     If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
     Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
     And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
     His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin...
     My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
     To children ardent for some desperate glory,
     The old Lie: Dulce et decorum set
     Pro patria mori.

     The Latin is from Horace. I looked it up – it means, "It is sweet and right to die for your country."
     So that's what I was thinking about when I visited MOMA the other day. I had forgotten about this particular iconic work being currently on display, but, the point is, there I was, sensitized to some kind of horror, and there IT was:

     I was vulnerable and I got hit.
     So I got to thinking: We're always looking to tap into a topic that is on people's minds, right? We hope that our message, with just the right timing, will feel like serendipity, a coincidental build on something that had been important to them. Do you remember Nike's commercial for Y2K (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhF7dQl4Ico)? That's what I'm talking about. When something like that happens, our message gets compounded and its emotion intensified. That's impact.