Fully Functional Phil: almost ironize the icon

The book's bleakest diagnosis of U.S. address: a sincere life-and-death warning can only work if it first disguises itself as a joke. The stakes are children's lives — the cartridge kills its viewers — and the ad's whole engineering problem is that an earnest authority-figure warning would give the lethal cartridge a "forbidden-fruit-type boost" — so the message must be delivered by "a prancing ass" with buck teeth and extravagantly crossed eyes, "to almost ironize the icon," warning "as a peer" so nobody's contrarian reflex fires. In this culture a warning is counter-productive precisely as sincere; to save a child you must ironize the thing that would save him. Sincerity has to impersonate its own opposite to function at all — the register disease raised to a public-health emergency.