When Speech Does a 180

[Dave Monroe]

>From Neil Strauss, "When Speech Does a 180," NY Times,
Thursday, April 18th, 2002 ...

Based on his own analysis, David John Oates believes
that George W. Bush has been a powerful, consistent
leader. "He is strong and resolute," Mr. Oates said,
speaking by telephone from his home in Australia. "His
reversals were very forceful. There was no internal
wavering inside himself."

Wait a minute. Reversals? Internal wavering? What
exactly does Mr. Oates mean? To understand, let's
begin with the popular factoid that flushing toilets
swirl backward in Australia. One day in 1983, Mr.
Oates said, he discovered that the toilets can also
make technology work backward, when he accidentally
dropped his cassette player into one. 

On removing it and checking to see if it still worked,
he said, he was surprised to find his Michael Jackson
cassette playing in reverse. As he listened to it, he
heard Mr. Jackson singing what sounded like actual
words even though the song was running in reverse.
This was not intentional backward-masking (like might
be used by a heavy metal group surreptitiously
advocating devil worship) but accidental hidden
messages that came perhaps from the subconscious of
the singer.

Intrigued, Mr. Oates began to discover all sorts of
messages encoded backward in songs and speech: clear
phrases and sentences often created by a person's hems
and haws. 

"Reversals are primarily formed by the inconsistencies
in speech: the stammers, the stutters and the rapid
alterations," he said. "It's not primarily the words,
but the sounds of the speech. Two people might say the
same sentence, but you'll get completely different
reversals."

Mr. Oates grew to believe that these speech reversals
contained subconscious messages, and since then he has
advocated their use in therapy and investigation
(where they serve as a sort of lie detector test).
Reverse speech, as he calls it, can also provide
covert peeks into the minds of pop stars, if one
believes in this homemade science.

In "Thinking of You" by Lenny Kravitz, Mr. Oates and
his students discovered the backward message "Still
missing mom; we'll be missing you." Jewel, in "Deep
Water," says, cryptically, "You're glamorous, and you
live with a Nazi."

These and examples from Queen, Ozzy Osbourne, Bonnie
Raitt, the Beatles and more can be heard forward and
in reverse on Mr. Oates's Web site ...

http://reversespeech.com/

... which contains thousands of examples.

In one of Mr. Oates's most infamous reversals, he
claims to have found the words Desert Storm in a
speech by the elder George Bush before the
announcement of the military operation. Some of the
examples on his Web site sound like clear phrases,
while others are more of a stretch to interpret as
coherent statements. 

So when the current President Bush talked of the war
on terrorism after Sept. 11, his reversals, according
to Mr. Oates, contained phrases like "I am avowed, we
will get them" and "Skies, we have seen the limit with
terror." At the same time, Mr. Oates found a more
ominous note in the president's speeches. His phrase
"an act of war against our country," when played
backward, revealed the phrase "Rule the planet."
Meanwhile, in a speech by Osama bin Laden, one of Mr.
Oates's students discovered the reversal, "Our
government is wrong; terror now."

James Underdown, the executive director of the Center
for Inquiry-West, which promotes scientific and
critical thinking, said that he had seen no hard
evidence supporting Mr. Oates's claims. He compared
reverse speech to a Rorschach test: different people
will imagine different words. "It's looking at a
pattern that's already out there, and assigning
meaning and intent to something where there was none
originally," he said.

[...]

When discussing how his Desert Storm research went
public, he admonishes himself in reverse, saying, "You
must behave, you must." At one point, he seems to
doubt himself: discussing his hopes for becoming more
commercially active soon, he says, "Observe humorous
me telling you this." And, most revealing, after being
asked a question, he displays his intimidation at the
hands of such a masterful interviewer. "Unhand me,"
his reversal says. "Neil scares."

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/18/arts/music/18POPL.html

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