Irony is one of those words that everybody seems to know the meaning of and perhaps understand the use of. They even go so far as to drop regular allusions to it in everyday conversation. The funny thing is that in spite of this overt familiarity, whenever genuinely true irony actually blisters up and shows its face it goes surprisingly unappreciated by the very people it should have touched the most.

Just the other day I saw a screen capture of a poster displayed in a London, England bus shelter that literally blew my mind. I didn’t actually believe what I was seeing, becoming immediately convinced it was part of a sophisticated ironic joke. It was such an obvious bit of dissonance or discord that had to be meant to tweak the public consciousness as to what was really going on around them. It just had to be some sort of organized effort to inform or even warn the masses of what was actually happening.

But it wasn’t. It was real and realizing that gave me the heebie jeebies big time.

The photo I saw (pictured alongside this column) is an ad for London’s Metropolitan Police and the local mass transit provider showcasing their expansive use of closed circuit TV cameras around metro London. The poster features a classic double-decker bus, drawn in a familiar stylized fashion, cruising across a city bridge under giant words declaring “Secure beneath the watchful eyes.” The picture is then dotted with several large eyes...watching...watching our big red bus roll safely along. The caption at the bottom states: “CCTV and Metropolitan Police on buses are just two ways we’re making your journey more secure.” The artistic style of the poster was pure 1940’s-50’s imagery. Eerie, yet confusing at the same time.

It was totally unbelievable in its raw barefacedness. How, in a wired world, in a time when the novel “1984” and even the name of its author exist as generic battle cries, as cautionary warnings practically tattooed on the foreheads of a generation of civil liberty activists can posters like this even exist? They are the accepted bywords for personal privacy lost to national state security. Well, look around. In London right now there are more than 1.5 million closed circuit cameras monitoring absolutely everything.

When you realize that somebody designed this poster, ran it by several committees and probably had it approved by several more you do have to wonder how completely sheep-like we must be as a people when Stalinist era propaganda can be copied, trotted out and used as current advertising.

Want to know the scary part? These ads first appeared way back in 2002. 2002! More than six years ago. It’s taken that long for this image to even find its way over here. Front page controversy? Apparently not.

To think that we are such pliable fodder for advertisers is more than slightly depressing. To be so very clueless that we can somehow find a way to accept an advertisement that is trumpeting the power of the state to exercise total, albeit supposedly benevolent, control is something to behold.

I guess the mistake we all make is in assuming that the events of “1984’” will come wrapped in scary, screaming leaders, marching armies and violent, amplified suppressions. More than likely such shifts in our day to day reality will take place in quiet office complexes under the tired eyes of bored bureaucrats and disinterested supervisors tasked with taking responsibility for a populace too fat and lazy to bother with it themselves. Advertising is the only thing that will make it interesting.

And when irony is the order of the day such a result sort of speaks for itself. Secure beneath the watchful eyes? You bet we are because we sure as hell asked for it. It would seem that years of relentless, daily advertising has left us incapable of seeing the forest for the trees.

I guess it doesn’t really matter though. I mean, all I really want out of life is to have sex every now and again, eat and watch reruns of Seinfeld. The CCTV cameras can keep their watchful eyes on the forest and the trees for me.

That’s a fair trade, right?