Sexy Gums and Reptile Brains

Welcome to Hate Saturday.

Beck Rally in Washington D.C. draws thousands

Keith Olbermann beat me to the punch Thursday night.  He stated the thesis that I’d been chewing over for the past couple of weeks. But that’s the way I write: until I have the puzzle pieces, I won’t set it on paper or pixel; as though my subconscious is waiting for some crucial threshold before it will release the “hold” on my essay. Only then can I write.

I don’t argue with it. My inner editor has a long track record of impeccable timing. I was waiting for a missing piece. And then, there it was.

Ironically, it was in the same Olbermann broadcast that the key piece was contained, although the dots were not connected on the broadcast.

Simply put, this grand conflation of Obama=Black Radical=Black Panther=Black Muslim=Muslim=Terrorist=Communist=Socialist, ad nauseum is an intentional tactic, aimed at the reptile brain, which is indisputably coming from the clot around Karl Rove, who is acting as “consultant” to one of the GOP power claques on this election. And his bloody fingerprints are all over it.

i. The Reptile Brain

You may think that you know all this, and perhaps you do, better than I. But listen to this formulation, and then we can fill in the missing piece of the puzzle.

At some point between Joseph Goebbels and Madison Avenue, the primacy of the reptile brain was understood, and, eventually, accepted as THE authority in sales. Remember when they used to COMPARE products (albeit as “Brand A”) and offer rational arguments as to why you should buy SCHLUB!® over the leading competitor?

Gone the way of the buffalo.

Why? Because the intention is to activate the reptile brain: eat, sleep, screw, eliminate. Lather, rinse and repeat.

And this is the way that it works: we KNOW it’s BS. We know we’re being lied to. But that rational part of the brain can’t keep watch all the time. You’re in an airport; you’ve got time to kill, and while you’re buying a paperback to read to kill the time, you see that gum by the cash register, you know, the one that makes hot chicks kiss you while ice crystals form in the air like some mystic nimbus.

Or you’re a loser in high school; not going anywhere. But somewhere in your reptile brain, you think that you can fight lava monsters with your sword if you’re a Marine. Few. Proud.

The “Lava Monster” Marine Corps ad

And, underneath the rational brain, you kind of think, well, maybe I can check it out, and the Marine recruiter does the rest (and the Armed Forces are notorious for promising all kinds of cool crap and assignments without ever delivering).

The reptile is somehow irrationally sure that you’re going to fight magma monsters with your magic sword.

Instead, you’re up to your neck in rats in some godforsaken desert and it’s approaching 130° Fahrenheit and you wonder how you ever managed to get into THIS.

The “Lava Monster” Marine Corps ad

You see, the ‘reptile brain’ here is a series of fundamental primal urges. There is nothing “rational” about it.

Put it this way: a lot of people think about strangling their boss. Very few actually do so. The rational mind keeps that urge in check. But when it comes to consumable crap, the success rate for mindless urges is much higher. Paris Hilton washes a car in a skimpy one-piece black bathing suit, and a specific demographic (because, as surely as the Monks of old named, categorized, classified and listed demonic heirarchies, advertisers have dissected us by reptilian urges) buys Carl’s Jr. hamburgers.

Sex = hamburgers.

Used to be that they cross-linked the reptile brain to something connected — i.e. “Communists” = “be really scared” — now it’s often absurdly non-sequitur. Selling “Keystone” beer with a redneck loser named “Keith Stone,” says nothing about how the beer tastes, nor even about wanting to BE like Keith Stone. But somehow beer sales increase. Or kissing and gum, which is tenuous.

Well, hell, you can sell anything to the reptile brain with SEX. Just add variable X to “SEX” in the commercial, and a strange, fetishistic cross-wiring takes place: somehow, Carl’s Jr. hamburgers cause Paris Hilton to get all wet and sexy with your car.

The rational mind can’t even BEGIN to follow any logical trail there. But that doesn’t matter. It’s DREAM logic. Ice cream reminds you of your teddy bear, and that teddy bear reminds you that Teddy Roosevelt was the “teddy” that teddy was named after, and you think of your old teddy bear’s face on Mount Rushmore and then you remember climbing a rock face in Wyoming that kind of looked like Mount Rushmore, and then, generally, you’re asleep. We do it every night.

Advertising (which now powers our news, weather and sports) just takes you INTO that dream logic, which makes emotional sense, irrational sense but no RATIONAL sense whatsoever.

The point of the reptile brain approach is that at some point, while the rational brain will be saving you from some other folly,  you will see that box of Detergo!® Laundry Detergent, and you will remember how some beautiful mother and her daughter danced ecstatically to the heavenly scent of their Detergo!® enhanced laundry, and you’ll pick up that box. What you’re really trying to figure out is ‘Where did they move the diet ice cream aisle?’

In modern advertising — and, increasingly in national politics — nobody even bothers making the rational argument, because they depend on your lower impulses, you’re most non-rational, emotional urges to do their work for them. So, while the rational mind marvels at how they can make that sexy skater chick effloresce with a mandala of fractal ice crystals, your reptile brain wants to know where to get that gum.

Which was why Dick Cavett’s rational plea about the bigotry on display about the Muslim center in New York City was shooting peas at a charging rhinoceros . The point was the reptile brain, and the collective reptile kerfuffle — and subsequent kerfluffing by the Usual Suspects — had already taken on the ominous specter of the lynch mob. Passions swirled and all the utterly logical (and valid) arguments were already doomed to fail, because the rampaging reptiles Wo

And, clearly, it works, else we wouldn’t see giant futuristic Coors® Locomotives appearing as irrationally as in any Magritte painting, splattering frost on the hot people in the street (and that “hot” is used in two senses).  Coors® beer makes you cool! (And that “cool” is used in two senses.)

As some comic noted, every beer company sells how COLD they are, but isn’t that really YOUR responsibility? I can testify from personal experience that lukewarm or warm Coors® beer may or may not taste better than lukewarm horse piss, but it’s a close call.

It’s ridiculous and it works.

It’s not even that they consider us stooopid. They simply know that sooner or later everybody acts stoopid, and having programmed our reptile to want that frost-mandala kiss and a silver locomotive we’ll buy gum and beer.

Look: Book clubs depended on that “stoopid factor” for years. They knew that sooner or later you’d be too lazy to mail back the little card that said “NO. I DO NOT WANT THIS MONTH’S SELECTION.”

Then porn sites came up with that little “auto-renew” feature for credit card subscriptions, and it spread to mainline internet places like, say, Ancestry dot com, who are flush enough with cash from genealogy subscriptions that they’re carpet-bombing on cable TV with spendy commercials. Or just about any other “subscription” website you care to mention.

Sooner or later, they’re depending on you to be stoopid. And then they got you.

Have a beer.

You’re a smart bunch. You can fill in the rest of the picture without a long explanation from me.

Immediately following (tomorrow), “Glenn Beck, Karl Rove and the Reptile Brain,” the senses-shattering conclusion — if a hunchback getting the hot chick because he used magic breath mints hasn’t rattled you too much already.

Courage.