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DEMOCRATS SCRAMBLE [1]

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Date: 2022-11-05

Did you ever catch the cult classic They Live? Awesome flick. You should check it out.

Apropos of nothing but an analogy, of course. I mean not to say that the Washington Post plastered that headline in order to strike a tone of fear and trembling in their Democratic readers.

I mean that another form of emotional resonance may be going on, and that has nothing to do with the intentions of the journalists or editors per se. It’s about association of stimuli.

During the Biden presidency, I don’t know about you, but I’ve seen several instances of “Democrats scramble” as banner headlines in the major newspapers. Just off the top of my head, one instance was the debt ceiling faceoff back in August 2021. (Coincidentally, after the Democrats successfully headed the GOP off of that cliff, we had the expedited withdrawal from Afghanistan at that time; and the whole media apparatus immersed itself in that story for five straight weeks.) Another obviously was said withdrawal, as well as the efforts to save various Biden policies (torpedoed, as it happened, by members of his own party).

During those instances, there was a miasma of unease in the political atmosphere. That tone was set, and so was the stimulus (the phrase).

I posted this recently in a side comment:

(from ~10:00)

To illustrate the idea of classical conditioning, we’re going to use this model of a dog. And the dog is … fine, just resting normally. There is an unconditioned stimulus: a shock, which is applied to the dog. The dog then responds in a way that shows us that he’s scared or in distress. This would be considered the unconditioned response. In other words, you shock the dog, the dog gets scared. That makes sense. What about ringing a bell, a neutral stimulus? Well, when you ring the bell, the dog … doesn’t respond, doesn’t do anything. It’s not scared. It did nothing. But interestingly, when you pair that stimulus—the bell—with the shock, and you do this many times, what ends up happening is the neutral stimulus then becomes a conditioned stimulus, in that after you’ve paired the shock with the bell over a number of times the animal—the dog—will respond even when the shock isn’t there. In other words, it has learned that shock + bell = bad. Bell by itself is associated with the shock; therefore, when the bell rings, the dog is anticipating that a shock will come, and it will display frightened behavior even when a shock is not there. So even neutral stimuli will initiate the fear response as a result of associative learning.

The parts of our brains highlighted in the video (premier among them the prefrontal cortex [PFC], orbitofrontal cortex [OFC], and amygdala) get hijacked when confronted with a conditioned fear stimulus. Even if the writers and editors at the Washington Post, NYT, et al. never meant to tie those things together (the phrase and the consequent senation), that’s rather incidental, as the association needn’t be intentionally ingrained, merely coupled. Once made, it’s established.

So now, in this environment, where the outcome of the election is still not known and not knowable (as normally attends to the “fog of war”), what did that Washington Post headline do? Well, for me, it recalled that previously established anxiety, that tension—unease—that had been associated with those past, stale, not even anymore relevant headlines.

It’s residue.

So, I say, fck Democrats scramble. I don’t care how WaPo intended that verb—either descriptively or suggestively. I say we respond with

flappity flapjacks

DEMOCRATS FLAPJACK

and just be entirely silly about it. If my hunch is correct, many of us may be feeling these vestigial sensations of feeling on edge or somewhat paralyzed (or churning in a circle). In that case, what we need to do is decouple this association.

It can be done.

From the video (~12:50):

So if you go back to this diagram, the conditioned fear response—again, the unconditioned stimulus, the shock, with the neutral stimulus of the bell leads to the conditioned response of the dog being very upset, because it was shocked. When we do this a number of times, the then learns that the bell is associated with the shock and it will respond even in the absence of the shock. But interestingly, if you continue to use the bell but don’t use the shock, and you do this a number of times, what’s interesting is that the dog, slowly over time, learns that the bell is no longer a threat. And, pretty soon, it becomes a neutral stimulus again. Because what it’s done is, it’s learned a new pathway.

We need to decouple this fear response, this association. So we need to take that operant phrase— “Democrats scramble”—and deconstruct it semantically. We need to change the meaning at the root.

I think silliness can be a tool here, because silliness counteracts anxiety, emotionally speaking. They cannot coexist in the selfsame individual. In that spirit, refashioning the phrasing and construction (and, keep in mind, this should for any variety of sloganeering in the main) changes the emotional resonance and so can neutralize any residue that may be associated.

I chanced upon “flapjack” due to its natural pairing with other breakfast foods such as scrambled eggs. But, hey, why not Democrats hopscotch? How about tilt-a-whirl? What matters is that they all are plays on the word that needs transformation, while the original “handle”, if you will, of the sentence is preserved (as the fixed variable).

Also, humor utilizes the same areas of the brain that are otherwise mugged in this cascade. Even the amygdala, the fear center, participates in the appreciation of humor.

So I say, when someone suggests this weekend that a freakout is warranted, you might want to tell them, “Flap, jack”.

(Go flap yourself? I’m spitballing here.)

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