Thang Nguyen 555

First the disease. Then the vaccine. Finally the rush to spend to line people up for a jab.

Who are we going to enlist? Dead Presidents? X-Presidents? Or Presley (Elvis).

It’s called “pair-association”. The “Like” factor i.e. if I like Lady Gaga, I am more likely to buy VOCE VIVA.

Entertainment (pleasant) and Medicine (unpleasant) make unlikely bed-fellows; yet… from Snake Oil to Shampoo… they are a couple.

Elvis Presley was recruited for a Polio vaccination campaign….Michael J. Fox for Parkinson’s (and recently planned but scrapped, Dennis Quaid for a covid push – ironically, he played a Secret Service Agent in Vantage Point).

Besides the Church, Madison Avenue has done us a dis-service (by turning propaganda into an art form and a science): “buy this pass (indulgence) for Peter’s gate..” “think different”.

The hidden messages to monopolize our attention, behind those catch phrases and chants are:

• you are missing out….you should see that many (proof) of your friends and neighbors are buying , hence, you should play catch-up (he who dies with the most toys wins) and keep up your status (of being equal…..with the Jones, folks like us tend to do or buy this )
• the celebrity/hero you admire are choosing this or doing that… you should too (be all you can be, join the Army – incidentally, recent Presidents never followed this advice of “being all Presidential they can be”)
• conversely, the celebrity/hero you worship doesn’t like that….hence, neither should you (GOP? don a mask?)
• if you think it’s true, perhaps it is (Dems are gays, GOP’s tax less ….while hard data tend to disprove this).

It’s been since that experiment conducted by Pavlov (dog-meat-bell-saliva—–>dog-no meat-bell-saliva) that our society has been played by bad actors, from Strong-Man State to Consumer Society.

Tulip (as in century past mania in Holland) or Tweeter (as in Trump) bit by bit, tweet by tweet, we’re sucked in, 140 characters at a time while living in a Pavlovian post-truth world. Logic and consistency tells us to wait it out, the crowd can’t be wrong ( truth vs illusion) to follow-through….to persevere….tomorrow….soon….you’ll see…..just to find out the other side….of that proverbial Pavlov door is placebo.

Last century’s the Seekers, after selling all their possessions and waited all night for nothing, hugged one another in the morning, to self-congratulate on their faith – rationalizing their illusionary & vain pursuit – that it’s their tenacious faith that delayed End Times.

The antidote, per Walter Lippmann, who studied propaganda effects of WWI, is to stay out and away from crowd and chants, from what stirred but not shaken (truth mixed with untruth or half-truth). If Dracula were to appear in full form and in full light, we wouldn’t follow.

The Lt Governor of GA said it best on PBS Newshour: “At some point, people are going to realize they have been duped”. At the end of any slow-boiled experiment, all frogs realize they have been cooked.

BTW, because of false advertising (esp when it relates to health), we now have “Truth in advertising” and FDA.

Those guard-rails still stand despite many failed attempts to bend them.

Once upon a time, there was a disease, then the cure, then the rush jab…