Faith-Based Lie

Not much time to post today, but for the sake of actually contributing something, I did want to point out a longish but very worthwhile article by Ayelish McGarvey posted a few days ago on the American Prospect Web site on Bush's so-called deep Christian faith. Frankly, notwithstanding the many testimonials to the sincerity of Bush's Christian vision, I've always suspected that the whole narrative of his Christian conversion has proved in reality simply a rather convenient excuse to wipe away, for political purposes, his aimless and reprehensible youthful activities. McGarvey points out that

The president’s storied faith journey began at the bottom of a bottle and led him all the way to the White House. But though these accounts ramble on for hundreds of pages about his steadfast leadership and prayerfulness, they all curiously rely on one single event to confirm that Bush is a man transformed by a deep Christian faith: He quit drinking and took up running instead . . . Judging him on his record, George W. Bush’s spiritual transformation seems to have consisted of little more than staying on the wagon, with Jesus as a sort of talismanic Alcoholics Anonymous counselor. . . .

There's much more in here worth reading -- but the bottom line, to McGarvey, is that, judging from his actions, "the available evidence raises serious questions about whether Bush is really a Christian at all."

Amen.

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Bush Fatigue

The New York Review of Books is running a feature, "The Election and America's Future," which asks some of the journal's regular contributors for their views on "what has been called 'the most consequential election in decades.'" The result is a set of very much on-target critiques, neatly organized in alphabetical order by author name, on the failings of the Bushites, crisply and lucidly written by luminaries ranging from Russell Baker and Anthony Lewis to Norman Mailer to Gary Wills and Brian Urquhart. The brief essays run down the list of Bush Administration crimes and misdemeanors -- the Iraq war looms largest, of course, but there is also ample coverage of the Administration's "accomplishments" in alienating most of the world, in the erosion of civil liberties, in redistributing wealth upwards, and in rolling back environmental protections, as well as riffs on the election's high stakes in the realm of jurisprudence, and the prospect that Bush will name as many as four Supreme Court justices to the bench should he snag (or steal) another term in office.

It's all sobering, of course, and these fine writers come up with many a trenchant turn of phrase. But it's also strangely exhausting. Reading through the NYRB pieces, you get the sense that it's all really been said before, and that no one who reads these essays (especially considering the subscriber base of this particular publication) is likely to be changed by them.

No one who knows me would doubt my bona fides in terms of raw contempt for the current Administration; my family now tiptoes around political topics at the dinner table for fear of the reaction any foray into that realm will stoke from me. I am the choir to whom these essays preach. So I wonder whether my reaction to them might be an early symptom of Bush Fatigue -- a sign that I have made the transition from outrage at the Administration's actions, through a jaded lack of surprise at anything it might do or try, to, finally, simply being sick and tired of Bush generally, and to a sense of waiting to see if we will finally start shaking free of him in two weeks. Exactly two weeks from today, in fact.

Interestingly, the NYRB issue that includes "The Election and America's Future" is dated 4 November 2004. That's two days after election day. At that point, will the body politic have heaved a massive, long sigh of relief, or will the reaction instead have been a sharp gasp at the prospect of four more years of chaos and inept government? Or will we (as many have darkly suggested) face yet another long endgame of litigation that steals any legitimacy the election itself might have offered?

Recall the well-known (and likely apocryphal) ancient Chinese curse: "May you live in interesting times."

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Banging Away at the Old Prefrontal Cortex

Quick: What do Coca-Cola and the Bush campaign have in common?

Answer: Branding. Repetition. Staying "on message." All, perhaps, names for the same thing.

Etymologically, the word brand traces ultimately to Old English (and, previously, Scandinavian) words denoting the blade of a sword (brand, brond), which, in turn, arose from byrnan, beornan -- to burn. Which, of course, makes sense, not only in the crude image of cattle drivers, burning their ranch's mark into the flank of a calf, but in the more subtle ways in which modern branding efforts burrow and burn their way into our brains.

The effects of branding on behavior have found their fullest scientific exegesis in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies that track brand-directed activity in specific brain regions. The most highly publicized such work has come from the lab of Read Montague at the Human Neuroimaging Lab at Baylor College of Medicine, whose work with several colleagues on this front was finally published recently in Neuron. The work essentially involves the "Pepsi challenge": experimental subjects were first given portions of Coca-Cola and Pepsi in unmarked containers, and then were given two portions of the same drink (i.e., either two portions of Coke or two portions of Pepsi), but with brand information presented with one of the drinks. During both trials, the brain activity of the subjects was mapped using fMRI.

The result: subjects in the blind taste tests showed no difference in their preferences of Coke versus Pepsi. But when the subjects were led, through brand information, to believe that one of the drinks was Coca-Cola -- irrespective of what they were actually drinking -- they expressed a significant preference for the drink they thought was Coke. (Interestingly, presentation of the Pepsi brand didn't have the same effect.)

And the fMRI scans showed that the brand information recruited a different area of the brain as well. In the blind taste test, in which only sensory information was being processed, the brain activity was centered in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC), an area believed to be involved in basic assessments of reward and punishment -- "the representation of elementary positive and negative emotional states." In the test that included information on the Coke brand, by contrast, there was significantly elevated actvity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), hippocampus, and midbrain. These latter brain areas are involved in higher congitive control, including "working memory," in the framing of "goal states" out of emotional information, and in "employing affective [i.e., emotional] information in biasing behavior."

In short (at least as I would interpret all of this), a good brand stimulates areas of the brain that appear to be involved in drawing together the constellation of factors that contribute to our sense of ourselves -- our memories, and the emotional states yoked to those memories -- and in shaping those myriad variables into a particular action or decision. And the brand achieves this legerdemain, I would submit, through ceaseless repetition, and through a relentless process of connecting simple verbal and visual constructs with specific emotional states, until we identify the brand not only with our preferences but with our very selves.

And so it goes, perhaps, with the mandate of modern political campaigns to "stay on message." Although the Bush campaign, with its appeals to elemental fear, may be more overtly targeting the amygdala rather than the DLPFC, its legendary "message discipline" seeks, in a larger sense, to worm its own branding into the fabric of our selves, so that the repetition of a single phrase -- be it weapons of mass destruction, family values, or ownership society -- is enough to condition our reaction, judgment, and behavior. Irrespective of what it is we're actually drinking.

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