FLINT DILLE’S GAME THEORY 3: The Covfefe Game; Clorox/Covfefe/Plague Masks and The Three Day Revelation (written on Day 2 of Clorox).

Have you ever heard somebody say, “I got really mad, and then I did something really smart?”

No?

I haven’t either.

Fear and Anger are valuable emotions, because they motivate us into action by repressing our cognitive abilities.

Fear and Anger cause us to fight, flee or freeze.

These are the three basic tactical reactions to any crisis. They’re great for the species, they’re not great for the individuals involved.

It goes back to cave man times. A Saber Tooth shows up in the camp. Some freeze. Some flee. Some fight.

A few people get chowed down, but the tribe survives.

To fight another day.

The panic subsides. Reason returns. Now, advances can happen. Dread (fear of fear) triggers invention and Grott, our cave man, figures out what to do next time. He starts inventing weapons. He starts building walls. He figures out how to Saber Tooth Tigers in their lairs before they get to the tribe.

A few Millenia later, Grott’s decedents have built a museum with Saber Tooth skeletons on display.

There are no living Saber Tooths (Teeth?).

Surprise plus fear cause action. Action leads to survival. Dread leads to invention. Invention leads to Civ advances. Civ advances lead to domination of present enemies. Struggles never end. They just change.

But what happens when you live in a constant state of anger? You never get smart. In fact, you keep doing stupid stuff. Continual stupid stuff leads to frustration, more anger, more fear and you never get to dread and invention.

Chronic anger is outrage.

Enter the Media. Much of it seems to exist to trigger adrenaline hits followed by dopamine hits. I’m oversimplifying here, but adrenaline and dopamine lead to addiction. The media supplies this. They prod the fear, anger and outrage and then offer you a temporary fix in the form of blind faith in a fanciful ongoing narrative.

How did we get here? Half of this country was shocked and scared by an unexpected election result. It wasn’t what they were told was going to happen? They were confused. Understandably, they wanted an explanation and a hope — something to ease their pain

They headed to media opium dens of pain and relief and experienced the usual product of opium — pipe dreams. We had the emoluments clause, the 25th Amendment and then finally the Mueller investigation. Night after night. Day after day, they sold the drug. Anybody who thought about it clearly for five minutes knew the Russia charges were preposterous, but under the influence of political opioids they fed the addicted and sent them into a deeper and deeper spiral. Finally, it got to an impeachment that was never going to happen. There was never a credible path to 67 votes in the senate. Still they pursued it. Tricks. Feints. Diversions. Impeachment constipation (week long delay). All the things one does when they realize they’ve led their followers into a slaughter.

Nancy Pelosi knew how George Armstrong Custer felt like when the 7th Cavalry dismounted on Last Stand Hill.

This is not the behavior of rational people. They whipped their followers into a frenzy, intimidated and even excommunicated the doubters picked their hill to die on and died there. (She actually lost a seat in the house over it and failed to convert even a single Republican).

Except Custer didn’t go down saying ‘it’s only a flesh wound.’

And, like addicts who don’t notice that they’re slowly destroying their health and wealth, they lost awareness. How the House Intelligence Committee decided that it was a great idea to go on the Quixotic Impeachment Quest rather than try and figure out what was going on in China with this new virus, is beyond rational thought.

No rational person would make that choice. Only the bug-eyed irrational would make that choice.

Think about that for a moment.

How did they get there and, more importantly, how do they get back to rationality?

And calamity led to calamity. After sacrificing Chris Matthews on the altar of god knows what, they realized the reality of what he was saying. Bernie Sanders was going to be the Democratic nominee and that would lead to an election that would make George McGovern ’72, look like a big win for the Democrats.

So the searched through the candidate list which bore an uncanny resemblance to Dick Tracy villains, and came up with the only known brand name: Joe Biden. In the process, everybody learned that the incredibly noisy Progressive Media Twitterati really added up to less than half of the Democratic Party. Less than half of a half. Fig leaf gone.

Poor hapless Joe Biden. He’s a two or three time loser (depending on which runs you count) Joe Biden, and that was when hair plugs were the only thing wrong with his head. Joe Biden who Kamela Harris accused of being a racist before flaming out when it became evident that her message didn’t play east of the Berkeley Hills. Millionaire (as Mayor Pete pointed out) Joe Biden who lives in a house that doesn’t match his income and is father of ‘don’t mention’ Hunter Biden who’s got Tara Reade problems that we’re also not supposed to talk about.

And, of course, we can be sure Donald Trump politely won’t mention them in the general.

But that’s what they ended up with, and barring him wandering off between now and election day, that’s their candidate.

It takes a lot of anger-fueled cognitive repression to get to Joe Biden as Democratic nominee. Does anybody not secretly think they’d be better of with a Hillary rematch. She, at least, makes sense most of the time.

I’m going non-linear for a moment. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard the toast: ‘Confusion to our enemies.” It’s a little bit funny and everybody laughs, but I’d never really known what it meant.

Now I do.

‘Confusion to our enemies’ means that your enemies are in a state where they can’t do anything right. And if the American Center and Right have been making that toast, they’ve gotten what they want.

But it’s had a very bad consequence for all of us. We’ll recover and, in time, when the panic has subsided (which is happening right now), we’ll figure out a way back.

We always do.

But for now, the exact same people who sold us ‘Collusion’ and ‘Impeachment’ are selling us ‘Plague.’ For people who pride themselves in being ‘progressive’ and ‘people of science’, when the best thing they have to offer is wearing plague masks and hiding behind walls, they’re looking not exactly progressive.

In fact they’re looking downright medieval.

If you don’t believe me, just google ‘Plague Mask Images’ and see what comes back to you.

We’ve gone Medieval. As a D&D player and a History Major (Ancient, not Medieval, but close enough for this conversation), I like medieval, but I’m not sure it is great public policy.

Now let’s go back to Grott. Grott didn’t start beating the Saber Tooth until he got away and started inventing. And what does that look like? That looks like coming up with 100 bad ideas for every good idea. Vlott, his tribemate might have suggested that they poison babies and then have Saber Tooth eat the baby and be poisoned. Grott thought about this for 2 minutes and rejected it. However, that bad idea might have led to the good idea of poisoning arrows. Of course, that idea is flawed because life is sloppy and too many tribesmen end up nicking themselves with poisoned arrows, but a lot of tribes were willing to accept the losses to get rid of Saber Tooth.

Somebody else thought of longer spears. Attack formations. Nets (we use this to catch fish, maybe it can catch a lion). Stand off weapons (we put ten arrows into Saber Tooth before he gets to us, if the arrows don’t kill him, the infection will). And so on. Point is, there were 100 bad ideas before there was the good one. But on the 100th idea, they defeated Saber Tooth forever and his bones are in a museum.

Enter the modern Grott, Donald Trump and Clorox.

Drinking Clorox is not a good idea. It’s a really bad idea. However, it is an idea. It is forward looking. It is lateral thinking. Somewhere in there might be a good idea. Lots of medicines are also poisons. We all know that. You have to go through a lot of bad ideas before you get to a good one. That’s how innovation and invention work.

If Trump was being sarcastic, well, it’s a little funny.

And, in passing, I might note that, as every dramatist knows, the most effective weapon against anger, fear and panic is humor. Actual humor, not simulated humor known as snark, actual funny stuff. Think about Die Hard for a moment. John McClane (Bruce Willis) is making jokes in the face of mortal danger. Not only is that about as cool as it gets, but the humor is breaking the anger cycle, allowing the invention (resourcefulness) cycle to kick in. The definition of cool is staying funny when others are hot. Actual cool is funny, not broody.

As we contemplate the effects of anger addiction, we might also look at the sorry state of comedy these days. There is so little of it. Comedians are our canaries in the cultural coal mine and there are a lot of yellow corpses in comedy world these days. Will write more on that some other time. Just planting the idea.

Where this becomes relevant to where this non-linear discussion is going is that the most famous stand-up comedian in the world is also the President of the United States. It’s true. I got tipped off by this when I was reading an article written by a guy either in Vegas who reviews lounge acts. He said something like, ‘I’ve seen ’em all. I don’t support Trump, but I’ll give him this, I’ve never seen anybody work a room like this. They were climbing the walls.’

After I read that, I started watching Trump differently, and the truth is that he has far more in common with Shecky Green or Rodney Dangerfield or Buddy Hackett than he has with anything we’ve ever seen in the White House before. If you don’t believe me, just actually watch a Trump rally. There’s a reason why he can pack a bigger house on a bad night better than a legion of opponents can with billions in free food and armies of paid attenders. He’s entertaining.

Hell, some people tune into the Coronavirus updates to be entertained. Better than watching the grim Gusses everywhere else.

Even if you’re not entertained, look at the crowds at his rallies. They are loving it. Yeah, he throws in some actual content, but it’s the comedy that they go for.

And watch the effect is has on their humorless enemies. It just makes them madder and less funny. The rebukes are now so overtopped that they are a form of comedy all their own. You never know what noise is going to come off Whoopie’s cushion on The View, but makes great clown toss fodder on lazy nights on Fox News.

Point is, Trump makes his side laugh and that throws his opponents into rage.

So we have the grim, angry side and the funny side. Anybody want to guess which side is going to win?

Do we really believe that the lets put everybody in America under house arrest forever crowd is going to do well in November?

Seriously. Tell yourself a joke. Allow the blood to flow, and ask if relentless maudlin negativity is a real winning face to present to people. If you think so, tell yourself a joke or go watch a funny movie and ask yourself again.

So back to Clorox and eating lightbulbs or whatever Trump is supposed to have said. I’ll tell you how this is going to play out over three days. And that’s the Trump game. It is a 3 move game. Moves take about a day.

Move 1, he says something that sounds outrageous and other side reacts/overreacts. News cycle eaten.

Move 2, somebody actually looks at what he says and it wasn’t quite what he was represented to have said.

Move 3: The original story is out of gas and ALWAYS, something has changed. The goalposts have moved.

We’ve seen this 100 times and yet every time it happens it seems unique.

One columnist got it right when they said that Trump was playing, ‘pull my finger’ with the media. The difference is that even a 6 year-old only falls for ‘Pull My Finger’ once. The media keeps falling for it, because ‘Pull My Finger’ works every time for addicts who probably get to like the resultant smell.

Why else would they fall for it every time?

And here’s the subtle, genius part of the whole thing. We can debate whether this is conscious or just Trump’s operating system, but he seems to have an uncanny ability to release a cycle burning story at exactly the moment when he doesn’t want the media covering something else. I first noticed this with ‘Covfefe’ (if you don’t remember it, look it up). ‘Covfefe’ blew every other story out of the water that day. Do you remember what the ‘B’ story was that day? The ‘C’ story?

Take a moment to remember, because it matters.

‘Covfefe’ was also the day when Trump pulled out of the Paris Climate Accords and Kathy Griffin, an unwitting rage dupe, did her severed head stunt.

Fauxrage all around and when the smoke clears. Nobody really knows what Covfefe was, Kathy Griffin draws all sorts of praise and agro and flushing the Paris Climate Accords is a done deal. Surrendered with little fight.

No energy left in the old Paris story. Literally yesterday’s news. Yeah, people would whine about it, but the impact was blunted and it never got full play again. Stump speech fodder for the converted, but the Media couldn’t bring it up lest somebody ask why they were covering ‘Covfefe’ and Kathy Griffin and something so allegedly important became the ‘c’ story.

So Trump and the Clorox. Did he have some meeting with advisors who said, ‘hey, Texas is about to partially open up and we don’t want the media to go down there and tell a bunch of sob stories.’

I doubt it.

Did he instinctually know that he wanted to suck the air out of the media room for a day while Texas opened. Yep. It’s his instinct. Control the narrative, even when it gives you a bad day of coverage. Call Jeb Bush ‘low energy’ and let the kid embarrass himself with phony displays of energy. Let Marco Rubio and Trump do dick jokes at a Republican debate and let’s see who’s standing afterward.

He love being the top story and he doesn’t mind looking bad for a day (that’s the unique thing about him), because he knows that when the smoke clears, under cover of Texas, all sorts of states are going to be opening up. It’s not an accident that the night after the Bleach hubbub he announced arch-enemy Gavin Newsom, king of the lockdown, was beginning to capitulate. Newsom, who a week earlier claimed California is a nation state is made to appear to be dropping trow for Trump. He can protest. Trump can clown kick him and we’ll see who has the bigger megaphone. What compelled Newsom, who will so much money from the Federal government, to say something so stupid and so obviously loser.

And anybody who thinks about it knows that Newsom has to capitulate, because he hears that Ross Perot sucking sound of jobs moving to Texas and that’s bad news for a state that’s somewhere near the end of Chapter 10 and heading to Chapter 11.

In passing, we’ll note that many suspect that over-extended states, many of which are blue, are exacerbating the damage to the economy so that they can hide decades of bad management behind Coronavirus.

Good luck with that.

Late yesterday, a friend of mine, the kind of Republican who’s embarrassed by Trump but loves the fact that the 9th Circuit isn’t a Progressive rubber stamp anymore said, “I watched the interview. Trump didn’t exactly tell people to drink Draino or Bleach for that matter.”

And he was right. As always, after Joy Reid, the WaPo, the NYT and everybody else is done with their frenzy of McShock, the actual quote is disappointing. But what’s worse than that is the impression that’s left behind in the Zeitgeist. While some PC Pope has us wearing Plague Masks, Grott is out inventing the throwing spear.

Because Trump is Grott.

If you don’t believe me go back and actually watch the interview, not some second hand account of it. It will be a little disappointing if you hate Trump. Maybe it was sarcasm. Maybe it was spitballing. Who knows? I don’t live in the mind of Donald Trump, but it wasn’t worth the frenzy.

And when the sun rises on the third day, America will be a little more open, the goal posts will have moved and his opponents will have given up ground. It’s too late to do a Texas sob story. Who knows, maybe California will stop putting sand in skate parks and arresting surfers?

Sanding skate parks and arresting surfers? Does that look good for the Demi-tyrants. There’s no way you do that kind of passive-aggressive crap and look good. My kids were getting a big ‘ho-ho’ out of the paddle-boarder being arrested. Not the face ‘serious’ leadership wants to show — especially, when we learned (big surprise) in the very same briefing that sunlight is the best disinfectant (a phrase that will even deeper resonance when collusion turns into a Done Ham later this summer).

So, yeah. Here’s the 3-Day answer to Clorox. The sun rises. America is a little more open. Everybody will have Bleach Amnesia and Trump at least looks like somebody who’s trying to come up with ideas while the other side would have us huddled in some Medieval garrott as the imaginary death wagon rolls by.

So yeah. The Covfefe Game is a winner for Trump and will be until the media learns some impulse control, which hasn’t happened in four years and maybe won’t for another four.