The Reverse Gorilla James Bauhaus 2010

Many adults are familiar with the 'ordinary' gorrilla. This is where a teacher of psychology will present to his students a short, boring film clip, asking them to perform some task, such as noting how many times, if any, a basketball is fumbled. Midway through, a man in a gorrilla suit walks across the scene, then the professor glories in the fact that none of his students can remember seeing this thoroughly outrageous occurrence. This exercise is to demonstrate the fallibility of attention and memory. This technique has been used to amaze and astonish students since the early seventies. Periodically, Hollywood and TV producers will vend variations of 'the gorrilla' to their audiences. Still, it remains fairly obscure to the busy, youthful, general public.

The 'reverse gorrilla' is far more obscure and more sophisticated. This is where skilled propagandists show their targets an elephant, then convince them that there was a gorrilla present as well. This technique was used today (8-6-2010) on CNN's Larry King with Jeff Probst and some prison guards selling a new TV show called "Prison cops!" or some similar title. One of the teases used to draw an audience was a show of deadly weapons made by captives. One was a 'knife' made of toilet paper and water, which was never exhibited. Another was a 'gun', which was briefly shown on camera. This was their masterpiece: two shiny, inch-diameter tubes of metal, one four inches long, the other two inches long, that fit together, one inside the other. The elite, 'internal affairs' correctional officer fumbled with it briefly under the camera a while describing mechanisms that it did not appear to possess. He mumbled about it having a hole for a nail, functioning as a firing pin that is actuated by a spring or elastic band.

This reverse gorrilla appears because people tend to believe what we are told, even when we do not see it, especially when the stage is set by 'experts'. People defer to 'experts' even more when the experts' targets are programmed by the propagandists to believe that we are unqualified to appraise the subject matter. It also helps when the gorrilla is very small, briefly exhibited and no chance is given to anticipate what is about to occur prior to its exhibition or introduction. Magicians use this technique often. Their tricks are almost impossible to decipher because the outcome is kept secret until it occurs, and there is no rewind that lets the audience counter the misdirection that had them looking at all the wrong places and things. 

To the discerning, critical eye, the officers' "gun" was nothing but shiny fit-together tubes that may have had a hole, but no nail, no spring or elastic band mechanism, no handle and no bullet. Anyone with the slightest bit of curiosity and logic would have asked, "What would these inmate engineering geniuses use to make the thumb-sized "bullet" (or grenade) that this prison-made 'gun' fires?" But this was TV, and the purpose of every participant was to sell their new TV show glorifying guard-work. Glaring deficits in logic were ignored or left to the reverse gorrilla, where tricky verbiage disguises a lack of substance. People are told what they did not see, which causes them to scratch their heads and assume that we actually did see what was so expertly described. The more time that passes, the more 'healed' that this psychic wound becomes. Eventually we forget what we did not see and remember only what the expert told us. The discrepancies blur as the reverse gorrilla gains solidity. Fantasy substitutes; reality fades.

Most of the experts in the use of the reverse gorrilla are slippery, successful politicians and media propagandists such as Bill Clinton, John Boehner, Richard Shelby, Chris Dodd, Rush Limbaugh, Pat O'Reilly and Glen Beck. Party propagandists and politicians can be seen on the weekend morning news-talk shows performing these arts, skillfully dodging questions, substituting their own versions of reality and planting clever malinterpretations of events involving their political competitors. Reagan's Iran-Contra criminal, Ollie North, popularized the science of using verbal trickery to make evil deeds sound acceptable and moral. His most famous phrase is "plausible deniability", which is how mass-murderers like him dodge accountability for their actions. He and Clinton tie for the prize of making people believe in things that are not there. The reverse gorilla is only one of their minor tricks, and it is the major tactic of prosecutors used on jurors.