It must be serious business, this empty escapism.
#zombies
Genocidal Eros
Posted in Books, Featured, History, Movies Tagged with: Walking Dead, World War Z, Zombie Contentions, zombies
Rooting for the Zombies
The zombie is a perhaps only slightly exaggerated version of the slave or other member of the lower orders from the perspective of the privileged. Like the hungry poor, the zombies confront the responsible citizen as insatiably ravenous mouths to feed, the “unreasoning mob” itself, human as less than human, pure destructive appetite. At the same time, the terrifying joy of the zombie movie, like the terrifying joy both of other apocalyptic genres and of the slave revolt, lies in the destruction of one form of inhumanity by the other that it has produced, or is produced from it. We witness or continually re-experience the liberating annihilation of the whole constricted, compromised, and evil world, all of its inequities, and all of its false values.
Citizenship Annihilated
The Citizens United decision and its application joining together and heightening disgust with and alienation from multiple central institutions of republican democracy – Supreme Court, the “free” media, popular elections – with some prospect of contaminating the entire political-ideological superstructure < -> triumph of our self-consciously most ardent patriots.
Posted in notes, Politics Tagged with: Citizens United, Constitution, Supreme Court, Vampires, zombies
The Figure of Mitt
All successful politicians must by definition adapt to the system which in its pure form – something to be feared – is the system of empty opportunism (we hold empty opportunism to be self-evident). The figure of Mitt represents its nothingness exquisitely, but the meaningfulness of its meaninglessness would have at least as much to do with us and where we are with poor rich Mitt.
Posted in Internet, notes, Politics, US History Tagged with: Mitt Romney, Ordinary Gentlemen, Vampires, zombies
On Vampires, Zombies, and Supreme Court Justices
West Wing becomes Veep. Obamessiah turns into the psychopathic janitor-in-chief. A figure like Mitt Romney – open fraud, an ambulatory non sequitur whose nonsensical emptiness is his main redeeming quality – becomes theoretically electable as Head of State and Government. The words “citizens united” come to mean “citizenship annihilated,” we wait for the economy to vote for or against itself to no known purpose, and at every crisis the mask slips away further, revealing nothing at all in the foreground, beyond it a coven of vampires (“them”) amidst a mass of zombies (“us”). To continue functioning at all, the system will have to finish discarding itself, likely to the applause of those few who even notice.
Posted in Culture & Entertainment, Featured, Politics, US History Tagged with: Constitution, Supreme Court, Vampires, zombies