That couldbe a question about one of the hippest retro fads that pop culture has goingthese days. Inspired by horror genres of past, zombies have lurched back topre-eminence in books like "World War Z," video games like "Left4 Dead" and blockbuster films like "Zombieland." Even thehighbrow producers at National Public Radio recently devoted a segment to a University of Ottawa study entitled "MathematicalModeling of An Outbreak of Zombie Infection." Indeed, the undead havebecome so popular, they've spurred "zombie walks" in cities andspawned Weird Al-ish parodies through Jane Austen knock-offs like "Prideand Prejudice and Zombies" and bands such as the Zombeatles (with their hit"Hard Day's Night of the Living Dead").
Frighteninglyenough, though, that question about zombies could also be asked of America'spolitical culture.
It was onlya year ago that "zombie" first entered the colloquial economiclexicon during the collapse of the financial institutions that werecannibalizing the economy. From a balance-sheet perspective, many of thesefirms were dead. But they were quickly reanimated as zombie banks withtrillions of taxpayer dollars.
Like atypical zombie outbreak, the initial plague spread.
On WallStreet, we have zombie executivesthose who destroyed the economy butnonetheless kept their same jobs and now continue paying themselves hugebonuses. At the White House, President Obama hired zombie advisers whose zombieeconomic ideologies and records manufacturing recession conditions should havekilled their careers, but who now sit in high government office letting outmoans in support of the zombie banks.
On CapitolHill, the scene this Halloween season looks like Michael Jackson's"Thriller" video. Decrepit zombie politicians with the funk of 40,000years stalk Congress with the very zombie lobbyists that the election was saidto disempower. Lately, they are working in tandem to construct zombie healthinsurance companiesfor-profit corporations eternalized by public subsidies,customer mandates and almost no regulation or competition. At the same time,wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that should have already concluded keep ploddingon with an unchanging zombie strategyall while media zombies push zombie mythsabout death panels and birth certificates, effectively feasting on the lastfunctioning lobes of the American brain.
Call me azombie pundit, but I agree with "World War Z" author Max Brooks'suggestion that the concurrent rise of zombie pop and political cultures is nocoincidence.
"Zombiesare an apocalyptic threat, we are living in times of apocalyptic anxiety (and)we need a vessel in which to coalesce those anxieties," he says.
In fact,I'll go out on a severed limb and take it further: If zombies specificallyrepresent the apocalyptic downsides of immortalized mindlessness, then today'szombie zeitgeist is not merely a result of scary quandaries created bystupidity. It is a reaction to both those problems and the sense that they cannever be thwarted.
Here we are,a year after a financial implosion that should have driven a stake in the heartof free market fundamentalism. Here we are, a year after an election that wassupposed to pour holy water on Wall Street vampires, exorcise the economy'sdemons and challenge the ancient mummies of neoconservative foreign policy. Yethere we are, with virtually nothing changed, watching the same zombie crisesindomitably stumble forward.
And so whatdo we do? We flee to entertainment venues that let us enjoy the campy thrill ofconfronting the undeadeven though we've lost the ability to do that in reallife.
"Thezombie is a way for us to explore massive disasters in a safe way," Brookssays. "You can't shoot the financial meltdown in the head, but you can dothat with a zombie."
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