There's a wonderful photo at ICanHazCheeseburger.com - a site from which I lack the Kosediting skills to copy photos - showing a pootie looking out a window. The caption reads: "Hmmmm. Dat's more zombies than usual." I can't prove it, but I think the photo was taken with time travel technology. It was posted a year ago, but that cat might be looking at this summer's town hall meetings, cable news chatter, or political blogs.
More below the fold....
More Zombies Than Usual
George Romero documented it in Night of the Living Dead. Don Siegel offered a space-based spin in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Paul Anderson offered a government research gone bad theory, based on a video game, in Resident Evil. Al Gore chose a more intellectual perspective in The Assault on Reason. Those who like their gore with well-timed humor - as some voters would have - will prefer Edgar Wright's British documentary Shaun of the Dead.
If I'm citing zombie movies as documentaries, I must be one of the zombies, right? Well, maybe. Some of you do look tasty, now that I stop to consider it....
Snark aside - at least momentarily - Romero, Siegel, Anderson, Gore, and Wright were circling around a common theme. Ordinary people get infected by some pathogen, become unthinking beasts, and begin searching for others to transform. Kinda like evangelical religion, but without the uplifting moral values. (Like I said: "at least momentarily.") So when I see town hall protesters chanting "Just Say No," or polls that show a growing legion demanding that President Obama produce his original hospital birth record - and then probably a video of him nursing at his mother's breast with Jack Lord in the background saying "Book him, Danno" - I think of Romero, Siegel, et. al.
Note: et. al. is Latin for "eaten by Al [Gore]." Gore was well known in Rome. Note the writings of Seneca. (The original, not FPer Doane.) He was forever complaining about how Gore in the Colosseum was decaying Roman virtues, while his namesake FPer will probably complain about these horrid puns.
So what's your point, Crissie?
My point, and I did have one somewhere back there, is that these folks remind me of zombies ... but without the makeup. (Okay, Orly Taitz has the makeup too, but I guess as the Zombie Queen she gets better perks.)
Not that conservatives have a monopoly on zombieism. We get some on the left as well. But conservatives are more prone to like guns, whereas we progressives are more comfortable with blunt objects like facts and science and stuff. And as Wright documented, blunt objects defeat zombies, while shooting them doesn't work. (Resident Evil got that part wrong, but Milla Jovovich looks tastier than Simon Pegg. Sorry, Simon.)
In fact, pointy things (like having points) don't work with zombies at all. Has Talking Points Memo stopped the zombie uprising? No. Point proved, or disproved, depending on your blunt object of view. (I have a quota of bad puns on a given word.) And this all turns on one's blunt objects of view....
Credit where credit is due.
If you watch zombie movies, you'll see lots of zombies. The screen is full of them. Zombies here, there, everywhere. But if you watch the credits, only a small number are for zombies. (Most films just list them as extras. Here at Blogistan Polytechnic Institute, we call that extra credit.) Most of the people in the credits work behind the scenes. But the zombies get most of the camera time. Zombie movie film editors, it seems, move on to CNN and other news outlets.
So just imagine how the movies would look if all of those other people - the non-extras - showed up in the frame, doing absolutely normal things like asking sensible questions? It wouldn't be a zombie movie then. It would be cinema verite (Latin for "boringly realistic"). That might not be good for box office receipts, but it probably makes for much better political dialogue. (Although Max Baucus and many others seem to favor box office receipts.)
So if we want policy verite (Latin for "government that works for real people rather than corporations"), we behind-the-scenesers have to get out in front of the cameras and make sure we outnumber the zombies on film. It's not about making our points; again, points don't work on zombies. It's about making sure Americans know the zombies haven't taken over everywhere, that their numbers are just camera tricks.
Or we can be like Pootie the Precious, who's decided she's not coming out until the zombies are gone:
+++++
Happy Thursday!