Tag Archives: zombies

Dick Cheney…Zombie?

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Image Courtesy of L.J. Whitsitt

Image Courtesy of
L.J. Whitsitt

If you Google Dick Cheney zombie, you shall be rewarded. For some people, he mines the polysemy of the zombie like no one else; emotionless, with his voice as uninflected as his thinking, he advances relentlessly propelled by some other (truly) dead person’s heart. Watching Cheney, I appreciate the points of zombie resemblance but I don’t feel the fear because it reminds me of something we have all experienced; discussing politics with the guy whose gaze disconnects as he stops listening in order to excavate a cached response. Your argument is simply a launchpad for his own prepackaged sound bites. The singularity of your thought is dead to him. You think, “there is no talking to this person”. While this is a drive-by zombie moment, you have no fear. Individual zombies even as fleshed out as Dick Cheney are not fear inducing. We can run circles around individual zombies. They cannot recognize us or appreciate us or predict us because they are not connected to us (and have not tried to connect with us).

Zombies are frightening because they are an onslaught. They kill by overwhelming.

The zombies I fear are aggregated for me daily by my web sites of choice. I personally fear the the inexorable advance of a cult of belligerently insular white people who fear change and who want to perfect the world by petrifying it. I can feel inundated by foolish dehumanizing utterances and I can imagine that millions of my fellow citizens agree with such statements. Is it such a huge leap to also imagine that those millions are coming for me next?

Conversely, Fox viewers must feel the inexorable advance of hordes of smug, condescending, Prius driving liberals who, adrift in relativism, look down their noses at traditional values and place too much trust in the government.

It is a most common fallacy to assume that what is true for one member of a class is true for all. Congressman King thinks Hispanic immigrants have calves like canteloupes from humping bales of grass across the border. King is a Republican. Therefore all Republicans believe the same thing about Hispanic immigrants . We can spot this fallacy instantly when it applies to a group of which we are a member. Bernie Madoff is a con man and a thief. Bernie Madoff is an American. Therefore all Americans are con men and thieves.

Unfortunately, we humans are most prone to this fallacy when we are marking the moral distinctions between ourselves and the other; between those that think like us and those who do not; between our tribe and the other tribe. The liberal tribe (zombies to the right) and the conservative tribe (zombies to the left) have in common this easy human readiness to see in an “other” group, a repository of all that is to be scorned and feared.

If we don’t think clearly and if we don’t grant individuals who disagree with us their subjectivity, we consign them…in our false thinking and fearful imagination…to the vast, looming hordes of the undead.

Killing Zombies

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Image courtesy of L.J. Whitsitt

Image courtesy of L.J. Whitsitt

The guilty pleasure we take in a zombie flick is first that they scare us and then they get what they deserve. We tell ourselves, “they are not human”. Cool, open season! Let’s sit back and enjoy how gaudily can we disarticulate them. What the undead do to us normals is horrifying and disgusting, what they get in return is our most lethal creativity.(Jule’s comment two posts ago nicely limns the phenomenology of the zombie flick.)

A related guilty pleasure is political invective. During the frustrating Bush #43 years, I felt almost suffocated by the rhetorical fog (“Patriot Act”, “Operation Iraqi Freedom”,”the Axis of Evil”, “trickle down economics”, “enhanced interrogation). Trenchant criticisim spiked with invective was emotionally and intellectually liberating. Bloggers like the Rude Pundit debased an already debased political language and pointed it in the other direction. The invective of the liberal blogosphere was and continues to be particularly creative in describing the rigid right wing: ,”slack jawed yokels”, “shoutycrackers”, “half-mad dingbats”, “wingnut wahabis” and “skeevy old white people with a thick shell of nutzoid shellac” (to list a few exemplary epithets). In a public Facebook post, I myself once described Republicans as “dim-witted gibbons”.

I apologize for that remark. With that remark I became a zombie; so much a disciple of my own certain beliefs that I could turn all who disagreed with me into Objects of my scorn.

I am not being a scold: political invective can still occasionally amuse me and invigorate my outrage. I do not believe that civility in discourse is a trumping issue: where would African Americans be today if they put civility in discourse above speaking the truth to power? I am making a smaller point as a reminder to myself: you cannot hope to fully understand another’s subjectivity if you do not grant them their subjectivity.

Pope Francis on Zombies

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Image courtesy of L.J. Whitsitt

Image courtesy of L.J. Whitsitt

Pope Francis talks about zombies:

“The faith passes, so to speak, through a distiller and becomes ideology,” he said, according to Radio Vatican. “And ideology does not beckon [people]. In ideologies there is not Jesus: in his tenderness, his love, his meekness. And ideologies are rigid, always. Of every sign: rigid.

“And when a Christian becomes a disciple of the ideology, he has lost the faith: he is no longer a disciple of Jesus, he is a disciple of this attitude of thought… For this reason Jesus said to them: ‘You have taken away the key of knowledge.’ The knowledge of Jesus is transformed into an ideological and also moralistic knowledge, because these close the door with many requirements.”

“The faith becomes ideology and ideology frightens, ideology chases away the people, distances, distances the people and distances of the Church of the people,” Francis added. “But it is a serious illness, this of ideological Christians. It is an illness, but it is not new, eh?”

To be a disciple of a rigid ideology is to be infected with a “serious illness” which frightens other people.

Zombies and the Moral Universe

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In my last post I ended up talking about invective. I will wend my way back to invective. Stay with me.

We live with zombies. Zombies are the betes noire of our times because they are a lurching confusion of categories; zombies are neither natural or human but they partake of the qualities of both.

Nature is impersonal. When Natural disasters strike (earthquakes,tornadoes, flash floods), they affect good people and bad people. Nobody “gets what they deserve” because Nature makes no moral distinctions. Nature simply and implacably does what it must do.

Zombies were human once. They don’t have feelings, they do not communicate, they are ugly and they are a contagion. Short of eating us tartare, they can also infect us with their corruption. We are are only a bite away from becoming mindless flesheaters ourselves. But what makes them truly frightening is that zombies do not see us “normals” as subjects; as thinking, feeling moral entities that deserve to live. We are merely edible objects and they are insatiable and implacable.

Zombies, although quasi-human in appearance, no longer live in our moral human universe. The foundational precept of human morality (tip of the hat to Immanuel Kant) is that we must treat other people as subjects not as objects. Subjects think and feel. Although we humans are subsumed (indifferently) by the same Laws of Nature that rule all creatures, we are also naturally endowed with the ability to think and create the moral universe in which we live. We take for granted that people will stop at stoplights; that we will not be subjected to random assaults by strangers. We assume that other people are going about their business based on ideas in their heads and will generally treat us as they expect to be treated (exceptions prove the rule).

Terrorists who set off bombs and kill innocent people are also zombies. They treat other humans as objects; as means to their religious/political ends. They have demonized or dehumanized those who do not think exactly as they do. In a very real sense, They are not killing people like themselves. How do people get like that? When in the course of his usual fulminations, Rush Limbaugh calls a Georgetown University co-ed a “whore” because she disagrees with him, most people recognize that strong beliefs have taken someone “over the line”.

When political discourse turns to invective, we become zombies.