What Does Our Obsession With Zombie Stories Tell Us About Our Politics?
AlterNet / By Kristin Rawls
What Does Our Obsession With Zombie Stories Tell Us About Our Politics?
Between widespread feelings of political disenfranchisement and growing economic inequality, it's easy to feel as if we're facing a zombie apocalypse.
June 6, 2012 |
Zombie chatter reached unprecedented cultural prominence last week when reports of two murders involving cannibalism appeared in the national headlines.
But since the 2008 financial crisis, zombies have had quite a resurgence in popular culture. First, it was the comedy film Zombieland, followed by 2010s sleeper hit, AMCs "The Walking Dead." During the summer, well get two youth-themed zombie flicks, the high school film Bad Kids Go to Hell and a stop-motion film called Paranorman from the creators of Coraline.
Zombies are everywhere these days theres even an Osama bin Laden zombie film coming to the big screen this summer. But why might zombies be so omnipresent at this moment in time? Maybe between widespread feelings of political disenfranchisement and growing economic inequality, its easy to feel as if were facing, say, a zombie apocalypse.
A year ago, a CBS poll suggested that, Americans have long felt they have little say in government. But the trends are troubling: While 58 percent said they have little say in what government does in 1990, that figure has risen to 69 percent today. In the new survey, 85 percent say that people like them had too little influence on American life. ...............(more)
The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/story/155783/what_does_our_obsession_with_zombie_stories_tell_us_about_our_politics_/
xchrom
(108,903 posts)ChicagoRonin
(630 posts)1) The government will fail you
2) The military cannot protect you
3) We are ill-equipped to deal with environmental catastrophes
4) Modern society is a fragile collection of interdependent systems; if one goes down, we all go
5) To paraphrase the Joker from THE DARK KNIGHT: People are only as good as society allows them to be. When the chips are down, these so-called 'civilized people' will turn on each other
Brigid
(17,621 posts)Whether I'm watching "The Walking Dead" or Rachel Maddow. Or a particularly good George Carin clip.
4th law of robotics
(6,801 posts)rug
(82,333 posts)kenny blankenship
(15,689 posts)will be able to reproduce themselves or recruit. We'll drone them right out of existence, by God, even if we have to pawn the Washington Monument, Washington State, Mt Vernon and Washington DC off to China to pay for it.
DRONES! More Drones and we can fix all our problems!
Drones! Drrro-o-o-n-n-e-s!
cbrer
(1,831 posts)Indeed, "Zombie" is a collective term for all these phenomena. Didn't it spring from the video game sub-culture?