Zombie Summer Politics: Zombies (under)Lie; Mitt Romney’s Ronald Reagan, Labour’s Tony Blair
Glitterazzi Dave give 1/8th of his support for Mitt Romney’s vice presidential selection to Zombie Ronald Reagan. Dave writes in “Who Should Be Mitt Romney’s Running Mate? Here Are Our Top 8 Choices” of “Reanimated Ronald Reagan”:
You know what’s hot right now? Zombies. And not just the hopped-up-on-bath-salts-and-eating-human-flesh kind, but the resurrected dead kind, too. Seriously, they’re everywhere. So we think an undead 40th president and GOP hero would be a great choice. It would rally the party and get the zombie-loving youth vote!
There are prior zombielaw posts about zombie tip oneil and reagan and about mitt romney zombies — but you’ll have to find them yourself because my computer is still broken and it’s hard enough just to find these zombie political references let alone blog them and if I open any more firefox windows this netbook might crash.. So I continue to apologize to my fans and hope that one day I have the time to properly edit this post.
Meanwhile, the zombie political rhetoric is alive and well in Great Britain too. Rafael Behr in the New Statesmen, writes: “The campaign against Progress spells pure danger for Labour”:
The convenient explanation for the left is that Miliband has somehow been captured by Blairites – that the zombie tendency of the old regime is preventing him from carrying the sacred flame as bestowed by the bloc vote. The natural solution: smash the zombies.
The reality is that self-declared “Blairites” are marginalised in the shadow cabinet, do not have the leader’s ear and generally wander around looking like some of the most forlorn and lonely people in Westminster. (So yes, there is a haunted/zombie contingent, but not a very powerful one.)
But even that is a distraction. It hardly matters whether or not Blairite ideas are influencing Miliband or whether those ideas are good or bad. What matters is whether the Labour party and the wider labour movement – the unions in other words – can tolerate dissenting voices. It is all about control: who runs the machine, who has the resources to print leaflets and fund local campaigns, who decides which candidates get selected in safe seats.
Next, Richard Roeper at the Sun Times asks: “Will this be known as the summer of the zombies?” For me, definitely yes – this is my Zombie Summer. But for Western culture this is really but a peak in what has been decades long growth for the zombie character class. And ‘peak’ implies it’s about to decline, and I’m really not so sure the tipping point is yet in sight. There is something deeply embedded in Western culture about the ‘party at the end of the world’ and that place where sidewalk’s end. But these kinds of ends are only a beginnings for imagination…
Finally (for this rambling post), consider babylonsister’s post on DemocraticUnderground: “What’s The Opposite of a Zombie Lie?”
asking:
A zombie lie is a false statement that keeps getting repeated no matter how often it has been refuted. Zombies are difficult to kill and they keep coming back. We need a term for a true statement that isn’t believed no matter how many times it is repeated. “Zombie truth” doesn’t seem to quite capture what I’m looking for. My term would describe Bruce Bartlett’s column in today’s New York Times. He makes many true statements that are often repeated but seem to have no impact on our political discourse.
I think it’s a great question. I have been thinking that the opposite of zombie is creativity. But “creative truth” doesn’t seem to answer babylonsister’s question. “non-creative truth” doesn’t do a better job, “ignored truth” makes some sense, and it’s the zombies who are presumably the ignorant. But sometimes it seems like there really isn’t a thing called truth anymore. Similarly it’s not that the zombie is lying. The zombie doesn’t “lie” the zombie presents what is fed to him. The zombie ignores what he can’t eat. The zombie isn’t the truth value, he’s the continuously arising and non-reconcilable controversies. The zombie doesn’t lie, the zombie underlies.
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