The Zombies are your Daddy

“What’s your name? Who’s your daddy? Is he rich like me?” ~ The Zombies “Time of the Season” (1968):

So of course I knew this song and I am 90% positive that at one time I knew the artist name too, but somehow when I was reminded of this band today I felt as if I had never heard of them. It’s funny how you can work on a word for months and still come across mind-blowing connections. I rediscovered ‘The Zombies’ today because of mention by Dorothy Copus Brush in her Crossville Chronicle opinion piece “RANDOM THOUGHTS: What draws people into politics?”. In it she connects summer election politics, poker, Anthony Burgess, Tammany Hall, Maurice Chevalier, Bela Lugosi, the band ‘The Zombies’, and the “zombie apocalypse in 2012″. She writes:

Author Peter Dendle wrote “The Zombie Movie Encyclopedia.” He said, “What zombie movies do for the human consciousness is strip away layers of civilization.”

Bryan Senn wrote a book on the subject. He said, “Zombies have long lives. It’s both our fascination and fear of death that makes them so popular. We want to believe in something after death, but we sure don’t want to be a zombie. They attract and repulse.”

Now in 2012 we are living through another zombie period asking the question, is this the zombie apocalypse? Experts in human behavior explain it as one answer to the dark mood of today’s citizenry. The prevailing feeling grows more and more pessimistic about the state of the United States.

Meanwhile, there is a recurrent message in many zombie articles that there is too much zombie. The creator of a new zombie video game, “Dead State”, was interviewed by Daniel Nye Griffiths in Forbes:

There are too many zombie games out there, period. And I don’t mean that in an “afraid of the competition” way, but in a “just stop it” way. There are zombies slapped in just about everything now – zombie shooters, zombie pajamas, zombie toilet cleaners – and it’s getting to the point that people just zone out when anything vaguely zombie is mentioned, especially games.

Which makes it kind of difficult to sell a game that’s trying to get back to the roots of the zombie genre – the human aspect.

Similarly, Noah Cruickshank reviewing JR Angelalla’s “Zombie a novel” writes:

Zombies are nowadays such a common trope in pop culture it’s hard to remember why they ever frightened us in the first place.

Concluding:

Our interactions with zombie-as-concept have become equally superficial.

But explain about which zombie films the “Dead State” creator likes:

I love the Romero films mostly because they aren’t about the zombies. The Romero films concentrate on the social and political breakdown that something like the dead coming back to life would cause. They show just how easy it would be to slip from civilized society into desperate tribes of survivors.

At the same time Bill Bonner is not ready to let the zombie political metaphor die. This is the third time I have mentioned Bill Bonner in ZombieLaw. I honestly don’t think his ideas deserves this much attention but he keeps using “zombie” so what choice do I have. Today he published “War Is Still The Most Profitable Racket In The World” in Business Insider and on his own site, The Daily Reckoning, as “The American War Racket”. In it he calls President Obama “a portrait of failure and homicide” and manages to insult him for not having a mistress. Bonner also writes “every president wants to be a war president. War is America’s #1 zombie industry.” And then goes on to quote Major General Smedley Butler: “[War] is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.” Although, I think banking too, no?

At the same time Katie Drummond in Wired has a story about “Pentagon’s Zombie Satellite Program Comes to Life” using “dead satellites” as a “low-cost” “array” of “antennas”:

The program is “definitely ambitious, and some might call it crazy,” according to Brian Weeden, a former officer with the U.S. Air Force Space Command

Obama’s supposed “homicide” is by drones. Pentagon zombies are technological improvements over dead soldiers or soldiers coming home zombified. But war is not a viable industry – it is “social and political breakdown”

ZombieLaw fans may remember that a while back I wondered if Darth Vader was a cybernetic zombie. His slavish obedience to the Emperor, his blackness, his cyborg’ness — he is the father -

We are the father too… But we’ve abdicated. We’ve killed our fathers. Sent them back to Vietnam. As if it never happened we stepped right into another quagmire. We were never here:

See also my ZombieLaw Father’s Day post – “Not your fathers’ zombies”