Monday, July 26, 2010

Welcome to Zombieland. No, wait, we've been living in it since the Twentieth Century.



It was probably 1970 when I first saw George Romero's 1968 zombie classic, Night of the Living Dead, at a small theater on High Street, off the OSU campus in Columbus, Ohio. I thought it was campy, stupid and not particularly scary. Romero's zombies were folks who had been dead, now arisen to live off the flesh of the living. There had been zombie movies before, but I think this was like one of the first so-called "zombie holocaust" flicks (the first being 1964's The Last Man on Earth), where the disease, if that's what it was, went viral and threaten mankind in totality. Being dead, Romero's zombies shuffled and struck with girlie blows. I guess that was because, being dead, they hadn't been getting much exercise lately. This made them easy to out-run and easy to kill -- all you had to do was wreck their slow moving brain cases with a baseball bat or a well-placed shot.

Such zombies would hardly scare a second grader today. That is why today's film zombies are usually not resurrected dead folks, but infected live ones who have, in the process, lost their humanity if not their souls.

In I Am Legend, the Will Smith 2007 film (which was a remake of Charleton Heston's 1971 The Omega Man, which was itself a remake of The Last Man on Earth, the first film treatment of Richard Matheson's 1954 novel I Am Legend), the zombies were living folks infected by a virus originally crafted to cure cancer. In 28 Days Later (and its sequel, 28 Weeks Later), the virus originates in a lab where monkeys have been infected with "Rage." The monkeys are set loose by animal rights activists, and the zombie apocalypse is on.



In this year's Zombieland, the Zombie Holocaust is mined for comedic effect. My daughter Zoe presented me with this DVD for my birthday and I have to admit it is pretty funny, even if lefty loon Woody Harrelson stars in it. The movie was a critical and commercial success, grossing more than $60.8 million in 17 days, surpassing the Dawn of the Dead remake to become the top-grossing zombie film to date.

"Nut up, or shut up."

There are, I am told, beaucoup zombie video games, and zombies are now a fixed part of American popular culture.

The zombie as political metaphor has also sprung up on both sides of the political divide. The left-collectivists in particular now refer to their opponents (any and all opponents, it would seem) as "zombies." At the Huffington Post, a David Sirota column is headlined "Confirming Right-Wing Zombie Lies: Obama's Budget Freeze." On Alternet,Chauncey DeVega opines on "Zombie Tea Party George Washington, Right Wing Epistemic Closure, and Slavery in America." And at MediaMatters.org, we are treated to "BP writing the cap-and-trade bill: Another right-wing zombie lie in the making?"

Of course we too use the zombie metaphor, with greater justification I think. The Borg of Star Trek is a personification of the collectivist zombie, "resistance is futile, assimilate or die." The classic zombie is, of course already dead, and your assimilation by him IS your death. Zombies in their various iterations, if they have not lost their souls have at least lost virtually everything that makes them human. The divine spark, that creation in the image of God, is gone. And, it is not unimportant to stress, they are about the wholesale conversion of the human to the inhuman.

I thought off Zombieland when very late last night, unable to sleep, I watched The Soviet Story from a link I picked up off Pete's WRSA site. There are those who believe that the left-collectivist virus of the 20th Century is dormant now, and that any suggestion to the contrary is "paranoid." Oliver Stone is happy to tell you differently.

And while most of our present day Eloi are worried about stuff like this, the Borgian zombies are still preparing to assimilate them.

If you can find the time, watch the documentary below. It is of poor quality, as these things go, but you will never look at the zombie regimes of the 20th Century the same way again. The Nazis and the Soviets were merely rival zombie gangs from different towns. When they begin roving again in a community near you, just remember Zombieland's first two rules:

Rule Number One: "Cardio (fatties get eaten first)."

Rule Number Two: "Double tap."

21 comments:

Dedicated_Dad said...

*MIKE*

You've REALLY mssed your chance here.

Tom Woods - in hawking his "nullification" book - has created a MASTERPIECE -- "Interview With a Zombie" -- see at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrcM5exDxcc

DD

Anonymous said...

And let's not forget collectivist economics, which is dedicated to draining the life-energy of the productive to feed the parasitic political class and their enablers. One could make a productive metaphor for collectivist economics using zombies, the animate dead that are kept alive only by the flesh of the living.

Dave
III

Defender said...

I watched the trailer. A few executions, some vary large mass graves -- the "sardine method."
I hope and pray that our young people, who grew up during glasnost and saw KGB head and Russian president Vlad Putin and George W. Bush swap dirty jokes -- yeah, W. thought ol' "Pooty-poot" was a purty good ol' boy -- will watch it and realize that people are the same pretty much everywhere, and it COULD happen here. Socialist zombies, in their fear of freedom and those who love it, call for our deaths daily, and they mean it.
For the Allied leaders to finish one fight and then allow Europe to be divided by an Iron Curtain so the Soviets could do the same and worse... FDR made the famous speech about freedom from fear, freedom from want -- and left half the world at the mercy of those horrors.
Kennedy left the Cuban freedom fighters in the lurch. Nixon made the Communist Chinese lovable again. On W's watch, well, Sudan had no natural resources we need.
People are the same, always have been, and it doesn't change. Good, bad ... the bad are often more highly motivated.

Defender said...

Oh, I watched a non-Romero remake of "Day of the Dead" last night. They took what was a haunting, poetic metaphor of the human condition -- isolation, aspiration, desperation, loyalty and betrayal, courage overcoming hopelessness -- and turned it into a by-the-numbers gorefest. I turned it off.

Chuck Martel said...

"Shaun of the Dead" is one I highly recommend.

One of the many lessons learned is that even if you have a firearm with ammo, if don't know how to use it, the probability of being eaten by zombies goes up dramatically.

Hollywood said...

The lurching Zombies are kind of funny, but once they run, it adds a whole new level of creep.

"Quarantine" was a really good Z movie, and you get to see how the government would be no help!!! ("Crazies" also fits the same model, of government being a determent, at least to the people who are not yet "undead")

Chuckb
nccmwake.org

Defender said...

Speaking of BP, Cliffs of Insanity has a great piece on the Obama administration OKing the deal exchanging the "dying" Libyan Lockerbie Pan Am bombing terrorist for big drilling rights off the coast of Libya. BP was a major Obama contributor, it says.
Shutting down drilling in American waters and shifting it to people who hate our guts, making us more dependent on our enemies AND planning to tax us for using the fossil fuel (carbon tax) which will cost us more, much more. A real coup for the elites.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the links. A lot of useful visual data for the kids. I download everything I can, and this was VERY, useful. Too easy for somebody to hit delete and thus re-educate or indoctrinate and then propagate.

Bocephus said...

I refer to any Statist Party adherent, D or R, as a zombie.

They have one thing in common - attendance in a public school. They're taught that ink on a piece of paper gives a group of people called "Congress" the permission to rapine and theft.

H. Nelson said...

The Soviet Story should be shown to all high school kids. They NEED TO KNOW that the party they are shown as peace loving and color blind is in reality evil. They need to be shown the dead bodies and brutality the democratic party evolved from.

Anonymous said...

You can also purchase Zombie range targets, if your into that. http://www.shootingrangetargets.com/Zombie-Targets-103-1000-00.htm

Anonymous said...

Many lessons for the present. Socialists are socialists, and their core beliefs only repeat, ad infinitum.

Get ready. History will repeat, but this time, it will occur in the United States.

There are worse fates than death, as this documentary clearly makes the case. Better to live and die a free person, than to suffer the fate seen in this documentary.

Lock and load.

- G
III

Defender said...

WikiLeaks. U.S. military documents say the Pakistani and Afghan governments -- you know, our allies in the war on terror -- are aiding the Taliban.
But we knew that, didn't we?

Anonymous said...

+1 for Shaun of the Dead. One point it brings up is just how different *are* the lives of those who became zombies?

About a week after we watched Zombieland, we were watching some campy yeti movie on the Sci Fi channel. After one of the characters had shot the creature, she (typically, of bad horror movies) turned her back to it, at which point my Zoe started yelling, "Double tap!! Double tap!!"

That's my little princess. :)

P.S. I asked her if she thought it was time to get her a new backpack for school, and she looked horrified. "Dad, my Three Percent patch is on this one," she protested. "Can't we just get it repaired?"

We got both straps reinforced and re-stitched, and it's ready for another tour of duty at our local government school

Anonymous said...

For those Socialists who got ObamaCare ... enjoy it ... you phuckers will deserve every bit of it and all its unintended consequences.

I want to remind you that many of those socialists/communists who followed Lenin into his Marxist revolution ... also ended up in Stalins gulags and/or had a bullet put into the back of their heads.

So with that in mind ... I wonder how some of you are going to act when one guard puts a gun to your head and tells you to get on your knee's ... while another guard is telling you to open your mouth so he can piss in it ... courtesy of Stalin?

The list can go on.

Keep that in mind.

Trust me "progressives" when I tell you what you are asking for is nothing compared to what you will inevitably get from the very people you ... trusted.

"And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say goodbye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling in terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand. The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst; the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!” - The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

And this does not leave the repukocrats unscathed. Bush tried his version of health care restructuring also. Bush gave us the pathetically named PATRIOT Act. ... of which Obama also loves. Neither party has your liberty or freedom in their heart.

And remember this "patriots", the Tree of Liberty WILL BE fed by the blood of patriots AND tyrants.

Dennis308 said...

Dakota; please this is what we MUST NOT DO.

These people must be kicked out of this country and our nation cleansed of this horror of humanity, never to be allowed in this or any other nation again.

Please sir, No Cleansing Please, I pray that I can find the strength to resist and to stop any type of cleansing horror. Kick their Ass´s Yes, Defeat them so BAD that they Never want to come back for more. But PLEASE NO CLEANSING.

Educate everyone you can to what this Collectivism is really about.And those that won´t or can´t see what it is then send them away. And let them live their lives as they see fit, Just some where else other than here.

DD; funny, but all to true.

Dennis
III
Texas

Dedicated_Dad said...

Dennis: Dakota said "kicked out of our country" - I don't think he's considering mass murder, and if he is then he isn't saying so. Nobody could harbor THOSE thoughts and be a Patriot.

I honestly don't like the ramifications of "kick them out" even -- but it's pretty damn obvious that it's impossible for statism and Liberty to coexist.

McCarthy was right, if misguided. I've read years of reports from the "unamerican activities" committee, and seen how lives were ruined and careers ended without any evidence at all.

We - when the time comes - must judge only by **ACTIONS**. Liberty of thought means you can think whatever you like - but if you work to undermine the founding principles of our Republic, then you have to go. No "thought police."

DD

Concerned American said...

Alternative site with better quality:

Kitman TV

Anonymous said...

Kick them out? Not going to happen. The best that could happen is for states to pull from the union, the dollar crashes and the Feds can't fund their jack boot operations any longer.

Power would hopefully cede back to states and individuals but not until then. If not we will continue to be cornered and harrassed. Blood will flow in that instance as it already has in the past and does under the increase of our police state.

The video game Left for Dead is a great Zombie shooter. I never forget to double tap.

Felonious Maximus

Anonymous said...

Another Shaun Of The Dead vote. Hilarious. Need some good humor now days. The record throwing and "blending in" bits are too much. USMCinSC

Anonymous said...

Dennis308

We tried the education thing and discovered that we're not allowed to be there. Only one point of view is allowed and it isn't going to be ours. You might want to note the similarities between us and the film in question.

If you follow the logical progression of thought here you will come to the conclusion that the clock is ticking faster. What would you be willing to do to protect your family from what you see in this film?

Understand that they already know the answer to this question, which is why the surveillance levels are as they are. You are a counter-revolutionary and you frequent counter-revolutionary sites like the rest of us. What do you think your fate will be? Different?

They believe they have this managed but they are one miscalculation from unleashing hell. Once that happens, rules of conduct will go out the window on both sides and this was the intention all along. They have declared their intentions openly and have made war against the people and they will continue until they achieve their goals.