Zombie Politics and Other Late Modern Monstrosities in the Age of Disposability by Henry Giroux.

[sinkingfeeling]

This is wordy, but describes what is happening in this country with the teabaggers and the politicians and pundits that support them.

http://www.truthout.org/111709Giroux

This is a politics where the undead, or more aptly, the living dead, rule and rail against any institution, set of values, and social relations that embrace the common good or exhibit compassion for the suffering of others. Zombie politics supports megacorporations that cannibalize the economy, feeding off taxpayer dollars while undercutting much-needed spending for social services. The vampires of Wall Street reach above and beyond the trajectories of traditional politics, exercising an influence that has no national or civic allegiance, displaying an arrogance that is as unchecked as its power is unregulated. As Maureen Dowd has pointed out, one particularly glaring example of such arrogance can be found in Lloyd Blankfein's response to a reporter's question when he asked the chief of Goldman Sachs if "it is possible to make too much money."<6> Blankfein responded by insisting, without irony, that he, and I presume his fellow Wall Street vampires, were "doing God's work."<7> A response truly worthy of one of the high priests of voodoo economics who feels no remorse and offers no apology for promoting a global financial crisis while justifying a bloated and money-obsessed culture of greed and exploitation that has caused enormous pain, suffering and hardship for millions of people. Unfortunately, victim to their own voodoo economics, the undead along with their once barely breathing financial institutions keep coming back, even when it appears that the zombie banks and investment houses have failed one last time, with no hope of once again wreaking their destruction upon society.

Zombie ideologies proliferate like the breathing, blood-lusting corpses in the classic "Night of the Living Dead." They spew out toxic gore that supports the market as the organizing template for all institutional and social relations, mindlessly compelled, it seems, to privatize everything and aim invective at the idea of big government but never at the notion of the bloated corporate and militarized state. Zombie culture hates big government, a euphemism for the social state, but loves big corporations and is infatuated with the ideology that, in Zombieland, unregulated banks, insurance companies and other megacorporations should make major decisions not only about governing society but also about who is privileged and who is disposable, who should live and who should die. Zombie politics rejects the welfare state for a hybridized corporate and punishing state. Just as it views any vestige of a social safety net as a sign of weakness, if not pathology, its central message seems to be that we are all responsible for ourselves and that the war of all against all is at the core of the apocalyptic vision that makes zombie politics both appealing as a spectacle and convincing as a politics. Zombie violence and policies are everywhere backed by an army of zombie economic advisers, lobbyists and legislators, all of whom seem to revel in spreading the culture of the undead while feasting on the spread of war, human suffering, violence and catastrophe across the United States and the larger globe.

[juno jones]

1. K&R! n/t