[THS] Henry A. Giroux: Revenge of the Zombies: Palin, Beck...

[The Harder Stuff in news and commentary]

http://www.truthout.org/revenge-zombies-palin-beck-limbaugh-and-return-dark-times59952

Revenge of the Zombies: Palin, Beck, Limbaugh and the Return of Dark Times

Wednesday 02 June 2010

by: Henry A. Giroux, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed


[H]e had found the bridge with which to span the abyss that yawns between the 'no
longer and not"' yet of history, between the "no longer" of the old laws and "not yet"
of the new saving word, between life and death: "Not quite here but yet at hand;
that is how it has sounded and how it would sound." -Hannah Arendt


Armies of the Hyper-Dead

In the world of popular culture, zombies seem to be everywhere as evidenced by the
relentless slew of books, movies, video games and comics. From the haunting "Night
of the Living Dead" to the comic movie "Zombieland," the figure of the zombie has
captured and touched something unique in the contemporary imagination. But the
dark and terrifying image of the zombie with missing body parts, oozing body fluids
and an appetite for fresh, living, human brains does more than feed the mass
marketing machines that prey on the spectacle of the violent, grotesque and ethically
comatose. There is more at work in this wave of fascination with the grotesquely
walking hyper-dead than a Hollywood appropriation of the dark recesses and
unrestrained urges of the human mind. The zombie phenomenon is now on display
nightly on television alongside endless examples of destruction unfolding in real time.
Such a cultural fascination with proliferating images of the living hyper-dead and
unrelenting human catastrophes that extend from a global economic meltdown to the
earthquake in Haiti to the ecological disaster caused by the oil spill in the Gulf of
Mexico signal a shift away from the hope that accompanies the living to a politics of
cynicism and despair. The macabre double movement between the living dead and
those alive who are dying and suffering cannot be understood outside of the casino
capitalism that now shapes every aspect of society in its own image. A casino
capitalist zombie politics views competition as a form of social combat, celebrates war
as an extension of politics and legitimates a ruthless social Darwinism in which
particular individuals and groups are considered simply redundant, disposable -
nothing more than human waste left to stew in their own misfortune - easy prey for
the zombies who have a ravenous appetite for chaos and revel in apocalyptic visions
filled with destruction, decay, abandoned houses, burned out cars, guttered
landscapes and trashed gas stations.

The 21st century zombies no longer emerge from the grave; they now inhabit the
rich environs of Wall Street and roam the halls of the gilded monuments of greed
such as Goldman Sachs. As an editorial in The New York Times pointed out, the new
zombies of free-market fundamentalism turned "the financial system into a casino.
Like gambling, the transactions mostly just shifted money around. Unlike gambling,
they packed an enormous capacity for economic destruction - hobbling banks that
made bad bets, freezing credit and economic activity. Society - not the bankers -
bore the cost."[1] In this way, the zombie - the immoral, sub-Nietzschean, id-driven
"other" who is "hyper-dead," but still alive as an avatar of death and cruelty -
provides an apt metaphor for a new kind of authoritarianism that has a grip on
contemporary politics in the United States.[2] This is an authoritarianism in which
mindless self-gratification becomes the norm, and public issues collapse into realm of
privatized anger and rage. The rule of the market offers the hyper-dead an
opportunity to exercise unprecedented power in American society, reconstructing
civic and political culture almost entirely in the service of a politics that fuels the
friend/enemy divide, even as democracy becomes the scandal of casino capitalism -
its ultimate humiliation.

But the new zombies are not only wandering around in the banks, investment houses
and death chambers of high finance; they have an ever increasing presence in the
highest reaches of government and in the forefront of mainstream media. The
growing number of zombies in the mainstream media have huge financial backing
from the corporate elite and represent the new face of the culture of cruelty and
hatred. Any mention of the social state, putting limits on casino capitalism and
regulating corporate zombies puts Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh into a
state of high rage. They disparage any discourse that embraces social justice, social
responsibility and human rights. Appealing to "real" American values such as family,
God and guns, they are in the forefront of a zombie politics that opposes any
legislation or policy designed to lessen human suffering and promote economic and
social progress. As Arun Gupta pointed out, they are insistent in their opposition to
"civil rights, school desegregation, women's rights, labor organizing, the minimum
wage, social security LGBT rights, welfare, immigrant rights, public education,
reproductive rights, Medicare [and] Medicaid."[3] They spectacularize hatred and
trade in lies and misinformation. They make populist appeals to the people while
legitimating the power of the rich. They appeal to common sense as a way of
devaluing a culture of questioning and critical exchange. Unrelenting in their role as
archetypes of the hyper-dead, they are misanthropes trading in fear, hatred and
hyper-nationalism.

The human suffering produced by the walking hyper-dead can also be seen in the
nativist apoplexy resulting in the racist anti-immigration laws passed in Arizona, the
attempts to ban ethnic studies in public schools, the rise of the punishing state, the
social dumping of millions of people of color into prisons and the attempts of Tea
Party fanatics and politicians who want to "take back America" from President Barack
Obama - described in the new lexicon of right-wing political illiteracy as both an
alleged socialist and the new Hitler. Newt Gingrich joins Glenn Beck and other
members of the elite squad of the hyper-dead in arguing that Obama is just another
version of Joseph Stalin. For Gingrich and the rest of the zombie ideologues, any
discourse that advocates for social protections, easing human suffering or imagining
a better future is dismissed by being compared to the horrors of the Nazi holocaust.
Dystopian discourse and end-times morbidity rule the collective consciousness of this
group.

The "death panels" envisaged by Palin are not going to emerge from Obama's health
care reform plan, but from the toolkits the zombie politicians and talking heads open
up every time they are given the opportunity to speak. The death threats, vandalism
and crowds shouting homophobic slurs at openly gay Congressman Barney Frank
already speak to a fixation with images of death, violence and war that now grips the
country. Palin's infamous call to a gathering of her followers to "reload" in opposition
to President Obama's policies soon followed in a nationally televised press conference
with a request for the American people to embrace Arizona's new xenophobic laws
makes her one of the most prominent of the political zombies. Not only has she made
less than vague endorsements for violence in many of her public speeches, she has
cheerfully embraced the new face of white supremacy in her recent unapologetic
endorsement of racial profiling, stating in a widely reported speech, "It's time for
Americans across this great country to stand up and say, 'We're all Arizonans now.'"
[4] The current descent into racism, ignorance, corruption and mob idiocy makes
clear the degree to which politics has become a sport for zombies rather than
engaged and thoughtful citizens.[5]

The hyper-dead celebrate talk radio hatemongers such as Limbaugh, whose
fanaticism appears to pass without criticism in the mainstream media. Limbaugh
echoes the fanatics who whipped up racial hatred in Weimar Germany, the
ideological zombies who dissolved the line between reason and distortion-laden
propaganda. How else to explain his claim "that environmentalist terrorists might
have caused the ecological disaster in the gulf"?[6] The ethically frozen zombies that
dominate screen culture believe that only an appeal to self-interest motivates people -
a convenient counterpart to a culture of cruelty that rebukes, if not disdains, any
appeal to the virtues of a moral and just society. They smile at their audiences while
collapsing the distinction between opinions and reasoned arguments. They report on
Tea Party rallies while feeding the misplaced ideological frenzy that motivates such
gatherings, but then refuse to comment on rallies all over the country that do not
trade in violence or spectacle. They report uncritically on Islam bashers, such as the
radical, right-wing, radio host Michael Savage, as if his ultra-extremist racist views are
a legitimate part of the American mainstream. In the age of zombie politics, there is
too little public outrage or informed public anger over the pushing of millions out of
their homes and jobs, the defunding of schools and the rising tide of homeless
families and destitute communities. Instead of organized, massive protests against
casino capitalism, the American public is treated to an endless and arrogant display
of wealth, greed and power. Armies of zombies tune in to game and reality TV
shows, transfixed by the empty lure of celebrity culture.

The roaming armies of celebrity zombie intellectuals work hard to fuel a sense of
misguided fear and indignation toward democratic politics, the social state and
immigrants - all of which is spewed out in bitter words, and comes terribly close to
inciting violence. Zombies love death-dealing institutions, which accounts for why
they rarely criticize the bloated military budget and the rise of the punishing state
and its expanding prison system. They smile with patriotic glee as automated drones
kill innocent civilians - conveniently dismissed as collateral damage - and the torture
state rolls inexorably along in Afghanistan and in other hidden and unknown sites.
The slaughter that inevitably follows catastrophe is not new, but the current politics
of death has reached new heights and threatens to transform a weak democracy into
a full-fledged authoritarian state.

While the presence of zombies seems to dominate the news and the American
political and cultural landscape, it does not signal the end of democratic politics. In
fact, the increasing presence of the hyper-dead makes the need for resistance to
such a politics all the more obvious, especially regarding those public spheres and
institutions that produce knowledge, ideas, desires and values crucial to an aspiring
democracy. While the struggle for reclaiming the government as a responsible social
state capable of both placing limits on capital and providing protections for all
Americans has to be central to such a challenge, so does the struggle over culture as
a form of public pedagogy. The likes of Beck, Limbaugh and Palin matter not simply
because of what they say, but because of the emergence and influence of anti-
democratic institutions and the formations of capital that support them.

Power does not work simply through the control and influence of wealth, income and
resources. It also has to legitimate itself, and for that it needs to create a pedagogical
culture through which it can promote its ideologies and values. Vast right-wing
cultural apparatuses now exist in the mainstream media, on college campuses and in
the government - a kind of stealth pedagogical machine that does everything it can
to promote its political agenda. The current fiascoes in Texas and Arizona speak to
the seriousness of such a struggle as ethnic studies is banned, social studies curricula
are written so as to erase any vestige of progressive history and freedom is
sabotaged as it is abstracted from politics and reduced to the practice of
consumerism. Mythic history now combines with a notion freedom that is as
reactionary as it is depoliticizing. Zombie politics thrives on a culture of blinding
illiteracy, and for such a culture to be challenged, labor, youth, unions, and other
groups must unite over the need to address at the very least two pressing and
interrelated issues.

Effective resistance to zombie politics first requires addressing the political, economic
and cultural conditions of massive inequality produced by casino capitalism. These
conditions must be challenged in every sphere in which such injustices appear. Such
inequality is destructive of human lives and human societies, defines matters of life
and death - whose life is valued and whose life only counts as redundant and
disposable - and determines which members of society will have access to vital
resources and which ones won't. [7] This is demonstrated by the inequitable funding
of public schools and political campaigns, the poisonous influence of corporate
lobbyists in shaping legislation that benefits corporations and the rich, access to
quality health care based on wealth rather than need and the massive corrupt
financial institutions that make a mockery of democracy while providing a beachhead
for expanding inequality in every aspect of our lives.

The second most pressing issue involves the educational force of political and popular
culture. Democratic ideas cannot exist without the public spheres that make them
possible. Culture in the form of the Internet and mass media is the most powerful
influence now used by the hyper-dead to promote their zombie politics. These
spheres must be taken back. Intellectuals, parents, unions, workers, and other
concerned citizens need to reclaim those places that give the voiceless a voice, allow
those marginalized by class and race to speak and offer everyone the opportunity to
reclaim an America that currently offers them little hope in terms of a better and
more just life. This not only means using alternative media to counter the
hatemongers, the conservative foundations and right-wing radio and television, but
also organizing in churches, synagogues, mosques, union halls, and public schools in
order collectively to reclaim such institutions as democratic public spheres while
gaining the experience needed to challenge zombie pedagogy in its all of its
manifestations throughout the culture and society.

Hannah Arendt has written that there are turning points in history when "the decline
of the old, the birth of the new, is not necessarily an affair of continuity." What
emerges in this luminal space between generations, according to Arendt, is a "kind of
historical no man's land" that can only be described in terms of "no longer and not
yet."[8] Today, we are living in one of these in-between times. The looming abyss is
most obvious between the "no longer" of casino capitalism and the politics of the
hyper-dead and the "not yet," which holds the potential of a new politics to emerge
and assert the imperatives of a democracy that values trust, compassion, equality,
freedom and social justice. As Americans, we must choose now whether to fall back
into a pit of despair and death, ever-widening to contain all but the immensely rich
and powerful, or to move forward as politicized individuals and organized
communities into a future rooted in and sustained by democratic principles. The "not
yet" of this presently unknown future demands of us that we connect thoughtful
critique and outrage to a notion of realizable hope and that we heed a rallying cry for
justice against a zombie politics in which democracy has been reduced to a
graveyard for the hyper-dead.

Footnotes:

1. Editorial, "Wall Street Casino," New York Times (April 28, 2010), p. A24. Online
here.

2. Some of the ideas come from Richard Greene and K. Silem Mohammad, eds.,
"Zombies, Vampires and Philosophy: New Life for the Undead," (Chicago: Open
Court, 2010).

3. Arim Gupta, "Party of No: How Republicans and the Right have Tried to Thwart all
Social Progress, Truthout.org (May 21, 2010). www.alternet.org/story/146965

4. Jonathan J. Cooper, "We're All Arizonians Now," Huffington Post (May 15, 2010).
Online here.

5. See the excellent commentary on this issue by Frank Rich, "The Rage is not About
Health Care," New York Times (March 28, 2010), p. WK10. See also Justine Sharrock,
"The Oath Keepers: The Militant and Armed Side of the Tea Party Movement,"
AlterNet (March 6, 2010); and Mark Potok, "Rage on the Right: The Year in Hate and
Extremism," Southern Poverty Law Center Intelligence Report 137 (Spring 2010).

6. Paul Krugman, "Going to Extreme," New York Times (May 16, 2010), p. A23.

7. Göran Therborn, "The Killing Fields of Inequality," Open Democracy (April 6,
2009). Online here.

8. Hannah Arendt, "No Longer and Not Yet," in Reflections on Literature and Culture,
ed. Susannah Yong-ah Gottlieb (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), p. 121.