Just watched another zombie movie last night, Zombieland. Not an extremely serious movie as most of them are not.
I’ve seen some genuinely good zombie stories and shows, played for camp or otherwise – Last of Us, 28 Days Later, Sean of the Dead, Return of the Living Dead.
But mostly Zombie movies were just silly fun for me. Night of the Living Dead cracked me up, not sure if intentionally. “They’re coming for you Barbara!”
Philosopher and cognitive scientist John Vervaeke has taught me to look at zombies in a more serious light. The fact that they’ve been so prevalent tells us that Western culture is undergoing a meaning crisis.
Zombies in Western Culture A Twenty-First Century Crisis, by John Vervaeke, Christopher Mastropietro and Filip Miscevic laid out the case pretty well.
The zombie is a mythical creature that represents meaninglessness. They don’t make sense, but it doesn’t matter you have to escape them. They shouldn’t exist and yet they do. They’re mindless. The wander about without purpose or agency.
And what do zombies eat? Brains. Interesting symbology. They have no minds of their own, but consume and destroy the minds of others. Pointless. Like trying to learn by eating a book.
They’re also a perversion of the Resurrection, which seems to signal a loss of belief that Christianity can explain the world. They rise from the grave, but they’re still dead. It’s an apocalypse where the world ends, but nothing is revealed.
I think it’s a good diagnosis for what’s wrong with the world. So many incompatible world views, arguments over definitions, unable to agree on what’s right or wrong, good or bad.
It might be a prescription for how to fix it. I’ve discovered several people on YouTube who seem to be working on the problem, reverse engineering Western Culture to find useful wisdom paths, from the likes of Socrates that may have been lost.
They’ve been having discussions they call Dialectic into Dialogos to tease out deeper levels of truth from one another. They’re fascinating to watch. Kind of like something we all used to do called have conversations, but collaborative.
This is an example of how Dialectic Into Dialogos works. I’m not sure what will come out of what they do, but I respect them for trying. At the very least, I find their discussions enlightening and inspiring.
Just watched all seasons of Peaky Blinders and it occurs to me: Society and the criminal world are really mirror images of one another. They have a symbiotic relationship, all of it to do with avoiding the tax man.
The underworld tries to transform dirty money into wealth, and the system tries to make sure dirty money stays dirty and wealth stays at the top.
Where people can’t find jobs, there will be dirty money. If the only money you have is dirty, the only way you can build wealth is by washing it. You can’t buy property if you can’t pay taxes.
That’s why organized crime exists. Organized criminals are better able to wash their money through seemingly legitimate ways and get away with it. It allows them to turn dirty money into wealth. Witness all those glass towers in Miami.
Peaky Blinders is set in England, but it puts me in mind of Gangs of New York. Different factions of the underworld fighting over slices of the pie. I think just about every ethnic group in America has had some kind of mafia.
The mainstream and its favored tribes are less likely to need a mafia because it has the police and the law. The legitimately wealthy get to use police to fight their battles with the ambitious poor and keep the illusion of clean hands.
Gangsters tend to get themselves killed or thrown in prison and don’t get to taste the aristocrat’s life for long, but as long as their operations are running successfully, they’re paying the guy who took the deal and that business hires people.
That’s where the real trickle down happens. The slow conversion of dirty money into small amounts of clean money.
People have been gambling, paying for sex and doing drugs for as long as anyone has kept track. People at the top, and just below the top, and every level below the top will find a way to get those things no matter what the law says.
Where there is dirty money, there will be laundering. Where there is laundering, the system will try to stop it. By cracking down harder or by seizing the means of corruption. Then all that vice starts with clean money and produces clean tax money.
It may capture the means and turn it into something taxable. That’s why we have state lotteries instead of the numbers racket. It’s why Vegas and all those mini-Vegases exist.
It’s why everybody uses plastic now, instead of folding money. The system got tired of all that papermoney disappearing off the grid and producing wealth outside the system.
But capitalism’s evil shadow always finds a way. Now we have cryptocurrency, so the black market can convert those digital ones and zeros into clean currency.
The system can “declare war” and crack down harder, but that raises the price, which just makes it easier to bribe people. With enough money and potential for violence, every means of enforcement can be corrupted.
Like Tommy Shelby says in Peaky Blinders, “Everyone is a whore, we just sell different parts of ourselves.” Some people sell their bodies, some sell their integrity.
Why wouldn’t it go that way? These are our values. Wealth trumps everything. We don’t mind when billionaires thumb their noses at the law and get away with it. They’re our heroes. We watch them on TV.
We don’t want to stop them. We want to be them.
Which is why capitalism’s shadow won’t go away no matter how strict our society gets. All that wealth stuck behind that logjam at the top. All the rest of us who can observe that with a good work ethic, you’re lucky to pay the rent, much less get wealthy.
All that mess is exactly what Jesus was talking about when he said “money is the root of all evil.” We’ve made the act of getting rich into a virtue in itself, so what else should we expect?
….
BTW, if you think the above is a conspiracy theory about a shady cabal making all that happen, you don’t have enough imagination. I’m way crazier than that. I’m saying the system has a mind of its own. I’m saying it’s alive. And we live inside it.
Currents of noise and potential sweep past in the accretion disk. Might be’s and might-have-beens. Glittering distractions.
And occasionally, an insight.
This is important, I think. This could lead somewhere. This could lead to the truth. But it’s bigger than me and it will take time and effort.” So I put it down, just for a while. And scroll through the feeds till I’m ready to take it on.
When I reach for it again… it’s gone like a dream.
Interesting concept, isn’t it? Dirty money? It starts as an innocent dollar bill, or digital dollar. Use it in a crime and it becomes dirty. It gets laundered through various trickery or seized by law enforcement and suddenly it’s clean again and goes back into the system.
It made it past the gauntlet, the system gets to count it. Clean, dirty, clean. It’s the same dollar. If it was digital there weren’t even any germs involved. Then on the other side, legitimate parts of the system don’t have to be moral, just legal.
A large corporation can do all kinds of harm, exploit people, destroy the place they live. But because it was legal, it’s clean money.
I wonder how it would feel to be a dollar with a conscience? Pretty confusing I imagine.
BTW, sometime read A Simple Plan, about a regular guy who thought he could handle a duffel bag full of dirty money. Gave me nightmares for days. Interesting now I think of it that his family had lost the farm to the bank. The Edge always goes to the house
When I saw Cloverfield for the first time, I knew what it was really about: 9-11. Something deadly and totally incomprehensible happened and there was nothing the characters could do but fight for their lives.
The illusion of safety collapsed and upended reality. Exactly the way I felt when I saw tower two fall. I woke up in the back of the newspaper office where I was staying till I could find a place to rent. I heard them talking about the World Trade Center on my clock radio and couldn’t understand what was happening.
I went into the little room where they sold satellite TV subscriptions. And saw the tower, smoke billowing out. I thought, what kind of angle is this? Where is other tower? Then it collapsed. Then a plane struck the Pentagon and another one crashed when the passengers overpowered the hijackers.
It was like in that movie. Things just kept coming at us that just didn’t seem possible. I was like everyone else, in shock, angry, confused, not knowing what to expect.
Notice in Cloverfield how you can’t really get a bead on what kind of creature is attacking. It’s like a mish mash of monsters from different movies – Godzilla, Alien, War of the Worlds.
That’s how 9-11 affected America’s psyche. We had this threat that we never expected, that wasn’t supposed to be possible. Reality got turned on its head and the country behaved like a wounded animal.
For a long time after that, most of my news coverage involved various events by country folk showing their patriotism. So many American flags. Any other time I would have thought it was over the top, but I understood.
We wanted to feel like we had some kind of power. It was something you could do: Be super patriotic, and ready to support whatever might prevent something like 9-11 from happening again.
I remember how it felt. I never displayed any yellow ribbons, but I supported the wars we got into. Until I didn’t. Looking back it seems like pure insanity. Which in a way it was. 9-11 shook us up. Threatened our concept of reality.
I don’t know if we ever really got over it. We found out we are vulnerable and we still don’t know the nature of the monster.
The internet squabble over Oliver Anthony’s song “Rich Men North of Richmond” really got under my skin. I already wrote about him, but I wasn’t done. I couldn’t write about anything else until I got it out of my system.
I’ve always been a contrarian. Sometimes I stick up for the wrong people and get egg on my face. Maybe it’ll happen again. But I’d rather be a contrarian for undeserved empathy than undeserved cruelty. I hate having to choose between mobs.
“I Want to Go Home” really gets me in the feels, with that line about the grandkid selling the family farm and seeing “only got concrete growin’ around.” People in the country do get attached to the land. The system doesn’t like that.
Instead of dwelling on what Oliver Anthony’s agenda was, I decided to take a deeper dive and see what I thought of him as a musician. I’m a fan of his type of music. Based on the dozen or so very good song he’s been uploading for the past three years, I don’t see an agenda. As far as I can tell he’s just been following the muse and got caught up in other peoples’ fight.
This comment on his Facebook page doesn’t sound something a would-be culture warrior would say: “I HATE the way the Internet has divided all of us. The Internet is a parasite, that infects the minds of humans and has their way with them. Hours wasted, goals forgotten, loved ones sitting in houses with each other distracted all day by technology made by the hands of other poor souls in sweat shops in a foreign land.”
I can’t help but notice he’s Appalachian. A culture that has influenced a lot of America, but doesn’t seem to get much respect. There are reasons why he and his fans think the way they do.
She talks about exploitation by the timber, mining and pharmaceutical industries.
What I found interesting was her explanation of how money-based economies and governments try to urge people from land-based cultures into the city, and how that has resulted in a superiority complex among city dwellers and internalized shame among country folk.
Oliver Anthony – Rich Man’s Gold. I like the tone of this song. “You weren’t born to just pay bills and die…”
As for those lines about welfare… I watched his Joe Rogan interview and he said something interesting about “Rich Men North of Richmond.” He didn’t think it was his best song and was only half-finished when Radio WV chose it. He finished the second half in a hurry.
So I think he meant what he said, though not necessarily with any ill intent. It’s pretty much middle of the road thinking where he lives. I had similar views as a rural Texan, and I was a lot more liberal than the average Republican.
Why don’t people from Oliver Anthony’s demographic find progressives convincing?
It comes down to something Kingsolver said. “We will only take information from people we trust…. so if you open a conversation with ‘you bonehead’ the conversation is over.” In other words, they don’t trust the the messenger, so they don’t trust the message.
City culture is the mainstream culture of America. Most of our media comes from cities. But that’s not the only culture. People in the countryside don’t feel like city people aren’t on their side.
So they don’t trust what the mainstream says. That’s how the rich men north and south of Richmond are able to fool them. They pretend to care. If those rich men won’t lift a finger to help, at least they’re on the correct “side.”
What would it look like if progressives actually did care?
In the South, there is a custom where you want to have a little conversation first, before you get down to business. You talk about your kids, your dogs, your favorite music. Anything to establish a connection. I think that custom would come in very handy on social media.
If you dislike the messaging in “Rich Men North of Richmond,” and you find someone who likes it, what if you tried to make a connection instead of writing them off? You liked his voice, or maybe you like some of his other songs? Start there and maybe they’ll care what else you have to say.
Oliver Anthony – Ain’t Got a Dollar. I can vibe with this song. There is value in living on the land near where you grew up, instead of moving all over to chase a dollar.
Just finised Nova Swing, book two in M. John Harrison’s Kefahuchi Tract trilogy.
Also loved the first book, Light, winner of the 2002 James Tiptree Award. It feels so nice to lose yourself in a good novel. Doesn’t happen enough these days.
No spoilers. I’m not going to review it so much as talk about what it made me think about. I like books that make me think.
The series revolves around a naked singularity called the Kefahuchi Tract, a black hole without an event horizon, around which incompatible and impossible physical laws are possible.
Nova Swing takes place on a planet where part of the Kefahuchi Tract landed, creating “the event site,” a mysterious no man’s land that both terrifies and fascinates, though people have becoming comfortable living next to it. There is an underground industry of lawbreakers who conduct tours and hunt for treasure.
All forbidden activities, due to the risk of invasion by “daughters,” entities that can turn people into alien goo. Creepy scenario, yet seemingly taken in stride by the society in the story. With the exception of law enforcement, determined to keep things from getting out of the event site.
It got me thinking, this is a trope in science fiction isn’t it? “Forbidden zones.” Places that don’t follow the rules. Places that threaten your sanity. Places that threaten to invade the outside world and make it incomprehensible. Places some are still driven to enter. Places that swallow people.
This one reminds me a lot of the Zone in Roadside Picnic by Arkady Strugatsky and Boris Strugatsky, a forbidden area exhibiting strange properties, where “stalkers” hunt for extraterrestrial artifacts they can sell.
In that book the theme seems to be that some things are just beyond understanding.
Moderat – The Mark (from the Annihilation soundtrack). Would you look into that thing? I think I would.
Vandermeer’s Annihilation is another one. A place that distorts nature, causes cancer and insanity, turns people against one another, and takes away their identities. And still people can’t resist. The drive to solve the mystery is too strong.
I think tropes are important. They tell you something about the writer’s thoughts, as well as those of the readers (or watchers if you only consume cinematic sci fi). If I see it enough, I start to suspect it’s about all of society. John Vervaeke has a theory about that regarding zombies in Western culture.
To me, those forbidden zones represent the unconscious. More specifically, how Western culture views the unconscious. As irrational, fantastical, mystical bullshit. It’s where nightmares happen, voices that tell people to kill, perverted impulses. You don’t want to go poking around in there.
What if you found out you were evil even though you didn’t wanna be? What you’re like a werewolf, a man who becomes a monster against his will? Better to leave that stuff alone, try to be disciplined, stick to the tried and true, be logical, rational, science-minded, modern.
On the other hand, it’s also where inspiration happens, isn’t it? Something from the unconscious has decided to visit you. Everyone dreams of coming up with that one idea that could change everything, make you rich. Assuming you had that idea, would it be good or evil?
I don’t think it applies. Depends on what people do with it. I think we’ll generally be OK “if enough people will do their inner work,” like Carl Jung said.
The thing about ideas that could change the world… People don’t like change. It’s why society generally punishes creative people with original ideas. Some earn respect in their lifetime, but the really good ones tend to be ahead of their time. Most of the time it’s either bully, exploit or ignore.
There’s a line in Nova Swing that speaks to that. “All crimes are crimes against continuity—continuity of life, continuity of ownership, systems continuity.”
I wonder if the message I’m getting from Devo’s song “Freedom of Choice” is the one they intended? They were prescient in a lot of ways – the whole concept of devolution seems to be panning out doesn’t it? So maybe…
I wonder if the paradox of choice occurred to them? The fact that once you get more than a certain number of choices, you actually have no choice at all. “Freedom of Choice is what you got. Freedom from choice is what you want.”
I always took that as a criticism of complacent Americans. Why do we let the powerful run over us the way we do? But that line, about the dog with two bones, “He’d lick the one, he’d lick the other. He went in circles, he dropped dead…”
I think it’s just a normal reaction to choice. What if the dog had to choose the best bone out of a trillion? That’s what we’re dealing with now. I’ve heard John Vervaeke use the term “combinatorially explosive” to describe the blast of sensory input human consciousness has to navigate.
A big part of what we do on a daily basis is ignore as much as we can and choose what we must, because otherwise we’d be unable to function. And still it’s too much for our brains.
Ideally you open your mind wide enough so you can choose the best option, but if the input continues to increase, at some point you get overwhelmed.
Things were complex enough in 1980 when that song came out. I always considered Devo to be when the modern age began. Now we have the Internet. I was blown away by all the choices at first. I discovered so much music, so many points of view I hadn’t considered.
But now I can see where it was all headed: Too. Many. Choices. Internet, it’s enough to melt your brain. You only have so much time and energy. So what do you do? Choose someone, or a collection of someones, to make choices for you.
You can still find enough variety in that narrow band of choices that it can feel like you’re getting the whole picture. Or as much of it as you need. But people you trust to make up your mind for you are in the same situation. So what are you likely to get? Choices that benefit them.
Too bad this movie came out during the Pandemic. More people should’ve seen it. I discovered it at just the right time for me.
I was walking in a little park with my wife not long after the Great Texas Freeze of 2021. Just a well-kept park with grass and a few trees. The city was recovering and the weather was nice again. The sun was setting and it was glorious.
Suddenly I felt like I was in the movie Coco. Everything felt very Mexican, then very Aztec. There were hidden symbols everywhere. I was a white guy in a quiet neighborhood – and an Indian from Mexico on a sacred quest.
The shrooms were kicking in. Time to head home.
The ghost of some graffiti the city had power-washed off the sidewalk popped out in 3-D. It reminded me of a goat, with a fish tail, like a mermaid. It meant something, I couldn’t figure out what.
About halfway home, a couple approached on the sidewalk, which made me nervous. Covid and the street violence on TV made me leery of people. They were Indians from India, out for a walk.
When we passed they smiled and I thought, good, they’re from a friendly tribe.
As we crossed a bridge, the sky darkened and so did my mood. I noticed how polluted and full of trash the creek was and I thought, “Blasphemy. How can we do that to our Mother?” I felt sick.
Then I wept because I wasn’t an Indian at all, or really anything. I was a white man from the country, living in a city full of concrete and asphalt. I didn’t have a tribe. I liked the culture of the city, but I didn’t belong. I missed the trees. I missed the wildlife. My wife grew up in the city and didn’t understand.
And I thought, how was that not a tribe? If you look at it that way, I’ve belonged to several over the years – rural, suburbanite, city dweller, conservative, liberal, progressive. Or anyway I tried to belong.
I hated seeing all the tribes of America at each other’s throats – when as Americans, especially white Americans, we’re all faced with the same difficult question: Who the hell are we?
I had just watched News of the World, the Tom Hanks movie about Texas during Reconstruction. Captain Kidd, Tom Hanks’ character, earns a living riding treacherous roads from town to town, reading newspaper articles to war weary citizens.
Kidd agrees to take on a twice orphaned German girl. Her parents were killed by Kiowa, who adopted her. They were then killed by Union soldiers who were busy running the Native Americans off their land. He takes her to her German relatives, but it doesn’t work out. She’s not one of them anymore.
There’s a scene where the girl wails at the Kiowa to come back as they ride across the Red River on their way to Oklahoma. But they can’t. The river is flooding. That part of her life was over forever. I felt that little girl’s pain. She had lost her connection to the earth. She’d become like us.
Those of us who come from settlers-on-other-peoples’-land have a little bit of that suffering in our hearts, whether we admit it or not. Not just because of guilt over the things our ancestors did, over slavery, over the Indians, but because of loss.
The continent modernized and towns became cities. Folks left their farms and got work in factories. They fought in modern wars. They became modern people, and they lost the earth.
The process continues as the cities devour our little towns, as the stores shutter and the populations plummet. Cities are important, the engines of our civilization. We need their culture. They’re a sanctuary for some of us. But if you ever lived outside a city you know: cities eat towns.
Leaving a town for the city wasn’t the leap that it was for settlers who left the frontier. We had running water and electricity after all. A lot of us went to college. But we lost the places where it felt like we mattered. And we’re that much further from the earth.
Some of us try to compromise, move to the suburbs, buy big trucks, listen to country music and pretend it’s about us, but we know deep down it isn’t, or the trucks wouldn’t be so big. The country is not our world anymore.
The machine ate us.
It wasn’t the mushroom trip I would have chosen. I wouldn’t call it fun. My wife certainly didn’t. But it was exactly what I needed.
Somehow remembering the Tom Hanks movie made me feel better. Captain Kidd was the Mister Rogers of the West, I thought. He couldn’t fix the world’s pain or his own, but reading those stories reminded people about life, about being human. It helped.
Not to be naive. Humans can be evil. Some of us have been leaning into it, but it’s good to be reminded of the other side of humanity: the humor, the art and the music, the way we push on when things get rough. You can always find the humanity if you look for it.
Tyrone Davis – If I Could Turn Back the Hands of Time
When I screwed up in the newspaper business, I ran corrections. I hated putting out wrong information, stories with typos or missing jumps. You might see them, you might not. But I tried.
The Internet has changed the whole concept of corrections. I’ve already made a few mistakes on this blog that I went back and fixed. I try to get to it before anyone catches it, but I always wonder. How many people saw both versions and are questioning their memories right now?
The Mandela Effect is such an interesting conspiracy theory. People claim to remember Mandela dying in prison instead of going on to become president of South Africa. Evidence for Doctor Who? If a time traveler tweaked the past what would happen to our memories? If you remembered something from another timeline, how could you ever prove it?
Memory is pretty fallible. I remember things wrong sometimes, who was there, who said what. But I don’t remember people attributing that to time travel until relatively recently.
It occurs to me the popularity of that idea – other than the fact it’s a fun theory – might have to do with the character of the Internet. Articles and social media comments disappear, giving people the opportunity to say “I never said that.”
Even on Wikipedia, which has a pretty good reputation for backing up its content, links to websites that no longer exist. Did that article exist and can you prove it? AI complicates things even further. I understand ChatGPT has been caught citing articles that never existed.
Kinda creepy isn’t it? Did I really see the thing or is it a figment of my imagination? Makes me wonder what that’s doing to society, that already disagrees over so many things.
Call me old fashioned, but I do believe reality has a ground floor and truth exists. Figuring out what those things are is another matter. It’s hard enough to do as it is. I’m afraid it’s going to get harder.
Late Boomer's Den 
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