Hi zombies. I wasn’t sure what it was going to take for me to resume this odd hobby. When I left for the new years holiday I had been intending a much shorter hiatus, but instead when I returned I shifted my zombie obsessive tendencies toward simply tweeting instead of blogging. I felt I had written enough about zombie and the new links could stand for themselves.
There have been some big moments the past few months when I thought it was time to come back, and I will maybe try to catch up to some stories I missed in the past few months. There were two Friday the 13ths this year already. And there are continuing parallel stories of a zombie cat and zombie dog (both buried alive and crawled out, and then custody issues for who gets the animal after the veterinarian – property rights or best interest of the animal), are sort of interesting in the way they have grabbed media attention. Questions of animal consciousness remain an important part of the zombie meme set (also related to zombie vegans).
Also the Zombie Foreclosure issues rage on. There are still homeowners who are trying to negotiate with banks and the banks are still playing games. New York’s newly re-elected Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is still stumping for legislative efforts but quite honestly it’s a lot of pomp and circumstance and other than lots of pictures of run-down houses and talk of community banks buying property… I don’t know what this is about. How can we help the homeowners who are still struggling battling bank frauds from like a decade ago? It’s basically nothing exciting on this issue since 2013 when ZombieLaw wrote: “Zombie Foreclosures are Bank Fraud“. OK, that’s not true, and there are exciting zombie foreclosure developments all the time (including lots of press on the NY bill this morning), so probably I’ll write more about that later this week. I’ll have to read the bill but I’m not sure the banks aren’t still screwing the borrowers with government assistance.
And then there’s Bill Bonner still zombie’ing – this week attacking Social Security zombies, claiming social security recipients are zombies and then comparing zombies to a herpes infection (so social security recipients are diseased?), in MoneyWeek: “Social Security is braindead, but that doesn’t make us all zombies“.
There’s so much interesting zombie art (not just zombie formalism – see also Bruce La Bruce exhibiting at MoMa). And there’s zombie drug law reform efforts and the pharmaceutical’s zombie side-effects, and debts, lots of zombie debts from all sort of zombie companies. And Canadian hackers (see “Foreign hacker sentenced for first time ever in US” – involved hack of “Zombie Studios”). And zombie parasitic insects (see this zombie praying mantis). Yes, there are still so many fascinating zombies on a daily basis.
And yet, I had been contenting my zombie obsession with mere tweets and not sure when I might return to this blog, but it’s this weekend’s NYTimes that I finally has me rise from the dead. Both Paul Krugman and Maureen Dowd using the word in their respective NY Times columns. Now, I am still really not sure what the point of this ZombieLaw blog is or ever was, but mocking the NYTimes zombies has definitely been an important part. Recall ZombieLaw previously listed Maureen Dowd’s “zombies” and would tag Paul Krugman with significant frequency.
This week “zombie” is in Krugman’s headline, “Zombies of 2016“, and he repeatedly uses the term throughout his column to describe the status of current Republican politics. Starting in on zombie Chris Christie (who used to fashion himself the zombie-killer), Krugman says “a zombie went to New Hampshire” then assails the GOP primary process for adherence to false economic ideas (“classic zombie”).
Recall Krugman thinks of “zombie ideas” as “zombie lies,” and in this column he directly refers to the voodoo economics of supply-side politics. This is a important connection for zombie political rhetoric: that zombie economics is the result of voodoo … voodoo economics = supply-side economics! For Krugman, it’s the supply-side voodoo that makes zombies. And it was George H.W. Bush (the father) who helped popularize “voodoo economics” as a denigration of then candidate Ronald Reagan’s supply-side proposals in the Republican primary in 1980. See this NBC report from 1982. Bush as VP denied having ever said “voodoo economics” but it the camera can catch zombie doublespeak (be careful camera’s might also steal souls).
The voodoo connection runs through West Africa to Haiti . Recall my visit with George Pfau to the African Burial Grounds, a Federal property with voodoo symbols. But note that the George Romero and the modern fast zombies have transcended the voodoo roots, (perhaps with the aid of computer technology?)
Meanwhile, in Maureen Dowd’s column, “Beware Our Mind Children” is promotions for “Ex Machina“, a new movie written by, Alex Garland, who previously wrote “28 Days Later”. So Dowd’s zombie reference was sort of obligatory, and we all know zombies and robots are well-connected ideas in terms of automaticity, worker-slavery and mindlessness (coincidentally interesting, it’s partly a robo-signing problem causing the zombie foreclosures). Dowd asks:
what will end humanity first, zombies or robots?
and Garland responds:
We’re going to manage that perfectly without any help from zombies or robots.
Yeah…
Krugman’s column also concludes with a question, asking:
why has the Republican Party experienced a zombie apocalypse?
…
Whatever the reasons, the result is clear. Pundits will try to pretend that we’re having a serious policy debate, but, as far as issues go, 2016 is already set up to be the election of the living dead.
And, Forbes still loves zombies, quickly responding to Krugman with: “Paul Krugman’s Zombie Social Security Reform Idea” by Tim Worstall.
Consider also from The National: “Zombie facts that pose as real science” by Robert Matthews discusses why false facts don’t die.
So yeah, it’s a political circus, a rhetorical mess of zombie facts, so look out zombies, ’cause like Arnold in “Maggie”, we be back… to, ya know, save the children from the future we’ve created for ourselves. I’m not promising to be back forever, this may just be a last hurrah at the end of the zombie movie when the monster rises one last time. Be sure to also keep watching the @Lawzombie twitter feed too, because there will surely still be more zombie links than I will blog.
