(no subject)

The popularity of zombies would appear to be related to political polarization. The original Invasion of the Body Snatchers movie appealed to anti-communists and anti-anti-communists alike, after all. In a democracy the inattentiveness or delusions of the populace are a sufficiently obvious danger that even the deluded and inattentive fear them in others. Each side views the other as murderous sleepwalkers - enabling abortion and death panels vs. executions and bullshit wars. And these are our own family members, and you'll never know who will turn next. Your first warning might be a ridiculous chain email. Body Snatchers was a sort of alien invasion, though. Zombies are either purposeless or derived from sinister but finally incompetent military experiments. They aren't intentional or intended. They're horrible errors doing nothing for anyone, like the liberals and the young they mislead, who will experience hedonistic burnout, valueless malaise, and then go to hell. Or like the dittoheads and in-denial racists who vote in surrogates of the richest rich, who appease their every self-flattering whim in exchange for dismantling every tax-maintained aspect of civil society, until uneducated poor whites are as permanent and wretched an underclass as the blacks and Hispanics they blame for their problems. Though they bring us down with them zombies are too obviously self-destructive to be blameable.

Whereas Vampire stock is down for everyone but Mormons and teenage girls, probably because we got a few things out of our systems across the '90s: the loudest social constructivist and evolutionary psych people fought one another to a concessive, bored draw; the ubiquity of domestic sexual assault went from unfaceably horrific revelation to symptom of depressingly intractable social failures; interracial romance went from provocative to "whatever." Homosexuality and BDSM retained their tabooey charge a bit later than these, but the mainstream's now mostly bored with even these disturbances of apparent norms. What's the Futurama line? "I can't believe the internet made sex boring"? There's been a weakening of most sexual boundary zones, and the anxieties they're shaped by and shape in turn. Not enough to make everyone happy and free forevermore, but enough to inspire apathy in most. Which, for the non-most, becomes part of that ascendant horror of widespread social mindlessness.