Tag: Zombies

On Black Friday, the Hologram Is Revealed

Today's Teresas are driven to ecstasy by commodities
Today’s Teresas are driven to ecstasy by commodities

W.J. Astore

It’s Black Friday: shop ’til you drop!  I watch my share of TV (mainly sports), and this week I’ve been subjected to a bumper crop of commercials showing me that my happiness–even my life–depends on buying more and more stuff.  People on these commercials experience paroxysms of pleasure when they save a few dollars on sweaters or shoes or electronic gizmos (probably all made in China).  Thank goodness I stopped watching morning “news” shows and other infotainment, which simply reinforce the drive to consume like gormless zombies.

Speaking of zombies, my favorite scene from the “Walking Dead” series came in Season 1 when our intrepid heroes are hiding in a department store among the racks of merchandise as hordes of zombies press against the doors, fighting desperately to gain access so they can consume some choice brains.  What a telling visual metaphor for brainless consumption!

As usual, Joe Bageant knew the score.  If you haven’t read his work, I strongly urge you to read “Deer Hunting with Jesus” or “Waltzing at the Doomsday Ball.”  From the latter:

In effect, the economic superstate generates a superhologram that offers only one channel–the shopping channel–and one sanctioned collective national experience in which every aspect is monetized and reduced to a consumer transaction.  The economy becomes our life, our religion, and we are transfigured in its observance.  In the absence of the sacred, buying becomes a spiritual act conducted by satellites in outer space via bank transfers.  All things are purchasable and, indeed, access to anything of value is through purchase–even mood and consciousness, through psychopharmacology, to suppress our anxiety or enhance sexual performance, or cyberspace linkups to porn, palaver, and purchasing opportunities.  But, most of all, the hologram generates and guides us.

Through advertising and marketing, the hologram combs the fields of instinct and human desire, arranging our wants and fears in the direction of commodities or institutions.  No longer are advertising and marketing merely propaganda, which is all but dead.  Digitally mediated brain experience now works far below the crude propaganda zone of influence, deep in the swamps of the limbic brain, reengineering and reshaping the realms of subjective human experience…

Now, as walking advertisements for Nike and the Gap or Jenny Craig, and living by the grace of our Visa cards, we have become the artificial collective product of our corporately “administrated” modern state economy.  Which makes us property of the government.

Bageant, from another essay: “The media have colonized our inner lives like a virus.  The virus is not going away. The commoditization of our human consciousness is probably the most astounding, most chilling, accomplishment of American culture.”

Amen, Joe.  One thing that strikes me from the commercials I’ve seen: the depictions of people as they purchase that commodity they hold so dearly.  Their expressions are akin to religious or sexual ecstasy.  The message is simple: Here is your god.  Here is your loved one.  Here is your life. This commodity–buy it–now.  Rapture!

And that’s the true blackness of Black Friday.

Fear and Monsters

Fear is the mind-killer (From the movie, "Dune")
Fear is the mind-killer (From the movie, “Dune”)

W.J. Astore

Tom Engelhardt has a stimulating article at TomDispatch on the many monsters stalking us, both real and imagined.  The imagined ones we can deal with; the real ones, well, not so much.  As Engelhardt notes:

“we’re living in a country that my parents would barely recognize.  It has a frozen, riven, shutdown-driven Congress, professionally gerrymandered into incumbency, endlessly lobbied, and seemingly incapable of actually governing.  It has a leader whose presidency appears to be imploding before our eyes and whose single accomplishment (according to most pundits), like the website that goes with it, has been unraveling as we watch.  Its 1% elections, with their multi-billion dollar campaign seasons and staggering infusions of money from the upper reaches of wealth and corporate life, are less and less anybody’s definition of ‘democratic.’”

We’ve up-armored our country and our nightmares even as we’ve downsized our jobs and our dreams.  The worst nightmare of all, Engelhardt notes, is our continued trashing of the planet in a drive for corporate profits tied to fossil fuel extraction and consumption.  We may be making our planet a hell-hole, but it’s hell in slow motion.  And since our corporate sponsors are telling us to look away, we hardly notice the descent, even as it gets just a little warmer every day …

“However nameless it may be, tell me the truth,” Engelhardt asks: “Doesn’t the direction we’re heading in leave you with the urge to jump out of your skin?”

Yes, it does.  Our real fears are not as Hollywood-ready as vampires or zombies or velociraptors, but they’re equally as frightening and immobilizing.  Fears like keeping our jobs, paying the rent or mortgage, not getting an illness that may bankrupt us.

Fear is indeed something to fear.  “Fear is the only darkness,” as Master Po explains to the young Kwai Chang Caine in “Kung Fu.”  “Fear is the mind-killer,” as Frank Herbert wrote in “Dune.”  “Quite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it?  That’s what it is to be a slave,” explains the doomed replicant in “Blade Runner,” memorably played by Rutger Hauer.

Today, our fears run at fever pitch.  In movies and on TV, they take the form of zombies, vampires, and other “terrorists” out to destroy us.  But in real life, our fears are more mundane, even as we’re distracted from the true vampires and zombies – those among us who mindlessly consume without ever reaching satiation.

How are we kept distracted?  Because we’re taught that voracious “monsters” are really superheroes.  We inhabit a world turned upside down in which victims (the homeless, the jobless, the desperate) are portrayed as despoilers even as zombie capitalists are celebrated for voraciously munching their way through America’s wealth.

What keeps us in line?  Our fear.  Fear keeps us in the dark.  Fear numbs our minds.  Fear slaps us in chains.

Change – if it comes to America – will come when Americans master their fear.  But before that, we must recognize the true monsters.

The Perils of Zombie Education

Image: Jared Rodriguez / Truthout
Image: Jared Rodriguez / Truthout

Also at Truthout.com

As a history professor with a B.S. degree in mechanical engineering teaching at a technical college after 20 years’ service in the US Air Force, I’m sympathetic to education that connects to the world of doing, of making, of providing goods and services to consumers. Yet we must not allow education itself to become a consumable. When education becomes a commodity and students become consumers, the result is zombie education. Often characterized in practice by the mindless munching of digestible bits of disconnected PowerPoint factoids, zombie education leads to more mindless consumption of commodities after graduation, a result consistent with greed-driven capitalism, but not with ideal-driven democracy.

Mindless consumption is bad enough. But zombies are also mindless in political contexts, which is why totalitarian systems work so hard to create them as a preliminary to taking power. Think here of Hannah Arendt’s critique of Adolf Eichmann as a man devoured by the demands of his job (the extermination of the Jews in Europe), a cliché-ridden careerist who was unable to think outside the constraints of Nazi party ideology.

But let’s return to the economic bottom line. In his signature role as Gordon Gekko, Michael Douglas in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010) describes the latest generation of college graduates as NINJAs (no income, no jobs, no assets). Basically, they’re screwed, he says. This may even be true if you view a college diploma strictly as a passport to a vocation that pays well.

But true education is much more than that. True education is transformative. It’s soul-enriching and soul-engaging. It opens alternative paths to living that don’t begin and end at the workplace. It measures personal fulfillment in ways that aren’t restricted to take-home pay.

Higher education is (or should be) about enriching your life in terms that are not exclusively financial. It’s about the betterment of character and the development of taste. It’s about becoming a savvier citizen whose appreciation of, and dedication to, democracy is keener and more heartfelt.

And that’s precisely why it’s worthy of greater public funding. State and federal funding of higher education must be restored to previous levels precisely because an informed and empowered citizenry is the best guarantor of individual freedoms as well as communal well-being.

Education, in short, is not a commodity – it’s the commonwealth.

But today’s view of education is often narrowly focused on individual profit or vocational training or STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics), a bias that carries with it class-based strictures. Students are told it’s OK to be selfish but also that their role is to be consumers, not creators; conformists, not dreamers.

Powerful institutions at local, state, and federal levels share this bias. Educators currying favors from business and industry spout bromides about “competitiveness.” Business leaders address graduates and tell them the secrets to success in life are a positive attitude, punctuality and smart clothes.

If we view education as an ephemeral commodity in a world of goods, so too will our students. They’ll lump it together with all the other trivial, product-based, corporate-funded information with which they’re constantly bombarded. Critical thinking? Informed citizenship? Boring. And could you shut up a minute? I need to take this call/send this tweet/update my Facebook.

Staring vacantly into electronic gizmos as they shuffle to and from class, students are already halfway to joining the zombie ranks. Let’s not infect them further with commodity-based zombie education.

What is to be done? History is a guide. Consider the words of John Tyndall, eminent rationalist and promoter of science. In “An Address to Students” in 1868, or 145 years ago, Tyndall opined that:

“The object of [a student’s] education is, or ought to be, to provide wise exercise for his capacities, wise direction for his tendencies, and through this exercise and this direction to furnish his mind with such knowledge as may contribute to the usefulness, the beauty, and the nobleness of his life.”

Of course, back then such an education was reserved for young men. We congratulate ourselves today for including the “her” with the “his,” of promoting “diversity,” usually defined in racial or gender or ethnic terms.

But what about the diversity of a college education that embraces, not just hardheaded utility or the politics of identity, but ideals about the beauty and nobility of life? What about the fostering of judgment, the ability to go beyond prefabricated, binary thought processes of ideology to a form of thinking that can assess the value and significance of events, situations, and choices on their own terms?

But zombies don’t care about beauty or nobility. They’re not worried about making judgments, especially moral ones. All they want is to consume. Defined by their appetite, they are hollow people, easily led – and easily misled.

As long as we market education as a consumable, the zombies will come. They may even find ways to pay their tuition. Just don’t expect them to de-zombify upon graduation. Just don’t expect them to become noble citizens inspired by, and willing to stand up for, the beauty of true democracy.

W.J. Astore