City of the Living Dead
Anyone covering Capitol Hill knows
that congressional hearings can be deadly — deadly boring and
deadly predictable.
But when a reported Iraq war veteran exploded into a House Armed Services Committee hearing
this month as Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta was reading his prepared
remarks, for a split second it was like a test to see if someone blinked.
Better yet, it was a test to see if anyone was human enough to respond.
One person reportedly burst out laughing, right after the veteran, who was screaming
“We murdered people! I saw what we did to people!” was dragged from
the room by security. But the rest of the chamber was silent, faces
turned stoically forward. The vet was followed by two silver-haired
antiwar women decrying the war. They were also manhandled out of the
room in short order. Seven people altogether that day were arrested
for interrupting the proceedings — one charging that the veteran had
been laughed at — while a number of others outside in the hallway chanted,
“We are the 99 percent, and we don’t support these wars!”
But like something out of a Kevin McCarthy movie, the chamber’s inhabitants impassively waited
until the would-be rabble-rousers were silenced. Aside from the reported
spark of laughter — probably born out of nervousness or condescension,
or likely both — and a couple of stolen sideways glances, the business
of war went on.
This is what the current “Occupy”
protests are up against. This is what the antiwar protesters have battled
since 2001 — a persistent indifference, which in some cases is very
real but in other ways is merely used to mask more volatile feelings:
disgust and fear of the protesters, confusion about what they stand
for, even self-loathing and regret for the passion the indifferent no longer feel
about anything outside of themselves.
The good news: According to Kevin Zeese,
founder and executive director of America
Come Home and organizer
behind the October
2011/Stop the Machine demonstrations,
which are running parallel to the Occupy D.C. protests in Washington this
month, the antiwar movement has gotten more traction than any time in
the last 10 years, particularly in Washington, the proverbial belly
of the beast.
“There’s no question, when we started
working on this [last year] we didn’t know if there would be 50 people
out here or anyone joining with us,” he told Antiwar.com. Since Occupy
Wall Street began in New York and then the launch of Occupy D.C. corresponded
with Zeese’s group’s rally to commemorate the 10-year anniversary
of the Afghanistan War on Oct. 6, “we’ve had several thousands of
people out here. This is just the beginning.”
The message, Zeese said, is resonating
with folks who might have come down to Freedom Plaza for Occupy D.C.’s
anti-corporatist agenda but understand how it all fits into the stunning
growth of the military-industrial complex over the last half-century.
Nowhere is this more explicit than in Washington, D.C.
“The dominant message is economic
insecurity, and it’s bringing people out, and people are recognizing
that the unbridled spending on weapons and on war has a big impact on
why we have this economic insecurity,” he added.
On Oct. 8, the protesters in effect shut down the Smithsonian’s
Air and Space Museum. They
were rallying against the glorification of drones and warplanes in front
of the building when a scuffle with police brought out the pepper spray
on the front steps. A right-wing provocateur instigated
the situation. More on that later.
But aside from the protests at the
Smithsonian and the Armed Services Committee, Zeese said the group has
been leading teach-ins on various aspects of war and peace, including
the enduring drum beat for war by the city’s hawks against Iran.
For obvious reasons, the antiwar theme (which at its core, is really
about America’s unrestrained post-9/11 militarism) is much more
prevalent in Washington than in New York and the many other cities that
are hosting similar
Occupy demonstrations. The question is whether Zeese and the others
can sustain any sort of focus on it as Occupy becomes more of a
political
force on the mainstream’s radar.
All Types of Zombies
Everybody knows that zombies eat brains.
George Romero set the scene in Night
of the Living Dead,
and Hollywood never looked back. Before that, zombies in movies typically
involved reanimation and mind control through so-called African-Caribbean
voodoo. In films like White
Zombie and I
Walked with a Zombie
bad actors with the magic enslaved poor mindless fools to do their bidding.
We see all types of zombies reacting to Occupy and its various manifestations. It’s not
much different from how antiwar protesters have been treated throughout
the last 10 years of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. But now
that the mainstream is actually paying attention to what is going on
in Zuccotti Park — in a way it never did for the dozens of major antiwar
protests in Washington and New York over the decade — zombiism is rampant
and quite easily discernible.
Most prevalent are the zombies talking
about and mostly criticizing the protests in language that suggests only mind control could be at work. These zombies include all manner of talking heads, political courtiers and operatives,
politicians, status-quo junkies, and haters — but also mindless corporate
newspersons who typically just put their heads down and repeat what
they’re told.
On a trip last week to the Northeast,
I was bombarded almost immediately with the charge that Occupy Wall
Street protesters were engaging in anti-Semitic chants, violent behavior,
open sex, and flagrant drug use. One man had crapped on a police car.
According to a family member, the whole thing had devolved into a dystopian
nightmare with shades of Woodstock — Woodstock
’99 that is. At the beginning — according to the evolving meme — these demonstrators might have
been well-meaning, but now the whole thing has been taken over
by anarchists and criminals.
Who, by the way, really hate America.
Surprised that I had heard none of
this before, I realized then I hadn’t been listening to the right ZRF (zombie
radio frequency), that is, any station carrying Rush Limbaugh,
or reading the correct zombie guru texts, coming in over the ether from
Andrew “Dr.
Caligari” Breitbart (a
man so righteous with the limited-government mojo, he sources
zombies whose main occupations
are to hack into private emails and feed the juice to protest-shadowing
FBI and NYPD).
I soon find the so-called “Jew go
home” frenzy was
a concoction, a well-used
sleight-of-hand to turn the movement in and against itself. The rest —
the defecation, the “free love,” the violence, the purple haze, and
the stink — turned out to be hackneyed hippiephobia delivered as
clunkily by its lesser purveyors
as a horde of zombies trying to shuffle across a bumpy country road.
But for a time it seemed to be working. Not only did it successfully
create an impression that the protests are as divisive as the rest of
Washington politics today, keeping things in manageable, us-versus-them encampments (apparently, only the Ron Paul types know better than to be hip
to that jive), but all
the fearmongering has emboldened political leaders never inclined to
support the protest to fling the worst
hate-filled rhetoric while
keeping the potentially sympathetic skittishly at bay.
So now we have the most foolish right-wing pander-zombies spewing Orwellian newspeak as casually as waving
the flag on the Fourth of July. Rep. Paul Broun, Republican from
Georgia, called the protests an “attack
on freedom” in a recent
interview from the U.S. Capitol. So he understands a demonstration of free speech to be an “attack on
freedom.” Is this not the ultimate voodoo zombification?
Swollen Svengalis
like Limbaugh and Breitbart are zombies, too — the aggressive, brain-eating
kind. They are victims of their own small single-mindedness, but like
the weirdly alert zombies in the 2004
remake of Dawn
of the Dead, they sprint for the kill just the same.
And they are clearly more focused and
agile than their slow-moving, brain-eating counterparts, those who get
disturbed and turned on to their prey by sudden noises, lights, or the
scent of blood, like in Romero’s original Night
of the Living Dead.
These zombies typically shuffle along haplessly, and violence
can usually be avoided if they aren’t aroused (see AMC’s The Walking Dead). More on these in a second.
The aggressive ones aren’t hard to
spot. They are the most wild and vicious — even gleeful— in their
attacks against the protests. For example, Limbaugh called the demonstrators
a “parade
of human debris” on Oct.
5, not long after Occupy Wall Street started surfacing in the mainstream
media. Political egoist Rep. Peter King, Republican of New York, chairman of the
House Homeland Security Committee, had no compunction racing in and
calling his own constituents a
“ragtag mob.” In recent
days, both Breitbart’s Big
Government and Tucker Carlson’s Daily
Caller have engaged in
blatantly McCarthyite tactics, not only whipping up the already berserk
voodoo zombie hordes, but getting at least one woman, so far,
fired from her job.
Remember that “standoff” between police and protesters at the Air and
Space Museum, the one where the museum “was closed Saturday after
antiwar demonstrators tried to enter the building to protest a drone
exhibit, and at least one person was pepper-sprayed”?
Turns out that Patrick Howley, an assistant
editor at the right-wing American Spectator, was the “one”
pepper-sprayed. How do we know? He
bragged that he “infiltrated” the protest and broke through police
lines in an online account
his magazine later altered (luckily, the evil liberal media caught a screen grab of the original story). But The American Spectator
editors didn’t mess with what is clearly the funniest line in the
bit:
Guess we forgot to mention “the passive-aggressive
zombie.”
These rapacious zombies look almost
virtuous compared to the slow-moving ones, however. Establishment types
— those who have “made it” and whose identities and livelihoods
depend on the corporate wheel turning in rhythm with the political
powers
and authority invested in Washington, Hollywood, and New York — are
typically
slow to bare teeth over such issues, but they smell their own lifeblood at risk now and have responded with sanctimonious lectures and smug, condescending putdowns
of the Occupy rallies.
These include people like
New York Times editor Bill Keller, who in essence said the protests are boring, and the Washington Post’s Anne Applebaum,
who claims they will
“hurt democracy.” Even
naughty Howard “King of Media” Stern, typically a beacon for the
disaffected fringe, has dismissed
the demonstrators as “foolish
dirty hippies who have no idea what is going on in the world.” But
with an estimated $400
million Sirius XM radio contract,
he certainly knows where his bread is buttered, and it’s clearly not
on the side of the rabble screaming “oligarchy!” at the base of
his penthouse tower.
But there’s good news for the non-zombies.
Despite the grim reports, you are not alone. And, according to The
Washington Post on Sunday, there has been an extraordinary collision
in the universe, and Tea Partiers and Occupiers are finally finding common ground, resisting the urge to eat each others’
brains. And don’t forget the
Marines. These guys hate zombies,
too, and they just might
be headed to a city near you. Scarier things have happened.
Happy Halloween.
Follow Kelley Vlahos on Twitter @KelleyBVlahos.
that congressional hearings can be deadly — deadly boring and
deadly predictable.
But when a reported Iraq war veteran exploded into a House Armed Services Committee hearing
this month as Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta was reading his prepared
remarks, for a split second it was like a test to see if someone blinked.
Better yet, it was a test to see if anyone was human enough to respond.
One person reportedly burst out laughing, right after the veteran, who was screaming
“We murdered people! I saw what we did to people!” was dragged from
the room by security. But the rest of the chamber was silent, faces
turned stoically forward. The vet was followed by two silver-haired
antiwar women decrying the war. They were also manhandled out of the
room in short order. Seven people altogether that day were arrested
for interrupting the proceedings — one charging that the veteran had
been laughed at — while a number of others outside in the hallway chanted,
“We are the 99 percent, and we don’t support these wars!”
But like something out of a Kevin McCarthy movie, the chamber’s inhabitants impassively waited
until the would-be rabble-rousers were silenced. Aside from the reported
spark of laughter — probably born out of nervousness or condescension,
or likely both — and a couple of stolen sideways glances, the business
of war went on.
Veteran at Occupy D.C. (Credit: thisisbossi)
protests are up against. This is what the antiwar protesters have battled
since 2001 — a persistent indifference, which in some cases is very
real but in other ways is merely used to mask more volatile feelings:
disgust and fear of the protesters, confusion about what they stand
for, even self-loathing and regret for the passion the indifferent no longer feel
about anything outside of themselves.
The good news: According to Kevin Zeese,
founder and executive director of America
Come Home and organizer
behind the October
2011/Stop the Machine demonstrations,
which are running parallel to the Occupy D.C. protests in Washington this
month, the antiwar movement has gotten more traction than any time in
the last 10 years, particularly in Washington, the proverbial belly
of the beast.
“There’s no question, when we started
working on this [last year] we didn’t know if there would be 50 people
out here or anyone joining with us,” he told Antiwar.com. Since Occupy
Wall Street began in New York and then the launch of Occupy D.C. corresponded
with Zeese’s group’s rally to commemorate the 10-year anniversary
of the Afghanistan War on Oct. 6, “we’ve had several thousands of
people out here. This is just the beginning.”
The message, Zeese said, is resonating
with folks who might have come down to Freedom Plaza for Occupy D.C.’s
anti-corporatist agenda but understand how it all fits into the stunning
growth of the military-industrial complex over the last half-century.
Nowhere is this more explicit than in Washington, D.C.
“The dominant message is economic
insecurity, and it’s bringing people out, and people are recognizing
that the unbridled spending on weapons and on war has a big impact on
why we have this economic insecurity,” he added.
(Credit: thisisbossi)
On Oct. 8, the protesters in effect shut down the Smithsonian’s
Air and Space Museum. They
were rallying against the glorification of drones and warplanes in front
of the building when a scuffle with police brought out the pepper spray
on the front steps. A right-wing provocateur instigated
the situation. More on that later.
But aside from the protests at the
Smithsonian and the Armed Services Committee, Zeese said the group has
been leading teach-ins on various aspects of war and peace, including
the enduring drum beat for war by the city’s hawks against Iran.
For obvious reasons, the antiwar theme (which at its core, is really
about America’s unrestrained post-9/11 militarism) is much more
prevalent in Washington than in New York and the many other cities that
are hosting similar
Occupy demonstrations. The question is whether Zeese and the others
can sustain any sort of focus on it as Occupy becomes more of a
political
force on the mainstream’s radar.
All Types of Zombies
Everybody knows that zombies eat brains.
George Romero set the scene in Night
of the Living Dead,
and Hollywood never looked back. Before that, zombies in movies typically
involved reanimation and mind control through so-called African-Caribbean
voodoo. In films like White
Zombie and I
Walked with a Zombie
bad actors with the magic enslaved poor mindless fools to do their bidding.
White Zombie (1933)
We see all types of zombies reacting to Occupy and its various manifestations. It’s not
much different from how antiwar protesters have been treated throughout
the last 10 years of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. But now
that the mainstream is actually paying attention to what is going on
in Zuccotti Park — in a way it never did for the dozens of major antiwar
protests in Washington and New York over the decade — zombiism is rampant
and quite easily discernible.
Most prevalent are the zombies talking
about and mostly criticizing the protests in language that suggests only mind control could be at work. These zombies include all manner of talking heads, political courtiers and operatives,
politicians, status-quo junkies, and haters — but also mindless corporate
newspersons who typically just put their heads down and repeat what
they’re told.
On a trip last week to the Northeast,
I was bombarded almost immediately with the charge that Occupy Wall
Street protesters were engaging in anti-Semitic chants, violent behavior,
open sex, and flagrant drug use. One man had crapped on a police car.
According to a family member, the whole thing had devolved into a dystopian
nightmare with shades of Woodstock — Woodstock
’99 that is. At the beginning — according to the evolving meme — these demonstrators might have
been well-meaning, but now the whole thing has been taken over
by anarchists and criminals.
Who, by the way, really hate America.
Woodstock '99
this before, I realized then I hadn’t been listening to the right ZRF (zombie
radio frequency), that is, any station carrying Rush Limbaugh,
or reading the correct zombie guru texts, coming in over the ether from
Andrew “Dr.
Caligari” Breitbart (a
man so righteous with the limited-government mojo, he sources
zombies whose main occupations
are to hack into private emails and feed the juice to protest-shadowing
FBI and NYPD).
Occupy Austin (Credit: Elizabeth Brossa)
home” frenzy was
a concoction, a well-used
sleight-of-hand to turn the movement in and against itself. The rest —
the defecation, the “free love,” the violence, the purple haze, and
the stink — turned out to be hackneyed hippiephobia delivered as
clunkily by its lesser purveyors
as a horde of zombies trying to shuffle across a bumpy country road.
But for a time it seemed to be working. Not only did it successfully
create an impression that the protests are as divisive as the rest of
Washington politics today, keeping things in manageable, us-versus-them encampments (apparently, only the Ron Paul types know better than to be hip
to that jive), but all
the fearmongering has emboldened political leaders never inclined to
support the protest to fling the worst
hate-filled rhetoric while
keeping the potentially sympathetic skittishly at bay.
So now we have the most foolish right-wing pander-zombies spewing Orwellian newspeak as casually as waving
the flag on the Fourth of July. Rep. Paul Broun, Republican from
Georgia, called the protests an “attack
on freedom” in a recent
interview from the U.S. Capitol. So he understands a demonstration of free speech to be an “attack on
freedom.” Is this not the ultimate voodoo zombification?
Swollen Svengalis
like Limbaugh and Breitbart are zombies, too — the aggressive, brain-eating
kind. They are victims of their own small single-mindedness, but like
the weirdly alert zombies in the 2004
remake of Dawn
of the Dead, they sprint for the kill just the same.
Dawn of the Dead (2004)
And they are clearly more focused and
agile than their slow-moving, brain-eating counterparts, those who get
disturbed and turned on to their prey by sudden noises, lights, or the
scent of blood, like in Romero’s original Night
of the Living Dead.
These zombies typically shuffle along haplessly, and violence
can usually be avoided if they aren’t aroused (see AMC’s The Walking Dead). More on these in a second.
The aggressive ones aren’t hard to
spot. They are the most wild and vicious — even gleeful— in their
attacks against the protests. For example, Limbaugh called the demonstrators
a “parade
of human debris” on Oct.
5, not long after Occupy Wall Street started surfacing in the mainstream
media. Political egoist Rep. Peter King, Republican of New York, chairman of the
House Homeland Security Committee, had no compunction racing in and
calling his own constituents a
“ragtag mob.” In recent
days, both Breitbart’s Big
Government and Tucker Carlson’s Daily
Caller have engaged in
blatantly McCarthyite tactics, not only whipping up the already berserk
voodoo zombie hordes, but getting at least one woman, so far,
fired from her job.
Remember that “standoff” between police and protesters at the Air and
Space Museum, the one where the museum “was closed Saturday after
antiwar demonstrators tried to enter the building to protest a drone
exhibit, and at least one person was pepper-sprayed”?
Turns out that Patrick Howley, an assistant
editor at the right-wing American Spectator, was the “one”
pepper-sprayed. How do we know? He
bragged that he “infiltrated” the protest and broke through police
lines in an online account
his magazine later altered (luckily, the evil liberal media caught a screen grab of the original story). But The American Spectator
editors didn’t mess with what is clearly the funniest line in the
bit:
I deserved to get a face full
of high-grade pepper, and the guards who sprayed me acted with more
courage than I saw from any of the protesters. If you’re looking for
something to commend these days in America, start with those guards.
Guess we forgot to mention “the passive-aggressive
zombie.”
These rapacious zombies look almost
virtuous compared to the slow-moving ones, however. Establishment types
— those who have “made it” and whose identities and livelihoods
depend on the corporate wheel turning in rhythm with the political
powers
and authority invested in Washington, Hollywood, and New York — are
typically
slow to bare teeth over such issues, but they smell their own lifeblood at risk now and have responded with sanctimonious lectures and smug, condescending putdowns
of the Occupy rallies.
These include people like
New York Times editor Bill Keller, who in essence said the protests are boring, and the Washington Post’s Anne Applebaum,
who claims they will
“hurt democracy.” Even
naughty Howard “King of Media” Stern, typically a beacon for the
disaffected fringe, has dismissed
the demonstrators as “foolish
dirty hippies who have no idea what is going on in the world.” But
with an estimated $400
million Sirius XM radio contract,
he certainly knows where his bread is buttered, and it’s clearly not
on the side of the rabble screaming “oligarchy!” at the base of
his penthouse tower.
Marine at Occupy Austin (Credit: Elizabeth Brossa)
But there’s good news for the non-zombies.
Despite the grim reports, you are not alone. And, according to The
Washington Post on Sunday, there has been an extraordinary collision
in the universe, and Tea Partiers and Occupiers are finally finding common ground, resisting the urge to eat each others’
brains. And don’t forget the
Marines. These guys hate zombies,
too, and they just might
be headed to a city near you. Scarier things have happened.
Happy Halloween.
Follow Kelley Vlahos on Twitter @KelleyBVlahos.
