Paxety Pages

A Periodical - Internet Edition

 

Home
Daily News and Commentary
Mahone Speaks
Lehamic's World
Cuba Libre
Bluenotes and Three Heads
Feature Articles
Tales and Humor
Our Animal Companions
Music
9/11 Memorial
Guest Appearances

Site Meter

Night Of The Living Mullahs
Wednesday, July 27, 2005   By: William O'Shea

Zombies are all around us. And growing.

Some thoughts on how much fun it is to hate, and how the process of Zombification caters to our subconscious needs.

Here are our lemmas for the (oxymoronically named) one-way discussion that follows:

The creative mind is a repository of subconscious beliefs. Art often contains the expression, willful or otherwise, of these deeply held, and sometimes repressed, beliefs. Often, in an effort to skate around social ostracization (because it’s products are more often shocking and embarrassing than not), the subconscious mind obscures the true meaning of its product by shrouding it in something more palatable to society. Now, hold that thought. We'll get back to this.

Remember the video pictures of the chanting hordes of Arabs joyously celebrating after 911: what American with a pulse did not think of these Arabs as "The Other?"  i.e., a group of dangerous uncivilized lunatics whose values and belief system are inaccessible to rational minds because they are completely alien, and wish he could wander among them for a bit while armed with a machine gun loaded with dum dums? Such feelings of violence are not limited to frothing-at-the-mouth Arabs; they are ubiquitous. No matter your political, religious or social perspective, we all have groups of other humans - such as spammers -  that we mutually find alien and hostile to our existence and would like to be rid of by any means. But since rabid hate and violence are ostensibly frowned upon in many societies, we can only indulge ourselves, as it were, when there is an acceptable level of social support for our hate. The common way this is done is through the process of dehumanization of our opponents

The process of dehumanization of another group is both easier and more common than one would think. All we need is an identifiable group; a recognition of their alieness; and an awareness of their potential danger to society. For example: Rioting ghettoans are certainly denizens of a dangerous underworld to middle-class Americans - as were the hippies at Woodstock to their parents; the fat stockholders at a meeting of a Fortune Five-Hundred company are crowing devils to minimum-wage employees at Mickey-Ds, as are infidels who refuse to bend their knees to Allah to the Islamic, Baptists to Mormons, Mormons to the rest of us, and, certainly, a crowd of democrats cheering Al Gore sends a shiver down the backs of most rational Americans.

Mind you, I'm not saying the dynamics of group hate is a bad thing. To the contrary, it is a necessary if not a good thing. Dehumanization is a needed first step in the process of expunging the (real or perceived) carcinogenic elements for the body social. Consider, for example, those idiot Americans who drive around with their hub caps spinning backwards and 120 decibels of tacky bass pulsing from their car trunks. Personally, I consider then a sub-human major nuisance and could squash one like a bug with very little remorse.

As you can see, if hating an individual is a minor thrill, hating a group can be orgasmic. This would include racial hatred, cultural hatred, social hatred and religious hatred. In short, any identifiable group that is perceived as sufficiently alien and hostile to us, we perceive as "the other" and consider worthy of our hate. And this brings us to the reason why zombie movies - "Shaun Of The Dead", "Night Of The Living Dead". "Resident Evil: The Apocalypse," and so forth - are so endearingly popular. They provide us a safe, socially acceptable, cathartic medium for venting our hatred. They are an expression of our deepest subconscious desire to destroy those who threaten us.

We are fascinated by zombie movies because they allow us to give free reign to our most violent impulses. The zombie is a mobile archetype, a subconscious representation of the "other:" a faceless, less-than-human creature, dangerous and infectious (through their bite - a metaphor for speech?) which is always fatal, who personifies the embodiment of evil. Though they have a semblance to humans, they are no longer considered human and therefore are not afforded the most meager of mercies.

There was a scene in at least two of the latest zombie movies I watched over the last year where the ‘humans’ took pot shots for sport at the zombies, cheering as brain pans exploded and gray matter sloshed out like beef soup slapped with a ladle. The killing of zombies appeals to our most basic genetic programming: survival of the self by the elimination of our antithesis. (Surely, at some point, a group of Cro-Magnon men probably stood on a hill tossing boulders down on the heads of hapless Neanderthals with equal glee.)

Another message in the zombie movies, a rationalization for the sport killing, was that since the zombies are miserable beings who are less than human, you are - in addition to cleaning up the ecosystem - actually doing the zombies favor by killing them. The Islamic community now excels at this kind of rationalization. Infidels are zombies. For Islam, the zombie is the Christian, the Jew, the atheist, the Westerner. His bite is infectious, contact with him is fatal. He has no rights and is beyond redemption.

Zombification, or dehumanization, of your opponent is nothing new in religious circles. The Catholic Church used this rationale more than once itself against heretics, such as the luckless Cathars, (the Albigensian heresy) of whom the Catholics murdered about eighteen thousand men, women and children in France for the crime of not wanting to be Catholic. (Fortunately, the Catholic Church today is now a fat old theological pet, defanged and neutered, decked out in a tacky jeweled collar, and reduced to spending a large part of its time defending pederast priests.) And we can all thank God that neither the Southern Baptists nor the Mormons ever tripped on to the idea of using exploding proselytes to thin out the unbelievers. But I digress . .. .

In most societies, an individual who rabidly espouses group-hatred and wanton murder (such as blowing up men, women and children in random bomb attacks, hacking them to pieces with machetes and tossing the parts in the river, or inviting communities of them to take gas showers,) is usually considered a psychotic menace and eventually locked away; however, if everyone in the community agrees that (as the Nazis, and numerous societies before them, did to the Jews) a particular group is below their acceptable standards for humanity and consequently deserves extermination, a mass psychosis sets in; everyone starts sharpening their machetes with guilt-free consciences, eager for the fun to begin.

A community in the throes of mass psychosis will not restrain the violent elements within it. The zombies must die.

The Islamic culture has successfully zombified us, the West, as the Nazis did the Jews, and as the Hutu did to the Tutsi, (or is it vice versa?). The Islamic culture is alien, hostile, and dangerous. They see us as the zombies. And we'd damn well better start seeing them as zombies–dangerous, rabid, infectious, and not amenable to persuasion other than by a sudden and violent cessation of cephalic activity. These pious barbarians have dehumanized us to the point that they can shoot children in the back with no remorse - as they did in Russia - blow up civilians and lie, kill and exterminate without so much a twitch of conscience--and have their Mullahs mumble pieties the whole while.

Violence is human. We all have a tendency to violence. If you do not realize this, you are lousy student of both history and psychology. When possible, we sublimate our violent dispositions with the vicarious thrill of movies , video games, or fantasies, but the tendency is always there. It is natural. And when someone has a mandate from their deity to kill you, and in their heart of hearts sees you as less than human, you better damn well watch out.

And with Zombies you have only two choices: fight them or become one of them.

After all - "What Do The Terrorists Want?"

|   



(c)1968- today j.e. simmons or michael warren