American Zombie

Monsters of disaster are special kinds of divine warning. They are harbingers of things we do not want to face, of catastrophes, and we fear they will bring such events upon us by coming to us.--Jane Anna Gordon and Lewis R. Gordon

Nothing I love more than any attempt to weave speculative fiction into politics. In this case, Henry Giroux ponders on the relationship between our love affair for vampires, zombies and the often dismal state of our political atmosphere.

At present, Americans are fascinated by a particular kind of monstrosity, by vampires and zombies condemned to live an eternity by feeding off the souls of the living. The preoccupation with such parasitic relations speaks uncannily to the threat most Americans perceive from the shameless blood lust of contemporary captains of industry, which Matt Taibbi, a writer for Rolling Stone, has aptly described as "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money." [3] Media culture, as the enormous popularity of the Twilight franchise and HBO's True Blood reveal, is nonetheless enchanted by this seductive force of such omnipotent beings. More frightening, however, than the danger posed by these creatures is the coming revolution enacted by the hordes of the unthinking, caught in the spell of voodoo economics and compelled to acts of obscene violence and mayhem. They are the living dead, whose contagion threatens the very life force of the nation.

Ooooh! Doesn't it make your hair stand on end? Read the rest of Giroux's article at Truthout here.