The events of the last week are making me remember the famous t-shirt slogan of the 80s: Choose Life.
Right now Christians are being purged from Iraq by ISIS, a bloodthirsty terrorist group. Nigerian Catholics have been burned alive by their Muslim neighbors. An unarmed young African-American in Ferguson, MO is shot for no apparent reason. To top it off, comedian Robin Williams hangs himself.
I have started to wonder if one of the reasons for the popularity of zombie movies is that, in a perverse way, the total breakdown of society isn't unthinkable any more. One reason we got into this situation with Iraq was that the Bush administration's bible was Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man . It was the Condaleeza Rice view of things that all human beings desired to live in western democracies. One only needs to look at what happened to Iran after the Shah to see that, no, not all human beings wish to live in western democracies. Indeed, the first thing that some people will do with their votes will be to install religious extremists as their government. The Bushies made this mistake in its most extreme form when they encouraged the creation of the Palestinian Authority under the mistaken belief that Palestinians would create a moderate, democratic government. When they actually installed Hamas as the ruling party, Israel was now faced with the necessity of treating people who will not accept their existance as the Palestinian government.
The zombie movie resounds with people because it refutes the neoconservative idea that people have an intrinsic love of democracy and order. Humans everywhere do not love freedom, at least the western idea of freedom as being liberal democracy. This relentless crusade for making the world democratic has only put the most barbaric and retrograde elements in positions of strength in Iraq and Gaza/West Bank. Indeed, how other than the existance of revived corpses could there be more chaos in the world right now?
The movement in the world, and especially the middle east, is towards governments that utilize mass murder as a tool for uniformity. In that sense, the Yugoslav civil wars in the 1940s and 1990s are the template for groups such as ISIS. Why persuade people to support a government when you can just kill off your opposition? Why worry about drawing national borders to account for ethnic groups when you can just destroy minority ethnicities?
Choose Life isn't just a t-shirt slogan anymore. It is the most basic and anachronistic aspiration for today's blood-soaked world.
Right now Christians are being purged from Iraq by ISIS, a bloodthirsty terrorist group. Nigerian Catholics have been burned alive by their Muslim neighbors. An unarmed young African-American in Ferguson, MO is shot for no apparent reason. To top it off, comedian Robin Williams hangs himself.
I have started to wonder if one of the reasons for the popularity of zombie movies is that, in a perverse way, the total breakdown of society isn't unthinkable any more. One reason we got into this situation with Iraq was that the Bush administration's bible was Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man . It was the Condaleeza Rice view of things that all human beings desired to live in western democracies. One only needs to look at what happened to Iran after the Shah to see that, no, not all human beings wish to live in western democracies. Indeed, the first thing that some people will do with their votes will be to install religious extremists as their government. The Bushies made this mistake in its most extreme form when they encouraged the creation of the Palestinian Authority under the mistaken belief that Palestinians would create a moderate, democratic government. When they actually installed Hamas as the ruling party, Israel was now faced with the necessity of treating people who will not accept their existance as the Palestinian government.
The zombie movie resounds with people because it refutes the neoconservative idea that people have an intrinsic love of democracy and order. Humans everywhere do not love freedom, at least the western idea of freedom as being liberal democracy. This relentless crusade for making the world democratic has only put the most barbaric and retrograde elements in positions of strength in Iraq and Gaza/West Bank. Indeed, how other than the existance of revived corpses could there be more chaos in the world right now?
The movement in the world, and especially the middle east, is towards governments that utilize mass murder as a tool for uniformity. In that sense, the Yugoslav civil wars in the 1940s and 1990s are the template for groups such as ISIS. Why persuade people to support a government when you can just kill off your opposition? Why worry about drawing national borders to account for ethnic groups when you can just destroy minority ethnicities?
Choose Life isn't just a t-shirt slogan anymore. It is the most basic and anachronistic aspiration for today's blood-soaked world.
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