Charlottesville
These are the monsters we mock. Young white men (probably a few older ones, mixed in, but that’s the only mixing), unaware of inadvertent comedy, clueless about the cartoon quality of tiki torches. They say the same vile shit their ancestors did, but they must know they’re extras in someone else’s film. Someone with more power, more authority, more vision. There’s no vision here, not a speck. Aargh.
The ones who aren’t marching are also zombies. They’d never march, in fact, and in some cases they’re offended by this open hatred and puffed-up bigotry, although God knows they voted for it. Whether they have some rudimentary, lizard-brain notions of political philosophy and have picked one they like, or they’re just—as I suspect—passive receivers of whatever someone shoves onto their screens, they’re still the walking dead of our once impressive republic.
The truth is out there, and it’s not hidden at Roswell. It’s where it always has been, in a well-disclosed location known as In Plain Sight, but these undead…boy, I don’t know. Their information-gathering skills seem limited by their cable subscriptions and car radios, and how easy was that, Mr. Murdoch? Give them biases that are totally confirmatory of their worst fears, then tell them THIS IS THE ONLY TRUTH. DON’T BELIEVE ANYONE ELSE.
And they don’t. Of course. So maybe they’re lost, doomed to shuffle the landscape in search of brains, a natural instinct, if apparently hopeless. Nature abhors a vacuum, and I assume their crania are already being filled with non-white matter, the way my basement has all those books. Apologies to books.
These shuffling paleo-people, the ones in the photo, who might as well be wearing T-shirts that proclaim their inability to get a prom date? Nothing but fodder, drones in a battle that they can’t possibly grasp with their tiny hands. Annoying, alarming, and capable of great mischief, they’re unaware of their irrelevance for anything but distraction while power plays alone.
So we get distracted, and the showrunners get more rich and more powerful. We sometimes, even, willingly toss coins their way, buy their wares, watch their “news” and their reality television, unaware that we’re forging our own nails for our own coffins. Oh, it’s only The Bachelorette, we say. Harmless. It’s only a horoscope, or essential oils, or whatever fantasy we decided to invest in, because life is hard and awfully boring, anyway.
They’ve always wanted to run the show. Their philosophy will always be in the minority, by definition, but their power is growing and now overwhelming. They see themselves as Randian road warriors, a tiny sliver of humanity that can actually do things, and in some ways they’re right. They know how to accumulate wealth and power, and their prophecies seem awfully self fulfilling now. They are now in ascendancy, they are quite often brilliant, and they have no souls, not really.
It’s never been about the zombies. These wannabe Klansmen are just foot soldiers. It was always going to be about the vampires.
