The American Zombie Walk
This Time, It's Not For Fun Or Charity, It's Real. Will the Realities Of COVID, Monkeypox, and Climate Break The Spell?
Every passing week seems just a little bit stranger.
If it could be defined, I guess you might call it The American Zombie Walk.
It’s as if whole segments of the population have turned into hypnotized, barely animated corpses, lurching uncertainly, marching down neglected, dilapidated streets, populated every few feet with encampments for the barely surviving houseless population.
Without purpose, spiritually bereft, they lope forward in a disconnected hive mind state within an illusion/delusion that they are thriving again in a post-pandemic “normal”.
What else but zombie mythology could begin to explain the greatest spiritual and intellectual disconnect in the last 50 years?
COVID minimizing has become so deeply embedded in the mainstream narrative that common sense, rationality, and empathy have all but disappeared.
The CDC, at least for the last year or so if not longer, has become thoroughly politicized, and has completely abandoned its purpose to safeguard and protect public health.
Imagine Joe Biden and the FAA, in a sort of sideways Ronald Reagan moment, suddenly deciding to willingly cut the number of air traffic controllers monitoring US domestic air space by half. Not because they go on strike, but because too many workers eat at profit and cost government and businesses too much.
The entirely predictable uptick in crashes, near misses, and other related disasters causing death and catastrophe inevitably result.
Then, imagine the Executive and Congressional response to the predictable public outcry is that what matters most is the “urgency” of decreasing spending to reduce the federal deficit, far more important than relative “safety,” so the numbers and salaries of qualified air traffic controllers must be cut.
Airline crashes, they might say, will “always be with us”. “There is no federal solution for airline safety” intones Pete Buttigieg. It’s all part of the new, disastrous “normal”.
America’s COVID policy in a nutshell.
To be fair, as I’ve written here before, this isn’t really exclusive to the United States: Canada, Britain, Australia, and all Western governments based on capitalist structures have aggressively embarked on a campaign of subterfuge that dismisses and minimizes the spread of COVID. The goal is to induce amnesia and simultaneously promote commerce, and it’s apparent the strategy is working.
I think of a comment on Twitter from a medical worker I saw saying a maskless woman barreled into a clinic where she works with her sick daughter, then, when she was reminded of the mask requirement, expressed puzzlement and said “I thought it (COVID) was over.”
Even the medical community, once trusted across the board, has divided itself into medical professionals that prioritize public health, and continue to sound the alarm and beg for COVID precautions, and medical professionals like Dr. Leana Wen, an advocate for commerce over public health. Wen advises: “Now is not the time to hunker down,” or, in the case of her like-minded contemporaries, that COVID is “nowhere near as scary as it once was.”
These medical COVID minimizers gaslight and deceive us, all while pimping their latest book, or sitting in front of Zoom cams in a daily string of well-paid interviews with the talking heads of corporate news. Go about your business, they say, be good consumers, get back to work, and send your kids back to school. Multiple reinfections have no measurable long-term consequences. Don’t be an alarmist, we have the tools to handle an outbreak. We are prepared.
The millions who are immune compromised, dealing with Long COVID and related complications that can end up being fatal, are like victims of a mining disaster, calling out in the dark, frightened and helpless, with no living, empathetic voice to reassure them. Instead, people like Wen callously walk by and shout to them through the void to learn to live as victims.
Even when the inevitable recently occurred, in the news that the President himself contracted COVID, as well as Speaker Of The House Pelosi, the needle that measures the response in America barely moved.
It’s been official policy for months to downplay and relegate COVID to the realm of amnesia as the November midterms approach. Political optics and commerce, not the pursuit of public health policies and mitigation, is the priority, and with few exceptions, the media cheerfully, if completely disingenuously, spins the perpetual surges and reinfections almost as good news.
I follow many younger people struggling with Long Covid, as well as those with first-time infections and reinfections, the nightmare symptoms related to BA.5 are described often as being “pure Hell.” This is the norm, not the exception. Look at the anecdotal example below of COVID after effects, farther reaching than the average person imagines. People we rely on for their professionalism and experience, in everyday jobs in everyday life, are now hazards to health and safety due to COVID-induced “brain fog”. It’s logical to assume this isn’t an isolated or rare incident.
So for these marginalized people, and for their advocates, it’s both enraging and ludicrous that the media keeps trying to spin a disease that has caused millions of deaths, and uncountable long-term illnesses, into a moment of American strength, in the form of a 79-year-old man with cognitive difficulties, who, despite infection, remains “vigorous”, smiling, and “busy”.
When a reporter at a recent WH presser expressed doubt and concern that the leader of the “free” world might be sicker than the White House physicians and press secretaries implied, the response was: “Have you ever had a cold?” The fact that Biden could be spreading COVID with every cough to other people working in and around the White House is instantly minimized: his age is not a factor, and, as always, the symptoms are “mild”.
The US, according to a recent report, now leads the world in new COVID cases as the disease that never left continues to spread. The government, like sociopathic abusers, has trained the victims of that abuse to simply accept that, as Biden said in a turnabout of his original campaign promise, there is no federal solution to mitigate COVID.
There is no sense of alarm on social media like Facebook or Instagram. Zombies lurch on. The pursuit of the “best life” as imagined before the pandemic goes on now as if simply forgetting about COVID is a strategy that’s workable.
It’s also rather astounding that people, inexplicably, pretend to be perplexed that COVID has wrought inevitable havoc on the domestic economy that it has, especially in terms of worker shortages, blaming everything from sudden “high demand” to “early retirements” during the first two years of COVID.
Like zombies in a trance, they can’t fathom the reality that COVID is making the workers, people that are the engine of the economy, sick, leaving small to large businesses short-staffed. Forced to return to crowded offices and other places of work, the disease spreads like wildfire. It’s the last thing people think of because now, many are largely focused on believing they live in a post-pandemic Universe where what matters is avoiding irritations and inconveniences like their favorite restaurant closing early, being short-staffed, or the lack of instant gratification when the product they want on Amazon is not available because of supply shortages.
Scaling the heights of zombie-like, disconnected absurdity, the ever-compliant corporate media, even in the face of another, more serious international public health emergency, continue to tell us that we need not be alarmed or panic.
The irony is that panic might not be the first reaction IF there had been a continuing, best-effort attempt to mitigate the disease, perhaps one generated with the same enthusiasm as the government has exhibited to manufacture consent for global war on multiple fronts.
The advertisements on television and other media that run in between the shallow, allegedly informative “news segments” seem to perversely reflect this, reminding us that in the dimension of “normal” our main purpose is mindless consumption and that there is no more worthy goal than to accrue debt and up our credit score, while we sit stationary on the couch.
We are encouraged to use the latest apps to do everything for us, hypnotized like zombies, from buying a car to buying a home, ordering food, or finding a cure for our ailments with medical experts online, all without moving anything but our fingers. Could there be a more zombie-like state than one where you interact with life through phones and apps exclusively?
The disconnect is purposeful. In the real world, financial capitalists are dividing the spoils for themselves, and duped American consumers are no longer part of the plan. The zombie nation can’t fathom, at least yet, that it’s financial capitalists and the government that works for them that has declared economic war against them.
The Federal Reserve Bank, an almost holy, religious institution, in the eyes of Biden, Congress, and for decades, the entirety of the bipartisan system of government, is somehow supposed to solve the urgent issue of inflation through economic ritual magic. That seems highly unlikely, as, according to experts like economist Michael Hudson, inflation has been purposefully engineered.
“So if you look at what’s happening in the overall world economic system, you can see that this inflation is being engineered. And the beneficiaries of this inflation certainly have not been the wage earners, by any stretch of the imagination. The crisis that the Biden policy has created is being blamed on the wage earners instead of on the Biden administration’s foreign policy and basically the U.S.-NATO war to isolate Russia, China, India, Iran, and Eurasia generally.
Biden keeps calling it the Putin inflation. And of course, what he really means is that the sanctions that America has placed on Russia have created a shortage of oil, gas, energy, and food exports.”
The zombie nation is either unaware, or ignoring the fact that the ongoing proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, (and future conflicts being planned against Iran and China) are last-minute profit grifting, as the Fed “prints” billions in worthless paper money to fund the final battle to defend the American petrodollar, the world’s dominant (through military force) reserve currency.
Defending democracy is the last thing on their minds. Biden’s spokespeople have re-branded what George H. W. Bush called the “New World Order” a plan for America’s economic dominance through hegemony, as the “Liberal World Order”. “We” means Americans who have no vote and no say, because as an oligarchy, the government has become bolder in its pronouncements and actions, and has ceased trying to hide it. “Our” inclusion in the plan, that is, those of us regular folk that are required to “stand firm,” is purely for decorum on TV interviews. No matter what the economic cost and suffering, the financial capitalist’s agenda will be prioritized.
Just a few hours before I started writing this piece, the World Health Organization declared that the incremental spread of Monkeypox has exploded and is now far more dangerous than previously thought. The WHO declared the current rate of spread to be a global health emergency. But only because a formal panel of experts was OVERRULED. Part of the “tools” to deal with the pandemic disease is minimizing, once again.
Tragically, it appears, as always, that children are the first and most vulnerable victims, as pediatric cases are spreading. Out of 72 cases reported so far worldwide, 23 are under the age of four. We have multiple overlapping diseases with untold consequences. Yet, appealing to the zombie nation’s sense of wanting to forget it all, a compliant media started the campaign to minimize and downplay nearly immediately.
Medical experts and the media report that the Smallpox vaccine will be deployed for use against the spread of Monkeypox. The CDC, the agency that recommended personal choice as a public health strategy calmly reassures us that if you have been vaccinated against smallpox you are 85 percent protected. No one worries that this untested strategy could fall flat on its face, and it remains to be seen if the spread can be mitigated.
There’s a possibility that zombie nation can be shaken out of their trance when the literal environment begins burning around them, but so far I haven’t seen anyone moved to express any thought but “Wow”!
Of course, there are outliers, responsible people less focused on “self-care” and living their best life, or “influencing” us toward another mindless consumer purchase.
I documented my experience in a 100-plus degree heat dome effect a few weeks ago, and at an advanced age, I certainly would have gone into sheer panic with the failure of air conditioning. I can’t imagine how Texans are coping, with a purposefully privatized and failing electrical grid, and a Republican Governor in Greg Abbott who shows little concern or empathy for the deadly plight of his constituents.
The Northern hemisphere is burning up, and friends in the state of Maine, despite surviving another cold Winter, are stressed about surviving the heat. Within the last few years I lived there one particular Summer stands out, it was the very first time I went frantically searching for an air conditioner. In rural Maine, I had to travel 75 miles one way to get one. The heat was intolerable, and it was a premonition of things to come. Up until that time, it seemed no one ever needed to worry about cooling in a Maine Summer.
Wildfires are breaking out and spreading, like a disease, faster than firefighters can respond to them, especially in areas in and around dense forests and National parks. The short-term worry is protecting homes, and I can relate to the despair of having everything I ever owned at one point in time burned up in a house fire. The longer-term problem, the destruction of forests and oceans, which give us life isn’t pondered or considered.
Most certainly aging, flailing Joe Biden isn’t the man to address this existential problem, at times he seems like a zombie himself. As someone who voted for Biden because of the perception that four more years of Donald Trump would destroy the country, that’s saying something. Like a lot of Biden’s responses to multiple overlapping crises, the appearance of action is substituted for facing problems that are literally consuming us head-on.
Every living human being has a stake in these existential crises. At this point, without a massive GLOBAL awakening, we may be marching towards inevitable extinction. The facts and the onjective realities bear this out. Isn’t it past time to come out of the trance, and break the hypnotic spell cast by corporations, government, and media? Stay as safe as you can.