From Pine View Farm

Brains, or Not 2

Someone at Fox News decided to complain that the “Walking Dead“* is a sign of American decay, much like the Police Gazette, dime novels, silent films, Esquire Magazine, the wireless, comic books, and many other predecessors.

Tony Norman isn’t having any of it.

“Is watching ‘The Walking Dead’ seriously hurting American society?” Dr. Manny Alvarez asked in the lead sentence. “I would argue ‘Yes.’ Hate me all you want, or call me paranoid and misinformed, but there is one common theme that is pervasive in American pop culture today: violence. Even more specifically, zombie violence. The idea of a zombie-infested world inspires fantasies of monsters possessed by an uncontrollable rage to kill, and viewers get a thrill imagining what it would be like to participate in this new world order.”

Zombies possessed of an uncontrollable rage sounds a lot like Fox News regular Sen. Ted Cruz and his gang of nihilists who shut down the government with no winnable strategy.

Do read the rest.

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*It could not possibly be as stultifying as The Beverly Hillbillies.

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2 comments

  1. George Smith

    October 25, 2013 at 3:11 pm

    The prevalence of successful zombie movies and dramas speaks to many things in culture, a great deal of them trivial. Many are easy to make, cheap, and reasonably guaranteed a decent audience. The Walking Dead is the high end. They also appeal to the demographic of American prepper nuts and are promoted to such. You have what used to be respectable news organizations even catering to the taste by posting articles asking the question, what is a zombie and could a zombie apocalypse happen? And then conducting inane reader polls to gather more clicks and eyeballs. You can play a Walking Dead game on-line. It’s an industry, one that generates a good deal of money and attention. It may be pathological in some ways, it certainly is pandering, but not the former in any way that would be interpreted by Fox News.

     
  2. Frank

    October 25, 2013 at 5:16 pm

    Every generation takes up something that horrifies their elders.

     

    Then they become their elders and in turn horrified.

     

    Jazz music, swing music, rock and roll, rock, and rap have in turn sent the Miss Grundys of our society into the vapors.

     

    Hell, even the waltz scandalized the older generation of its day.  By even the minuet presaged the downfall of civilization in the eyes of some.

     

    The one constant is old fogeys.