Review of two chapters

The zombies of voodoo (one of the world’s great religions), the Reverend and the old Boris Karloff-Bella Lugosi era horror films, however, are fundamentally different than the modern zombie. Representations of the old style and the new style modern zombie often share some shuffling characteristics, yes, and they are both indeed animated corpses, or seem so, but the modern zombie is more or less self-directed and focused, albeit of simple tastes. He wants to eat living human flesh, your flesh, and in many renderings of zombie tales, is partial to brains. Especially yours. The old zombie of the black and white movies had no apparent appetites save perhaps violence or revenge, and even then he was only a delivery boy, a dullard carrying out the wishes of his animator. Rather than being created by radiation, a super virus or corporate-governmental genetic weapons engineering gone wrong (or right), the old zombie was a natural organic product, and perhaps a bit of a trick; he might not really have been dead at all, and hence an elaborate fakery.

An alleged Haitian recipe for a creating an old style zombie uses puffer-fish, porcupine fish and the skin from a marine toad of some sort, to create a drug mixture that if absorbed through the abraded skin of the victim induces a death-like coma. Burial being more or less immediate in the tropics by the necessity of putrefaction, near asphyxiation from oxygen deprivation in the grave combines with the drug to produce a retarded, limited cognitive state in the victim, rendering him incapable of the higher mental functions; he also must be dug up not too long after burial if he is not to really die. It is reported that such persons were useful as slaves for simple manual labor in cane fields. Allegedly one such person who wandered off after 16 years in this condition recognized his sister—she did not recognize him—and was able convince her of his identity by relating shared childhood experiences (Davis 1983). The ingredient Puffer-fish, by the way, is a Japanese delicacy that by law must be prepared by licensed chefs because of its neurotoxic content, and which nevertheless each year allegedly accounts for more than 100 deaths in Japan. It is unknown to me if this zombie recipe has been tested experimentally; one would not foresee such a proposal passing a university human subjects committee. It certainly would put some new juice in what has been called the “psychology of adjustment,” however. But then “adjusters” in the U.S. already widely use powerful drugs that allegedly help millions of allegedly ADHD children to “focus;” and then there are millions who take prescription pharmaceuticals in order to take the rough edges off of the daily grind; so perhaps we have already merely arrived at the same location by a somewhat different route.

As a fad or idea-product of the entertainment industry, however, that the zombie has achieved perhaps its highest degree of tangibility. He exists now an irreplaceable part of the modern scene. In most depictions, the new style zombie is often found moving about in packs, just like modern man. Also, as with modern mass man, the zombie seems confined to a fairly narrow range of possibilities, shifting about to make a living, but narrowly confined by economic and social circumstances and by personal limitations, the same old same old, with no very exciting prospects on the horizon, just more shuffling and groping. Compared to the old zombie, however, once again, the new zombie is very much his own man, or, as may be the case, its own it. The old zombie functioned merely as a flunky, an agent of private malice, spell-created, or pharmaceutically modified for exploitation, and has a very narrow range. It is essentially sterile in the sense of being a reproductive dead-end; although, in the movies at least, it is subject to getting out of control in ways that rebound on his its creator.

The modern zombie, however, has arrived at the modern-age equivalent of freedom and autonomy, albeit the dollar-store versions of these once mighty concepts, and represents a social-biological vector. It has teleological force and direction, whether acting as a unit or in mass. It shuffles onward. It can shuffle anywhere it wants, within its limitations. What it may lack in efficiency and creativity is more than made up for by the economy of scale intrinsic to an army of shufflers. He or it is a part of a mass society and mass society is a part of him.

Plus, inexorably, every passing second, the ranks of the dead just keep growing. Modern zombie-ism is highly communicable, it reproduces itself, perhaps inescapably, a condition or infectious disease transmitted by zombie bites, body fluids, chemical agents, or viruses either of the airborne type or through direct contact. In the series The Walking Dead, the characters are stunned when they eventually find out that they all have the zombie bug inside of them—no escape—and will resurrect when they die unless some merciful soul shoots them in the head.

Zombie populations are vital in the sense that they manifest Malthusian, non-linear (exponential) growth, more or less: one zombie leads to two, which lead to four and so on and on; in this aspect zombies appear to function much like urban development, chain stores and Third World population growth. Normal dead people merely pile up, one or a few at a time, a simple arithmetic growth.

The generally recognized way to “kill” the new style zombie is by the time-honored central nervous-system-disconnect—the brain must go, whether by bullet or other mechanical intervention. Strictly speaking, though, one “destroys” zombies, because how does one “kill” something that is already dead? Some representations of the zombie, however, are so demonically animated that even when pulped or diced, the dead flesh quivers still; but on the whole, the brain is the conventionally accepted stop button, e.g., Zombie Max ammunition boxes advise, “Destroy their brain before they try to eat yours.”

Stepping back and considering the zombie as merely an entertainment product, its growth, plotted as a mathematical function, would also be non-linear, bounding upward exponentially in response, no doubt, to our dear old friend, the market. At some point we might expect saturation—a flattening out of the curve or perhaps even a plunge. But again, what has caused the market?

Is zombie consciousness merely a fad, a communicated enthusiasm that follows behavioral patterns well known to mass psychologists (e.g., Le Bon, 1892)? Doubtlessly humans are herd animals, and the psychology of the crowd transmits throughout, which Gustave Le Bon called the law of the psychological unity of crowds. Modern mass media audiences bear much resemblance to crowds or mobs, especially in terms of their heightened suggestibility, contagious enthusiasms and diminished rationality. How else could one explain recent presidential choices and television program favorites?

So certainly to some extent zombies are a fad, but the zombie-as-fad notion, although it carries some explanatory weight just doesn’t seem to carry enough. Consider the hula-hoop fad of the late 1950s. It was fun. It came, and then mostly went, over a period of a several years, a surge helped by vigorous promotion. More than 100 million hula-hoops were sold over a period of a few years. But it did not bleed off into literature, parodies, gun culture, games, films or television to any extent worth mentioning. Zombies are fun, too—to an extent—and serve an entertainment function that helps drive away meaninglessness for yet another moment. Zombies in the modern version have been with us in increasing force for at least 30 years. Hula-hoops are sometimes used for exercise and display, and descend from older wooden hoops used for similar purposes. If I recollect properly, even the bull riders of Crete used hoops in their gymnastic rites.

But hula-hoops, as I also seem to recollect, were never portrayed as attacking the human race, nor did they serve as the germ for hundreds of apocalyptic tales and gruesome cannibalistic game/fantasies, nor figure in dreams, nor did one see transfixed hula-hoopers on college campuses. One can even find trace sediments of hula-hoop porn down at the bottom of the market, but not much. Zombie Strippers (Lee 2008) is, in the sense of true pornography, mere T&A. The entertainment industry being what it is, I would not be surprised to see some desperate entrepreneur introduce a zombie-hula-hoop film, or even the ultimate in arcane weird specialization, zombie hula-hoop-porn, but these would exist only on the exotic fringes. The zombie in pure ideal form as a modern psychological or philosophical archetype, exists, as of right now, more or less in the center of things.

Unlike the zombie, the hula-hoop did not really penetrate the collective unconsciousness, unless one wants to speculate that the hula-hoop was some sort of ring Ourobouros, that infinite circle that symbolizes Life’s cyclic renewability, depicted in ancient jewelry and alchemical texts as a serpent eating its own tail. This speculation seems more than farfetched. At its chromatic best the hula-hoop is a pink undulating ring. There are no modern hula-hoop epics that suggest a high level of psychic fascination. In the matter of story-generation, the hula-hoop has proved a dud. Compared to zombie consciousness, relatively, the hula-hoop has been an isolated phenomenon.

Zombies have psychical legs, however. They indeed seem to have permeated the modern Western collective unconsciousness. The story is being shared and retold, re-lived, re-died, and it ripples collectively outward and inward, perhaps losing some of its purity and force, but spreading nonetheless. For an example, an annual “zombie run” marathon is now held, appropriately enough, in Detroit, that epicenter of social decay. Some people report dreaming of zombies. Available are colorful zombie-theme decorator bedspread sets graced with motifs of blood spatters and groping hands. Biting zombie action toys are also sold.

Still, none of these facts and conjectures directly or substantially answers the question of “why zombies?” To this, a man in my local gun shop answered, “Because there are a lot of weirdoes around these days.” But, granting this, then, why do so many “weirdoes” now exist? Have we collectively passed some sort of weirdo-density cusp, thereby tripping an invisible catch that opens a door for zombie consciousness? The weirdoes are seemingly speaking volumes on this matter. Perhaps we should listen.

One might also try to explain zombie consciousness as the result of sheer promotional science at work, as unnatural, a synthetic fad, much like the hula-hoop’s days of glory, except more potent, bigger and much longer lasting. Many rightfully attribute awesome thought-control powers to the opinion- and fad-manufacturing engines of the world, especially to the U.S. entertainment-news industry. The machinery of propaganda and promotion works night and day—even so-called “news” is mainly promotional in origin, pitching commercial and social agendas, deriving as it does from public relations offices and organizationally created or managed news spectacles, more than it does from the “objective” practices of journalists or from neutral reports of naturally occurring events.

The promotional apparatus seems more and more efficient and coordinated as the years pass. Nowadays, the book, the movie, the action figurines, the game, the news coverage, the talk shows, the faux controversy, the sound track, the fast food promotion, all arrive simultaneously, like an avalanche. Much capital is staked on outcomes that are by no means certain, but which often pay off.

There can be no doubt that various parties have successfully promoted zombie ventures—although the phenomenon has so far lacked a coordinated “avalanche” approach because no one person or corporation ever “owned” the zombie, unlike the hula-hoop or the Star Wars movies. Some identify film director George Romero, director of Night of the Living Dead, as the modern zombie’s baby-daddy, but his zombie has grown up and run wild. Oddly, because of copyright irregularities having to do with international film release, it is claimed that Romero doesn’t even control the copyright on his own landmark film; the film is alleged to be in the public domain. Perhaps this situation was broadly prophetic, for zombies quickly became part of the public domain.

But promotion in itself does not explain the zombie phenomenon for reasons that I will now lay out. Promotion cannot make something from nothing, out of the air, so to speak, even though things may sometimes seem so. Even the lowly hula-hoop, although it may have made some astonished entrepreneurs into millionaires, served preexisting needs: e.g., novelty, fun, nubile exhibitionism, jelly-fish like undulation, and I’m not sure what else, maybe even some sort of obscure, inner, unconscious desire of having one’s own live-action, pink plastic, Ring Ourobouros, which sounds like it could be a fun sex toy novelty.

A fundamental principle of propaganda—and by extension, of its entire immediate family consisting of promotion, persuasion, marketing, political communication, advertising and public relations—is that propaganda must reflect preexisting needs, beliefs and the values of the audience (Patrick, 2011). Failing this, it is simply irrelevant noise. To understand why any particular promotional venture may have worked, or not, requires a sort of reverse psychological engineering. Bear in mind that promotional ventures are often easier to retrospectively analyze via hindsight than to plan. Promotion might, therefore, best be considered an intuitive art informed by science, but as such, successful promotional intuitions are rooted in a sense of the needs of a collective unconsciousness.

As a prominent example of this deep rootedness, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi movement provide a standard case of what often comes to mind when people hear the term “propaganda.” Even so, this well-known example is generally understood but poorly, if at all. Hitler did not by any means create or even popularize German anti-Semitism, although so many people nowadays seem to believe that he first synthesized it. Rather, he harnessed it, concentrated and bureaucratically focused what was already there, calling upon a strong European heritage of distrust, following well-worn folkways and quasi-religious beliefs that dated to the Middle Ages and before. The Jews were traditionally perceived as Christ-killers, heathens, outsiders, usurers, cabalists and suckers of blood and money, who sacrificed Christian babies in Passover-like blood rituals. Remember Shylock’s pound of flesh. Recollect, too, the English folk song of the mother who, missing her little William, finally finds him, only to hear his dying declaration “The Jew-wife hath me slain.” There is no need in the song to explain why, motive, it was generally understood that this was the sort of thing that might happen when Jews were around.

In the Nazi era, this xenophobic value heritage, as it were, converged with grave anxieties and terrors, including millions dead and crippled, arising from the German economic collapse and social upheavals consequent to the Great War. The Kaiser had abdicated, a psychological-spiritual abandonment signifying the end of a hereditary monarchy that had perhaps become more important symbolically than otherwise. The orderly rational good life had been overthrown. The Germans, thus, were fundamentally disturbed in their collective mind, the very same Germans who until then had prided themselves, with considerable justification, as world paragons of science, art, progress and government.

Nazism channeled the energy of this mass collective agitation with a marching song of renewal, order, power, food, employment, creative work, personal, collective and historical worth, and perpetual triumph over uncertainty and malignant social forces. In this sense Nazism operated as a sort of collective psychological defense mechanism. We might also note that under Nazism, Germany was universally referred to as the “fatherland.” Hitler, the great male leader, corresponded with Big Daddy himself, Moses, maybe, and represented a return of the traditional stability of the father-like or avuncular figure of the Kaiser who had abandoned the collective family not so long before.

Dismissing its surface ideology, which relatively few understood anyway, Nazism as a mass phenomenon seems to have been more or less an up-bubbling of some of the lowest common denominator aspects of collective unconsciousness. As Jung observed, “The masses are always breeding-grounds of psychic epidemics, the events in Germany being a classic example of this” (1968, 127)

Backing up the above assessment of mass ideological knowledge levels approaching zero, interviews conducted of captured German soldiers by the U.S. Army’s Psychological Warfare unit in 1945 indicate that the soldiers did indeed look up to Hitler as a father figure, but had little or no knowledge or interest in the tenets of Nazism (Shils & Janowitz, 1948).

Symbolism, then, perhaps matters most in the end; and maybe in the beginning too. It is all that most people experience concerning collective ideals. Curiously, to cite typical examples, Russia was always the “motherland,” while some American blacks now refer to Africa as the “motherland,” attesting perhaps to the existence of an alternate set of collective preoccupations concerning the all-giving mother. There is no stable father figure in many black American homes; and the idea of America as a fatherland doesn’t apparently set well, symbolically speaking. “The Man,” as in, “Working for The Man,” in 1960s-1970s black/urban vernacular, was certainly not someone with whom one willingly associated.

Don’t imagine any of this symbolic bacchanalia as an overtly logical or rational process—although thick rationalizations and focusing rituals tend to overlay symbolic facts. As is well recognized, the unconscious, especially in the collective, the mass psyche, doesn’t necessarily employ deductive or inductive scientific logic, no more than does religious transubstantiation. It seems rather to traffic in symbolic equivalencies, in vague approximations, that may be more or less obscure: blood and wine, body and bread, cross and hakenkreuz, mothers and fathers, Chevrolet Corvettes and penises, mandalas and wheels of fire. The crazy symbolism of dreams, for example, is also well known and to some extent even understood, where indeed a car is seldom a car, and a cigar virtually never a cigar. The same is true of archetypes and archetypal symbols. The blood, folk and fatherland nonsense of the Nazis evoked a mystical symbolism that could be broadly, collectively shared, but not at any significantly rational level. Crowds, by their nature, preclude such rationality and, accordingly, mass politics is the politics of Le Bon’s bovine crowd. In order to be broadly collective, this sort of sharing has to be at the lowest common denominator; hence, too, the terror and primordial destructive power of mass movements that may be cult-like in their interior dynamics.

Even the ever-present swastika of the Third Reich was merely a recycled ancient symbol. It signified Power, Life, Luck and Goodness, resembled the mandala in its eternal rotation, and dated back thousands of years. Its potential for psychological fascination is evidenced by frequent recurrence in ancient American petroglyphs, Vedic artifacts, architectural motifs, medieval sword-hilts, and in even on clothing and jewelry of the 19th and early 20th centuries, and before. It possessed the symbolic advantages of being easy both to draw and contemplate. Even idiots can readily employ it, as it can today be seen scratched on many a bathroom stall and elevator wall. Again, logic is never the priority in a collective symbolism that corresponds but roughly with primal needs, fears and desires. The priorities are expression and satisfaction. The only seemingly firm rule is that strong inner content will out in some way or another.

Even colors may signify or correspond with deep psychological content. One of Hitler’s main concerns in adopting a symbol for the Nazi party was that it had to look good on posters, which functioned as the mass symbolic predecessor of television. In Mein Kampf he states:

In red we see the social idea of the movement, in white the nationalistic idea, in the swastika the mission of the struggle for the victory of the Aryan man, and, by the same token, the victory of the idea of creative work, which as such always has been and always will be anti-Semitic (Hitler, 496-497).

Similarly, the colors and devices of flags of all nations supposedly signify all sorts of spiritual and psychological content: rising suns, stars, blood, light, struggle, to name but some possibilities. Nor must we overlook “The Reds,” as symbolized in the red flag and the thrill of the red star. Flags of a number of recently emerged African nations bear representations of the famous AK-47 rifle that midwifed their birth throes (Strauss, 2011). Such symbols focus collective psychology and action and help usher the general mass state of cognitive fuzziness toward some appearance sharpness and coherence. Unity requires fuzziness.

So, finally, you may ask, why and how did zombies become so popular in the modern symbolic landscape—especially in the visual electronic media that have crowded out the Old World’s posters and displays of public pomp? What might zombies signify in primal, collective terms? What is it that zombies are symbolically outing? And here is my answer, one that will occupy the remainder of this book.

We are the zombies, or fast becoming so. By “we,” I mean Western civilization. We are dead and mindless, or fast becoming so, shuffling, and certainly not walking upright, toward destiny. Many are beginning to consciously recognize and articulate this apprehension. Many more seem to perceive it at some deep, pre-rational level. The zombie is an articulation and embodiment of collective spiritual alarm over our own state of walking death—our walk toward destruction and uselessness. My thesis, stated plainly:

The zombie phenomenon represents a profound disturbance in the Western

collective unconscious caused by anxieties over the decline of Western civilization.

The jig is up, as far as the west is concerned, and in a hundred different ways this fact impinges on the Western psyche. The zombie, beyond being merely a death’s head symbol, which is bad enough but we have seen plenty before, is a ravening death’s head symbol that consumes the living society, negating life and order. The zombie represents both a looming psychological threat and emergent actuality.

Further, this modern, western collective unconsciousness is inextricably tangled with omnipresent mass media representations that reflect, echo, feed, amplify and reinforce it. Symbols of the collective unconscious need to be widely available culturally. Western psyches no longer gorge on concentrated religious symbolism—once its major diet—but are now exposed, cradle to grave, to mass media entertainment and news; not that there is much difference anymore between the once distinct genres of news and entertainment. Psychic expression reflects this change of diet. The West now feeds on a synthetically flavored mélange topped with zombie sprinkles.

Many symbolic parallels, significations of anxieties over decline, can be drawn between the zombie as a psychic symbol in popular culture and what appears to be an emergent social-political reality of decline. Most significantly, when a 2012 Super Bowl advertisement discusses an American “comeback,” this is a frank admission of serious decline made within one the holiest sanctum of American culture, football, before 100 million worshippers. The same is true when American milk-toast politicians such as Mitt Romney make empty assurances that the best is yet before us; this really means things have gone very wrong indeed. America remains the standard bearer of the West—whether the West may like it or not—and such blandishments suggest an advanced state of culture rot.

Subsequent chapters will discuss symbolic parallels between the zombie in popular culture and social-political trends of decline. Chapters include:

(1) Zombies and the collective unconscious, tangibility and known effects of the collective unconscious.

(2) Zombies and dawning recognition of western decline.

(3) Zombies and meaninglessness (ennui), the endemic condition of the detached modern mass human.

(4) Zombies and mass enfeeblement, anxieties over the increasing populations of invalids such as geriatrics, Prozac and other soporifics dependents, social work clients, diseases (sexually transmitted disease and otherwise), and the general overpopulation. The modern plagues.

(5) Failure and malfeasance of traditional social institutions such as corporations, schools and military. Zombieism as a survival skill in organizations..

(6) Citizen Zombie. Mass democracy’s “client” masses as opposed to rational citizens, resulting in de facto zombies as voters and citizen-zombies.

(7) Zombies and Guns, an essential theme of the zombie narratives. Armed self-reliance as a response to the shuffling hordes.

(8) Zombies and media/thrill addiction. Zombies often seek brains of the living. A brains/media parallel is symbolic of the need for constant lurid media stimulation. The role of media today is the stimulation of an otherwise dead citizenry—providing the next big distraction, a fleeting hunk of meaning. They want and need brains, brain food. They need spiritual and mental nourishment. Functionally, in many ways, media addicts resemble zombies.

(9) White people seem most affected. Not Blacks, Islamics or Asiatics. A certain black vitality appears evident by the heroes who emerge in the movies –not brains but vitality.

(10) Overpopulation and decay of cities, many to the point of widespread uninhabitability. Many zombie tales center on malls and urban life—and escape is to the country. Omega man. Only people highly educated/elites can “live” well in many large cities—in the sense of a quality life—who can to some degree insulate themselves and also fool themselves because they are so propagandizable by dint of their highly educated condition. They live in a world of symbols and information that they mistake for an exterior “true” world.

(11) Zombies and Consumerism, the obvious parallels with shuffling fixated hordes that one sees in malls and elsewhere. The zombie-consumer figures in many zombie depictions are obvious satires on mindless shopping. Shopping and consumerism provide the principal habitual activity for many people—it’s where they get their kicks.

(12) How not to become a zombie—a chapter that I fear has as much chance at halting western decline as a penny laid on a railroad track has of halting a diesel locomotive.

In writing this book, I cannot avoid casting myself as a prophet of doom. I should take some comfort in this, at least according to one elder prophet of Western doom, the rather dubious Comte Arthur de Gobineau, who is credited with the epigram, “Mankind did not descend from apes, but we are certainly headed in that direction.” Prophets of doom, claimed Gobineau, have historically been more accurate in their predictions than their opposites. I find little consolation in this. I live and admire Western culture, and consider myself a product of it, professionally and vocationally, a proponent of sorts. This book is a matter of a perceived writerly duty to interpret the meaning of the zombie as a sign of the time in the West.

Chapter 2

Zombies, UFOs, BVMs and the Collective Unconscious:

Expression Via Apparition

The zombie as a modern artifact of the psyche can be partly understood by looking at the psychic artifacts of other times ands places.

In 1960 psychologist C.G. Jung published his analysis of the unidentified flying object sightings that had been receiving a great deal of popular attention since the end of the Second World War.

During this period, UFO sightings had become regular events. People scanned the heavens anxiously—reporting saucers, spheres and giant luminous cigar-shaped objects that moved at fantastic speeds, sometimes in erratic, non-linear, “impossible” fashions, appearing and disappearing abruptly. These UFOs were the subjects of news reports, governmental investigations and numerous books. Associations of UFO watchers formed.

Explanatory theories abounded: swamp gas, ball lightening, weather balloons, Russian communists, secret U.S. Air Force test flights, photographic frauds, time travelers, aliens from other planets and dimensions, interplanetary ambassadors, invaders or spies, to name commonplace theories.

UFOs interacted with popular culture in a big way. Moviemakers picked up the flying saucer theme, carried and varied it, and still haven’t finished their deliveries. Hundreds, if not thousands, of movies and television productions featured UFOs, flying saucers, space travelers and invaders. Various monsters and “life forms”—today’s politically correct form of the perhaps too ethnocentric term of “space monster”—attacked earth or earthlings whenever they could. Sometimes the message from beyond was simply “I/we want to eat you;” sometimes a grave voice of warning to desist from mad hominoid ways; sometimes, more rarely, a benign invitation to ascend from our human cesspit to a greater state of wisdom, being and power—a major theme of two decade’s of the Star Trek line of productions—and a theme which reflects religious visions of heavenly ascension. As humans we constantly need to escape from the shit, literally and figuratively. This need prominently figures into the definition of civilization promulgated by Freud—cleanliness, order and beauty—and discussed by Laporte in his History of Shit (1993). Zombies are none of the above.

Jung interpreted widespread UFO sightings as a mass vision of the sort known to take place in times of collective anxiety. He viewed UFO sightings and hysteria as akin to mass hallucinations or delusions, calling them “visionary rumors.” He attributed them to anxiety over the Atomic Age and the East-versus-West Cold War state that persisted for decades after World War II. It was widely believed back then that at any moment, through mistake, madness or malfeasance, nuclear bombs might destroy everything and everybody. An example, Stanley Kubrick’s darkly comic film, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), depicted a mad Strategic Air Command officer whose attempt to engineer a preemptive nuclear attack against the Soviet Union triggered a nuclear Soviet doomsday device designed to prevent nuclear war: Mr. Irony meets Mr. Death.

UFOs were direct psychological kin to the atomic monsters that populated the 1950s-1960s sci-fi movies. Irradiated mutants would terrorize nuclear war survivors, especially any good-looking women. That was a visionary age, indeed, in an America that Jung described as, “the land of superlatives and science fiction.” He also described California, as “classic saucer country,” and, accordingly, one might still note that the state still seems to concentrate—and perhaps consecrate—UFOs, cults and zombie productions. Meanwhile, across the U.S. and elsewhere, some people still investigate crop circles and other phenomena they seem to believe are UFO-caused. At least a dozen national and international associations exist for this purpose.

The UFO craze by no means stands as a unique manifestation of a collective response to anxiety. Other instructive episodes of visionary rumors referred to by Jung include powerful surging outbreaks of collective beliefs and behaviors by crusaders. Ghostly apparitions of Bishop Adhemar of Le Puy, a spiritual leader of the first crusade, manifested before a number of people at the siege of Jerusalem in 1099 A.D. Even though Adhemar had died the year previous, the ghostly bishop allegedly advised on the authenticity of a suspect relic, The Holy Lance, believed to have been the lance that pierced the side of Jesus. More importantly, the apparition also provided the strategy that finally took Jerusalem from the heathens—the crusaders had been having a very bad time of it and were nearing starvation. The dead man instructed the crusaders to march barefoot in procession nine times around the city walls, a tactic having biblical precedent at the Battle of Jericho, although Jerusalem for reasons obscure required additional revolutions. The apparition was heeded, despite the mockery of the besieged. The crusaders then took the city, although a few newly built siege towers also seemed to play a role; reports have the crusaders wading ankle deep in Saracen blood (Runciman, 1994).

Certainly, though, however one might interpret this account—as hysterical superstition, as intervention from God, or as an expression-and-response loop of inner content—the specter seems to have been just the thing for the occasion. It somehow, symbolically, sub-logically, summed, focused and mobilized a collective agitation that had driven men thousands of desperate miles to confront some projected antitheses in a wholly foreign land.

The Holy Lance also figured in the crusader’s visionary rumors. Death had reversed Adhemar’s original skepticism concerning the authenticity of Lance. One of the crusaders later undertook trial by ordeal to prove the authenticity of the Lance, a judicial process that in those days was regarded as a valid method of knowing the truth. He died of burns 12 days after passing through the hellish corridor of fire devised for the trial. Still, his followers interpreted the event as a divine proof mark, saying he had really passed through the fire successfully, but then had accidentally been pushed back in by the well wishers who had gathered around him to celebrate his passage through the flames. The Lance continued as an object of reverence for some; crusaders apparently needed it to help make sense of their lives and actions. Their hermeneutics seemed to crystalize about these symbols that functioned more or less as kernels for their thoughts and actions.

From the above-mentioned acts, apparent perceptions and outbreaks of symbolism one may infer the tremendous pressure of unconscious content. It will out. So when one hears of educated persons who castrate themselves and commit suicide in order to somehow obtain evacuation by flying saucer to a higher civilization in a far, far galaxy, one should not be too surprised (See http://www.heavensgate.com/). Such acts seem inexplicable only to the uninformed.

In Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain mocked the Roman Catholic Church for its apparently pragmatic explanation of the self-duplicative powers of relics such as those which bemused the crusaders—saints’ bones, crucifixion nails and holy shrouds—which, altogether, functioned as just another set of symbols of inner needs. Even crusader Adhemar, however, when living, had doubted such relics because he had seen another alleged Holy Lance in Constantinople. But because holy relics were themselves associated with miracles and miraculous beings, by applying the omniscient rationalizing powers of the ever-needy human mind, it could therefore be inferred that relics also possessed miraculous powers that included self-generation. This rationalization handily tied off hermeneutical loose ends. Thus, even though there was probably enough wood and nails from the One True Cross in various European locations to build a fleet of ships, it had all self-generated miraculously. Relics were like a chocolate cake that grew back when piece was removed. One miracle begets another. Here, as is generally true, logic and perception served stronger pre-rational needs.

The Church adapted doctrinally in this way because probably it had to; adaptation was the only way to keep up some appearance of ecclesiastical authority in a riot of symbolic expression, to keep riding the wave instead of being drowned by it. The Church perhaps has been the most successful surfer in this age of the world.

Jungian psychological notions of the collective or individual unconscious can be compared to surfing. One either rides the wave or goes down under it. Freud, on the other hand, presented a more or less mechanical, more conservative approach: if the unconscious lacked appropriate, healthy outlets, it blew up like an over-pressured steam boiler. But no matter what, within either conceptualization, unconscious content would be coming out, in one way or another, through sex, neurosis, hysteria, or psychosomatic disease, depravity or sublimation, dreams, arts, symbolism, individual or cultural creativity and/or destruction, or mass political and/or spiritual movements. Both the Jungian and Freudian metaphors have merits and limitations, and seem to explain much actual experience fairly well, at the individual and collective levels. This sort of approximation may be all one can ask of any explanation of human events. Zombie consciousness seems like a wave of symbolism that is moving over and through us, impelled not only by circumstantial anxieties and deep fears, but also perhaps ancestrally inherited terrors.

Consider the symbolic aspects of another, yet-living visionary rumor, the phenomenon of the Lady of Fatima. The Blessed Virgin Mary manifested to three shepherd children in 1917 and began a religious movement, a sort of interior cult within Roman Catholicism, that today refers to itself as a “network.” This apparition issued, so say believers, a series of heavenly communiqués (press releases?), meant to be unveiled in public one at a time according to set schedule, predicting grave world events and laying certain burdens upon the Pope for preventive action to obtain peace. The predictions, as I am aware of them, were fairly banal; one was that a Pope to be called Pius XI would be elected; and since Pius X had died only in 1914, this would seem a pretty safe bet. Another was that the war would end. The predictions seem to mirror the usual recurring Gog and Magog-like anxieties about war and rising powers in the East, Russia in this case. The Fatima network remains fervent (see, for example, http: //fatima.org/).

Likewise active is another BVM manifestation, the Lady of Lourdes and its miracles of healing or pacifying the halt, the lame, and the dying. Beginning in 1858, a series of apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary allegedly took place to a simple-minded, pure local girl, Bernadette. The apparition took the form of an ethereally beautiful, white-clad lady who said parts of the Rosary with Bernadette, and who revealed a spring that gave rise to the now famous healing waters of Lourdes. The apparitions, 18 in total, attracted crowds of up to 20,000 people, including a brass band. It is unclear to me that anyone other than Bernadette ever actually saw the Lady, but this doesn’t matter. People wanted to believe; they demanded to believe; they obviously did believe; they still do believe.

Church authorities tried to close off the site and restrict Bernadette from further encounters with the apparition, and to otherwise control access to the phenomenon. Locals apparently foiled this attempt at informational control and news of the miracle diffused. Bernadette later joined a convent, eventually died, and her body, exhumed in 1909, thirty years after death, was said to be incorrupt by witnesses that included two physicians. Hagiographers regard this as one of the highest stamps of saintly authenticity. Believers continue to regard it as an absolute sign. She was beatified in 1925, the official Church recognition of her entrance into heaven, and promoted to full blown sainthood, i.e., canonized, in 1933. Thousands of people still travel annually to Lourdes to seek miraculous healing in its waters. Cures have allegedly been documented; there is little need, however, to document the obviously powerful effects on the local economy.

The site is also said to have the property of instant conversion—of changing hardened minds and hearts—although one might suppose that someone who traveled thousands of miles to visit Lourdes to be already in a state of mind favoring “instant” conversion.

By the way, the word “apparition” as used throughout this chapter appears a standard designation for such events, UFOs and BVMs both, and is in general use by believers and non-believers alike. Also, the adjective “simple” as employed above may also designate a virtue, despite having connotations of near-idiocy in colloquial language.

So the Great Mother Goddess is still with us in the 21st Century, a popular tendency that resembles the contagion of ideas and feeling in crowds as described by Le Bon, upon which Roman Catholic authorities have struggled to keep a lid, least Marianism—the veneration of the Blessed Virgin Mary—overwhelm the worship of Jesus Christ. This is more than just a remote possibility considering the functionally paganistic symbolic propensities of the masses. For does not the Mother often intercede on behalf of her misbehaving children with the stern, far less approachable Father? I might add here that a major secular reason why Roman Catholicism has worked so well as a world-scale religion is its obvious ability to accommodate symbolic needs and expressions; it has proved superior in this regard even to the wildest pagan faiths. It is also superior in this regard even to Voodoo, its cousin religion, which also glories in saints, candles, blood, smoke and oils and in rising from the dead. Catholicism does all this and more, at the same time offering to even the most subtle of minds an apparently infinite set of hairsplitting rationalistic possibilities whereby Aristotle—conveyed via Aquinas—can shake hands with Animism. In its accommodation to intellectualist needs, Catholicism far outshines and trumps Voodoo.

Retuning to BVM outbreaks, the online website “Mary Pages” provides current examples of Marianism’s deeply rooted visionary strength. Listed are more than a dozen distinct episodes of BVM apparitions in various parts of the world. The site’s author ties it all together by stating:

The Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to this world to give us a warning. Her words, during her apparition in Salette, are striking and imposing. “If My people will not submit themselves to God, I will be forced to let go of the Hand of My Son.” The Blessed Virgin points here to the end of time. Her dejected manner, the flood of tears and the words of her are the expression of her concern and affection for the people: “Never will you be able to repay me for what I have done for you.” The Blessed Virgin Mary asks for many prayers; to save the earth” (http:// www. marypages.com/).

Here is Apocalypse expressed in the voice of long-suffering motherhood, with the added homely touch of you-just-wait-until-your-Father/My Son-gets-home. The BVM, aka Mother Mary, is of course the entirely emotionally correct entity to approach for intercession with a big God-Daddy reputed to be jealous and exacting, a hard case relatively speaking, at least based on his Old Testament reputation. It is no wonder that hundreds of millions pray to her regularly. One might reflect that a sit-com based on the Holy Family could offer quite the set of convoluted plot twists that might well align with psychological audience needs and experiences.

Incidentally, Mary’s Son, Jesus, shares with the zombie the property of rising from the dead and also another somewhat queasy characteristic, perhaps symbolic and perhaps not, of flesh eating. Dressing this in religious ritual makes it seem the less queasy, but the bread of communion is his flesh and the wine is his blood, according to the doctrine of transubstantiation. Also like the modern zombie, Jesus is somehow inextricably tangled up with the Apocalypse. Obscure? Maybe, but by such mysteries, correspondences and rites the psyche feels it way through the word. Possible implications are stupefying if not profound. Is the zombie our brother Lazarus? Is the zombie the revitalized or un-vitalized human who has arisen from the foul crypt of the modern age? Is he, the zombie, purifying or joining in communion with humanity by eating it? Cannibalism is often highly ritualized, just like communion in church: one eats one’s neighbor or enemy to acquire his characteristics, his strengths and virtues, and not merely for food. So bless us, Zombie Jesus.

If any of these things are true, and psychically they all resound of truths else they would not be practiced, it’s no wonder that so many people shudder at the thought of zombies. In one of the early influential zombie movies, Return of the Living Dead (Bannon1989), a speaking zombie, a relative rarity in zombie films, explains that zombies crave brains to eat because they take away the pain of being dead. Do not communion and salvation also cheat proud death of its pains and horrors?

So now brains have been added to the collective menu. All this bespeaks unsettled, dark psychic content and night terrors. Death and The End are coming, just a’ walking down the hall. In Walking Dead, the character Jubal—a highly moral southern conservative Christian white male character—becomes increasingly horrified as he learns more and more about the flesh-eating, resurrected “walkers.” He notes that the Bible said the dead would be resurrected, but he didn’t realize it would be like this.

But if the psychic content is there, then out it will come, one way or another. I was raised in a city of homemade backyard bathtub shrines to the Blessed Virgin. These had been set up mainly by first- and second-generation Slavic immigrants as homemade sacred grottos. The mode of construction was that an old cast iron bathtub would be buried halfway upright, sheltering a plaster statue of “Mother Mary.” Votive candles occasionally graced the shrine, but more usually flowers were placed or planted before it. The month of May especially would see major services, devotions and processions to the BVM at neighborhood Catholic schools and churches. Ancient Romans and other pagans at this same time of year, spring, would rut in plowed furrows to celebrate and encourage the eternal fecundity of the earth. In my hometown the spring ritual involved chant-like repetitions of the Hail Mary prayer, sometimes hysterically, especially by the elder nuns, who would screech them with the closed eyes of inner intensity, a line of which was: “Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.” Mary was always the big interceder, the maternal barrier against woe. And she never rose zombie-like from the dead. She never even died. According to doctrine she “ascended” directly into heaven, an event known as “The Ascension” that was celebrated as a Holy Day.

As a tranquilizing influence, Mary’s divinely fruitful womb and her death-cheating son, Jesus, preceded Prozac by long years. Note too the word hysteria, that so well describes the tone of many of these events, “hysteria,” derives from the Greek hystera meaning “womb.” In so many ways these May events could be considered the annual crazy womb celebrations and placation rites of spring. In ancient days physicians believed that many mysterious ailments resulted when the womb somehow got loose and wandered about the body, afflicting various parts. Freud’s sexual-dynamic explanations of migrating hysterical symptoms in women, such as blindness and numbed hands, are but one step removed from wandering womb. All these women needed was good adult fuck, such was the implication, to get married and reproduce. Of course Freud pronounced his diagnosis, perhaps unintentionally and perhaps not, in euphemisms of arriving at what he called a normal adult sexual genital developmental stage. At heart, Freud may have been no more than a verbose good old boy. Feminists have called this a patriarchal world view or, better yet if you like big words, phallologocentrism (Iragaray ). Nowadays, as baffled or self deluded as ever, physicians load down patients with the sort of placating drugs that the rock n’ roll group the Rolling Stones years ago satirized in song as “Mother’s little helper.” This nearly universal practice produces a sort of medically induced zombie state, an iatrogenic zombie. And nowadays the medicos drug the kids, too, not just the mother.

As for the backyard Marianists, the urban ghetto eventually displaced their sacred grottos in the lilac bushes, and their schools and churches, too, for the most part. The folk Marianists died off or moved on to the suburbs, so called white flight, abandoning their shrines, but certainly not their needs. I know of a case of postmortem white flight in which the family exhumed the body of the father and removed it to a distant suburban cemetery. “I didn’t want little niggers throwing rocks at his gravestone,” explained a brother. Junkmen hauled off the BVM tubs and sold them for cast iron scrap, along with many of the city’s manhole covers. Once in the suburbs, the Marianists, along with others, took up the pursuit of what might be the biggest visionary rumor of all—the belief that they were the middle class.

A high point in the lives or imminent deaths of some of the folk Marianists seemed to be a visit, sometimes called a “pilgrimage,” to Lourdes. Such visits were much gossiped about and were obviously held to be important life (or death) markers. Based on the Lourdes pilgrims that I have personally known, however, the Lady of Lourdes appears to have a very low batting average when it comes to miraculous cures. It doesn’t matter, though, for in addition and more importantly, Mary seemed a very personal saint/goddess to the folk Marianists. She was associated with mercy and mercy and merciful death. They displayed her medallions, sang her praise, droned her Rosary which has very few “Our Fathers” in proportion to its overwhelming “Hail Marys,” and seemed especially fervent, if not carried away, at devotions. I suspect that many of the urban Churches would have much sooner gone out of business if not for the Blessed Virgin trade. Jesus was not enough of a draw.

Other modern visionary rumors have melded UFO sightings with what are now being called “BVM sightings.” This was bound to happen in an age of shifting hopes, which has moved partly from psychological reliance on religious mythology to what is perhaps an even more desperate reliance on scientific mythology. Significantly, the BVM has often been depicted in religious paintings with rays emanating downward from her hands and wrist areas, representing Grace or Mercy, no doubt, but also bearing an uncanny likeness to the ray guns and death rays as depicted in classic science fiction movies such as War of the Worlds and Mars Attacks.

The story of simple Bernadette and the Lady of Lourdes, for an example of the ready transmutability of visionary rumors, has been re-explained as a UFO visitation. It has thus been recycled and hermeneutically reinterpreted to accommodate the unconscious content and symbolic availabilities of the more modern age. For after all, isn’t Heaven located somewhere in Outer Space?

Although why space aliens should want to travel to earth for the purpose of saying the Rosary with a French peasant girl is extremely mysterious. But then, so are Transubstantiation, the Holy Trinity, the Immaculate Conception, and other core tenets of major faiths, including the proposition that the BVM, the Official Mother of God, would wish to meet with Bernadette at all, despite that being simple can be a virtue of sorts. In this case the virtue of simplicity serves to confirm the unique sanctity, the importance of each individual in God’s omniscient eye, and also in the mind of the vision-holder.

The converse proposition, namely that Bernadette should wish to meet with the BVM, is much more explainable, although nowhere near as cosmically dramatic. Who wouldn’t want to chat for a bit with the Mother of God? The “vision,” however, seems likely a product of an admixture of the inner needs of Bernadette with the agitated community that quickly gathered about her. Note, she was not working in isolation, and the effects of crowd mentality in the history of Bernadette appear strong. Again, see for examples, Gustave Le Bon (1896) on the suggestibility of crowds, and their propensity for collective visions and delusions, such as crews and passengers seeing mermaids from passing ships. Likewise is the human propensity to seek to explain; when we look into the fog of events, we think we discern shapes moving, and once a shape has been named and shared, we can then imagine seeing it more clearly. As is well known, definition strongly affects perceptions.

The modern UFO vision likewise reads as a product of the inner needs and unconscious content of modern “scientific” mass man. Scientific man is still just as needy and desperate as ever when faced with cataclysmic uncertainty, if not more so because he is no longer simple, and his visions are informed, defined, by half understood terms and symbols that have more recently been added to the general psychic storehouse. Blessed virgins, in the here and now, in the flesh, are no longer the trend; they are getting harder and harder to find. UFOs were the trend for a time, and are still reported, but the popular interest and fear of atomic apocalypse has diverted. Although I have met people sporting “alien” tattoos and who have claimed firsthand experience with sightings, e.g., one type of alien is known as a “grey,” and “greens” are said to exist as well. Now, more recently, zombie consciousness has been added to the current psychic mix, that bizarre mélange that feeds today’s media babies.

One still sees occasional reports of BVM sightings in the form of miraculous images that various people discern upon apparently random, banal objects—cornflakes, vegetables of varying sorts, silos, even on turtle shells. A 20-year-old grilled cheese sandwich said to manifest the BVM image was auctioned on Ebay recently.

Will such miracles ever cease? No, definitely not, not while the human collective unconscious still exists. One is reminded of the Shroud of Turin that bears, it has been said, the image of Jesus Christ. There is no readily apparent divide between hope, dread, gullibility and psychic needs.

A recent BVM apparition site is “The Lady of the Rock” in the Mojave Desert. It attracts enthusiastic crowds and has seemed to blur whatever boundaries may exist between public relations and visionary rumors (http://www. califcity.com /virginmary.html).

My point with these many examples: none of this is going away anytime soon. To paraphrase Hannah Arendt (1948), people believe in mysterious things—conspiracy theories, UFOs, visitations, propagandas—precisely because they are mysterious. Mystery is the essential part of the attraction, life itself being essentially mysterious. When people say the “Lord works in mysterious manner,” it’s because mystery is where the market is for explanations.

The “Reality of the Unseen,” as William James called it (1902), accounts for much human behavior, including both its highs and lows. People need these mysteries, obviously. The need is tangible even if the ideas and visions by which it expresses itself may not be. People need the magical black box of mystery to reconcile the mundane with the indirect nature of their experience with the “unseen.” They know something is out there; they sense movement in the fog. As William James writes:

The more concrete objects of most men’s religion, the deities whom they worship, are known to them only in idea. It has been vouchsafed, for example, only to few (1902, p. 53).

People are always anxious for vouchsafed information concerning higher things and events. Don’t overlook the fact that for many people, virtually all higher experience with the supposedly concrete political and social matters of world events is indirect, known to them only as an idea conveyed by various forms of mass media, and vouchsafed only by remote experts (Lippman, 1926). People must seek their confirmations where they can get them.

Other powerful modern age visionary rumors include tales told and eagerly absorbed of St. George, angels and ghostly (zombie-like?) English long-bowmen that miraculously came to the aid of World War One British expeditionary forces in 1914 at Mons, Belgium, when the British were desperately fleeing the German advance. Rumors spread of German soldiers slain by arrows having been found on the battlefield. Of course the spreading of such tales was also, often, deliberatively propagandistic, e.g., sentimentalist war-themed fiction published in newspapers, but as such, these tales could only take root in a susceptible collective unconsciousness. Variants of these rumors resurrected in World War II.

My own suspicion, even the mass behaviors that led to the Obama presidency could be interpreted as a sort of visionary rumor, where the vote, especially the youth vote, represented a projected vision of the savior/change figure that best reflected vague contemporary anxieties. The vote reflected not a cold reality of just another Chicago mass-politico speaking paternalistically in absurdly vague generalities, but fears and worries of social obliteration, e.g., employment, education, energy, the standard of living, and an opportunity to led a meaningful life. This statement no doubt necessarily applies to all mass democratic political figures, to those whom, as piratical demagogues, must perpetually careen on the winds of collective anxiety. Obama is just as much an apparition as the BVM. The Obama apparition has not yet to my knowledge been associated with UFOs, but stubbornly popular claims of him being a Kenyan would seem to be an attempt to locate his origin in some transnational space, an invader disguised, and therefore an insidious agent of no good. This is a much more psychologically pleasing account than the apparent banal, sad reality that he merely reflects the primal/emotional needs of a woebegone mass electorate. Which idiocy—or idiot—may be next? Does it even matter in the mass politics of psychic neediness? Fantasy mass politics are the politics of decline. Perhaps realpolitik signifies civic health.

So what general sorts of disturbances in the collective unconscious would demand the appearances of visionary rumors? Visionary rumors might be thought of as mass precipitations of mythology. If the atmospheric conditions are right, the precipitate forms. In the case of Mons in 1914 and Fatima in 1917, the role of the Great War seems obvious—a mechanized bloodbath on a scale hitherto unimaginable, Death riding rampant. The old, comfortable order had been upset. Political and economic chaos combined with imminent threat to life, home and tribe. Is this not enough to qualify as a mass disturbance? Anyone even slightly connected back then to the literate world of newspapers and mass communication lived in a cloud of urgent propagandas. Nationalism and Red revolution mobilized abroad and at home; evil was not merely looming, but had tangibly manifested in military uniform. The Kaiser was represented as a sort of pagan conqueror intent upon destroying Christian civilization. The Reds personified godlessness.

It seems also that an initial disturbance leads to even more disturbance. The mere fact that the collective unconscious is disturbed further disturbs the wa of the individuals who constitute the mass; wa being a handy Japanese concept that refers to spiritual-psychological equilibrium, inner peace, e.g., to paraphrase the words of Yoko Ono during an interview years ago, “That disturbs my wa.” The meaning is clear enough. Something is up, an unsettling change in the wind. Zombies indicate general and upsetting disturbances in the collective social wa.

Another indicator of the present disturbance is dreams of zombies. In one woman’s words:

I’m not afraid of dead people coming out of their graves or of half rotting corpses. My nightmares and fears consist of super viruses, plagues and no cure in sight. I am afraid of the possibility of a virus that infects exponentially, and causes its host to lose all humanity and kill and infect others. . . . . After an out-break of the “zombie” virus, basic institutions begin to fall apart. The police force, firefighters and hospitals begin to be overwhelmed and from there, local governments, state governments and laws are gone. . . . . the world turns to chaos.

My husband laughs at me when this freaks me out, because to him this means he gets to use all of those survival skills he learned in his army training, and maybe even test out his gun. No laws or authority mean no more 9-5 jobs, no more responsibilities, and a simpler life. I, however, find this kind of world terrifying. Never mind the zombies, it’s often the humans who make this kind of world worse, from looting, murdering and fighting for resources in complete disregard for anyone but themselves. If the zombies don’t get you the selfish survivors will. Katrina is an all too recent example of what humans do if laws and law enforcement are thrown out the window.

I joke with my husband and tell him to shoot me in the head at the first sign of a zombie. In all seriousness, I don’t think I would survive long. In the beginning there will be soldiers in gas masks herding people to various places. This means my husband will be expected to do his job as a soldier and try to keep the peace. This never ends well for the soldiers and if there was an epidemic, I want my husband with me, not trying to calm down masses of people with a mob mentality. I also can’t stand the thought of stealing from a starving family only to feed mine, having to kill someone like me to eat and on top of all that having to deal with crazy infected people every day. I think about all the helpless children and elderly who couldn’t fend for themselves, the animals who would be homeless and scared and the fear you would have to deal with every day.

So why do zombies scare the hell out me? Zombies come with baggage. You can’t have an infectious super virus without the breakdown of society. You can’t have a plague without looters, murdering and completely selfish, un-co-operating people who only think about themselves. The breakdown of society would bring out the murderous human nature of everyone without a conscience and kill off any civil person in the way. I don’t want to live in a world of savages and survival; I also don’t think I would make it for long (Personal Communication, 2012).

Clearly, “Zombies come with baggage.” A great deal, one might say.

Similar blends of anxieties bind together many of the current militia and survivalist movements or groups. This collective group activity is practiced at varying levels of sophistication and intensity throughout the U.S., sometimes with the sort of fervor that one has come to expect from Heaven’s Gate advocates and the extreme Marianists who protest abortion in ways that have apparently included murder, actual or intended.

So-called millenarian, apocalyptic style militias correspond in important ways with the beliefs and behaviors of other partakers in the visionary rumors and fantasies discussed so far. While foresight and preparation are reasonable and wise, and the extent of such preparation is always arguable, the example of the recent Hutaree Militia trial in Michigan would seem to show how fantasy, apocalyptic anxieties and apparent simple-mindedness can elide into a laundry list of federal criminal charges. This slide, apparently greased by a well-paid informant and possible agent provocateur, allegedly resulted in militia members threatening or fantasizing—it is difficult to tell which from a distance—to kill police officers by ambushing them at a funeral of a police officer murdered expressly for the purpose of baiting this trip. The Hutaree belief system seems to be a blend of apocalyptic folk Christianity, camouflage cargo pants, weapons training, groupthink and role-playing fantasies or recreation in the woods. And while there is no mention of zombies in any of the reports on the Hutaree that I have seen, fears of political decline, economic/social collapse and racial or cultural inundation seem to have overloaded the interior dynamics of the group to the point where the overflow was noticed and denounced to the authorities by some of the constitutional militia operating the region. The latter types of militia group members see themselves as operating within the legalistic purview of the Second Amendment’s “well regulated militia” clause, and within the tradition of a citizen militia composed of all the people, for use in extremis. Millenarian militia, however, such as the Hutaree, are more or less apocalyptic in their hermeneutics (Churchill 2008) and resonate more with zombie consciousness. Hutaree members apparently perceived the Antichrist incarnate in a European Union politician. Reports have also linked them with the Christian Patriot Movement, a movement idealized by J. W. Rawles in Patriots: Surviving the Coming Economic Collapse, a novel that reads like a dramatized how-to survival manual. Its Christian protagonists, after repelling looters and bandits, fight and eventually win against oppressive U.N. troops that had moved into the western United States under the guise of peacekeeping forces. There are martyrs.

If one believes the newspapers, a practice that cannot be entirely recommended, Hutaree militia members seem to have imbibed a similarly dramatic view of themselves which informed their “conspiracy,” which to me sounds more like fantasy that was foolishly and unfortunately expressed in the presence of a well paid police informant. A federal judge apparently agreed, and dismissed all but the weapons charges. Several years ago another militia group in Michigan planned apparently to blow up a major freeway bridge in the middle of the state for some muddy purpose having to do with U.N. occupation. One might reasonably wonder if they had their own clone of the Holy Lance to inspire them.

All these people may have been much better off staying at home and watching zombie movies—which would perhaps have provided a safer outlet for their anxieties over decline. This form of catharsis might provide a vent that would not lead so directly to the slammer.

But one should not dismiss these anxieties lightly, as people “clinging to” their guns and bibles.” Would it be better if they clung to the empty words and feel good programs of welfare state politicians? Nor should one dismiss the visionary rumors informed by these sorts of anxieties. Folk who used to be able to derive, by hook or crook, a fairly decent living—the “simple” lower working classes—are being left out of the modern social equation except as objects of a modern client state that processes them as grist for unsound social welfare programs and mass educations schemes.

The sorts of anxieties that manifest as zombie consciousness beg for speedy, broad and soothing assurances. Accordingly, fantastical solutions saturate the social market: the wind will blow us energy; we will farm the cities; recycling memos will save our planet. A professional leadership class, that lives largely by spending other people’s money, offers limitless pap and drivel in the form of magical words and propagandas: recovery, work, job creation, education, renaissance, sustainability, wind power, diversity, urban farming, hope, training programs, transformational leadership, etc. Even Detroit is allegedly coming back. Nothing changes but the vocabulary—and even that is recycled from trash. Things aren’t seemingly working out. It’s a grim situation as viewed from below. But ompared to this sort of insubstantial pap, the zombie approaches tangibility.

For in the way of a potential catharsis, the modern zombie offers a hands-on (killable) solution to many contemporary psychological and spiritual problems. This is important, if for no other reason, that for in the age of multiculturalism and diversity one may no longer, without fear of moral condemnation, blame immigrants, or so-called “minorities,’” scapegoats, or “the other” anymore. Cathartic satisfaction for some is found by choosing sides in mass-mediated puppet games of Republicans v. Democrats or Conservatives v. Progressives, which frequently vent the foulest of expressions and feelings under the excuse of political speech.

The “Other” has been a faddish term in the Humanities for quite some time, perhaps too long. It designates, more or less, an alleged fundamental need or propensity of Western culture to define itself oppositionally. This explanatory jargon is probably true as far as it goes, which is not very far, for it constitutes a moronic oversimplification of the broad thrust of Western thought. Nevertheless, many have trafficked in these sorts of explanations. Whatever the case may be, however, the zombie has come to function as a sort of ultimate symbolic “Other.” Scapegoat and plague, universal enemy and absolute evil, eater of Life, it may be destroyed without violating the rigid canons of politically correct behavior and utterance. The zombie is a sink for negative emotions.

A last point in this chapter, as Jung noted, if all this up-bubbling and out-swelling of religious and mythological symbolism and its associated ritual, whether folkish or haute couture in origin or style, were to be somehow cut off at a stroke, it would commence an immediate and luxurious new growth. People badly need it. Without it, to paraphrase Jung, the world is cold, grey and unending (1977). And it seem to be getting more so in the West daily. We might note Dr. C. George Boeree comments on Jung’s notion of the collective unconscious:

Jung dreamt a great deal about the dead, the land of the dead, and the rising of the dead. These represented the unconscious itself—not the "little" personal unconscious that Freud made such a big deal out of, but a new collective unconscious of humanity itself, an unconscious that could contain all the dead, not just our personal ghosts. Jung began to see the mentally ill as people who are haunted by these ghosts, in an age where no one is supposed to even believe in them. If we could only recapture our mythologies, we would understand these ghosts, become comfortable with the dead, and heal our mental illnesses (1997).

By means of the zombie we can better haunt ourselves.

The zombie at the very least adds some much-needed psychic contrast to the cold, to the grey and to the unending. It also provides a face, albeit necrotic, to the seemingly impersonal sociological forces that undermine the West, for in a near-perfect correspondence with the zombie, the West itself appears necrotic in a galloping way. Both are in need of brains to ease the pain.