Martin LeFevre: The Zombies Are Angry

Is the mammoth display of anger on the part of the walking dead at town hall meetings across America a last gasp of reactionary zeal, or the ominous sign of things to come? It’s hard to say, but it’s a most interesting spectacle to watch.

I talked with a fellow last week who was part of the student takeover at Columbia University in 1968. He noted with bemusement that the right wing clones screaming down members of Congress who have returned to their districts to talk about health care reform are using the same tactics the Left perfected in the heyday of the 60’s revolution.

I don’t think this is what the counterculture meant by “what goes around comes around.” So what the hell is going on the US of A? It isn’t the stupid economy, which is showing signs of life, and it certainly isn’t health care reform.

The public discourse in America has become detached from reality. A third of the country believes the lunacy that “death panels” are going to decide who lives and who dies after the age of 74.

One professional pundit acidly blames Obama’s supporters, saying, “His backers seem to lack all conviction, perhaps because the prosaic reality of his administration isn’t living up to their dreams of transformation.” Much more perceptively, one disillusioned Obama supporter said this week, “I feel like he punked us.”

Obama, it’s now clear, had an unspoken covenant with the American people: ‘Let me be elected by embodying all your empty hopes for change, and you won’t have to face the hard truth about this country, but can feel good about having elected a black man President of the United States.’

“But we thought that you were really going to change things,” the increasingly disillusioned Yes We Can believers exclaim. “Or at least that the good feeling would last longer.”

But Barack simply smiles from his lofty perch high above the hoi polloi, and says that he still believes in the people. After all, didn’t even the ironically named Arlen Specter say after his bruising this week that he thinks people who have been angrily disrupting town hall meetings across the nation are "not necessarily representative of America?”

The top dog in the Senate on the health care issue, the Republican Charles Grassley of Iowa, was more accurate, if not more truthful during his foray into the most attended town hall meetings in the nation’s history: “We’re here with such a large crowd because people fear for America,” adding, “we don’t really know what’s happening.”

Indeed. Affordable, high quality health care for all citizens is a debate that’s been over for decades in most developed countries. But the prospect of even a government option in America resurrects the old bogie of communism, and elicits shouts of ‘Socialism!’

“No one can tell me how to live my life,” one typical protester yelled at her congressman, “no one tells me how long I should live and when I should die.”

Another brought down the house by crying her truth: “I don't want this country turning into Russia, turning into a socialized country.” The country is coming unglued, and it’s affecting even the unflappable Hillary.

It wasn’t just her lifelong marital competition with the ‘Big Dog’ that made Mrs. Clinton become slightly unhinged in the Congo: “My husband is not the secretary of state; I am…I'm not going to be channeling my husband.” The systematic rapes and ceaseless carnage in the Congo didn’t deserve a genuine expression of outrage, but a question about Bill did. Apparently the star of “It Takes a Village” forgot that even in the Congo, it really is a global village now.

An insight into what may really be going on in America is contained in a column I wrote during the primaries, “The Enlightenment of Hillary.” In it I said, “Clearly, people who are walking more slowly up the mountain (or are mired in the valley), harbor inchoate fears of a new eugenics program to cull the herd.”

Much ado has been made of the fact that many of the zombies, I mean protesters, have not been expressly told to turn out and disrupt town hall meetings by their physical and metaphysical puppet masters. But zombies don’t need marching orders to know when to march. All they need is the sight of other z0mbies getting all worked up over non-existent threats.

By definition, zombies don’t give a damn about this country, or anything else except themselves. To give a damn means to still care about what used to be called the common good, not just what’s ‘mine.’ The inwardly dead are /out in force because they’re all deathly afraid of losing the tiny corner of America over which they still think they have control.

Anger conceals their fear, and fear drives their anger. So they mob together in a half-choreographed primal bellow. It’s the growing, unchoreographed part that we really need to worry about. The walking dead aren’t just on the right, and they aren’t disconnected from the rest of America.

Like sleeping on an arm all night, it hurts when life returns to the appendage. The question is, are the people waking up, or is the numbness spreading?

Martin LeFevre is a contemplative and philosopher. martinlefevre@sbcglobal.net

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