Pardon merci, je suis le grand zombie
I’m just not human tonight
— Mekons, “Big Zombie”
I haven’t thought about anthropologist Wade Davis much since his 1985 nonfiction book The Serpent and the Rainbow was turned into what I thought was an icky film by Wes Craven in 1988.1
In L.A. I had a habit of picking up review copies and other first editions at Cosmopolitan Book Shop, where I got Davis’s book. I always had good luck there.
In his book Davis recounts his attempt to see if zombification in Haitian Vodou had a pharmacological component. I remember his tale being akin to Terence McKenna’s Food of the Gods, published seven years later, taking the reader on a similar, esoteric journey regarding psychedelics.2
So, on my birthday, last Monday, Wade Davis shows up on of all things, Christiane Amanpour’s PBS show. And he ain’t talking zombies. But perhaps he is. He was tapped because of an August 6 Rolling Stone article that went viral:
A sampling from that article…
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- In a dark season of pestilence, COVID has reduced to tatters the illusion of American exceptionalism.
- More than any other country, the United States in the post-war era lionized the individual at the expense of community and family. It was the sociological equivalent of splitting the atom.
- In truth, at least in economic terms, the country of the 1950s resembled Denmark as much as the America of today. Marginal tax rates for the wealthy were 90 percent.
(Hmm… Maybe there is something to that MAGA hashtag.)
And then there is this:
The United States, virtually a demilitarized nation on the eve of the Second World War, never stood down in the wake of victory. To this day, American troops are deployed in 150 countries. Since the 1970s, China has not once gone to war; the U.S. has not spent a day at peace.
In essence, the U.S. has kept alive its corpse—once decimated by Depression, animated by WWII animus—only to be eviscerated by a military-industrial-congressional complex that planted “defense” plants in every district to insure an economic survival more akin to aspartame than, say, agave.
On July 23, two weeks before Davis published his article, Prof. Richard D. Wolff posted “Why a Cold War Against China?” in which he explains how the U.S. needs enemies to justify an insatiable military.
Predictably Wolff invokes Eisenhower, who warned us about the “conjunction” of arms manufacturers and arms consumers in his farewell address of January 17, 1961. What’s less remembered is that Eisenhower also said, “Those who have freedom will understand, also, its heavy responsibility,” which left open the United States’ exceptional place in the world. That responsibility, despite Eisenhower’s caveats, meant—and means—arming ourselves and our allies to the teeth rather than cultivating endeavors involved with life rather than death: education, health care, the arts—not to mention sustenance itself.
Three days later Wolff said “our economic system is on life support.”
And then last Friday Wolff published an article in which he discusses the Chinese economic model.
Rising labour productivity yielded rising average real wages (also rising far faster than in the West). Across these years, no Chinese troops fought in any foreign wars. Housing, education, health care, and transportation received massive investments; their supplies often grew ahead of Chinese demand for them.3
All of this is Economics 101.
Then on Sunday David Cay Johnston’s DCReport posted the following appeal:
But what about the tyranny of the military and its stranglehold over whichever choice you choose?
Vote? That’s something the walking, living dead do.
