The economy is afflicted with a zombie plague: that meme has clung to popular culture since the eruption of the Great Recession. Today's case in point comes from the Huffington Post.
Rebekah and Stephen Hren focus on peak oil and Boomer demographics, which leads them to a Gothic vision:
we have an economic system -- whose only purpose is growth -- stuck in a shrinking vise of money and energy, inhabiting the hollowed-out body of a debt-bloated carcass that continues to stumble forward,
Which is great. But only the first half of the lyric:
...only to be bonked on the head or shot in the stomach every few years by never-ending financial crises that are the product of attempting to achieve infinite growth in a finite world.
Then the authors hit the heroic resistance to the living dead theme:
Until we have the wherewithal to remove our current collective zombie economic brain and immolate it, we'll be stuck in the land of the economic undead, giving our hard-won earnings to zombie banks and the ridiculously-compensated zombie CEOs that control them (and us).
Feels like a connection to my view of White Zombie, and the left-wing rebel zombie story. Does anyone have recent examples of the political opposite, stories seeing the unemployed as the living dead?
Previous Infocultismo on zombie econ:
- 2009 was the Year of the Zombie (Jim Kunstler)
- Paul Krugman wonders who's eating the brains
- Another New York Times writer catches on
- Some banks are zombie banks
- Time magazine nibbles
(thanks to Pecha Kucha-mad Steve Burnett; nice photo from atp_tyreseus)
Not quite what you're looking for, but there's Dennis Etchison's classic "The Late Shift."
Posted by: Steven Kaye | February 27, 2010 at 19:36
Ground glass/wife's eyes?
Posted by: Bryan Alexander | March 02, 2010 at 16:10
Interesting article. Can this Zombie Economics be applied on a global scale or just to North America?
Posted by: Alistair | October 16, 2010 at 14:55
The walking dead is an amazing show! I LOVE it with a passion, seriously. I am even starting to read all the comics because the TV show has impressed me so much. I have created a fan blog for anyone that is interested in having a look – http://ilovethewalkingdead.blogspot.com
Check it out if you are as big a fan as me :P
Posted by: iain | October 22, 2011 at 16:26