Return to Zombie America

image from Umair Haque's article
on the American Collapse

Outstanding article "Why We are Underestimating American Collapse" by Umair Haque in Eudaimonia  looks at some of the human costs such as the epidemic of school shootings, the "opioid epidemic," the declining life expectancy of rural, white Americans.

This all fits in with what I've started calling  "zombie America." Zombies are variously referred to as the "undead" and the "walking dead," phrases that I think can be applied to American economy, politics and society at large. The nation is still lurching and weaving about, animated but no longer truly alive, dead (or dying) on the inside but because still animated, so that many observers still imagine it to have life.

Not like science fiction: the decline of America

 I began reading science fiction when I was nine, and it remains even today sixty-two years later still my favorite flavor of fiction, but science fiction has taught us all to expect the end of civilization to come abruptly, dramatically and unmistakably. This has made us collectively blind to the real world slow, drip-drip erosion of our society. 

A good example of what I'm talking about is the novel (and now HBO series) Station Eleven, a story of an apocalyptic pandemic and its aftermath. The novel published in 2014, shows the disease a deadly "flu" killing something like 90 percent of the people infected, and its impact in disrupting society occurs within days. People die in the streets, in their cars, everywhere all at once, and almost instantly modern society as we know it is gone.  Some time in the last month or so, I ran across someone (on Twitter or in an interview) using Station Eleven as the rubric against which our real world COVID pandemic should be marked as not very serious. I wish I'd written it down, saved the Tweet or bookmarked the interview because it epitomizes the way we've ingrained science fiction as the arbitrator of what is and what is not the end of the world.

Make no mistake about it, we are already in the midst of the fall and decline of the great American democratic, post-industrial society. It has been going on for some time now, at least two decades, but probably longer than that. Let me make it clear, I am NOT a MAGA, I am not talking about trying to recover some fake golden age of the past. I see as good and positive trends the exact things that MAGA people hate: increasing diversity, greater political, social and economic power for women and people of color, increasing openness to alternatives to rigid gender boundaries and the celebration of all kinds of sexual orientations. I applaud marriage equality and support the Black Lives Matter movement. 

However, even if the MAGA crowd is wrong about what ails our society and who or what is responsible, they are on to something when they express anxiety about the decline of America. Extreme inequality in wealth, political power, and social opportunities are fundamentally distorting and destroying our society. A very small class of people benefit hugely, others benefit slightly and the vast majority find themselves living on the edge with little voice and less influence. 

The COVID pandemic did not cause any of this, but it exacerbates all the existing problems, continues tiny piece by tiny piece to help tear away at the fabric of society. The pandemic which has killed less than one percent of our population has nonetheless shredded our health care system, scratches at our supply lines, and creates a huge new class of disabled persons, and is far from over in terms of its impacts, regardless of our intentions to just "live with it."