by Woodsbum
Gunguy ran across this article and forwarded it to me. I will include the text from that article here and then run through my commentary:
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The most political show on television today involves shambling ghouls that feed on human flesh and the meat puppets who try to avoid being feasted upon. “Fear the Walking Dead,” the “Walking Dead” spin-off set at the beginning of the zombie outbreak, offers us a view of the liberal, sensitive type of people who put Obama into office and – probably inadvertently – demonstrates the utter moral and intellectual bankruptcy of everything they believe in.
Modern liberalism is an unfortunate byproduct of civilization. The fact that our lives are not largely devoted to hunting and gathering food and fighting off marauders who would rape, enslave, and/or kill us, allows a large segment of our society to forget that this is the natural state of man. You didn’t have liberals in the Dark Ages because a liberal would last about ten seconds, expiring with a spear through his guts after telling the local warlord that he disapproved “of this patriarchal, phallocentric, cisnormative power structure.”
Now, of course a substantial number of Americans pay tribute to humanity’s past by understanding human nature and often by preparing to confront the forces of chaos. These people are conservatives. We conservatives expect problems, and expect that we will have to solve them ourselves. We generally know how to hunt, to gather food, and we have guns and know how to use them. And we understand that society always – always – teeters on the edge of falling apart.
Liberals don’t – in fact, they actively reject the notion because to accept it would require a complete rethink of their assumptions and premises. A couple of years ago, I got into a lengthy Twitter spat with Talking Points Memo editor Josh Marshall, who proudly identified himself as not of the gun-owning “tribe.” By this he meant that he did not feel the need to own weapons or to perform the most fundamental task of an American adult – to defend his family, community, and Constitution with his life – because some unidentified others would appear and do so for him.
He went on to mock the notion that society could ever collapse, which I found amusing. As one of those others who magically appeared to save the rear ends of hipster-bearded betas like Josh, I spent three weeks in the burning chaos of Los Angeles with the Army suppressing the 1992 riots. Don’t tell me things can’t go super bad super quickly.
The liberal characters in FTWD would probably earn invites to sip pumpkin-infused craft beers at Josh’s loft. The two main adults work in a public school, and their parenting style consists of catering to the whims of a drug addict son and the most obnoxious TV teen daughter since the hated Dana from the first few seasons of “Homeland.” When the apocalypse gets underway, yet another son decides to hang out at a street protest over police brutality sparked when the cops cap a homeless guy-turned-ghoul – apparently #UndeadLivesMatter.
In keeping with both the nature of their characters and with “The Walking Dead’s” traditions, the characters fail to communicate basic information to one another – you know, useful insights like, “Hey, the dead are rising and eating people, so you might want to look out for that.” They also undertake poorly thought-through, emotion-driven schemes that always end badly – in other words, they channel Obamacare.
Their tactical skills are distinctly limited. They never post guards, and they never look where they are going. Sure, part of that is the fact that if the characters were smarter and more capable, the threat, and therefore the suspense, would be lessened. But the other part is that these folks are not only soft-headed but soft-hearted, and therefore make bad, dangerous decisions. They talk about keeping their “humanity,” but what they really want to do is keep up residence in the expired liberal Eden that hard men carved out of a savage, hostile continent generations ago.
That’s why we get a scene with the father figure blowing his stack because a supporting character showed his activist son how to use a scavenged shotgun and daddy just doesn’t dig firearms. Naturally, none of these people have their own guns, much less the willingness to use them. At the end of one episode, their incompetence and weakness places another character in danger – a zombie they should have iced attacks him – and he is saved when a National Guard infantryman appears and puts a 5.56mm M4 round through the ghoul’s noggin.
Memo to Josh Marshall: That Army character’s left shoulder unit patch belongs to the real life 79th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, which I served in in Southern California. That’s my tribe, dude.
We will see where FTWD goes – already the show is turning on the military characters, the only characters who seem capable of exercising common sense, for their lack of sensitivity and feelings. There are a lot of feelings in FTWD – we in the audience always know exactly what the characters are feeling because they can’t shut up about it. But it’s clear that the focus of the show remains on the characters’ maintaining their “humanity” in the face of chaos, but what the writers really mean is maintaining the characters’ urban liberal illusions.
That’s why it is the most political show on television now – at least until the original “Walking Dead” revs up again in a few weeks. It’s because every episode demonstrates the utter meaninglessness of the liberals’ obsessions in the face of a world where monsters are real, where the monsters are ISIS and the mullahs instead of zombies. So lock, load, and stop babbling about your feelings, because you can’t coexist with someone who is trying to eat your head, or to chop it off. Nonsense like “microaggressions,” “nonjudgmentalism,” and “fairness” can only exist in a world built and defended by macroaggressive, judgmental, and unfair people who carry guns and don’t hesitate to use them.
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Being a fan of the Walking Dead series, I was all about jumping on board the “Fear of The Walking Dead” bandwagon. From the very first episode, I have been on the fence. Even though I love the zombie premise, seeing idiots barely able to survive life let alone the apocalypse, and find Hollywood’s take on disaster preparedness very similar to watching a train wreck I am having issues with being able to get through an entire show without screaming at the TV. Like the article says, these progressive types have no clue and expect everyone to bow down to their needs so that their “humanity” can be spared.
Rather than this being an anti-this, pro-that, I hate blah, political rant or slanted post I wanted to examine the really interesting aspect of this show and how these people are represented, however.
Let me start off with this: I believe everyone has a responsibility to themselves and their families to be prepared in case something happens. I don’t care if it is a loss of a job, illness that caused hardship, a massive earthquake or the zombie apocalypse. The source doesn’t matter to me. I just feel that any responsible individual should make preparations in case something happens. Anyone that doesn’t is just planning on being a drain on society as a whole and obviously doesn’t care about their family. That is my opinion based upon the idea that adults should act like adults. Anything less is therefore childish.
If you are still with me and haven’t gotten completely ticked off at my thought process, let’s continue: Hollywood in general is a very artistic and progressive type place where those that produce entertainment live out their lives differently that those that work normal 9-5 jobs. Whether you agree with their politics or not, the fact is that they tend to push their beliefs upon the general population through the entertainment they produce. Take for example the animated movie “Open Season.” Hollywood in general doesn’t believe in hunting or true conservation of our natural resources so they produce movies like this to make kids hate hunters as well. Almost every movie with hunters depict them as blood thirsty savages that are ready to kill anyone or anything they come across. Of course anyone with half a brain knows, this is completely removed from the truth. Most hunters are very moral, law abiding citizens that believe in something that motivates them to spend days on end in the woods trying to procure their own food. So if Hollywood is showing how these progressive families really are and how they think, what is their real agenda?
The fact that the main characters in this series are very progressive types that will inevitably have to turn hard and callous to survive makes me wonder how the producers and writers will progress the story line. The Army is already being set up as the bad guy as of the last episode. People without signs of being infected were being gunned down in the streets, so obviously this foreshadows some future confrontation with the military. Couple that with the way they took various different “problems” to a different location to be dealt with as needed, you can see where the next few episodes will be going. How these progressives take the fact that those people who they placed their entire faith in are turning out to have different agendas will be very interesting to say the least.
Of course these characters will end up having to become survivors and self sufficient. How this happens and how much of their “humanity” is left after they get a reality check might be what the show is trying to explore.
What really interests me is how the viewers will perceive the failure of progressive ideology. Of course liberal ideas don’t work unless a totalitarian culture exists. You can’t get those types of programs started and keep them running unless you have a large slave population (middle class that doesn’t qualify for any welfare programs) to fund it all. There is just no way. Will the viewers that support liberal programs come to realize this? How will they respond? Will more people become adults and start to protect their family?
I really don’t know any of these answers, but I am happy to see how this show might just possibly address the misguided beliefs that many who depend 100% on the government possess. It will definitely be a fun ride if I can handle the stupidity of the main characters long enough for them to pull their heads out of their hind quarters.
