By way of Boing Boing, the io9 site has created a chart correlating the production of zombie movies with social upheavals in America and the world.  The inference one is expected to make is that Zombie movies are a symptom of unrest, either as a mirror to them or as an attempt at escapist self-therapy.

This narrative follows well known pop-analyses of Invasion of the Body Snatchers as a response to Cold War fears and George A. Romero's Living Dead movies as a reflection of mind-numbing American consumerism.

What the chart reminds me most of, however, is Alan Wolfe's book The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Threat which begins with a quote from Ronald Reagan:

"Let's not delude ourselves," Ronald Reagan said in 1981.  "The Soviet Union underlies all the unrest that is going on.  If they weren't engaged in this game of dominoes, there wouldn't be any hot spots in the world."  Not since the cold war began, and perhaps never before in American history, has an administration come to power with as insistently hostile an attitude toward the Soviet Union as that of Ronald Reagan.

Wolfe's thesis is ultimately an inversion of the Zombie = unrest argument.  Wolfe's book was immensely popular in political science departments in the 80's because it attempted to demonstrate that the American perception of the Soviet Threat moved independently of the "actual" Soviet Threat at any point in the 50 year history of the Cold War.  He argued for the lack of correlation between the perception and the reality of our fears.  Bear in mind that this was a welcome argument in a time when the left still suffered from mal foi following Solzhenitsyn's publication of  the third volume of The Gulag Archipelago. The ground for this sort of argument may also have been prepared by Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (claiming that our perception of science as a continuous progression does not conform to the historical reality) which had achieved a broad cross-discipline appeal by the time that Wolfe's thesis came out. 

Today Kuhn is mostly remembered for burdening us with the phrase "paradigm shift," though in his day he provided the model (perhaps unintentionally) for a broad range of arguments that attempted to demonstrate that reality is not what it seems, but instead is something constructed (a word that naturally entails that we must at some point de-construct it, of course) by social forces.  Reality is a manifold of social constructs.

The Zombie literature is interesting, among other things, because it attempts to go the other way.  People who write about the horror genre are always tempted to take what falls clearly within the realm of subjectivity and personal taste and find some sort of correlate for it in the "real" world.  This is true of many fringe interests, for instance sci-fi, pop music, prime-time television, software programming.  We all want to find deep meaning in the things we recognize as subjectively meaningful for us.

The summum bonum would certainly be achieved if each of our personal interests were acknowledged as universally meaningful.  Why shouldn't we spell words the way each of us prefers to, or use grammar in the way we think best?  Why shouldn't zombie movies have the same cultural status as the novels of Dostoevsky?  Why shouldn't Ayn Rand be found next to Rousseau at the local book store?  If a thing has meaning for us, shouldn't this meaning be reflected in the world?

The notion that the meaning of a name is the thing in the world that it points to (its referent) was originally formulated by J.S. Mill and is known as Mill's Theory of Names.  It is also sometimes called the "Fido"-Fido theory, for obvious reasons.  Fido, in turn, is a 2006 movie about the efforts of a small band of survivors to reconstruct society along 1950's lines following a major social upheaval.  The social upheaval, of course, is a zombie epidemic.  Coincidence?  I think not.

We all want our candidates to answer more questions, but it's hard to figure out what we really want to know from them.  Sometimes it seems like we want to gauge their knowledge of world affairs -- and so they are asked social studies questions -- "What is the capital of the Republic of Georgia?"  Sometimes we want to know about their experience -- and so they are asked what they would do in a certain situation.  Ultimately we want to know if they are smart "like us" or in the least "like us" and so odd questions will be thrown into various debates such as "Who is your favorite philosopher?" and "Which is your favorite book of the Bible?"

These questions typically misfire.  Very few politicians are like Adlai Stevenson.  Whatever it is that makes them good at what they do, which typically involves raising money and cutting backroom deals, we simply don't have questions for.  Lacking the right questions, on the other hand, may be considered as license to ask any question.  Here are some of mine:

1. How do you celebrate June 16th?

2. What memories do madeleines evoke for you?

3. Do you typically take the road less traveled, or the other one?

4. Would you explain the difference between the 'ontic' and the 'ontological', and how this distinction affects your daily life?

5. Can Virtue be taught?

6. How many wives of Henry the Eighth can you name?  and which ones bore future rulers of England?

7. Explain the difference between descriptivist and prescriptivist grammar, and apply the difference to something that has nothing to do with grammar.

8. Describe at least five of Martin Luther's 95 tenets; expand on any you strongly agree or disagree with.

9. Explain the difference between the Ptolemaic and Copernican systems of the world, and why it matters.

10.  Besides beds, what was the chief source of income at Peter Coffin's Inn?

Coincidentally, these ten questions also capture the ten main categories of knowledge that our presidential candidates are expected to exemplify or demonstrate some expertise in, namely:

1. Patriotism 2. Historical knowledge 3. Experience 4. Wonkiness 5. Family values 6. Foreign Affairs 7. Rhetorical skill 8. Faith 9. Science 10. Economics

The one thing I can't stand about Straussians is that they are always trying to deny that they are Straussians.  I recently debated a friend on a private message board in which he tried to deny this very thing, and I just let him, because every attempt he made to disprove that he was a Straussian only confirmed the fact that he was, indeed, a Straussian.

It is only Straussians who feel the need to deny they are Straussians, while the rest of us are simply never accused of such a thing.

Robert Kagan, a few years ago, actually wrote an article ironically entitled I Am Not A Straussian, in which he tries to subtly extricate himself from being labeled (outed?) as a Straussian.  He is amusing about it, and carefully avoids a full denunciation of all Straussians, as many Straussians denying that they are Straussians are apt to do, while also trying to make clear why (wink, wink) he isn't one.  It is an effort that would have made Leo Strauss himself proud.

As best I can recall, their biggest point of contention was whether Plato was just kidding in The Republic. Bloom said he was just kidding. I later learned that this idea--that the greatest thinkers in history never mean what they say and are always kidding--is a core principle of Straussianism. My friend, the late Al Bernstein, also taught history at Cornell. He used to tell the story about how one day some students of his, coming directly from one of Bloom's classes, reported that Bloom insisted Plato did not mean what he said in The Republic. To which Bernstein replied: "Ah, Professor Bloom wants you to think that's what he believes. What he really believes is that Plato did mean what he said.

But it is in this cleverness, of course, that we can always find them out, these Straussians.  They are always engaged in perpetuating the Noble Lie, as Plato called it.

In truth, Straussians are more or less Zombies, and all Zombies are ultimately Straussians.  They have the vague family resemblance to human beings, but underneath they are motivated by a single desire, be that world domination, academic influence, or human flesh.

Which is why the cleverness of Straussians can be so misleading.  How can a mere ideologue, you may ask, evince the subtlety and depth that Straussians sometimes seem to exhibit?  But the answer is very simple, and if you have ever studied Descartes' Parrot, it should be very obvious.  A creature that spends its whole life merely imitating, parroting if you will, the surface appearance of deep people, can certainly fool you eventually into thinking that it possesses such depth.  Isn't this the whole point of the Turing Test?

The rest of us spend all of our efforts trying to appear not so deep, really.  It tends to confuse, and it can put people off.  There is nothing worse, I have discovered, than trying to fill a lull in a business meeting by bringing up the distinction between nature and convention as something essential to understanding ancient Greek thought.

Which is why this analysis of Will Smith's remake of I Am Legend as a Straussian parable, on the blog Biomusicosophy, is so refreshing -- though I have my own suspicions that the author may himself be either a Straussian or a Zombie.   The author hangs his entire analysis on the particularly Straussian (though admittedly also Masonic) distinction between the esoteric and the exoteric.

The film has two sections and two audiences. I Am Legend is truly two films. Section One, the esoteric section, runs from the beginning of the film to the moment when Will Smith goes on a suicide mission after his dog has died and he has lost all hope. At the moment when the infected almost devour him, there is a bright light. This light represents a few things, one of them being the transition into Section Two of the film. Section Two, the exoteric section, runs from the moment after the bright light until the end of the movie, when the Brazilian woman and the child make it to the safe zone in Vermont. My thesis is this: Section One of the film is for philosophers, Section Two of the film is for the masses.

It's brilliant stuff, really, though, as Robert Kagan suggests (and he would know, being a Straussian) a real Straussian interpretation would invert the analysis to demonstrate that it is Section two, with all of the brutal action scenes, which is the true esoteric teaching, while the first part, trying to redeem mankind, is the part intended for mass consumption.

Not that I would know.