Book Sample: The Imperial Boomerang, part two

Posted on by Persephone van der Waard

This post is part of “Searching for Secrets,” a second book sample series originally inspired by the one I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact“ (2024). That series was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “Searching for Secrets” shall do the same, but with Volume Two’s assorted chapters and its twin modules, the Undead and Demons. As usual, this promo series (and all its posts) are written, illustrated and invigilated by me as part of my larger Sex Positivity (2023) book series.

Volume Two, part one (the Poetry Module) is out now (5/1/2024)! I wrote a preface for the module along with its debut announcement. Give that a look; then, go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the full module (which will contain additions/corrections the original blog posts will not have)!

Click here to see “Searching for Secrets'” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

Permissions: Any publicly available images are exhibited for purposes of education, transformation and critique, thus fall under Fair Use; private nude material and collabs with models are specifically shared with permission from the original model(s). For more details about artist permissions, refer to the book disclaimer at the bottom of the page.

Picking up from where “Bad Dreams, part one: Police States, Foreign Atrocities and the Imperial Boomerang (opening and part one)” left off…

The Imperial Boomerang, part two: Cryptomimesis, or Pieces of the Dead (feat. The Last of Us, Scooby Doo, and more)

“I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. […] now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart. […] I slept, indeed, but I was disturbed by the wildest dreams. I thought I saw Elizabeth, in the bloom of health, walking in the streets of Ingolstadt. Delighted and surprised, I embraced her, but as I imprinted the first kiss on her lips, they became livid with the hue of death; her features appeared to change, and I thought that I held the corpse of my dead mother in my arms; a shroud enveloped her form, and I saw the grave-worms crawling in the folds of the flannel. I started from my sleep with horror; a cold dew covered my forehead, my teeth chattered, and every limb became convulsed; when, by the dim and yellow light of the moon, as it forced its way through the window shutters, I beheld the wretch—the miserable monster whom I had created” (source).

—Victor Frankenstein, Frankenstein (1818)

Part one of “The Imperial Boomerang” laid out the core ideas of a zombie apocalypse—the zombie and apocalypse, of course, but also the state of exception and process of abjection when the Imperial Boomerang sails home to alienate, then rape and murder the worker as native, black, monstrous-feminine dead. This process of abjection (and its assorted counterfeits) are predominantly white, middle-class and patrilineal by function; i.e., something for whitey to inherit and absorb as children, then turn the handle of as adults to scapegoat dark forces for imperial/capital sins: “No bastard baby will inherit what’s mine[1]!” Such divisions classically function, then, as pro-state arguments demanding violence against the zombie as something to manifest/summon (often by accident, Reagan [above] filled with the vengeful spirit of the non-white dead as something to befriend [“Captain Howdy”] to which her liberal, gentrified mother is horrified to see: her sweet baby daughter as “ancient” zombie demonstrating the anisotropic quality [double standards] of the zombification process); i.e., as having vampiric and spectral qualities, generally with a monstrous-feminine element that speaks to the perils of childbirth given a postcolonial character that must canonically be exorcized by brave Christian martyrs protecting the pale affluent virgin from the raping incubus (a kind of abject take on Immaculate Conception); e.g., Pazuzu from The Exorcist as a zombie ghost—the spirit of settler-colonial trauma, and of feared revenge for those sins (normally having called the cops on such things, the proverbial angel of death reversed onto the colonizer for once)!

The idea is racist in ways that present white women (especially the daughters of the Western nuclear family unit) as susceptible to invasion through a manner of openings. One, of course, is the precocious absorption of knowledge; the other is the gratuitously sexual passing along of such information between formidably tempting (and brave, bold, confident) bodies when the time comes—puberty and the arrival of Miss Flo (shark week). The mental abjection of such demons is a kind of hysterectomy that aims to kill the Indian, save the woman; i.e., her baby parts making fresh bodies for the state to repeat the process of abjection on, forever and ever (conversely, GNC people generally get actual hysterectomies to free themselves from state control and observation).

(artist: Annabella Ivy)

The zombie is nothing if not productive, in this respect, canonically presenting sexuality and the passing of forbidden abject knowledge between different parties; i.e., as both self-destructive and loaded with abjected forms of past settler-colonial abuse foisted onto non-white groups, non-Christians and GNC elements to varying degrees of intersection (and to the peachy bodies associated with them as a selling point during liminal expression; e.g., women of color depicted from Charlotte Brontë’s Bertha to Jean Rys’ Antoinette Causeway to real-life examples, above, as a matter of non-white sex work [Latina, in Annabella’s case] haunted by colonial elements). As traditional extensions of the patriarch who are expected to do their duty and pass along the family line through his womb, daddy’s little white girl would be expected to keep demonic influence out of their minds but also their bodies; i.e., as an avenue for humanization by falling in love through social-sexual relations with others (which generally involves a fair bit of coitus, or at the very least nudism and asexual commentaries on such things through sex as a Gothic form of art): zombified by those “of age” (thus “on the market”) literally sleeping with the bestial, inhuman zombie enemy (under settler-colonial rule, that is); e.g., a Bride of Frankenstein waiting to happen—corruption and disassembly as something to pin on her and her forbidden love when she unsurprisingly rebels against her oppressive father (and browbeaten mother/siblings)!

(artist: Angelica Reed)

Part two shall now consider the zombie’s busy cryptomimesis (echo) as something to weigh on, but also harvest for ourselves while playing with the dead; i.e., collecting the necessary pieces after we’ve started to humanize these beings: to reassemble through rememory as a fitful process of fertilization, but ultimately one that requires rotten pieces of criminalized, shitty flesh to put nightmarishly back together! To that, if something was work to create, then ideally its volatile ideas should also constitute a kind of work for the audience—not something to romance unto decay as “all we get”; e.g., laborwave or Gothic Communism vs vaporwave[2]; i.e., the former sort challenging the non-radical viewer to motivate them to change: radicalization takes work (even if it stings, think of it as a love tap—a little pain that hurts to help you pull your head out of your ass).

By comparison, moderacy and delicacy are a dubious refrain, a faithful—however confident or reluctant it may seem—adherence to them a kind of self-tone-policing! To critique power (and its abuse), you must go where it is and shake things up with monsters as code (which anything monstrous-feminine is, insofar as liberation—of Medusa, of workers and nature—is executed through such code as something to holistically play with). Only then is praxial catharsis—by transforming the state’s arrangement (and flow) of power through Gothic engagement—possible!

(artist: Bernie Wrightson)

While such a quest is suitably Promethean (above)—with us searching for elusive love as something pure and wholesome to gab happily with the girls[3] about once in our grasp (all as white moderate dickwads insufferably act like our gods and masters; i.e, denying us company while literally confiscating it, enslaving and alienating us)—we’ll save Frankenstein for later (and its giant angry-lonely zombie punching Victor [and his Cartesian nonsense] repeatedly in the balls: “Let Jesus fuck you!” haha). We’ll also save the zombie house (and its ominous toys) for the next subchapter. Instead, this subdivision shall be looking at more zombie invasion scenarios (a genre Shelley alluded to with her infamous novel’s singular Creature, but for which the closest she ever came to writing as a doomsday scenario akin to an apocalypse was 1826’s The Last Man).

Why more, you ask? Well, one, just because; two, I like them; and three, I think populating my work with different stories, codes and ideas (which essentially is what monsters are) is important. This is my castle—my saloon-style danger disco—and so-help-me-God, I decide what goes in it! And before anyone starts comparing me to Bill Paxton’s Coconut Pete wailing about coconuts to a captive audience (“Yes, goddammit, yes!”) or Monty Python’s Dennis Moore endlessly giving the poor starving country folk stolen lupins (“We ever wear the blood things!”), making them feel imprisoned by yet another example to the point that they start quoting the Hound (“I understand that if any more words come pouring out your cunt mouth, I’m going to have to eat every chicken in this room[4]!”), know that repetition and patterns through said repetition is sort of the whole the point, loves. Also, this is heavy stuff we’re discussing, to which whatever joy there is to be found happens during the apocalypse; i.e., inside the world as a graveyard. I want my book to constantly reflect that, hence all the added jokes, anecdotes and sexy bits, the color and fun trailing across the marble, happily and pointedly defacing of the West as inherently genocidal. Such things routinely hide and show themselves in plain sight, on both ends of the dialectical-material spectrum, and we want to repeatedly examine and play with them without reservations.

To that, we’ll start with The Last of Us in connection with a variety of older pieces reflected holistically upon, collage-style:

Note: I want to address the things I’ve left out—the statuesque, Pazuzu-sized spectre in the room. This is a very cursory and rapid-fire, survey-style section, insofar as there’s a million such invasion fantasies concerning the zombie as something to classically survive. I want to stick with fleshy corporal entities, here (thus won’t really be looking at Pazuzu), asking you to consider them as projections of capital for liberation to actualize with; i.e., by playing with (and thinking about) such elements of zombie-style us-versus-them differently than canonical proponents do! Whatever arguments apply to the walking dead as something to shoot likewise apply to them as something to exorcize and banish through literal Christian dogma (re: Pazuzu). So whatever you feel like I’ve left out, just know that it’s all connected, all part of the same Crusade against an imaginary enemy (with historical elements) that capital needs to keep itself alive (and which we learn from its older problematic histories in order to camp them). —Perse

(exhibit 35b: Top-and-bottom-left: Last of Us promo and BTS material; artists, middle: Caravaggio’s “Judith Beheading Holofernes” and Elisabetta Sirani’s “Timoclea Killing Her Rapist” [source: Ariela Gittlen’s “A Brief History of Female Rage in Art,” 2018]; top-right: Cyber Aeon; bottom-right: Cloudy Pouty. Renaissance female artists reify revenge by “killing” their male abusers, which certainly strikes a chord in relation to apocalypse narratives—i.e., can be referenced again for us standing against state survival as less personified and more shown to operate through its defenders playing the victim with some grains of truth. Revisited, such things can help shatter heteronormative propaganda during oppositional praxis; i.e., by not using “appropriative peril” [unironic rape fantasies] to recruit “war orphans” that trigger like “sleeper” agents at the first sight of trauma during regressive Amazonomachia: dragons to slay as zombie-like in function regarding slayer and target alike!

[artist: Cloudy Pouty]

When treated as canon, neoconservative, monomythic characters like Newt from Aliens, Samus from Metroid [a famous dragon slayer, left] or Ellie from The Last of Us embody state parasite mechanisms impersonating rebellion as something to instruct in bad faith. Camping thus critiquing their tokenized intolerance exposes the pedagogic role such heroism maintains per survival stories [which Metroidvania and shooters most certainly are]: coded instructions for worker behaviors. Doing so subsequently helps raise emotional/Gothic intelligence [and class/cultural awareness] through iconoclastic art; i.e., whose messy synthesis includes the cryptonymy of various heroic and monster masks/subversive doubles that grant women [and other marginalized groups] a theatrical voice: to vent their frustrations/anger against the status quo, albeit in ways that transform socio-material conditions through ironic consumption, endorsement and performance of such disguise pastiche as de facto sex-positive education.)

Whether it’s the state or some rebellious faction, Gothic stories similar to Night of the Living Dead, Left 4 Dead or The Last of Us (again, cryptomimesis) address the trauma of constantly being hunted or under attack by indeterminate undead—a “bad dream” that, under canonical circumstances, patently “rapes the mind” in carefully directed productions tied to franchised material.

In The Last of Us, itself, the elite alienate weaponized fears—including the stigma of parasitoids like the fearsome cordyceps fungus (exhibit 35b)—to disguise Capitalism’s intrinsic inability to handle manmade disasters through crude xenophobia on top of more xenophobia; i.e., nature-as-alien, monstrous-feminine, undead. Its own Red Scare gimmicks cram Nazis and Commies into the same shadowy kayfabe. However, by dressing a given disaster in fascist, liminal hauntologies, the Cartesian façade “slips” over time, coming home to roost in sequel enterprises that drop the mask, more and more: The Last of Us, part 2 (2020) evolves with its target, “war orphan” audience to reveal disconcerting similarities to the real world: Zionist Apartheid (source: Emanuel Maiberg’s “The Not So Hidden Israeli Politics of The Last of Us Part II,” 2020).

As such, mutually-assured destruction and holistic genocide are suddenly “on the table” as menticidal tools demonizing labor as undead, animal, violence against the middle class; i.e., a rape culture whose bullet and knife penises aren’t better than sex, they are sex: “raping” the chosen dead during a sanctioned, necrophilic genocide. Not only can its victims not consent; their ruinous undeath occurs through the fusion of war and sex using various theatrical styles whose proliferation as solely unironic is its own kind of censorship; i.e., live burial; e.g., the “soap opera” with war and zombies. All this canonically disguises how fragile Capitalism is, but also how self-destructive. It won’t survive climate change/state shift—will have to evolve as feudalism did during the Black Death, or risk total annihilation. The steady intimation of this catastrophe is a veiled, bourgeois ultimatum.

Make no mistake, the displaced evils in The Last of Us aren’t just nightmare fuel; they’re half-real insofar as they’re pointed at and by state proponents abusing the usual liminalities of fiction and nonfiction/real and unreal—i.e., “not real” at home, but portending home as colonized in ways that are all-too-real in other places. Except the showrunners merely imitate such things through their own disposable fodder (whose ceaseless killing is merely the soldier’s reprieve). To expose these real-world evils requires transmuting canon by humanizing the zombie (and other monsters, mid liminal expression) in subversive social-sexual (often ace) ways: nudism and death theatre as dancing with the dead, but also its likenesses per cryptomimesis at large.

For this to happen, iconoclasts must help future workers understand the inevitable confusion that emerges during capital’s routine exploitation of workers; i.e., through Capitalist Realism exploiting zombies to punch the ghost of the counterfeit. Gothic Communism aims to camp the veiled Faustian bargain such that stories promise (with a Black Veil, no less) amid their own canceled futures: somehow surviving the zombie apocalypse to rebuild America as the new masters thereof (that’s a laugh). But we must still dance with the dead ourselves, including what made them dead, then angrily rise again and take what’s ours; i.e., day-to-day through our synthetic oppositional groupings: our anger/gossip, monsters and camp.

Slowly turned into zombies with zombie canon, lobotomized workers garner strange appetites, becoming not simply distracted from regular state abuses, but blinded inside Cartesian hauntologies that traumatize them again; i.e., lands of madness that compel violence against those deemed uncivilized, thus enemies of the state. Iconoclasm, then, requires the ability to tell zombie narratives apart—dialectically-materially analyzing their historical-material patterns and social-sexual connotations through rememory as reflective on various examples: older forms of media that, once analyzed and reassembled, can help produce new monster toys that xenophillically humanize those inside the state of exception always trying to repair itself, thus maintain the myopia.

By comparison Capitalism alienates such beings; i.e., to the point of becoming completely invisible under pre-apocalyptic conditions, desperately shooting at them by firing helplessly into the void (classically the state wastes its energy during settler-colonial expansion and defense, but nevertheless tries to monopolize these wasteful mechanisms; re: efficient profit). It’s the state variant of cryptomimesis, making war against the dead as conjured up, Radcliffe-style:

(exhibit 36a: Having access to older alien technologies, the vengeful Morbius conjures up his invisible Monster from the Id, during Forbidden Planet [1956]. To try and guess what it looks like, the ship’s crew makes a plaster mold of the monster’s foot. The same degree of abject reification applies to MGM’s big-budget spectacle [not rivaled in terms of scale or special effects until Stars Wars in 1977, over two decades later]. It’s ultimately a tremendously Freudian, thus dated story. But it nevertheless highlights the desire for scapegoats while falling back on older scholarly ideas to prevent more incisive ideas from having the floor. As I’ve shown with my earlier critiques of Creed, Freud, Kristeva, etc, such texts still make up an argument: as something to repeatedly face and respond to.

More to the point, some of the most anti-war perspectives I’ve found were from former soldiers; e.g., Howard Zinn or Edward Snowden. You see it in fictional examples, too, like Guts from Berserk or the kamikaze pilot from Godzilla Minus One. You see it in your own families; e.g., my grandfather versus the Nazi occupation in Holland. He didn’t enjoy war, but certainly said it makes a man outta you [one more reason I wanted nothing to do with it, haha]. We’ll carry on doing so when we look at Forbidden Planet more, deeper in the module.)

Let’s examine The Last of Us a little more before looking at some of those aforementioned toys, including how zombies (among other liminal monsters) are often presented through dreams, but also fetishized fragments recovered from those dreams as shards haunting the spaces in between open language: fatal visions whose poetic “retrieval” is liminal unto itself, informed by holistic trauma (of the mind, body and spirit) as ever-present, ambiguous and untrustworthy. Once bitten, twice shy.

The 2023 version of The Last of Us has a very canonical, “zombie film” approach to combating disease with war. Patient zero hails from the Global South—a ghost of the counterfeit, whereupon the abuses of Capitalism are transferred to a human host from animals in a faraway place: both an alien, “natural” virus that breeds inside Capitalism’s hosts, as well as an animalistic, “Mother Nature’s revenge” happening through Capitalism for Capitalism. Instead of critiquing the Patriarchy (exhibit 35b) and the Capitalocene, the writers justify nuking the site from orbit by proxy—i.e., by having a smarty-pants, female scientist from a third-world country hysterically propose genocide and mass destruction: “Bomb everything!” In eco-fascist terms, humans become the virus. It’s not the kind of call an epidemiologist would actually make, insofar as killing millions people to “save” them from the virus kind of defeats the point.

Sexist, xenophobic and Promethean, the show’s pro-war qualities are dubiously contained inside a familial, Aliens-style war narrative—think of the women and children, and hate the dumb locals (and their scientist women and Mother Nature—seriously, Capitalism, “Leave Brittany alone!“). The “scorched earth” approach makes no sense in terms of fixing problems, because bombs only break infrastructure and reinforce a state of panic and fear during the ruinous aftermath. In terms of maintaining capitalist control during the rapid-onset of destabilizing natural factors like a global pandemic, bombs actually make perfect sense; i.e., shock and awe, dispersing workers when the elite lose control due to ecological interference.

This being said, they will also surrender it through various invented apocalypse scenarios (fictional or not). As a matter of dogma, they’ll hand them out, only to claw power (and profit) back as a matter of capital moving money through nature as usual (this being a concept we’ll examine repeatedly through both Monster Modules). That’s essentially eco-fascism in a nutshell; i.e., not enough room or resources (save for the elite and some of their stooges) thanks to the state’s own bullshit destroying the environment on all registers. Like the dead on a plot of land, then (or Poe’s proverbial heart ‘neath the floor boards), such things concern guilt, stigma, bias (and other variables generally tied to profit as a xenophobic enterprise) as things to inherit and attack with differently.

To that, power remains anisotropic per any undead/Gothic poetics, not just zombies during feeding time (vampires and ghosts aren’t tied to an apocalypse, and demons also feed. More on those topics in other chapters)! Likewise, it maintains a hybridization, merging “dead” with this or that as ironic or not, sarcastic or not, cute or not, as a matter of degree.

This goes both ways, too, in a dialectical-material sense; e.g., “kitty” + zombie to make it cute, but also deliver such things through a faux-Egyptian lens as classically for the state: guardians of the hauntological underworld and sex objects first alienated per the process of abjection, only to be forced back together-as-alien per the profit motive punching the ghost of the counterfeit as Numinous; i.e., a fearsome traveller coming for empire out of an imaginary past’s recently-dreamt-up tyrant (some Dracula-style dragon lord, Grim Reaper or Archaic Mother) based on older and older fictions (e.g., Skeletor and Medusa, exhibit 43e2a). More to the point, white boys love to torment themselves with the idea, all while capitalizing on neoliberalism’s usual hypocrisies:

(exhibit 36b: Artist: Edward Repka, who the band, Megadeth—thoroughly strung out on hard drugs themselves—hired to reillustrate their infamous mascot in ways Mustaine himself could not produce through his own limited drawing skills [source: Timothy Gunatilaka’s “The Story Behind the Cover Art,” 2010].)

As with Cambodia or Night of the Living Dead, The Last of Us isn’t “new.” None of it is. Instead, the argument of survival per a zombie apocalypse constitutes a displaced settler-colonial narrative that operates cryptomimetically using traditional gender roles and extreme prejudice: the cowboys and Indians of America’s older past used to carry such things out on the motherland as eating itself when there’s no one left to colonize elsewhere (or said ability is lost). Reimagined and disguised inside a retro-future crammed with zombies, we’re given the Fallout world minus nuclear war and science fiction, ushered in by a magical plague of mushroom people (another cryptonymic[5] drug metaphor for those pesky “trippin'” Commies—acid Communism a topic we’ll unpack in the “Call of the Wild” chapter). It’s the usual dance with the dead, all the same.

Granted, occultism, xenophobia and scapegoats run deep in fascist thought, but fascism is endemic to Capitalism; i.e., as emblematic of an American hegemon having eclipsed a British one, and which it would abuse against other national powers, nature and labor once its ascension as the global economic superpower was attained. In turn, the usual cronyism and bad imitators flocked to its power and later its corpse-like rot radiating outward. With it, the Imperial Boomerang travels back and forth over large periods of time that accelerate as death nears.

To that, the Nazis loved America, having fantasized about a new European Dark Age a century ago during the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923; i.e., eager to carry out anti-Semitic target practice with their own Children’s Crusade (“Go east, young man!”), the Nazis’ return to tradition was inspired by the US and its own loudly advertised genocide per Manifest Destiny (Bad Empanada, 2022). Each and every time, though, genocide and the Imperial Boomerang are repackaged with liberal platitudes, but reinvented with neoliberal illusions that essentialize geography as moral while return to a freeing of the market Hitler never lived to see. Each time the ghost of “Caesar” returns, the ensuing bedlam causes the mechanisms of the state to go haywire: its armies, but also its nuclear arsenal (above). “Stronger than ever” becomes a cultish death knell as the state fights to the last man using everything it has against bigger and bigger foes. It balloons, then pops. Whether this happens by nuclear assault or irreversible climate change matters not; the apocalypse is already at hand, having been since capital grew into itself out of the Black Death: “Death is only the beginning.”

As such, cryptomimesis is the zombie and apocalypse tied to the system bringing them about. The worrying presence of cannibalism subsequently lingers, turned into a serial-killer bogeyman (the Nazi-Communist looking for solutions regarding capital’s “failures” [exploitation] dressed up as dogmatic kayfabe) and pointing hauntologically backward at the medieval as thrown awfully into the present; i.e., the sobering material reality behind the historical lies about taboo, unspeakable subjects: Capitalism rapes and kills to survive, making workers do the same to serve the state while blending in as bombastic entertainment (re: kayfabe) or Hawthorne-style hypocrite: David, from The Last of Us as an outwardly-benevolent community leader whose actually doing the criminalized eating of the dead—the false preacher preying on his own flock (aping the pioneers of yore by eating his own kind, murdering them as he would the Indians[6])! Invariably tied to war as a capitalist enterprise, the zombie (and Medusa as a zombie) cannot die, but live on in a perpetual state of restless hunger repeatedly denied to them by the elite. The latter consume what they think is infinite, the fascist destroying what can no longer regenerate per state models (the state dying as such).

Cannibalism, then, is merely the consequence of those with privilege open-secretly abusing the majority for their own benefit (and a tragic, episodic commentary on the broader stupidity of workers under Capitalism, inevitably forced to cannibalize once winter sets in whilst under siege; e.g., not just the serial killer false preacher from The Last of Us [above] but also the Mayflower Puritans, the Donner party and later on, survivors during Leningrad, Stalingrad, etc); its cryptomimesis is merely another form of rape under Capitalism-in-crisis, fanatically reducing state victims to “useless eaters” who must be killed and eaten themselves when the state decays. Trauma echoes inside a deadly chamber where nothing can escape and everything is eaten: a black hole that Capitalist Realism helps operate.

As something to study and learn from, then, these examples are canonical zombie poiesis as a kind of factory of factories—cryptomimetic forms of imagination “brain death” whose unironic propaganda preserves the status quo and its sex-coercive practices. They do nothing by themselves to teach workers sex-positive lessons that critique the state; they only force them into situations of controlled ignorance that compel violence by default (which can traumatize state enforcers, leading them towards dissociative, knee-jerk violence against themselves; it can also “masculinize” bigoted women, if they become violent instead of passive, but either way bigotry radicalizes in favor of the abuser as a state proponent). This clouds media of all kinds, either robing it of its irony or restoring it as media overlaps; i.e., as music, videogames, movies riff on and rip off older pulpy forms like Lovecraft or Matteson’s work dating back to Matthew Lewis’s bad echoes.

For example, though traditionally a site for criticism of capital, rock ‘n roll decays, too (e.g., Black Sabbath’s own 1970 zombie, “Iron Man,” eventually becoming gentrified by Marvel comics: “his revenge”). To that, metal bands like Megadeth can become an ominous war horn for capital in hindsight; i.e., songs like “Peace Sells” becoming a siren song for the middle class to weaponize against “zombies,” hence a nostalgic call to police violence per a staged, highly ordered conflict with assigned enemies conveniently threatening the elite’s dreams of a better world; e.g., Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society” or George W. Bush Sr.’s “New World Order“: in rising forms of media like videogames[7] out of older mediums like novels and cinema. Even without a catchy new tune to accompany the us-versus-them rhetoric, those against America become kill-on-sight, leading those who normally seem cool-headed to trigger and become irrationally violent (versus emotionally intelligent): shoot to kill, seeking with blind zombie eyes and wide gaping maws. It’s euthanasia performed by the meddling kids of the Scooby Doo gang (next page) “solving” the endless mystery of “the class, culture and race problems”; i.e., as one might the Jewish Question—with lethal force as echoed through pro-state cryptomimesis.

If Zionism is any indication, the Gothic imagination clearly needs to shift away from American Liberalism (and its subsequent fascism on all registers). For this to happen, echoed trauma must be reflected on in ways that change the echo (and its fractal recursion); i.e., humanizing zombies as recipients and markers of state violence by exposing the state as tyrannical: through subversive examples centered around real-world trauma something to find similarly amid difference, thus heal from rape as a consequence of endorsed police violence, lies, and assimilation.

Until these liberatory allegories emerge, though, there is only canonical zombie war’s cryptomimesis turning workers not just into men and women, but into givers and receivers of state violence as zombie-like: the myth of the fascist rebel, the sexy she-wolf, but also various American survivors like Zoey from Left for Dead, Ellie from The Last of Us, or even updated, warlike versions of the gang from Scooby Doo (exhibit 36c, below); and all-around them undead enemies to overcome, not allies to understand. “Trapped in time, surrounded by evil, low on gas,” says Sam Raimi; “Fight ’em ’til you can’t,” sings John Bush from semi-camp thrash metal act, Anthrax (2012). In practice, the whole ridiculous scenario reliably plays out like Robert E. Howard’s Conan asking Crom to “count the dead,” laying waste to a hoard of dark-skinned, savage cannibals all around him—except it’s conducted by a group of white-skinned wunderkinds stocked with all manner of military-grade wunderwaffe. When the apocalypse returns, they slay zombie medicine men and Medusas with all the impunity that the spirit of “neutral” entertainment allows: the monomyth as something to prep them like a military exercise; i.e., by making their monomythic avatar something from their (or maybe their parents’) shared childhoods under attack by an imaginary enemy tied to real voices. It’s DARVO punching down at the Omelas child, the escaped slave saddled with aged, rotting stereotypes:

(exhibit 36c: Source: DC Comics. The gang in Scooby Doo are generally concerned with the monster as a disguise that is unmasked; i.e., by “meddling [middle-class] kids” through the Radcliffean model of an “explained supernatural” of old Gothic tropes: the WASP-y virgin, whore, fool, scholar and athlete as good child detectives/soldiers for capital from a state curriculum [the school system; e.g., American high schools, but also British ones: Hogwarts] against a nebulous, unclear cartoon of fascism and Communism.

The classic archetypes make up different elements of the gang. Fred is the athlete [normally a skeptic or brute male challenge to female intellectualism]; Shaggy is the fool [also known as the faithful/superstitious servant—normally a stigmatized group, which for him is the hippy]; Velma is the virgin and the scholar [also, the scholarly nun as queer-coded/ace]; and Daphne’s the whore [characterized by her “witchy” red hair]. By handing the children guns, however, we’re left with a particular kind of gang: vigilantes, specifically bounty hunters trading in flesh-for-money as live or dead sanctioned by the state during the state of exception as increasingly undead.

As such, you can take any middle-class analogy and put it [and its allegories] inside a similar survival scenario; i.e., one where they canonically and ceremoniously respond in kind. There’s no reason they have to, provided the zombie is humanized and capital punishment discouraged, but such isn’t the American approach to Capitalist Realism. Guns become sexy unto themselves, but generally eroticize per the bodies holding them as erotic with or without firearms. Classically such detectives don’t have them, but the prejudice is still there, as is the exploitation; i.e., as something to camp in ways adjacent to harm, at the very least: naked equals exposed, but exposure-equals-power as something to perform in Gothic ways that move power through dialectics of the alien and of rape for or against state arrangements: a plunging neckline and, lo and behold, beauteous orbs ready to be penetrated [something even Radcliffe camped in The Italian—with Schedoni’s massive dagger aimed at his sleeping niece’s exposed breast]!

[artist: Meowri]

Except, there’s really no way to teach consent without getting naked eventually! Per cryptonyms, this includes nudity by proxy and extension; i.e., told through things that resemble, articulate and resemble our daily struggles turned into cartoonish forms we can reclaim as valuable to our labor, identities and code: as things to liberate, hence free us, through such paradoxical exposure during rape play! Clothed and naked at the same time! Big abuse, big booba, big powah!

[artist: Texelion]

This unto itself is a liminal proposition [which porn always is]. Armed as they are, though, the Scooby Doo gang several pages back is a particular resurrection of something Radcliffe constituted through her own problematic, banditti-style demon lovers [she didn’t fuck with the undead as Lewis liked to]: abjection, thus extermination by acting as such against the ghost of the counterfeit; i.e., as a voice for anyone but token groups during class/culture warfare. Such dormant, traitorous proponents cease to humanize zombies at all; instead, they shoot [or otherwise rape] them as quickly as they can, losing the humanizing potential of a lesbian/ace female detective; e.g., like Velma Dinkley exposing the abuses of the old, white man robbing the locals while hiding behind a superstitious veneer [the oldest trick in the book]. As blind parody, they’re detecting, exposing and confirming targets for the state, not the state itself as something to critique [similar to Rowling’s Potter trio: Harry, Ron and Hermione]!

Of course, someone could easily try to deflect and argue, “That’s not what Scooby Doo means to us! Look at my sexy Velma cosplay!” But the stereotypes and bad-faith simulacra are still present, echoing cryptomimetically to drum up profit [and moral panic] during the state’s dying period: more scapegoats, more harmful rape fantasies, more comfort food to try and distract from Gaza [and similar places] being raped and murdered right now. Again, death becomes something to attack through people as zombies, not the state.

[artist: Texelion] 

Given the cosmetic ambiguity/duality and dialectical-material tension, it’s perhaps easier to think of things in the Gothic, paradoxical sense: two things being true at the same time. Something can be a sex object and symbol of liberation [disco in disguise] while also being weaponized as a mask against liberation by pro-state “revolutionaries” [cops in disguise]. Regardless of who’s being brought back and why—and per franchise or across them [e.g., Lana Kane from Archer being a sexpot and token spy policing the world while winking at the camera]—such revivals are haunted by state abuse; i.e., often as something to comment on as a kind of urban legend [which genocides generally amount to, whispered about in hushed voices]. As we’ll see with the “Damsels, Detectives and Demons” chapter in the Demon Module, interrogation isn’t just of things hidden in the dark, but holding the iconic explorers accountable before they start pulling out guns; i.e., as a matter of settler-colonial dogma [which per capital, always has an element of plausible deniability to it: that such things are just “for nerds” per bad-faith arguments while genocide is going on at home and abroad. It’s gatekeeper rhetoric, combining DARVO and obscurantism.)

The illusions of a benign, “neutral” Capitalism are predominantly neoliberal. When these start to corrode, however, fascism emerges to defend the structure through DARVO arguments like the various simulacra (“likenesses”) above. Through grandiose displays of vengeful, empty bravado, the primary ingredient is shock and awe; i.e., a sacred hauntology whose fear and dogma unfold inside violent reprisals disguised as “games”: suburban kids playing war as a means of material disputes framed as us-versus-alien; e.g., the kids from Stranger Things. Their targeted chaos and punitive rules encourage a competition of sexualized, dehumanizing abuse against state targets during Red Scare; i.e., “zombies” rising from the grave in a “woke” fashion, which must be returned to the earth with lethal, rapacious, nuclear-familial force: castle doctrine, where said audiences ape their avatars (no matter how ridiculous) to stand their ground and hand out “dirt naps” (executions). In turn, they look human, but become the fascist zombies pitted against Communist ones made to look rotten to encourage said reprisals ad infinitum. It’s centrist dogma, which encourages genocide in and out of the text (re: the Duffer brothers weaponizing fatal, neoconservative, peace-through-strength nostalgia as Zionist, which extends to their mostly-male, mostly-white child cast).

Generally associated with the end of the world, the zombie apocalypse describes the state as the prime source of undead peril. War never seems to die, never changes; it just lingers like a bad dream, repressed through a variety of cryptonymic toys (which part two of this subchapter is going to explore even more). Neither war nor the state are “broken” when these witch hunts take place; nor are zombies a mere “accident” of a corrupted hegemon. Rather, the worrisome presence of the zombie as a domestic threat indicates the state functioning as intended, benefitting the elite by repressing the widespread exploitation of workers (and nature-as-monstrous-feminine) en masse. The key to ending this repression is ending the canonical, middle-class usage (and police function) of the zombie; i.e., by humanizing the trauma it symbolizes, including its dream-like stories and war chest—the violent, sexualized toys as mirrors reflect on in relation to one’s own trauma as part of a larger, undead scheme that straight up slaps: a symphony of destruction with a time limit (“You try to take his pulse before the head ex-plodes!”). We can reverse this abjection, but it’s generally something the state won’t like:

(source tweet, Mass Strike Now: July 11th, 2024)

In linguo-material terms, undeath indicates the placement of trauma unto a particular recipient or group as the giver or receiver of state violence through sides, aka teams in a sports-like configuration; i.e., the hyphenation of inside/outside and correct/incorrect, but also the liminal presence of generational trauma beyond a single body or lifespan that harms everyone differently through a grand contagion: mankind vs zombies. When used through canon, they portray society as sick, thus the home and its toy chest of different monomythic soldiers, detectives, sexpots, etc. Trauma takes many forms, such as material scarcity leading to “apocalyptic” uprisings that boil over into zombie-like violence feeding indiscriminately in all directions: looting and riots followed by police action during state crackdowns as a matter of stolen childhood sold back to us as cool (which invariably has a racist, paramilitary flavor—re: the Scooby Doo Hilter Youth as home-grown).

More to the point, xenophilic reflections on these already-troubling matters bleed into our personal experiences; i.e., as connected to the material world and vice versa being figuratively and literally dream-like. Just as my reflections on Cambodia informed my own imperiled home life as a teenage girl, they continuously inform America’s domestic imagination in times of societal unrest: something the state threatens its workforce with over time in relation to various stigma groups of uncertain origin having a toy-like role in dogmatic, us-versus-them military exercises. These make our toys (and heroes) police-like, rapacious, and genocidal, thus cannibalistic for the state when it starts to die again. It’s good to familiarize ourselves with these components, so we can recognize but also play with them, ourselves; i.e., through our own sex-positive regressions reclaiming childhood-as-monstrous (the childhood apocalypse) from elite forces and pro-state fantasies—per our ludo-Gothic BDSM!

Such playfulness needs to reject profit on principle; i.e., be less concerned with gaudy material displays (assimilation) and cashing in/selling out through a faithfulness towards such fairytale pastiche (nailing “the look,” below) than speaking out against oppression to varying degrees/of one’s time; e.g., Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey poking fun at the whims of the British middle class (mainly young women) being obsessed with such unironic, Radcliffean fictions to a Quixotic teenage degree! Life imitates art, Austen shows us; lacking any kind of critical bite regarding said cryptomimesis can often bite us in the ass—when the chickens come home to roost!

(artist: Ashlynne Dae)

Last but not least, then, this middle-class survival argument can be arranged in two basic invasion scenarios involving zombies: a single enemy (the slasher) or an army of enemies, the former commonly being a vanguard spearhead promoting future invasion as a matter of discourse, not fact (e.g., Alien, a neoliberal critique, with a single monster to run from, being followed by Aliens, a neoliberal revenge fantasy with lots of monsters to shoot)! Outside of singular instances of murder (e.g., Banquo from Macbeth), sexual abuse (the zombie familiar from Let the Right On In, 2004) or composite bodies and mad science (e.g., the xenomorph or Frankenstein’s monster as relatively gigantic, but also Resident Evil, exhibit 36d1), the horde formation is the zombie’s most common modern grouping. Representing widespread colonial trauma, the horde narrative canonically pits two large bodies—an in-group and out-group—against each other instead of focusing on the elite pulling the strings. Except they don’t have monopolies on sex, terror and force!

(artist: Mika Dawn 3D)

To subvert state manipulation and subterfuge, zombie humanization includes using rememory to reassemble and reflect, mid-play, on the personal traumas of workers playing with toys to relieve stress as not automatically a harmful act; i.e., as inextricably attached to the material byproducts the state either produces or encourages the production of, mid-crisis, but for which the results of playing with they cannot monopolize through the Superstructure (which we can camp). Per the run-on nightmare of the zombie and various weapon-like toys associated with them—the knife or the bullet, but also the fetishistically weaponized parts of the zombie body as fearsome—the return of the living dead is a kind of destroyer home. In turn, Grendel and Beowulf are two sides of the same coin per said home, the latter’s “teeth in the night” attached to a colonial subject/project (exhibit 36d1) but also the zombie’s genitals fetishized by in-group members (exhibit 37b) when deliberately manufactured into plastic, toy-like variants. These must also be reclaimed (exhibit 38a), something the next subchapter shall explore.

In some shape or form, all come from repeated introspection regarding trauma, including dreams of the Gothic past as infused with individual fears about faraway war and atrocities. Yet these inevitably combine with personal trauma and conflict at home—not just police states, but authoritative abuse within the family unit relayed through the action and drama of zombie survival narratives, but especially videogames working as escapist childhood war simulators: Hell coming home, requiring a purifying by the middle-class player (often young children to teenagers) regressing to Man Box levels of thinking against imaginary enemies:

(exhibit 36d: The state eats itself during decay. Its Beowulfian “teeth in the night” become fascist undead, eating workers in defense of the state as a matter of praxial inertia; anisotropically the devouring of the middle class by “zombies” amounts to their prescribed fear of the underclass [through the blinding stigma of “terrorist literature”] as “going to eat them.” Reversing this is challenged by the monomyth as endemic to videogames, which emerged out of the neoliberal era’s initial rise, crystalizing into various popular franchises.

For example, the zombie in Capcom’s survival horror flagship series, Resident Evil, is suitably a curious combination of mad science and localized murder tied to a “Gothic” mansion [eat your heart out, Walpole]: the home of the Tyrant as a giant-sized “king zombie.” Eventually the survival horror setting would shift to more urban and less claustrophobic, hauntological spaces, thereby excluding the zombie from these signature elements for pure zombie combat [which I also explore at length in relation to my research into Metroidvania and FPS games as connected to the survival horror genre; re: “Mazes and Labyrinths”]; e.g., Dying Light or House of the Dead.)

Imaginary or not, these mentalities have real consequences, resulting in a proliferation of stochastic terrorism modeled after the basic goals of such stories: to save themselves from the fearsome past’s giant, hungry maw! Instead, they climb right inside (often motivated by sex, as Romero clearly is):

Thou detestable maw, thou womb of death,
Gorged with the dearest morsel of the earth,
Thus I enforce thy rotten jaws to open,
And in despite I’ll cram thee with more food (source).

You are what you eat after all!

There’s a lot of metaphors and Gothic poetics at work, here. Try not to fret about that. The trick to surviving the zombie apocalypse isn’t having a gun (so many in these stories starve to death, unable to digest bullets any more than stolen gold), it’s changing capital into something less prone towards using the imaginary past against workers; i.e., as something to make the historical past repeat itself the way capital wants. Except, these coming cycles can be challenged by doubling them in sex-positive forms, doing so to patently show everyone the same iconoclastic beyond: that possible, seemingly magical futures exist beyond what capital normally offers (“silver or lead,” Escobar would say). Our Aegis, when used as such, breaks the spell of Capitalist Realism through the zombie narrative—its apocalypse felt through the human body as sexualized, fetishized and made into a terror device for workers or the state.

As such, I’ve given you plenty of different examples; i.e., various cryptomimetic likenesses to acclimate yourself with the fundamentals of play but also to play with and think about in dialectical-material ways (the usual Gothic, wrestling-style oscillations): as something to survive in a half-real sense, mid-discourse. I’ve also given you plenty to look out for through such fantasies weaponizing nostalgia by having children (or people with the minds of children) take up arms to defend capital disguised “as theirs” (versus the elite’s, which it truly is). In short, you have all the tools you need to perform rememory instead of responding with lethal force, DARVO antics and various other pro-state countermeasures; re: the trifectas, monopolies and qualities of capital illustrated by said examples. Like the orc or Medusa, only when we hug the zombie instead of attacking it (the state weaponizing our labor to serve profit during us-versus-them) will the zombie apocalypse end for good.

Next, we’ll explore Morrison’s rememory as the means of subverting the usual runs-of-the-mill in a collective push towards post-scarcity as occupied by the living and the dead, but also copies of them we take into ourselves; i.e., in dream-like ways that go beyond while we’re strictly awake, but which we carry into our waking moments from earlier days while awake, then asleep, then awake again; or, to borrow from Steve Huey’s review of Peace Sells (1986), we must combine

a punkish political awareness with a dark, threatening, typically heavy metal world-view, preoccupied with evil, the occult, and the like. The anthemic title track and “Wake Up Dead” are the two major standouts, and there is also a cover of Willie Dixon‘s “I Ain’t Superstitious,” which takes on an air of supernaturally induced paranoia in the album’s context. The lines between hell and earth are blurred throughout the album, and the crashing, complex music backs up Dave Mustaine‘s apocalyptic vision of life as damnation—his limited vocal style is used to great effect, growling and snarling in a barely intelligible fashion under all the complicated guitar work (source).

In short, we must wake up dead, effectively buried alive as a complicated, imperfect means of rememory as conversing with the dead, but also eating them in transformative ways (versus self-cannibalizing whenever capital tells us to finish our plate)! We’ll explore what I mean by this, next—based on my own experiences!

Onto “‘Bad Dreams, part three: Rememory, or the Roots of Trauma’ (opening and ‘Roots’ part one)“!

Footnotes

[1] I.e., the crossing of divided things, of white sleeping with black in the binarized sense of master/slave tied to the settler-colonial horrors of capital: of visibly non-white bodies brutalized by white oppressors chasing profit. This becomes a kind of ghost that can haunt the Cartesian agent, but also those who belong to either side in the same settler colony project as romanticized: to summon the monster and listen to it sing about its death as a likeness, an alienation; e.g., King Diamond’s Abigail nebulously possessing King’s teenage white bride as a kind of dark zombie baby ghost crooning with delight. She’s Morrison’s Crawling Already? with a mean streak, punching up inside the womb—the house and the mother’s uterus (more on this in the Demons Module).

[2] Zeuhl, for example, retreated regularly into nostalgic spaces that were decayed as such; i.e., a buffer between them and the realities of capital, which they certainly knew about but gradually liked to deny more and more. Originally tremendously genderqueer and outspoken, they regressed through these modes, eventually trading activism for a steady job (and longtime crush they could marry then presumably boss around to help them get what they wanted: passage to England, specifically Manchester). I used to think it was endearing, appreciating their Super Mario Bros. coasters and steady faithful love for videogames. Once, I even asked if I could fuck them while they played Pokémon on their phone. As they took off their pants, lay back and spread their thick, fuzzy thighs, I was over the moon. As I fucked them, I even thought for a second, “This is so cool!” But the novelty wore off as I discovered that I, in that present moment, didn’t seem to exist in their mind; they were entirely fixated on the game in front of them, not me!

Which, to some extent, is fine: one, mental stack; two, asked and answered. Things can be exchanged and offered as expressed, and Zeuhl’s offer was, “You can fuck my pussy but I’m going to play this game,” and that’s what they did! Fair play. But it—like Miss Crawford playing Speculation in Mansfield Park—seemed to provide a ludic metaphor (and pattern) for how they treated me in general: someone for whom whatever they were doing at the present moment took priority over and didn’t seem to be acknowledged insofar as my needs were concerned (this became a major problem, later).

At the moment, it was simply an observation, not a criticism (the two aren’t mutually exclusive). Over time, Zeuhl’s observations became gradually more and more gated by the buffers they placed in front of their own eyes; i.e., they became selfish and closed off to such a degree as abandoning me and their revolutionary principles: they sold out and bought into the usual assimilative schemes. In the end, it is what it is, but it’s hard not to feel disappointed in hindsight!

[3] Such sisterly communicating allow the ability to talk about sex without requiring said activity to be carried out (unlike cis-het men or token Man Box proponents, who seem to think—thus operate under the condition—that once sex is mentioned, it must then be pursued to a logical, heteronormative conclusion; i.e., hunted down, acquired, activated and tossed aside).

[4] Fun fact: He’s talking about the bounty hunters in that scene, not chickens!

[5] Cryptonyms tend to spontaneously occur from both abuser and abused parties under coercive power structures; i.e., self-preservative code-switching.

[6] As much out of desperation as guile under oppressive, unequal socio-material conditions; i.e., alienated from the land, thus unable to live off it, David becomes undead in multiple respects: unscrupulous and inhumane, preaching the Bible while beating children and raping women (as his unhealthy attraction to Ellie would suggest).

[7] (another except from my discontinued book, Neoliberal and Fascist Propaganda in Yesterday’s Heroes):

This section explores the use of music in heroic narratives by the rich, or otherwise serving the needs of the rich in a neoliberal sense. It’s almost hard to attack them, because they were undeniably fun as a kid. And seeing how unromantic and bland the true menace that lurks behind this nostalgic veneer is, I can’t help but wish we were facing something extraordinary. Nothing so otherworldly as the killer Martians from Metal Slug 3 (2000), which conveniently unite the nations (and apologize for Nazis).

Returning to the idea of slow-boil, one of the devices pivotal to neoliberalism is music. Yes, there’s “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “I Pledge Allegiance to the Flag.” However, music is historically tied up in stupidly popular hero narratives like Star Wars and Aliens that convey their own messages. In one chapter, I briefly explored their respective potential for allegory and propaganda; in another, I explored the role of action heroes as cops. In this chapter, I’d like to explore the role of music in videogames and media in relation to action heroes as cops.

Just keep in mind that I’m not dissecting fun purely for the sake of iconoclasm, nor saying these things can’t still be enjoyed (more of that in part 3); I’m merely analyzing the function of music when viewed by the capitalist as useful to their true aims: not to be good people, but to reliably turn a profit through deplorable means, lie about it, and sit on the biggest pile of gold.

The rest of this section is divided into the following subsections:

    • Saturday Morning Cartoons (“Go, Joe!!!”)
    • Fighting Music; or, “Go Home and Be a Family Man!”
    • Sports Anthems (aka Tolerating Sports and its Owners)
    • War aka “The Danger Zone”
    • Retro Glory

Saturday Morning Cartoons

As explored in my last chapter, action heroes further political ideals to children by presenting as neutral, family-friendly entertainment. Saturday morning cartoons accomplished this through their music. G.I. Joe and dozens of other cartoons had catchy themes set to deceptively well-animated intros. Amid that, they communicated the world in simple, violent terms. Captain Planet had its own neoliberal solution; its beautifully wacky music reflects an equally goofy premise: “The power is yours!” Unfortunately recycling plastics is basically a con—products made from oil, lobbied for by big oil companies for decades [Cracked’s “If Recycling Were Honest | Honest Ads, 2022]. Recycling plastics is a lie, one advertised by the likes of Captain Planet and shows like it since the 1980s.

Look at me, heartlessly killing Captain Planet. But I’m not grumbling aimlessly by presenting those with power as a convenient scapegoat (what Nietzsche calls ressentiment). Their role in the planet’s impending demise is plain: Capitalism is everywhere, and is historically well-documented and researched. No, my feelings can be acted upon. Iconoclasm is only the first step in the departure from faith—faith in Capitalism, in this case [Second Thought’s “Why Are So Many People Losing Faith In Capitalism?” 2022]. For instance, labor movements are nothing new in America; they’ve merely been suppressed by capitalists. (re: Mark Fischer’s “capitalist realism“). The drive for meaningful worker action needs to replace the neoliberal yolk of personal responsibility. For this to happen, the myth of socialism needs to die.

This includes Red Scare tactics. These need to stop insofar as framing the Chinese and the Soviets as Communist. Rather, we need to adopt Marx’s critique of Capitalism (in its modern forms) before we can gradually replace/dismantle neoliberalism. For this, we need someone as effective as Captain Planet, but teaching realistic forms of resistance to neoliberal abuse.

This might seem completely at odds, but neoliberal critiques generally emerged within media that resembles, on some level, its former self. Socialism is not antithetical to Saturday morning cartoons; it’s antithetical to the core tenets of capitalism that neoliberals have maximized since Reagan took office. If you think this is absurd, consider how North Korea—who are normally framed as enemies of capitalism—using cartoons to educate the masses [Sabrespark’s “What the HELL is Squirrel and Hedgehog? (The North Korean Propaganda Cartoon), 2018]. I’m not advocating for pro-state propaganda; I’m arguing that cartoons (and their music) can serve as powerful tools within the system of Capitalism to help it evolve into something better; i.e., something more stable, that doesn’t threaten the entire planet by breeding neoliberals.

Fighting Music

Street Fighter II; The World Warrior (1991) delivered on both the gameplay and the music. Battle Arena Toshinden (1995) illustrated that good music is enough to be memorable, even if the gameplay stalls. Both titles were early releases for their generation’s platform. Guile’s theme “goes with everything” comments on the universal adaptability of a hopeful theme. In neoliberal terms, if a total enemy can be designed, the hope of defeating it becomes fungible; so many simulacra can be sold and exchanged as part of the same overall supply and demand. Hence, Guile’s theme goes with everything. It’s the perfect antithesis to the neoliberal’s fabricated enemies, the interaction between the two on a commercial level insulating their consumers to what’s really going on, geopolitically.

Fighting music also pertains to a sense of conservative, patriotic anthems and struggle: i.e., the Rhodesian anthem. A knight belongs to a nation; the nation and its creation myth and traditional values are under attack, to which the music spurs a defense of the nation. It’s important to remember this nation as fabricated; i.e., as something to defend and protect in ways that primarily benefit the elite at the cost of so many “ordinary” lives.

Sports Anthems

Sports are a reliable sight for cathartic drama. But the myriad gears of the capitalist machine are also laid bare—a sobering reality that is overshadowed through admittedly badass music. Even if you don’t like sports, the spectacular music for NFL Gameday (1995) can make you forget how bafflingly dumb football is.

The amount of stupid shit that billionaire sports owners get away can sometimes break the spell (re: Secret Base); but they become associated with the music and the spectacle as the Providers of All That Is Fun. It certainly isn’t the charts (fuck you, Zeuhl, haha). Then again, this so-called “chart porn“ [Secret Base’s “The Search for the Saddest Punt in the World | Chart Party,” 2019] is all that remains after years of economic exploitation that would rival the bread and circus of the Roman Empire.