Monstrous Politics

Happy Halloween! We are now only a couple of weeks away from the US Presidential Election, which the whole world is watching with genuine terror lest Donald Trump become POTUS and get access to the nuclear codes.

Since little is more horrifying than monsters and politicians, today is an excellent day to discuss the zeitgeist and how Democrats are connected vampires while Republicans are analogous to zombies. I’m not making this up. When the POTUS is a Democrat the horror de jure becomes vampires, and when the GOP is in the catbird seat zombies become the most significant monster in popular media. Check out the stats:

Okay, there is a correlation … but WHY?

Well, regardless of who wins the opposition floods the media with allegations that the new POTUS is, at minimum, Satan incarnate in an attempt to win more seats in Congress during the next election … a brief two years away. That means, via the POTUS, the entire political party of the winner is demonized too. People like to be scared a bit. It’s why horror is such a popular genre. So with the subconscious fear of the new President percolating away in the hindbrain, the populace is drawn to certain kinds of scary stories reflecting this unthinking political angst.

Leftists (represented by Democrats) are, especially from the point of view of Right-wing Republicans, sexually deviants who want to suck the life-blood out of taxpayers and open the boarders of America to dangerous Others who will disrupt everything, overthrow the patriarchy via unchecked emasculating harpies, and change things in unholy ways. 

Vampires are also blood-sucking Others who unleash sex-crazed women upon decent, God-fearing male authority.  Even the most milquetoast, sparkly-assed, stalker-posing-as-lover vampires in creation – like those dweebs in Twilight – are all about sexual awakening. Even with Edward Cullen basically rendering Bella into the perfect patriarchal helpmate, she was still changed into a vampire and gained extraordinary powers. Moreover, the fact you can repel a vampire with the cross is a manifestation of the rejection of religion. The Right is convinced the Left’s attempts to keep Church and State separate is because the Left hates God, religion, human decency, apple pie, and their own moms; it is up to the Right to drive off those Leftist night-feeders with all that is Holy.

In return, the Left views the Republican party as a seething mass of zombies. They are seen as mindless, uncaring, ravenous consumers who destroy everything with their insatiable needs. The Left lives in trepidation of a mass of Right-wingers who cannot think ahead long enough to realize their policies are dangerous because the resources are not infinite. Furthermore, zombies are determined to eat brains and the Right’s perceived disdain for higher education, intellectuals and science indicates their willingness to empty everyone else’s skulls. Zombie also respond to stimuli in the most knee-jerk and animalistic of ways, which the Left sees as no different from the GOP axiomatic simplified response to complex topics. From the “Guns/Gays/God” talking points to the false conundrum of “America; love it or leave it” the Left sees Republicans as fundamentally incapable of higher-order thinking. For the Left, the Right is a shambling mass of barely-alive cretins whose can respond in only limited ways. As the Right fends off the Left with symbols of religion, the Left turns to science for the answers to defeating the zombies on the Right.

Needless to say, these over-simplifications and disparagements  of political affiliations disappear under the harsh reality of human complexity, the same way strong sunlight reveals how cheesy Hollywood constructed vampires and zombies really are. However, sociocultural jitters are not about rational concerns. Sociocultural unease is about uncertainty and dislike of nonconforming elements. If they are not US, then they are THEM and it is always US against THEM.

I am betting vampire stories, especially tales of emasculating female vampires, are about to hit big.