July 05, 2008
Living Dead (Four)
Robert Harris’s novel Fatherland, from 1992, considers a world in which The Third Reich won the Second World War. There are a number of books that take on the same subject, not least of all, The Man in the High Castle. In Phil Dick’s book the United States is split down the middle. The West is under Japanese rule, and the East is Nazi territory. The main character comes to realize that these divisions are a false consciousness. We are all living a surreal existence, blindly accepting of symbolic authoritarian suggestions, but in reality we have not lost the war. We take on face value that the rules by which we are governed are ascribed to the hateful ideologies of our enemies, when they are only a convenient smoke screen our own government has contrived to secretly carry out its repressive policies. Fatherland is far less cerebral. The Nazi victors guard a terrible secret. In the years that followed German victory the brutal reality of the Holocaust has been totally repressed by the Nazi Government. The world has no idea about the atrocities Germany committed during the war. It is a guarded State Secret. Most of the documents have been carefully destroyed. Only a hand full of Hitler’s innermost circle knows the truth, and they are starting to die off under suspicious circumstances. The story begins innocently enough: a drowning is caught by a dogged SS officer who starts to have serious doubts about the official explanation of suicide. All it takes is some little thing like that, some unexpected event that comes out of nowhere, to fell the empire. The cover-ups come one after another, cover-ups to cover-up the cover-ups in quickening succession, and before you know it the conspirators come unglued, indisputable facts emerge, and the game is up. Even under the best conditions there’s no way to stop it, but with this COCKSUCKING Administration of ours all you had were a bunch of mindless zombies. Take the Chief of Staff. He groped around his office in a daze of anger and confusion, and usually ended up cowering in a corner, shades drawn, wearing sunglasses in the dark. If you walked in on him unannounced he would cover his face with one arm, and should the unwelcome interloper turn on the light in the room by mistake, the CRYPTO-FASCIST-ZOMBIE-CORPSFUCKER swiped at the air and hissed loudly. The Chief of Staff, like everyone else at the White House, was incapable of any expression other than the most cynical parody of human behavior, and even under the best of circumstances that usually amounted to nothing more than a blank, hungry, stare, one eye rolled up in its socket, as he clawed and scraped along the wall of his office to turn the light back off before anyone could see the nasty sore that had developed on his cheek. It was becoming more difficult to conceal his increasing incontinence. It wasn’t so much that he had what Mark Shields famously called a single-minded “pathological hatred” of “democratic government.” The undead are totally unconscious that there exists any such thing as law, or love, or anything remotely resembling them. It was the zombie version of the Wild West at the White House. Undead men in the Administration groped around their offices with shit in their pants and the women were all whores! As Executive Producer and Creator of the revisionist Western Deadwood, David Milch pointed out that “reason” was in the neighborhood of 17th on his list of motivating psychological factors that drove the story of the show, and if it were up to him it would have been even lower on the list. Milch might as well have been talking to the Chief of Staff. There is nothing less rational than a bunch of zombies who’ve all shit themselves and are running the United States of America! Milch defends the use of gutter language in Deadwood as in some kind of symbiotic accord with fancy talk. Speech was all there was in the absence of law in the territories. It had two functions, according to Milch. As an expression of civilization, on the one hand, and of the crudeness that was the undeniable reality of the situation. The difference is that most of the time the Chief of Staff SHITPANTS growled and moaned with absolutely no discernible meaning. Language had no greater purpose for him than as a convenient way to clear the black phlegm from his rotten throat, which invariably ended up dripping from his chin. “The light hurts my eyes,” the sick zombie SHITPANTS managed to cough out when the room was dark again and he was back behind his gore stained desk, totally unaware of the ghastly impression he made. You never fully appreciated how stupid and vicious these Administration officials were until you got stuck in a room alone with one of them.