Where Have All the Zombies Gone? (the Dawn of a New Monster Era)

Truth be told, it is hard for this generation of Horror fans to remember a time without Zombies. Yet such a time seems to be upon us.

Rather abruptly (and some may think at last), the Zombie Craze seems to be fading.

What does it all mean?

And perhaps the more interesting question is – if your Literary senses are tingling –what comes next?

For those too young to remember, there have been other monster-dominated decades…and to fans of Literary Horror, such changes in Horrors represent changes in our times, our societies, our very self-image. More than any other genre, Horror “represents.” Horror is the spirit of the times…the Zeitgeist of who we think we are. And as such, these monster transitions can be very telling.

In Literature, Horror plays a unique and indispensable part. Horror mirrors our social and cultural failings: it is our dirty laundry, hung out for the world to see. And it is meant to awaken us, to inspire change.

Our World history and our regional histories are decorated by the monsters of our choosing. Pay attention: THIS is how Literature moves in Horror…

Because even if you don’t think your genre is speaking loudly in Literary terms – even if you “just” read or write pulp – monsters have historically been stand-ins for what scares us the most.

And what scares us the most – is humanity itself.

Growing Up Zombie: the Decades of American Disillusionment

It came at the end of the Reign of Vampires: the rise of the Zombie and the apocalyptic visions of a world we were clearly eager to see end.

But for Literary watchers, it also came coincidentally during the tenure of the George W. Bush Presidency – a time (2001 to 2009) when the United States was shaken rudely awake from its American Dream, “given more real life strife than it had seen since in the 1960s, including two very long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, destruction on the home front in the form of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, plus massive natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina, and the global economic meltdown [of] 2008…” And the subsequent Zombie movie milieu “fits in perfectly with these aforementioned national and world events because it functions on two levels simultaneously. On a literal level, Zombie movies concern rampaging monsters that want to eat your flesh and/or brains. But on another, more metaphorical level, these movies focus on the collapse of the familiar infrastructure that maintains our high-tech civilization.” (Muir 159)

This was a rather unpleasant rousing from our previous Literary monster decade – the Vampire Era – which seemed like a lazy summer reverie in comparison. Those were the times born of the Summer of Love and spurred by gender rights and sexual liberation. And I can’t help wondering if there must have been something about those amorous Creatures of the Night which pissed most of us off – or finished doing so – in order that we were willing to exchange Horror’s most beloved monster for something more like ourselves.

That’s right: we are the Dr. Frankensteins, creating the monsters in our own image. And therein hides the Literature.

The Zombie says a lot about us. The Zombie tells the world how we felt from the mid1980’s onward: like we were all being marginalized…like we were undervalued cogs in machinery that had swallowed us whole…like nothing of ourselves was valued or mattered. We began to see ourselves as hapless, unwitting victims. Conspiracy theories and suspicions of everything from our own neighbors, coworkers and government rose from the ashes of immolated Vampires. And we got angry.

It is no small coincidence that the rise of the Zombie coincided with the rise of Technology. In fact, the last time a monster rose in such a way to represent us en masse was during the Industrial Revolution when it was the Ghost who came to envision how we felt – like we were truly rendered dead and invisible in our own time…like the world suddenly lurched forward without us…like it didn’t even have the courtesy to wait until we died before burying us in time-stamped irrelevance.

During the Ghost Era we saw so much suddenly slipping through our fingers – some of it wrenched heartlessly from them – seizing our sense of spirituality and subsequent order of our universe and replacing tradition with an unsettling, rapidly changing uncertainty.

Literature abounds with examples of the heartless separation of humanity from a more acceptably paced march forward. Everywhere people were awakening as if from a stupor to find change unfettered, science dominating, the human touch in life left cold and uncaring. In the Ghost Era, we discovered we could no longer live the lies. And women’s voices rose in chorus to name the sins, spawning the Golden Era of spectral fiction that still today informs us strongly of that time in history.

It was not long after that our genre began documenting our own shock at the world around us…and all manner of Horrors and deceit and human tragedy was rendered in Horror form. From the psychological Horrors of Poe to the alien monstrosities of Lovecraftian nightmares, our genre continued to narrate the changes we all encountered, the fears we hid and the resentments we nurtured.

 

https://tulsaballet.org/dracula/

In fact we had tried on many monsters on the way to the Vampire (a constant infatuation throughout our folkloric history) – including the Mummy, Frankenstein’s monster, and the Wolfman – all in the attempt to make sense of self-discovery.

So when the Vampire came along again in the 1970’s to tease us about our sexual indiscretions, our Sexual Revolution and search for gender identity, the threat was more subtle…less encompassing… and certainly left us employed and believing what we did and who we were somehow mattered. It seemed a pleasant, if not superfluous distraction, its latent threat more shadowy. With the Vampire, the illusion that all was still well – just different – predominated. Not so in the Zombie Era.

When the Zombies rose, it was an apocalyptic moment. It was a sign that while we were sleeping, something had gone terribly wrong.

Much like the Time of the Ghost, the rise of the Zombie represented our minimalization by those we had trusted – a betrayal that wounded in private places made horribly public.

We had become mindless cogs in someone else’s machine. Our days grew from nine-to-five with weekends and holidays off, to 24/7/365…instead of eight hours including a lunch it became eight hours or more plus another for lunch, plus accommodation for breaks, plus longer and longer congested commutes, plus forget holiday pay or overtime, count yourself lucky you still have a job…plus fund your own darn retirement…and insurance…and education….

Worse, we now had jobs (many times multiple ones) instead of careers. And at any point, anywhere along the way anyone from a politician to a coworker could take it all away with a single fib.

We had trusted, invested, and committed. And we were summarily robbed. Unbeknownst to minorities and immigrants, the betrayal had at last reached all the way up the ladder of entitlement…We were – all of us for that moment in time – equalized by an impending sense of doom, poverty, ill health and despair.

The world as we knew it and had relied on with its haphazard, unequally applied rules, was indeed ending.

And so the Zombie rose…hungry for mindless vengeance to supplicate mindless anger at a mindless society which eviscerated us without apparent care.

Because the Zombie is all about humanity, according to John Russo in his foreward to The Walking Dead Psychology: Psych of the Living Dead, “about human beings, with all their good qualities and all their bad qualities, having to fight for survival against tremendous odds and daunting, soul-deadening destruction…[and] how we may rise to the occasion when we are in extreme jeopardy or how we may fail.” (xvii)

So this Zombie was different than any Zombie that came before.

Simply rising from the grave with a need to dine on brains wasn’t nearly enough to satiate our fury at what was happening in the world – at what was happening to us.

This new Zombie did not rise alone, but rose in hordes….walked in herds…swarmed like hungry locusts to purge the land of all we had built.

And we were different too – we who survived the first onslaught to fight the menace. WE rose as well…grabbing guns and bats and crossbows and swords and hatchets… We fought back in unspeakable violence – so much so that we shocked ourselves.

In earlier versions of the Zombie, the Zombie was the Horror. In this one, it was not only how the Zombie comes to be, but the hideous violence that we ourselves inflict on the Zombie that is the real Horror.

How Furious Are We? ZombieLit…

As in the Industrial Revolution, the Technology Revolution has disfigured our ability to see ourselves out of it, and we cannot separate this newer revolution from the human carnage of today. Now as then we have experienced massive job loss, massive blows to our loyalties, our sense of worth, our very identities. Talk of retraining the masses has been a lie for most of us; and when thousands of jobs are replaced by one or two, that leaves a lot of us free to stew in anger.

Unfortunately, we are not very creative when we are reeling in personal pain. How angry are we?

Just look at what we have undone in the United States with one rebellious presidential election. Because this is what is going to inform our Literature for the next few decades…

This is not about liking or disliking a president or American politics. This is all about the surfacing of major divisions that have been simmering beneath the surface of contentment and “progress” in our country and the world at precisely the same time Technology has completely reshaped how we interact with the world, how we process TRUTH and FACTs and understand what we ARE or ARE NOT entitled to…

Rather than fix the problems our own greed has created, we have chosen the old default in a time we should know better: to blame the Other.

This is why the Zombie has gone away…

The World as we knew it has ended. And no amount of tantrum-throwing is going to fix things. Yet far too many of us fear our own adulthood. We search for blame and make it up if it suits our purposes.

We have become exactly what our enemies have been calling us.

And it wasn’t the fault of a political party or one black President. It was the fault of our own insatiable greed – the greed to be better than our own neighbors, to keep our own job even if it meant hundreds of other people losing theirs, if it meant pretending it was their own fault for not being bright enough or lucky enough to live and work where the Tech Revolution had not yet reached its suffocating tentacles, to bestow the title of Too Big To Fail on an irrational, select few.

Now that job loss and identity compromise has begun to hit the last of the holdouts – the ones who belittled the evisceration of millions of their own countrymen and -women – NOW there is a crisis.

Now bonking Zombies with a hatchet isn’t enough and is no longer funny. It is no longer sufficient. Because it DIDN’T WORK.

Because it is the upper classes, the wealthy, the alleged job-makers who have risen unscathed from the death threat… Surrounded by hordes of Zombies too oblivious or too greedy or too fearful themselves, these ever self-wealth-replenishing masters of the universe cannot be reached. The boss you dreamed of walloping over the Zombie head or eating the brains of is safely in the bunker he had you build.

Anger is no surprise. Blaming the Other is the disappointment.

Most of us had so hoped we were beyond this…

It is a sad fact of humanity that when we cannot get at the real problem, we get at the one we can reach….the convenient one.

And sometimes we are so, so angry we are willing to divest ourselves of important things in order to release that anger in mindless vengeance.

This is how a country like the United States begins rolling back human rights. This is how we rationalize doing so.

We are so brainwashed into believing that only the rich – in their wondrous, pure humanity – have the capacity to save us, that we forget we saved ourselves by forming this country in the first place. We forget we gave all future generations the tools to save each other.

We treat the Other like those Zombies – rending them limb from limb without the slightest human compassion all in an effort to vent without biting the hand we are told feeds us.

How soon we all forget….

We forget the Native American code-talkers that saved us in one war, the African American soldier that (forgiving the rest of us our judgment of them) shared our fox-hole in another, the immigrant soldiers who fight the same enemies in our name in order to participate in what used to be the world’s greatest Democracy, the foreign nationals who have given their lives or risked them to stand beside us, the Asian Americans who have built our infrastructure – not once, but twice over now, the gay Americans who have given us incomparable culture in unexpected ways, the American woman who has fought her own battles while defending those that cast long shadows on a mutual future, the Founding Fathers who without remembering to define what a “man” was freed forever what the definition of a “man” would be…

For certain our history has not been neat. But at least we could claim a percentage of ignorance in and of our own times. This – this new monstrosity rising from the ashes of the Zombie Apocalypse – is being resuscitated in the full light of day.

Where we could excuse ancestors for misinterpreting, for doing the best they could with what they had and what information they had…This time it is on US.

This time it is on PURPOSE.

For those gleefully waving the bat, the flag, the hatchet and the noose, there will be no forgiveness by your descendants. The stain here will be too great to cover with lies the rest of the world can already see through.

That any of us would STILL resort to blaming whole peoples for our own errors in judgment, our own misplaced trust, our own unwillingness to remake and reinvent ourselves is just plain indefensible.

We are lazy.

We are greedy.

We are selfish.

Way to make the terrorists of this world look right. Because now that the Zombie is dead, something else will rise to take its place.

I am betting on the Werewolf.

Not The Good Old Days, Howling at the Moon

Chances are, if the Zombie was different this time around, so will the Werewolf be. In fact, the “Modern Werewolf” has already done some serious changing – slipping away from the simple, unfortunate nip in the moonlight to become (like the Vampire) an empathetic creature.

According to Nathan Robert Brown in his book The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Werewolves, “Werewolves are no longer depicted in exclusively negative or evil light. In fact, modern pop culture has embraced the werewolf as a rebellious antihero. Similar to modern-day motorcycle gangs, they move and hunt and live and die as a pack, and they live outside society’s rules. Pack law is the only law. In the last century, werewolves have been embraced by every medium of pop culture. They’ve become major figures in literature, films, art, comic books, and even video games. In America, urban legends about werewolves have sprung up with increasing frequency over the last 50 years.” (109)

I don’t know about you, but I see a lot of our modern outsider, rebel political factions right there. I hear the phrase “silent majority.”

Here we have a creature that cannot control its fury, who while in “human form” cannot fathom the carnage it creates, who cannot remember its animal behavior (which is far too convenient to ignore here), and who hides among the rest of us undetected, and for whom the end justifies the means. Like a mean drunk justifying his or her actions, everyone and everything else is responsible for the ensuing bloodshed – real or imagined.

Remember the last election? Yeah, I don’t know half of the people I thought I did, either…

But what I do know is that the Werewolf always denies he or she is a Werewolf – because that would be a horrible thing to be.

So they become in their own minds – if Were-anything – Werepoodles, I assume.

Where once they were unfortunate, hapless victims themselves… now with a kind of mental Photoshop, they are free to remake themselves into vigilantes – heroes of the state, the arm of popular justice…the same ones who say it is better to execute an innocent man now and then than miss one single guilty one.

And as we learned from the Zombie Apocalypse, there is safety in numbers…

Instead of being an isolated case, now we have Were-communities.

Like the Vampire Mega-Covens and the Zombie Hordes before them, we no longer think in singular terms….This is about survival. So what if other people think we are wrong to become a monster rather than cease to exist: they aren’t here with us.

Besides. They can’t get all of us if we swarm them, and if there is more than one of us, we are in the right…right? And if collateral damage happens, it cannot be helped…what can one person do in the face of the rise of Hell itself? The Devil made us do it…sure it looks like me, but it wasn’t me….I was just following the pack, the will of the people, orders….

For some of us, the familiarity of the excuses makes the hair stand on end, the hackles rise, our own fangs bare…

Like the Zombie Apocalypse before it, this new Horror is all about the Little Guy surviving the end of all reasonable things. And that means your neighbor may not in fact be your neighbor…but something else….something come to destroy all that the Zombies left of you…

And so what if the Werewolf is US? Or a spouse? Or a relative? Or a boss?

Forget the blood dripping from their lips….look at all of the STUFF they get to keep…

And if you keep feeding them Others, they might leave you alone.

Except they won’t. They can’t help themselves. They are sociopathic predators. You aren’t them. They are better than you.

Beware of Dog. Because like the Zombie Apocalypse, it is most likely not you who will survive. Once the carnage starts, we are ALL meat.

Read any old Werewolf story. Read what happens to the victims of the Werewolf.

In its animal form it can barely stop itself from devouring what it loves in its human form.

Do you want to take that chance?

How’d ya do stopping the Zombie Apocalypse? The Industrial Revolution? The Tech Revolution?

This is going to take more than Wolfsbane.

All of us better be prepared to lose some flesh.

Because if the Werewolf is back, we have to remember that as much as we once valued the human form, we are going to have to put the animal down, because indeed we might not be speaking of folklore anymore…

What cannot be trusted, what randomly and wantonly and indiscriminately destroys what we have – all of us – built, cannot be suffered to live and thrive and reproduce.

Horror “represents…”

Get your silver bullets. There will be blood. And this time, it will most likely be justifiably our own.

References

Brown, Nathan Robert. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Werewolves. New York: Alpha Books, c2009.

Muir, John Kenneth. Horror Film FAQs: All That’s Left to Know About Slashers, Vampires, Zombies, Aliens, and More. Milwaukee, WI: Applause Books, c2013.

John Russo. “Why Don’t They Die?” Foreward. The Walking Dead Psychology: Psych of the Living Dead Langley, Travis, ed. New York: Sterling Press, c2015.

Attack of the 151-Foot and One Inch Woman: What Real Horror Looks Like

 Okay. I’m going to break an unwritten rule of my own blog. I’m going to comment on an American Presidential election. Why? Because I don’t believe silence is right. And because of one singular phrase uttered during my own generation’s lifetime by the Greatest Generation who – amazingly – just elected this particular President: the words “NEVER AGAIN.”

One can banter about all manner of theories of bitterness and resentment by those who lose an election. But that is not the issue in this one; we in the United States are well acquainted with not getting our way, with having popular votes circumvented by our own Electoral College and those who know “better than us” what is “best for us.” We are also used to and appreciative of the constant swing of the pendulum between the views and efforts of differing political parties which in their radical and sometimes alarming swings to the left or the right typically mean we drive our national policies straight down the middle.

No, this election is about something different. This loss holds in its teeth the sensation that we have finally come to rationalize in ourselves the very worldviews we condemn in others. We have become hypocrites.

And who should we fear the most? The 151 foot, one inch green woman who stands in New York Harbor….because it is she who is not going to let us rationalize this one…It is she who stands in defiance of all of that hateful, misogynist, racist, anti-immigrant, anti-freedom talk.

Her. I’m with her.

Just the Facts, Ma’am

The Statue of Liberty is an immigrant. And she is a woman.

She was a gift from the people great nation of France, dedicated on October 28, 1886, intended by its conceptualist Edouard de Laboulaye – a French political thinker, U.S. Constitution expert, and abolitionist “to commemorate the perseverance of freedom and democracy in the United States and to honor the work of the late president Abraham Lincoln.”

(https://www.nps.gov/stli/learn/historyculture/stories.htm )

How sad that much of what was intended continues to lay fallow in the fields of American imagination.

“When Laboulaye’s Statue of “Liberty Enlightening the World” was completed, it not only represented democracy but also symbolized American independence and the end of all types of servitude and oppression. A broken shackle and chain lie at the Statue’s right foot. The chain disappears beneath the draperies, only to reappear in front of her left foot, its end link broken… However, although the broken shackle is a powerful image, the meaning behind it was not yet a reality for African Americans in 1886…” (https://www.nps.gov/stli/learn/historyculture/stories.htm )

It may be hard for those of us patting ourselves on the back for having elected an African American President to reconcile truth with our own perceptions. But we need to. We need to own up to our failures, or how else can we fix them?

For while “the Statue emphasized the bitter ironies of America’s professed identity as a just and free society for all people regardless of race… From the time of the Statue’s dedication, attitudes towards the Statue in the African American community were ambivalent and uncertain.” (https://www.nps.gov/stli/learn/historyculture/stories.htm )

This continues today. And it is our own fault.

So marry that mixed message to the conception we all have of what the torch means: a light to the rest of the world bathed in uncertain darkness and political unrest…

Now what good is a light if only “certain others” are invited to warm themselves in its glow?

And what of that plaque at her feet? The one that so clearly and plainly says in perfect, unmistakable English:

“Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Nowhere on the plaque does it say “white Anglo Saxon Protestants and/or models only…”

Like I’m saying, the United States is a product of “straight down the middle” historic accidents of fate and arrogantly miscalculated word choice…what a happy accident!

That poem, by the way, was written by another 150-foot woman, Emma Lazarus, author of “The New Colossus.”

And Just the Emotions…(You Know, Being Female and All)

And what is with this running commentary that a woman should never be President? It’s an elected office….nobody is getting married. If a woman President is inadequate then she would be AT LEAST the equal of a good many MALE Presidents, wouldn’t she?

Racism, bigotry, discrimination, nativism/anti-immigrant language and behavior proudly loosed in the national conversation in these United States? And all of that unchallenged by our leaders, everyone urging us to ignore the rhetoric and bullying and hate crimes and give this President a chance? A chance to do WHAT?

THAT? The unmentionable? Where would it end if we are starting with racially motivated deportation forces? Maybe we should ask Native Americans in this country, who are still eagerly awaiting our own departure from this imminent domain/soil. Maybe we should stand the ghosts of our immigrant ancestors alongside ourselves and our current immigrant population and just say, “Back off. These are people not only “too” but people “FIRST.”

And if you think real horror is not being in the middle class, you should see what the rest of the world endures daily.

Deportation forces? Anti-immigrant actions and language? All within the shadow of the Statute of Liberty? What will you do if she fights back?

Discrimination, sexism and bigotry?

Not in my country. Not in my America. I was raised – accurately or not – to believe that the United States was great and powerful because we saw the value in the voices and contributions of all nations, all religions, all races. I was raised to believe it is an ongoing struggle, and that there would be slips and falls and missteps along the way. But that these United States were not afraid to hang our dirty laundry in the front window, to learn from mistakes and seek the advisement of our better angels.

I was raised by The Greatest Generation…the ones that saw the Great Depression, and two World Wars…the ones that saw with their own eyes the very real horrors of what man is capable of doing to his fellow man, and which subsequently said, “Never again.”

And yet here we are.

Since the election, hate crimes are up against all minorities nationwide. Suddenly, we are not so special in the world or in the eyes of the world. And if we continue to not stand up and stop this vitriolic rhetoric and disgraceful endorsement of behavior, we deserve the horrified looks of disgust we are getting from the rest of the world. Period.

We criticize our protesting youth and yammer at them to “just grow up.” Well, fellow Americans, this election is showing they have. They have the guts and moxie to stand up the way our parents claim they did…and by golly I appreciate their passion, their courage, their dedication, their determination to be heard in a whole lot of shouting right now.

This is not about a lost election.

It is about the use of language to incite violence against anyone not white, not male, not already here.

I want to be on record. This is not acceptable. And I am not alone in thinking or saying so. Violent action begets violent action. Civil war is not an antique of our past, but the very real threat of every generation that thinks itself superior to its fellow Americans, a threat that vigilance and honor put down every time the beast raises its ugly head. Those of us raised believing in “Never Again” mean Never Again. And we will put ourselves right in the mix if we are needed to stand up and be counted. Rest assured, we are well aware that six million Jews did not fare so well when they gave a new dictator of Germany a chance to show his true colors.

To the rest of the world, I for one am profoundly embarrassed. Because if this election taught us nothing else, it is that even we do not know what our fellow Americans are really thinking.

Although that works both ways…even if your candidate won.

And there is some good news for those who remain disheartened by our current political circumstances. Not only is a U.S. Presidential term “only” four years, but there is the fact that the opposition party won the popular vote:

“On Friday, November 18, the latest numbers from the nonpartisan Cook Political Report showed that Democratic candidate Clinton has a lead of 1.43 million votes over Trump. With a margin of 1.1 percent over the real estate mogul, the former Secretary of State has 63,049,607 votes to the Republican candidate’s 61,610,484.” (http://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-news/news/hillary-clinton-won-popular-vote-over-donald-trump-but-by-how-much-w451352 )

That means that over a million Americans feel exactly the same trepidation as you or I, and over a million Americans might just be counted on to stand up to their fellow Americans and say Never Again…To say “Hands off” our sons and daughters, our neighbors and friends, our in-laws and spouses, brothers and sisters, immigrant groups, our women, our independence and our FREEDOM…How dare you threaten the very ideals so many have given their lives for. How very Taliban of you…

Rules of Horror: Most Monsters Shrink From the Full Light of Day

Make no mistake. This was an election founded on revenge: revenge for electing our first African American President, revenge for nominating a woman for President, revenge for considering a socialist leaning-President, revenge for job losses of a spoiled Middle Class too busy pointing out its entitlements while the rest of us rot in poverty, revenge for the constant exploitation of an impoverished lower class whose voice has been pirated for personal use of dual-tongued politicians, revenge for the burst bubbles of an Upper Class who can’t remain Upper enough unless more of us are on the bottom…pure, anger and frustration-fueled revenge.

And actions based on revenge never end well.

We need to wake up. We need to see that we are going through economic changes the scope of which have not impacted the world since World War I. NO ONE is doing well except those who misdirect suspicion with their own horrendous body counts. Like the one we just elected.

“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Bigotry is all about fear. Equality and Freedom are scary if you don’t get to hog all the benefits for yourself. But it is a great diversion from the real issues – the ones that are much tougher to fix and to keep fixed. Those scary-world-is-ending-because-of-all-other-races folks are the people who need to grow up, who never learned to play nicely with others, to share the sand box.  I stand with gays and straights, with the LGBT community and their families, I stand with immigrants: male and female and undecided, whether 151 feet tall or in the womb, Mexican, Syrian, all colors, all religions– estoy contigo, tambien…

I stand with minorities. I stand with those who have the courage to say not only Never Again, but “Not in My Country.”

The Statue of Liberty is an immigrant. If we don’t mean what is on that plaque at her feet, if we don’t believe in the spirit in which she came to us, then perhaps we should deport her back to France…before we really piss her off.

She’s green. And she’s packing a chain. Who knows what else she has under her drape. How willing are you to find out?