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And the characters themselves are – in the classic critique offered by a thousand screenwriting teachers – less characters than caricatures.  The first real redneck we meet is a racist loudmouth.  As is the second.  And the third is, so far at least, just a wife beater, though I expect he’ll end up hating black people too.  This is no surprise.  To people who write for the entertainment industry, if you live east of I-5 and south of the Mason-Dixon, you’ve got a sheet and a flammable cross in the back of your pick-up and you could someday grow up to be a revered Democratic senator.

Oh, and there’s not enough zombie action.  Instead of flesh-eating terror, we get scenes of budding survival suffragettes complaining about having to do the laundry.  Seriously.  The little band of refugees can’t be bothered to set up the most basic security for the undefendable position they’ve chosen to occupy, but these walking, talking clichés have plenty of time to bicker about gender roles while scrubbing Dockers.

These chronic problems with characters and actions that do not ring true, mixed with lazy writing and an inexplicable decision to spend most of the each episode on discussions of feelings, means that after this six episode season ends, the viewers might not arise when the second season stumbles across the screen next year.  What a waste.

Now, this criticism does not bring me any joy, because for as long as I remember I have had a weakness for zombie films.  The only film that ever truly freaked me out me – besides Alien (1979) – was the original Night of the Living Dead (1968).  I recall the immortal Bob Wilkins on the San Francisco Bay Area’s Channel 2’s Creature Features showing the uncut Night trailer in the mid-70’s (He later showed the entire film – unedited, because he was awesome and it was like 1:30 a.m. and no one decent was watching anyway).  That thing scared the crap out of me – I didn’t feel such unadulterated terror again until ObamaCare passed.

Night is a great film – lean, mean (in fact, it is probably the bleakest film ever made) and utterly terrifying.  Its crudeness is part of its charm, as is the fact that it was not made in shiny, fake Hollywood but in gritty, heartland Pennsylvania.  Night did not (and does not) look or feel like anything else – despite the weird ghouls stumbling about, it had an air of realism (heightened by the use of TV commentators talking about the zombie plague) that made it that much more scary.

Now, in Night, director George Romero did the same things The Walking Dead is trying to do, except he did them right.   This was probably just luck.  Let’s be clear about one thing: George Romero is a hack whose movies have gotten steadily worse over the years.  His latest films are literally unwatchable – Land of the Dead is one of the stupidest, most boring movies not starring Ashton Kutcher. Its follow-ups are, astonishingly, even worse.  But in Night, his characters usually make intelligent choices, not that it helps.  No, it’s not an Edward Albee living room character study, but the characters are at least drawn with a bit of subtlety (I like how the most obnoxious character is the one who has the best ideas for survival).  And while there is plenty of character interaction, the zombies are never absent for extended periods while the survivors rehash Gloria Steinem-esque cultural battles from about four decades earlier.

The original Dawn of the Dead (1978) followed, with Romero moving his survivors into a mall.  Again, his characters generally made good choices, like blocking the entrances and bringing lots of M16 ammo.  The character work was not going to win any of the no-name stars Oscars, but unlike in The Walking Dead, they were not so obvious cardboard clichés that they practically wear signs reading descriptions like “Upright, Moralistic Cop,” “Spunky, Independent Woman” or “Evil Racist Who Probably Voted For Bush #3.”

Now, Romero did make political comments with his movies, though it is unclear whether he intended to do so or whether he just sort of nodded along when goatee-stroking pop culture course professors started pointing them out to bored sophomores seeking an easy elective “A” for watching movies all semester.  Yes, the hero of Night is a black guy, and yeah (spoiler) the sheriff’s posse shoots him at the end – though it seems like they did so because he looked like a zombie instead of out of some arbitrary hatred of African-Americans that was so intense that the posse members felt the need to stop their battle for their survival in order to indulge it.

Dawn is supposed to be some sort of parody of consumerism.  As such, it falls short.  People like to buy stuff – if that’s Romero’s insight, it’s about as profound as a “COEXIST” bumperstickers or John Lennon’s “Imagine” – which is to say, not at all.   But it’s a really good movie, once again probably by lucky accident.  It is filmed with an almost documentary-level lack of finesse and a linoleum and pastel vibe that you had to live through the mid-70’s to really recognize and understand.  The ordinariness of it – the JC Penney’s-style normality of the setting, combined with the uncertainty of that era and the appalling Technicolor violence – made it a truly modern American suburban monster movie.  You couldn’t tell yourself that bad things only happened in Transylvania.  The scary part was that this was Pennsylvania, this was the suburbs, this was us.

The 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake was slicker – hell, everything is slicker than the original Dawn –  but director Zack Snyder also understood the need to have interesting characters doing smart things with plenty of zombies to break up the chatter.  He also kept the gore and bleakness; only his running zombies raised questions among the aficionados.

In 2006, Max Brooks published World War Z, a fascinating “oral history” of a zombie apocalypse.  Using the stories of individual characters, he covers the event from the micro level we had seen in movies (small bands of survivors) to the macro-level, discussing how governments deal with a huge, inexplicable threat to mankind’s survival.  This was the part that was most interesting to me – on my military side, I have worked on catastrophic event planning and operations for two decades and his tome about man-eating cannibal corpses was the most insightful piece of fiction on how people and peoples react to enormous disasters I’ve read.  He draws solid characters, who do smart (and dumb) things, and while there is a ham-fisted indictment of Dick Cheney in there (as if Dick Cheney wouldn’t have opened up a keg of zombie whoop-ass given the opportunity), it is a terrific book with serious insights.

So where has The Walking Dead gone wrong?  The first wrong turn seems to be the idea the producers embraced of focusing almost solely on the people, not the zombies.  No, no, no, no, no.  The point of a zombie movie is how people react to the zombies.  Yeah, they react to each other too, but that’s of distinctly lesser interest.  No one cares about the stupid soap opera “I did your best friend but at the time I thought you were dead but you aren’t and now we gotta deal with this emotional baggage” crap.  This isn’t a telenovela – stop exchanging sensitive looks and shoot some ghouls, damnit!

And have the characters take actions that are remotely intelligent.  At least in Night the folks barricaded the doors – in The Walking Dead, the rag-tag fugitive flunkies gather on a wooded hilltop, vehicles scattered hither and tither, tents pitched here and there.  Security consists of a fat guy with a deer rifle sitting on the roof of his RV in a lawn chair.  You don’t have to have 20+ years in the Army to find this kind of cluster-flunk distracting. 

Part of the fun of apocalyptic fiction is the “What would we do if this really happened?” factor.  I’d probably, you know, find a defensible position with multiple exits and integrate the fighting positions should they get past my outer security.  But apparently, the gang from The Walking Dead would allow the zombies to get close enough to overrun and eat them, if they didn’t die in crashes as everyone tried to turn their cars around to use the single exit route.

And yes, I am aware I’m talking about a zombie show.  But I’m just not ready to include tactical insanity within the scope of my “suspension of disbelief.”  I find it distracting. 

I also find the fact that these people only have about five guns between them bizarre.  The producers decided to center the show on the only group of people in the American South who can’t find guns.  Hell, in Georgia most of the guns themselves own a couple guns.

But then the writers have some odd ideas about Southerners.  The great, scary Michael Rooker plays one Southern guy – I don’t remember his name but it’s probably something like “Merle.”  Guess what?  He’s a redneck racist psycho who hates black people.  Then there’s his brother – his name is “Darryl” or the like.  Guess what he is – do I hear “a redneck racist psycho who hates black people?”  And there’s another Southern guy who seems to hate everyone equally and who also beats up his Southern wife, who is played by someone channeling the silent, abused Alison Janney character in American Beauty.

In short, we get the full variety of Hollywood writer Southern folk stereotypes – both of them.

You can tell the heroes and heroines because they are handsome white men, or spunky/pretty women, or wisecracking minority sidekicks.  Again, these writers are pushing that envelope…inward.

Oh, and only occasionally do we see a zombie, which I find strange, since zombies are kind of the reason there is a show.  It’s like Twilight without shiny vampires.   I guess I should be happy we haven’t been told that the zombie plague is somehow the result of a scheme by Halliburton, in conjunction with Bu$hitler, the Koch Brothers, Big Oil and the reverse vampires.  But I can feel that coming.

Again, this does not make me happy to say.  AMC has a solid track record with its shows.  Frank Darabont, the creative force, is a talented director.  People say good things about the source material, a popular comic book (save your “graphic novel” euphemism for your dork pals, Pointdexter).  AMC is also allowing the kind of gross-out blood-letting we’ve come to expect.  The Walking Dead should be cool, and I really want it to be cool.  Come on, dudes, be cool!

But you can’t be cool and boring, or cool and stupid, or cool and annoying.  We can only hope that in the last few shows of this season, and in the second season, they dump the clichés, smarten-up the characters, and start kicking some zombie asses instead of sitting on their own talking about their feelings.  If not, someone might as well bust a cap in the noggin of this zombie show – a zombie show in both senses of the words.

Frommer says he’ll consider whether “tourists should safeguard themselves” by avoiding the crime-ridden hellhole that is the Grand Canyon. After I read about this, I decided to do a search to see if Frommer ever made similar pronouncements about other cities or states. I wondered if he had ever told people to avoid Washington DC, where, according to a US Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2004 report – that place topped the entire country in crime.

Zilch. Nor could I find any such commentary, regarding Detroit, Memphis or Miami – the only large cities in the US with more than 950 violent crimes per 100,000 people, according to FBI’s 2008 crime report. And what of President Obama’s very own Chicago, a city experiencing a dramatic uptick in shootings, muggings and other violent gang activity? Did Frommer warn travelers away from that bullet-ridden borough?

Nope. Fact is, Frommer went after Arizona, because it’s an easy target. It’s just a buncha white rednecks with guns, even if one of the white rednecks is uh, black. And it fed Frommer’s ego: voicing an opinion in sync with the liberal, like-minded media provides him, for a brief moment, an elevated sense of self.

But I sympathize. All he does all day is make travel guides.

Maybe he should get out more.

Tonight, we’ve got Jim Nortion, Faith Salie and Tucker Carlson, and Mad Men’s Rich Sommer!

Well, I liked it. That’s no guarantee you will.

Years ago, I did stand-up. Learned a lot doing that. One thing you learn is that there’s often a difference between the craft of comedy and what it takes to reliably get laughs. Some of the most inventive, impressive comedy minds don’t sell a lot of tickets. (I could name them. You wouldn’t know them.) But one act you can almost always count on selling tickets—putting “butts in seats,” as a venue-owner will say—is one that is big and loud and shocking. That is, there is The Fine Art of Stand-up Comedy, and then there is Getting A Reaction Out of The Audience. (That’s why many comedians curse so much. That’s why I cursed so much.) Turns out the latter is almost always going to sell tickets, and people are going to laugh for much the same reason a baby laughs when you play peek-a-boo with him. I think most people laugh at Gallagher not because he’s particularly creative in busting that watermelon with a sledgehammer, but because he had the stones to drag the thing up there the first time and smash it at all. We are surprised, and all but the most unpleasant surprise begets laughter.

So “comedy”—rather, the getting of laughs—comes in two basic approaches, wit and shock. The former takes skill; the latter takes immodesty, but both are saleable and, to the vast majority of people, entertaining. (Hence the basis for the fact that the vector of quality for entertainment points ever downward.)

Sometimes, and it’s rare, you get wit and shock together. Borat was that. The problem with the combination is that a whole lot of people are so offended by the shock that they have no interest in digging through the muck to get to the wit. They may even deny that it’s there, or claim it’s not worth getting dirty to find it. Fair enough. But Borat did find that combination at times, and many controversial performers do (and did) find it fairly often:  Sam Kinison, Bill Hicks (both dead too young, bless ‘em), Howard Stern, Penn & Teller.

Bruno, though, is almost pure shock, and for that reason it will probably make more money than Borat. Bruno is pure raunch. As I said to a friend who saw it with me (my second viewing, I must admit), “If someone handed you this R-rated movie and asked you to make it NC-17, what could you possibly put in it to make it so?” I was stumped. So was he. Yet, as I said, shock is a pretty effective kind of entertainment. Bruno works if you don’t believe in the possibility of moral decline from an hour-and-a-half of immoral repose. I laughed. A whole lot. Sue me.

So what’s in the movie? Well, it’s mostly “gay fashionista” Bruno doing, describing, pantomiming, praising, parsing, and peeling back homo – and hetero-sexual, umm, acts, to the outrage of immediate onlookers, for the better (or worse) part of an hour and a half. It is explicit and vulgar and unflinching. Because of that, it is also riotously funny. It is tighter (sorry) than Borat; no scene simply marks time or advances the (almost non-existent) plot without incident. Unlike Borat, it tiptoes up to some of the sacred cows of the left, though it comes nowhere near tipping them over. It takes the easy shots at Alabama rednecks. (Memo to Sacha Baron Cohen: there are rural areas and rednecks outside every major city—New York, Washington, Chicago. Go there next time and expose the un-popped prejudices of some of your smug coastal fans.) It zaps stage parents. It digs at people too nice to dig back.

What it doesn’t do is preach about gay rights. I think the whole social consciousness shtick attached to this picture is nothing more than preventive marketing. Sacha Baron Cohen and director Larry Charles don’t have any political agenda that I can find, and I’ve dug through this thing twice (the second time to hear the jokes I laughed over the first time). They just want to get laughs. By any means necessary.

Mission accomplished.

Blessed Brother Ted Nugent

Ok, you’re back.  This whole “outreach” got me thinking.  It’s actually a good idea.  To tailor policy around making sure people don’t feel alienated and left out.  To change the national agenda in order to protect the sensitivities of people, even if those sensitivities go against what is traditional and accepted thought in our country.  Can I get an “Amen” from the Hippies?  This is what it’s all about, right?

Let me introduce you to another group…another alien culture that I think needs to get a little “outreach” from the government…especially the elites in D.C.  Hollywood, Europe and the academic world could also do a little better when it comes to making these people feel special.  We need more diversity!  More diversity!

Their culture may seem a little strange.  Some may consider it “backwards” but follow me…

These people attend their houses of worship regularly.  There are many different sects, but they are all similar.  The level of devotion varies from individual to individual.  Some are very strict, viewing their holy book as the direct word of God.  Others view it as more of a spiritual relationship.  Some see it as a social thing, attending services only on the highest of holy days.

Their families are close and tight knit.  They don’t like “outsiders” interfering with the education of their children.  They are also none to pleased about the influence of perverse Hollywood “entertainment” on their little ones.  They are frugal and view the taking of their money and property very, very seriously.  It is an “insult” to tax them or take money from them without good reason.  This tradition goes back centuries for them.  Many of their tribal “elders” fought and died over this very issue.

They value education, but don’t think a degree is the only measure of a man or woman.  They value hard, tedious work.  Many of them take pride in their jobs on farms, in factories, and in offices.  This is a tradition and a set of values passed down from generation to generation.

They are particular to foods that many consider “bad” or unhealthy.  Red meat, fast food, fried food.  They actually eat all of them…sometimes at the same time.  They even have a rich history of actually killing the food themselves instead of buying it at Whole Foods!

They like guns.  They like big, mean, nasty V-8 engines.  They like trucks and SUVs.  They like motorcycles.  They like state fairs where you can buy roasted corn on the cobb and ride on a rinky dink Ferris wheel.  They like outdoor sports.  They even have sports that really aren’t sports, like Monster Truck Shows.

To celebrate happy occasions they often times drink alcohol.  Sometimes they drink alcohol when they are depressed.  One of their favorites is beer.  They actually make beer in this country and these people drink it…in cans!  They drink in bars but they call them “taps” and “taverns.”

Some of them enjoy an ancient tradition of burning bits of tobacco and inhaling the fumes.  Some chew this tobacco.

They listen to country music and what is called “butt rock.”  If you want to see one smile just put a dollar in the honky tonk jukebox and pick a song by ZZ Top.  Then watch them sing by following it up with a track from Tim McGraw.

They live all over the country.  Milwaukee, Dallas, Omaha, Bakersfield.  Every city has them.

Proudly, I am one of them.

Some call us “white trash.”  Others use the term “redneck.”  I have a better one.  One that is politically correct.  It’s the one we choose to call ourselves…Americans.  In fact, I would like to officially declare that it is offensive, unacceptable, cause for firing, and “racist” for any person who is not part of the aforementioned group to ever use the term “redneck” or “white trash.”  We of course are free to call each other whatever we want.

So how about it D.C.?  Hollywood?  Europe?  Can we show these people a little more respect?  What about diversity?  Can we think about how our words and new laws and taxes may insult them?  Can Obama come to Biloxi and address the “Redneck” nation?  Can he explain himself on our terms?

Wait, come to think of it, he’ll probably make the speech somewhere in Connecticut.  Oh, well, I gave up on that dude a long time ago…