(Source: The Blaze)

As the United States sinks slowly in the West, the walking dead have taken over our airwaves and, apparently, our brainwaves. Can you tell the difference between AMC and C-SPAN?

It’s hard to control a herd of zombies once they’re set loose. Just ask John Boehner of the eery skin tone. They lack the ability to reason. They feast on brains. They are blindly guided by an urge to dismember and devour the slow, the weak, the empathetic, the vulnerable.

It’s a coup d’mindless evil and cynicism. Surely Ted Cruz’s Princeton degree taught him the reasoning skills needed to determine that jobs have increased in recent months, that Affordable Care Act requirements for employer don’t go into effect for another year, and that the percentage of Americans without health insurance has gone down. Nevertheless, the senator from Calgary asserts that currently “millions are losing jobs” as well as health care coverage.

It may be easy to sell that to some of his colleagues, who apparently still believe that a woman cannot get pregnant as the result of rape, or to the nuts who hang onto the idea that Obama is a foreign-born Muslim. But Cruz doesn’t believe what he says. He’s simply a brain eater.

Neither does Boehner. The Tea Party whores see this as their ticket to greater power and position in the Republican Party for the next two elections, leading, they must think, to world domination. Devour the reasoning ability of the electorate and you shall rule.

They count on an electorate that prefers the alternative apocalypse on TV to the real democratic apocalypse taking place in Washington. Why not? You can turn the TV series off at any time and return to a stultifyingly addictive game like Candy Crunch, a new opiate for the masses. You can’t seem to turn these Tea Party freaks off. They keep coming, inexorably marching on democratic civilization as we know it.

But, while we’re talking about the walking dead, why are the president and his Congressional leaders virtually silent? Obama or Harry Reid may stand up and wave a pitchfork at the insatiable Republican mob, but only Elizabeth Warren has the guts to call out the hostage-taking of America by the Republicans in the House.

Meanwhile Obama seems to be content hanging out 50 yards behind her, digging a deep pit for the right-wing catatonic horde to fall into, believing the economic disasters about to be wrought by the right will redound to Democratic electoral victories in the 2014 election and beyond.

But that’s not what your average voter or non-voter is thinking out here in TV land. People are thinking: A plague on both your houses—why can’t those elected officials work these things out?

And because Congressional districts have been disproportionately designed to fortify Republican extremism, it doesn’t matter what most people think, even the voters whose brains haven’t been eaten. Right-wing Republicans are going to hold onto their districts, even as China cites American political instability as it calls for an end to the U.S. dollar as the international currency reserve.

At the very least, where’s the Democrats’ Karl Rove strategy, running ads on every television and social network saying how the shutdown of the American way of life is the direct result of Republican lies and an attempted takeover of our democratic system? Veterans are beginning to demonstrate for their benefits. But it’s time for all of us to be in the streets—even if, and maybe especially if, Congress comes up with a temporary solution.

With unending Tea Party mortar attacks raining down on the American people—targeting continuing resolutions, debt ceilings, Social Security, affordable care—it’s no wonder people sit in their beds and concentrate on Candy Crunch or watch episode after episode of Walking Dead, wondering how long it will take until we all become zombies.

A few weeks ago, this country lost one of its best political thinkers. Lawrence Goodwyn, historian of populist movements, democratic theoretician, Duke University educator, and political activist, preached that economic and political democracy are inextricably linked. You cannot have one without the other. You cannot have huge wage inequality and a healthy democracy.

He also wrote that the populist revolts in this country in the late 19th century and in the Polish shipyards in the late 20th were, in large part, about the freeing of the political imagination.

“You cannot achieve,” he said, “what you cannot imagine.”

It’s high time Obama and Congressional Democrats stopped waiting for events to unravel, but instead called out a new vision for this country that includes greater income equality, affordable health care, unthreatened Social Security and Medicare, affordable student loans and, above all, the sense that we are moving forward, steering together toward a brighter future and not mindlessly tromping toward a bottomless pit.

And if our leaders can’t imagine that future, we need to show them we can.

Geoff Rips is a former editor of the Texas Observer.