You can tell a lot about a society by the entertainment it chooses.

Once was the time we watched movies about the conquest of the West, or war stories in which Americans helped save the world from fascism. We were fat and sassy -- well, not too fat -- and we believed that old saying that while an Englishman might walk the world as if he owned it, an American walked the world as if he didn't give a damn who owned it.

Even in our movies about corruption, good won out over evil in the end. Our heroes were, well, heroes.

That changed in the '70s, when movies like "Three Days of the Condor," "The Conversation" and "The Parallax View" fed our fear of conspiracies and told us that one person couldn't really be a hero anymore. By the '80s, when we literally began worshiping money, we even had a movie hero tell us that "Greed is good."

Yes, you can tell a lot about a society by how it chooses to entertain itself.

So what entertains us now?

Zombies.

[caption id="attachment_1200" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Our heroes"]<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/tumblr_l5b1yeIpjF1qzktngo1_500.png"><img class="size-medium wp-image-1200" title="tumblr_l5b1yeIpjF1qzktngo1_500" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/tumblr_l5b1yeIpjF1qzktngo1_500-300x225.png" alt="" width="300" height="225" /></a>[/caption]

It started in 1968, with George Romero's low-budget classic, "Night of the Living Dead." A lot of people didn't know it, but Romero was laying a message in between the lines. He couldn't come right out and say it, but by that time, television and consumerism had already started turning Americans into, well, zombies.

It was more than just a coincidence that '68 was the first year Madison Avenue sold us a president with the same techniques it used to sell us toothpaste. In fact, that's pretty much the way elections have been run ever since then in Zombie America.

Books are just about extinct now, but books about zombies sell pretty well. Movies get made and remade, and one of the best-reviewed new television shows of 2010 was "Walking Dead" on American Movie Classics.

It isn't that zombies are the heroes of the stories. It's more that a dwindling number of human beings fight desperately to hold out against a world in which more and more people have lost their humanity.

Sound familiar?

Think about how much less of a premium we put on intelligence anymore. Look at how many people running for president -- usually Republicans -- deny believing in proven scientific things like evolution, archaeology and climate change. I'd like to believe they're lying, that they're only doing what they must to get votes from the right-wing base, but I have my doubts.

Look at how callous we have become toward people who are really struggling to get by. We've got the feelings of zombies.

[caption id="attachment_1201" align="alignright" width="211" caption="Earth Day 1970"]<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/280px-Kellyposter1970.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-1201" title="280px-Kellyposter1970" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/280px-Kellyposter1970-211x300.jpg" alt="" width="211" height="300" /></a>[/caption]

I remember the classic old line from Walt Kelly's wonderful strip "Pogo," in which he said, "We have met the enemy and he is us."

Kelly wrote that for the first Earth Day in 1970, and if you wonder how much less zombified we were then, consider that it was a Republican president, Richard Nixon, who basically created what government intervention there is in the environment.

Think about this, too: "Pogo" was a fairly intelligent little comic strip that appeared in 500 newspapers for 25 years. Then try to picture someone like Sarah Palin <em>getting</em> "Pogo."

Nope.

We have met the zombies and they are us.

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