One cannot help but notice how often “Elvis” is invoked in hipster joints. The recent obvious example for me was visiting the original Chuy’s down in Austin. Elvis is almost invoked as a sort of patron saint of coolness in dens of irony, the places where all the women are covered in tattoos and the men effeminate; where traditional cultural standards are upended and eroded.
In my view, as I think about it, this is the whole zombie thing again. Elvis died a miserable death–on a toilet, as a result in my understanding of drug-related constipation. He took several flights of drug cocktails nightly. He take his first “attack”, as I believe he called it, then eat fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches until he passed out. This would keep him asleep a couple hours, then he would do it again. Despite his good looks and talent, he was decaying from within.
A zombie is a human being without firm form, without direction, who is lost. It seems to me that Islamic extremism in one respect has to be seen as the interaction of historical jihad with Leftist sociopathy–the reduction of human beings to talentless lumps of expendable clay.
At the same time, all so-called “Fundamentalisms” have to be seen as efforts to avoid being turned into zombies, shiny and smiley on the outside, but stitched together in an unstable way on the inside, with staples, rings and tattoos.