No? Too late. It already happened. Now it's our turn to kill the zombie and in doing so perhaps kill the motivation for all the zombie's minions.

Much has been said, and rightly so, about the remarkable peaceful turning out of Egyptian former dictator Hosni Mubarak, and some of that talk has centered around why it took thirty years for Egyptians to finally become fed up and stand up to the "Laughing Cow." Meanwhile much of the Arab world has been inspired by the sudden dismissal of a self-serving despot in a very peaceful but determined revolution. Not all the subsequent ones will be so peaceful, but revoutions rarely are.

The inspiration felt by Arabs may even have been felt in the U.S., where in the formerly very liberal state of Wisconsin a Tea Party governor has decided to play his assigned role in the seizing of power for the corporatist apparatus which controls said Tea Party, by attempting to disable collective bargaining by unions representing public servants: police, firefighters, teachers, all those who deliver "socialist" services like teaching, protecting life, fighting crime, etc. You know, stuff we by rights should be doing ourselves. Yes. Of course.

Well a funny thing happened en route to breaking the unions in Wisconsin. People stood up, a la Cairo, and are still standing.  Meanwhile, in a move similar to the defecting public officials and military in Libya, a bunch of Democratic state legislators have lit out for parts unknown, to jam the Wisconsin legislative system until Rick Scott is willing to at least listen to reason, even if he doesn't understand it.

Other states with Republican/Tea Party governers are girding for similar standoffs.

Why this? Why now? And where is this all leading?

It is time. The political cycle of most countries tends to average about 30 years. For the past three decades this great Republic of ours has been squirming under the heel of a tyrant, one who has been out of office (officially) since 1993 and has been clinically dead since 2004.

That's right, that's him right there, giving the White Power salute, our undead President, the man who has continued to haunt us through his minions, admirers, worshippers, voodoo economic spin doctors and various sycophants and simpering catamites. The Gipper. The Duke. The guy who's hair, at 90, was still a greasy dark color. Actor and one-time wannbe American Communist Party member, Ronald Wilson Reagan.

But...but...he's dead. His term ended in January, 1993 and the New Age was ushered in by Bill Clinton.

"...'I never died, said he."

Yes, that borrowed line was intentional irony, gentle reader, in the event you thought it was just an interesting artifact of my poor brain.

Since 1981 when this nation went stark raving insane and elected Ronald Reagan President we have been haunted, tormented...ruled by a zombie. As it turns out he may have been functionally a zombie while still in office. As a second-rate actor he was just good enough at his craft to pass himself off as something we wanted, someone we could relate to, the kindly Uncle Ronnie who always knew best, even when he was whistling in the dark as Ollie North delivered bald-faced lies regarding the Byzantine Iran-Contra treason cooked up with Reagan's tacit approval, even as the national deficit was driven to three trillion USD, even as the one-time applicant (turned down) to the American Communist Party worked a strange dog-and-pony show equal parts corrupt neoconservative and incompetent liberal.

Since Reagan left office (thank the lord for term limits) he has hovered in the  halls of power in D.C. and has slowly taken on a mythic godliness so that even our current far more than establishment President has a time or two made fawningly admiring remarks about the abilities of Mr. Reagan.

Ronald Reagan, who recently got more ink for having been born 100 years prior to, well, what would have been his hundredth birthday, had there been a living guest of honor to honor, than any other President ever -- and can anyone here name any former President, including Washington and Lincoln, who have gotten as much attention for having had 100 years pass since their birth? I didn't think so.

The neoconservative movement which has devolved (as impossible as that seems) into the self-titled and ineptly yclept Tea Party has set up Ronald Reagan as a sort of political Alexander the Great, an unassailable hero of all things good and worthy, even though the man was largely full of shit.

"Mister Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" was a stroke of pure genius that only Tom Sawyer could have equalled when whitewashing that damn fence. The spine of the former Soviet Union had already been broken by their decade-long engagement with Afghanistan. Even a dimbulb like Reagan could smell death in the air, and took advantage of the moment to cleverly steal some political momentum by giving an order to someone who was already in the process of trying to figure out how to gracefully do just that: tear down the wall.

Of course if we listen to the spiritual descendants of Reagan, most prominently Ms. Sarah Palin, half-term governor of the most sparsely populated state (Dick Cheney's Wyoming is the least populous in absolute terms) and a cultural and political illiterate who owes a great deal of her noteriety and one-time popularity to the Reagan School of Charm, it was the Soviet's Sputnik tin can satellite that not only broke the bank for the Great Bear -- though the effects were not felt til 34 years later. Interesting, that.

"It's morning in America" was another unforgettable hit by "Ronnie the Popular" (as named by John Fogerty in the 1970 Credence Clearwater Revival hit "It Came Out of the Sky"). Of course it meant absolutely nothing (the Reagan slogan, not the song, which meant a great deal) but it sounded so positive. This was to be the legacy assumed by what may well be, in history's long view, the worst American President ever, George W. Bush, the guy everyone thought they'd like to have a beer with. Family types. Senile old uncle, punchy frat brother Dubya, perky halfwit Sarah. There is something in a good part of the nation that wants a relative -- a simple-minded, mentally defective relative -- in the White House. And the godfather zombie President has been dictating policy here for 30 years.

The herculean task of freeing the Iranian hostages, negotiated by the oft-dismissed Jimmy Carter, was co-opted by the Reagan camp and has been turned into some sort of gospel: that the Iranians crumbled before the awesomeness of the genially blithering Gipper and to this day it is widely believed he somehow made that happen.

Even George H. W. Bush, the halfway likeable Veep who stumbled into the White House for a term clinging to Reagan's coattails, called Reagan's supply side economics "voodoo economics" prior to being invited to be Reagan's Vice President. It seems no one had much faith in what was later to become known as "trickle-down economics." It was a highly questionable, illogical, faulty scheme which essentially favored the already-wealthy, large corporations and the slow-motion sellout of the United States Government to said corporations (creating a poltical class of corporatists which would make Italy's Facists of the 1930s and '40s blush).

Shameless tax cuts for the rich, based on the premise that the more capital the rich owned, the more poor and working-class people they could afford to hire, were implemented and have continued on in various forms til the present moment.

Another article of faith of Reaganites was -- and remains -- that getting government out of the lives of ordinary (read: you and me) Americans would somehow help boost the economy, that deregulation of industry would give it more room to maneuver and grow, that de-unionizing workers would not only help the overall economic picture but would be more "fair" to those capitalists who had earned, begged, borrowed or stolen their "own" to keep their "own," This last is a very peculiar and strikingly un-American notion that has become a keystone of neoconservative thinking: that the wealthy got that way by fair means and that there is some sort of imperative somewhere in the Constitution that this is not only good but required. Of course just as there is no national religion and this is not a religious state, there is also no national economic policy.

Except of course when one speaks to a conservative, neocon or Tea Partier, in the minds of whom these things are not only true but manifestly obvious. When they cannot point to the location of these Constitutional mandates they simply go all Bill O'Reilly on us and "can't remember," then try to turn their fantasies on us, as though the burden of proof of their own negative lies with us.

This is, of course, insane, or perhaps just plane brainless -- like true zombies, who only eat brains for nourishment instead of growing and using their own.

We know how they get rid of zombies in the movies.

We also know how they get rid of them in Egypt and Wisconsin.

Our deadest President may be George Washington, but our livingest dead President remains the one, the only, Ronald Wilson Reagan, "The Old Ranger," who would this year be 100 years old -- and who thought and acted like he was 100 for most of his life. He also seemingly had more nicknames than any other President. This in itself says something unsettling about him and his admirers, the worshippers who sacrifice to him their own human brains as they continue to vote against their own best interests by electing Scott Walkers and Rick Scotts and Rand Paul's and John Boehners and who listen raptly to the demented babblings of Glen Beck and the poison gaseous pronouncements of Rush Limbaugh.

Zombies.

And now, after the rapid and peaceful dismissal of "Laughing Cow" Mubarak, the open mano a mano challenge by Libyans to Moamar Qadafi Duck, and now the runaway Democratic legislators in Wisconsin and the tens of thousands of demonstrators in Madison, which will shortly spread to those other states where so-called Tea Party governors will try to lead union-breaking movements only to be confronted by thousands of Americans who will be turning the tables on the zombies by employing "Night of the Living Dead" tactics, by coming forward, wave upon wave, not looking for brains to eat, but bringing brains to use, slowly, state by state, city by city, brick by brick, will overthrow the longest-lived despot the United States has ever endured: Ronald Wilson Reagan, and with him his anti-American, anti-human economic and power-gathering policies.

It may not all be pretty, but we've done this before. A generation now largely having "fat stomachs and responsible jobs" (Burroughs) once brought the government to its knees, deposed two Presidents, guaranteed civil rights for all Americans and ended a seemingly endless war.

Most of us are still alive and well, despite the oversize guts and investment funds, and some of us are coming back to life, inspired by Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Wisconsin. We are out here, and we are ready to help in any way we can to launch an assault on Ronald Reagan and to burn down Zombieland.

We can do this. We must do this.