My son knows a great deal about zombies. This is because he plays a video game called “Plants Vs. Zombies”, and also because he reads books based on the PvZ games with the same interest I devoted to William L. Shirer’s The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich when I was his age, but it’s also because he lives in a world where zombies have become an essential part of pop culture. My day-job co-workers, most of them men around my age or younger, festoon their cubicles with zombie paraphernalia, watch zombie TV shows and movies, discuss zombies on the Internet. Hornady, the detail-obsessed ammunition manufacturer whose peerless quality control made their 115-grain 9mm JHP the original choice of Cor-Bon almost thirty years ago, now sells ZombieMAX ammunition for shooting zombies in what has to be the oddest example of fantasy mixing with deadly reality I’ve yet seen.
I have long viewed the zombie fad with a mystified combination of distaste and contempt, but I never sat down to think very hard about why there was a zombie fad in the first place. My best guess was that zombies were stand-ins for “others”. Human beings are biologically engineered to distrust people who are different from us, but political correctness means that we can no longer discuss the idea of being attacked or victimized by those “others”. This is particularly true when it comes to race; even ads for alarm services have to show a black man protecting a suburban house from white criminals because to show the opposite would be racist. (That ad is particularly amusing for people such as myself who are fans of the movie Baby Boy.)
So to me, zombies are all-purpose “others”. They are a common enemy against which we can all unite. But they’re also us, which is an equally important concept for a generation of young men who have been taught to hate their own identities and to immediately turn against any friend or colleague who happens to say the wrong thing in public. At any moment, any of us could become a zombie, an unperson. If you don’t believe that, then you can test the assertion by posting something “racist” or “sexist” on Facebook from home, on your personal account, and seeing how long it takes for Human Resources to contact you the next day at work about your termination. Hell, you can lose your job for criticizing the Muslim Brotherhood, apparently. You can become a zombie just like that.
After reading what David P. Goldman, who writes as “Spengler” on a variety of controversial issues, has to say about the zombie craze, however, I’m willing to admit that I might be completely wrong about all of the above.
“The sexual revolution of the 1960s transformed women from prospective wives into sexual commodities, leaving them to choose between protracting their youth as long as possible or accepting consignment to a human scrapheap,” Goldman writes in a column entitled Eternal Youth And Living Death. Goldman argues that once “spirituality” replaced religion in the Western world, the old pagan obsession with the macabre returned in full force. What is aging, after all, except the mechanism of death? Without the prospect of the afterlife, what goal could be more worth pursuing than the retention of youth? If the tenets of Christianity are without merit, then what could be more important than maximizing the pleasures of sex and food and mindless activity?
Viewed in that light, the zombie obsession makes sense. To misquote Pirsig, the zombie you’re attempting to shoot in the head is a zombie called yourself. Except it always gets back up and keeps marching towards you. Slowly, but inexorably. Your decay. Do we have time for a Father John Misty quote to wrap this up? Yes we do:
How many people rise and think
“Oh good, the stranger’s body’s still here
Our arrangement hasn’t changed”?Now, I’ve got a lifetime to consider all the ways
I’ve grown more disappointing to you
As my beauty warps and fades
I suspect you feel the same
When I was young, I dreamt of a passionate obligation to a roommateIs this the part where I get all I ever wanted?
Who said that?
Can I get my money back?Just a little
bored in the USA
Save me white Jesus
“The sexual revolution of the 1960s transformed women from prospective wives into sexual commodities”
This is possibly the oddest line I’ve read. I probably don’t know what I’m talking about but the sexual revolution just made women equals in the marriage business. The sexual commodity business hasn’t really changed - it’s just that men don’t do ownership anymore. Women handle their own business.
This reminds me of Mike Huckabee’s line “Jay-Z is a very shrewd businessman, but I wonder: Does it occur to him that he is arguably crossing the line from husband to pimp by exploiting his wife as a sex object?”. No, you idiot, Beyonce is perfectly capable of running her own business with herself as a sex object - and she does a pretty good job of it too.
I’d suggest that women are in no way “equals in the marriage business”.
How marriageable is a 50-year-old man with ten million dollars in the bank?
How marriageable is a 50-year-old woman with ten million dollars in the bank?
What about if they have one million dollars? One hundred thousand? Nothing?
The sexual revolution has led to a lot of lonely people. And it’s made it perfectly legitimate for men to dump women as they get older and their options don’t drastically decrease.
I have at least two female friends in their forties who are bright, funny, and have very good figures — and they can’t get dates because every man sets 39 as his max acceptable age online, unless he’s 39, in which case it’s 29.
Fair enough.
But that begs the question, if it worse it better for women compared to 50 years ago. What about 100?
Perhaps the social consequences for divorce are dwindling (but do note that divorce rates are going down), but that doesn’t say much about a woman’s power within marriage. Not does it mean that a 40 year old woman is worse off today than she was 50 or 100 years ago when it comes to finding mates.
Men and women may not be equal when it comes to marriage, they are simply different.
The market is straightforward. Men tend to value youthful beauty more than other things. Women tend to value social status and money over other things. But that doesn’t mean that women have more voice today when it comes to choosing a spouse and more power within marriage than they did a 100 years ago.
Pretty women in their 40s face problems similar to those faced by a nice guy with an average pay at a blue collar job. The market simply not wanting to buy what you’re selling. If anything, the sexual revolution and social liberalism make dating or marrying an older woman *less* controversial.
“If the tenets of Christianity are without merit, then what could be more important than maximizing the pleasures of sex and food and mindless activity?”
Wait, what? Does the author believe that the remaining ~6 billion people - and probably a large section of modern Christians/jews have nothing to do other than sex, food and mindless activity? And somehow this is linked to independent women and zombies?
You know, both explanations in this article are plausible. It could be entirely possible that zombies are the generic “ick” and scary others and that’s part of the appeal. Painting the other (other as in, Different From Us) side of anything as “ick”/scary/dangerous whatever has always been an effective technique to draw clear lines between good and bad - and there’s nothing wrong with that. And it’s entirely possible that the modern PC nonsense is causing issues because something that was the “other” not too long ago, whether reasonably or not is suddenly a protected species. Theocrats are the weird other for me (and that will also explain the annoyance in my post), and it doesn’t matter which ones - although some are more othery and dangerous than others. Anyway, this could partly explain the popularity of Zombies.
The other explanation…well, I’ll phrase it differently. Our thresholds for “ick” are a lot higher than they used to be - and this has been moving higher and higher rapidly. At every step there’s someone saying that the world will go mad and everything will go explodey but it doesn’t. (Oddly enough, the people with some of the lowest “ick” thresholds are the most likely to go explodey). It’s interesting to look at places and people a bit behind the “ick” curve to see this. There’s this interesting John Oliver segment where he’s talking about India’s porn ban and it shows a clip where some Indian guy challenges another Indian guy on TV about why he shouldn’t watch porn in the privacy of his home. The other guy says “well, you might become a sex maniac”. And Zombies are basically that. Something ick that people just consider another plot hook now - but something that might have been waay over people’s ick thresholds not too long ago.
This goldman guy’s article is basically the combination of a nostalgic ode to the olde tymes, and a rant about all the newness of new things that makes him confront the ick.
Ok, that was my own rant and I definitely overused the non word ick…
Sigh, one of these days I’m going to delazy myself and write an essay titled “The theory of ick”
Sad for me to come to the realization that the Thriller music video is the greatest zombie movie of all time, and in 30+ years hollywood hasn’t been able to do better. Some I’ve seen have been good, but none excellent.
I can’t wait to read all the responses here .
-Nate
“No one grows up, they just get tired. Or few indeed. No stopping for dead animals on the turnpike. Too dangerous.”
I am sick of zombies
We need another “bad guy”
Although the white walkers are intriguing. .intelligent zombies? Zombies with culture? Zombies defending their land from us?
I prefer aliens as my favorite category of “others”. The outer space kind, not the human crossing an imaginary line kind.