Yesterday's Cowboys Are Today's Zombies
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.
Edit, 25 May 2018: The Z-Max ammunition is gone, as is the above link. Click here to learn more --- JB
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 roommate
Is 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