In our Day of the (Living) Dead, the reanimated are everywhere, from «Pride and Prejudice and Zombies», Seth Grahame-Smith’s inspired mash-up of Jane Austen’s Regency novel of manners and the zombie myth, to «The Walking Dead», a graphic novel about humanity reduced to Hobbesian brutishness in a post-apocalyptic America overrun by the undead, to the splatterpunk videogame «Left 4 Dead».
The zombie is a polyvalent revenant, a bloating signifier that has given shape, alternately, to repressed memories of slavery’s horrors; white alienation from the darker Other; Cold War nightmares of mushroom clouds and megadeaths; the post-traumatic fallout of the AIDS pandemic; and, in movies like «28 Days Later» and books like Max Brooks’s faux-historical «World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War», free-floating anxieties about viral plagues and bioengineered outbreaks. These days, visions of a zombie apocalypse look a lot like the troubled dreams of an age of terrorism, Avian flu, and H1N1, when viruses leap the species barrier and spread, via jet travel, into global pandemics seemingly overnight. Which may be why the Infected, as they’re called in both «28 Days Later» and «Left 4 Dead», move at terrifying, jump-cut speed, unlike their lumbering, stuporous predecessors.
In the postwar decades, as suburban sprawl and mall culture metastasized across America, Hollywood cast the zombie as the decaying face of popular ambivalence toward amok consumerism. Implacable consumption machines, the mallcrawling dead of George Romero’s «Dawn of the Dead» (1978) literalized the infantile psychology of consumer culture, with its oral fixation, insistence on instant gratification, and I-shop-therefore-I-am sense of self-worth, indexed to how pricey your status totems are, the sheer bodaciousness of your McMansion and your Super Duty Ford F-150 longbed pickup. The insatiable orality implied by market capitalism’s redefinition of citizens as consumers – «wallets with mouths», in the cynical parlance of Madison Avenue – is instructive.
Now that the econopocalypse has thrown millions out of work, triggered an upspike in homelessness, and eaten the «braaains» of consumer confidence, the zombie has undergone a role-reversal, incarnating American fears that the republic is a shambling shadow of its former glory, Left 4 Dead by the near-meltdown of the financial system. Zombies are the Resident Evil of an economy whose moribund state confronts us everywhere we look in a landscape littered with dead malls, «ghost boxes» (dark, shuttered big-box outlets), and «zombie stores» – retailers forced by dismal sales to reduce their inventory to its bare bones, with the ironic consequence that their emaciated stock and empty floorspace scare customers away, accelerating their death spiral.
«Zombies represent America hitting a very low bottom, as we witness the spectacle of consumer capitalism transforming itself into a feudalistic dance of death», the cultural critic and horror-movie historian David J. Skal told me. «During the summer of 2009, politicians and political pundits alike started hurling the z-word as an all-purpose epithet while the economy collapsed and health care reform sputtered. Zombies are, in essence, creatures who have already faced Sarah Palin’s death panels, the better to escape brain-dead politics and faceless corporatism. Having cannibalized all their home equity, and foreclosed our future, zombies have become everyman avatars that have traded in the forward-looking, if audacious, message ‹I must eat you to live›, settling for ‹I must eat you just to stay dead›. In recent decades, the zombie has been a cartoonish lampoon of consumer capitalism, but in the current economic mess, all the gathering themes of depersonalization and disenfranchisement have come to a critical mass. The image of real estate (representing the living, or the haves) besieged by the ravenous dead (the ultimate have-nots), has long been a staple of zombie nar-
ratives and never a more concise cultural statement than at the present. In the 1930s, at least one reviewer of the film «White Zombie» saw reflections of breadlines and displaced workers. Today’s zombies have an unprecedented, in-your-face rawness that seems to embody displaced rage about gut issues like food, shelter, and health care – the denial of any of these leading to living death, or death itself.»
Every age has its totemic monsters. Because he lived in an era of premature burials, «resurrectionists» (grave robbers), post-mortem daguerreotypes, table-rappers, and spirit photography, when the air was thick with ectoplasm, Marx – the unparalleled master of the political gothic – opened his Communist Manifesto in a dry-ice fog: «A specter is haunting Europe: the specter of Communism.» In «Karl Marx: A Life», Francis Wheen suggests that «more use-value…can be derived from Capital if it is read as a work of the imagination: a Victorian melodrama, or a vast gothic novel whose heroes are enslaved and consumed by the monster they created (‹Capital which comes into the world soiled with mire from top to toe and oozing blood from every pore›).» Indeed, Marx’s political economics teems with imagery straight out of Victorian penny dreadfuls like «Varney the Vampire» (1847): capital, that, «vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor» (Capital); bourgeoisie that «has become a vampire that sucks out [wage laborers’] blood and brains» (The Eighteenth Brumaire) and whose «prolongation of the working day beyond the limits of the natural day, into the night… only slightly quenches the vampire thirst for the living blood of labor» (Capital).
Today, gonzo economic commentators like Matt Taibbi take up Marx’s tune, describing the investment bank Goldman Sachs as «a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.» As befits a nation whose haves and have-nots regard each other across a Grand Canyon-sized income gap that’s yawning wider by the minute, America’s nightmares are haunted by vampires and zombies – the bloodsucking Wall Street elite, drunk on seven-figure bonuses, and the dead-eyed, bone-gnawing underclass.
The vampire as symbol of a parasitic plutocracy, battening on the tears and toil of wage labor, has been a stock character in the demonology of class war at least since Marx. With predictable perversity, America’s winner-take-all culture has embraced the vampire as an aspirational figure. And why not? Whether a scion of old money with a continental accent or a conscienceless monster in tasseled loafers, chainsawing workers to bolster quarterly earnings, the vampire has perfect hair, a sommelier’s taste in Type O, and more money than God or, for that matter, Lloyd Blankfein. He’s a photogenic poster boy for the new social Darwinism. Here, where neo-liberal capitalism is the official religion, on par with juche in North Korea, and where the Myth of the Level Playing Field is impervious to fact – for example, that 80 percent of the nation’s wealth is held by those in the top 20 percent of the income pyramid, or that the CEO who, a decade ago, raked in 30 times the average worker’s salary now makes 116 times that worker’s income – nobody wants to be a zombie.
Dead on their feet, zombies began as a glassy-eyed metaphor for the plight of Haiti’s human chattel, forced to do the boss’s bidding even in death. In his classic ethno-graphic study, «Voodoo in Haiti», Alfred Metraux underscores the parallels between the living dead and Haitian blacks under the colonial whip: «The zombie is a beast of burden, which his master exploits without mercy, making him work in the fields, weighing him down with labor, whipping him freely and feeding him on meager, tasteless food.» Like Frankenstein, a working stiff with neckbolts, readymade for the Fordist factory, zombies are wage slaves. A solitary hunter, the vampire is well-suited to Ayn Randian fantasies of Promethean captains of industry, self-made masters of their own destiny who need no convincing on the Virtues of Selfishness; zombies, by contrast, are trade unionists from beyond the grave, a Heritage Foundation wonk’s worst nightmare of collectivism on the march, the downsized and the disenfranchised jolted into action by class consciousness.
At the same time, the circular firing squad of Angry White Lumpen, emptying their political ammo clips at illegal immigrants, Nancy Pelosi, and the Red Menace at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue – everything, in other words, but the structural injustices behind their economic woes – sees zombies as harbingers of a post-apocalyptic landscape, overrun by Obamaniacs, where the embattled vestiges of what Sarah Palin likes to call «Real America» make their last stand against an engulfing tide of border-jumping aliens, left-wing academics, and brain-eating libtards. Stockpiling MREs and heavy weaponry, the survivalist fringe can’t wait to live in the America of «I Am Legend». When our unwieldy, duct-tape democracy collapses into anarchy, we’ll revert to the sociopathic utopia of the Western frontier, a happily uncomplicated time when every man – every well-armed white man, at least – was
a law unto himself, free from governmental meddling and moral ambiguities.
Over at SurvivalBlog.com, author Jim Rawles and his fellow survivalists are digging in for an apocalypse straight out of Left 4 Dead. There is much talkof «hordes of zombies running rampant» when «the government fails.» Contributor Michael Z. Williamson thinks a wicked-looking implement called the Dead On Tools Annihilator Demolition Hammer will come in handy When The System Crashes: «Anyone with bayonet training can grip this appropriately and hack through a crowd of zombies, or heft it like an axe and use it on single opponents.» An anxious reader with «a heavily supplied, fairly secluded and defensible, and very well-armed suburban outpost with several highly skilled sons for fire support» wonders if he should secure «a secondary retreat for when it looks as if our ammo is exceeded by the number of urban zombies (or, police-state drones, same thing) invading the ‘burbs.»
By «zombies», a.k.a. the «golden horde» in SurvivalBlog parlance, Rawles and his survivalist brethren mean «the anticipated large mixed horde of refugees and looters that will pour out of the metropolitan regions.» The «horde» trope has a familiar ring, especially when coupled with the suggestive adjective «golden», with its echoes of Yellow Peril. We’ve heard it before, in colonial whispers of rebellious coolies, out on the edge of empire, and in «The Turner Diaries» revulsion at the mongrel metropolis, that polymorphous horror of miscegenation and moral relativism. «The foundational morality of the civilized world is best summarized in the Ten Commandments», writes Rawles, in his «Precepts of Rawlesian Survivalist Philosophy». «Moral relativism and secular humanism are slippery slopes. The terminal moraine at the base of these slopes is a rubble pile consisting of either despotism and pillage, or anarchy and the depths of depravity.» Better to arm ourselves to the teeth, light out for the territories, and re-build society in a blast-proof City Upon a Hill, populated with People Like Us.
To «Browning 35» and the rest of the race warriors on the white-supremacist website Stormfront.org, the zombie apocalypse is a premonition of race war:
I’ve noticed recently that alot of survivalists and preparedness freaks are big fans of Zombie movies (…) where (…) a small group of people test their skills against an on-slaught of blood sucking and brain eating ghouls. For White Nationalists it’s easy to translate Non-Whites into the role of the Zombies as they’re certainly blood sucking leeches who are overrunning and ruining our countries and who in some cases are literally trying to prey on us and eat us (remember that case a little while ago where that black guy in East Texas killed and ate his white girlfriend? I’ll bet she didn’t foresee him turning into a Zombie and eating her.)
«Chrispy» – a participant, like Browning 35, in Stormfront’s discussion threads – is locked and loaded for racial Armageddon:
I’m a big fan of the zombie survival stuff. I’ve read the «Zombie Survival Guide» by Max Brooks as well as his novel «World War Z». Both were fun reads but certainly lacking as far as hardcore survival goes. One must always re-member that in a more realistic SHTF [Shit Hits the Fans] situation we will be facing armed opposition not some mindless shambling horde, but it’s still nice to imagine sitting on a rooftop all day with a boomstick popping zombie skulls.
Seriously, guys: «Son of the Mist» reminds the assembled White Nationalists that World War Z isn’t any laughing matter:
All fun stuff aside (I’ve always been a sci-fi fan and the «Day of the Dead» was a great [semi-comedy] movie except for the race mixing crap), the non whites ARE the «zombies» complete with man eating and crazed, brutal behavior (…) it will be unleashed full bore when the economy collapses and the Super Depression starts. Just as zombies do what they do, the non whites will show their DNA when the time comes. Count on it, they cannot do anything else! The wise are getting out of the multi cult cities and setting themselves up with dependable compatriots, well thought out, hardened retreats and lots of supplies.
Unfortunately for the blood-and-soil gang, history teaches us that the war of all against all doesn’t end at the barred gates of the Führerbunker. It’s only a matter of time, after the chairs are jammed against the doors and the windows are nailed shut, before the survivors succumb to power struggles and paranoia. Twenty eight days later, they’re eating each other. Worse yet, you can’t always tell Us from Them. «Eyewitness accounts described the assassins as ordinary-looking people», says a radio announcer in «Night of the Living Dead».
Aren’t they always?