Some of my friends have pondered what the fascination is with zombie fic. Ive been saying my theory is that it reflects a widespread feeling of being surrounded by thousands of people you dont really trust or understand, not to mention general worries about getting by in the world. Having now made my way into Season Two of Walking Dead, Im prepared to refine my theory. There was a great quote online a while back along the lines of Dystopian fiction is stories about what if all these terrible things happened to white people too. Indeed, I do believe that - its a whole genre for Default Race & Culture people to imagine what life would be like if the system treated them the way it treats Others. Post-apocalyptic genres, on the other hand, are about What if the daily survival struggles that characterize the lives of 1-2 billion people were extended to people like me? The zombie survival genre in particular makes me think about the lives of a lot of the people in my neighborhood, and especially those homeless immigrants who live in the woods nearby - many get up every day and make their way through a world where they cant actually talk to most of the people they meet, and they dont have any legal rights and very limited resources, and a lot of the people they meet (or the cops they hope to not meet) wouldnt hesitate to capture, abuse and deport them. Then again, some of the other people they meet are so desperately poor that they might do something desperate and violent. Its not paranoia, its just the life of one of the people who waits at 7-11 for a pickup truck to offer a days illegal wage for a hard days work. But no, we dont watch Walking Dead because we want to identify with illegal aliens. We watch Walking Dead and go to Burning Man and Regionals and Pennsic and we go camping and we join the Peace Corps and we do paintball games and we read survival fiction and Alexander Supertramp moved off to the wilderness of Alaska to die because we sense our luxuries and privileges have insulated us from something vivid, authentic and important. We suspect weve been living inside condoms. Our anxiety over the crashed Malaysian plane is absurd; we didnt know those people and we cant do anything about it. Hundreds of someones we never met turned into someones well never meet and we want to know why and it ramps up our cortisol and adrenaline and theres absolutely nothing we can do about it. We know climate change is going to have drastic effects and growing wealth inequity is killing our nation and soon well lose the use of antibiotics and theres nothing at all we can do about any of it. So we wish for zombies. Zombies by the hundreds, by the thousands, those are still much more manageable, graspable numbers than the paychecks of the hedge fund managers who wrecked our economy once with complete impunity and will do so again. Zombies, because theyre easier to understand and thus a little less scary than Anne Coulter and Michele Bachmann and Ted Nugent and Fox in general. We dream of a Little House on the Prairie pioneer survival life because its scale seems more real, only we understand that 21st century survival involves a lot more blood and conflict than Laura Ingalls Wilder ever wrote about. We want to see a city built in a week because the cities we live in in DefaultLife are overwhelming and make us feel insignificant and lost. We go to Burning Man and Pennsic because its too late to go to Deadwood. In many ways my Basotho friends in Lesotho really were happier than my DC area friends, and Ive long suspected its largely because poverty makes a person much more focused on whats really important. There are far fewer choices to make when youre desperately poor, and a lot of research seems to suggest having fewer options is actually a good way to live a happier life. If we could find a way to feel as grateful for a safe, clean drink of water as the heroes in zombie fiction (and the day laborer immigrants living in our woods) feel, if we could find a way to appreciate our meals as much as refugees in Darfur do, wouldnt we be oh so happy? And if we could find a way to appreciate our loved ones we see in their little square profile pics as much as we would if they had just cheated death (or if we had just cheated death to get back to them), wouldnt we do a better job loving them? Please come soon, hordes of zombies. Come bless us with a chance to know what were worth, because we dont really understand our credit reports or why we didnt get that promotion last year. Come free us from this clutter and babble and focus us on something human-sized, because were terrified that even Ebay and Amazon dont seem to have what we really want. Come give us an enemy we can at least imagine fighting or at least outrunning, because Walmart doesnt seem to have noticed us boycotting it, and it just seems to be getting bigger. Give us something to run away from in terror because we didnt get to the gym this week. Come, zombie apocalypse, and make life and love feel urgent, vivid, and authentic again. Hurry. Were desperate.
Posted on: Sat, 29 Mar 2014 03:19:04 +0000