A friend recently pointed me to a blog post by Felix Salmon, The Zombie Apocalypse has Arrived, itself mostly a summation of a longer piece by John Powers, The Political Economy of Zombies. Both are very good reading, and illuminate a phenomenon that has pervaded our culture since the last century and has metastasized in the current one: the longing for chaos.
Powers looks at the unkillable-yet-always-worsening face of neoliberal capitalist systems and sees the appeal of watching it crumble, the joy inherent in finally there being no more of “them” to fear, only “us” remaining to build a new, fair world in the remains.
He sees it in the appeal of movies like “28 Days” and “Zombieland” and “I am Legend,” the relief when the slow, inexorable horror of dehumanization that is our way of live is finally over.
Powers, and even more, Salmon, see that craving for finality and ugly cleansing in our current political climate, when Tea Partiers cheer the shutdown of government, when otherwise sane people speculate a President Trump or Cruz “might actually be a good thing” because they’ll “bring down the system” and people will finally turn to and build a better one in its place.
I understand this poetry, the brutal beauty of the Leveling. It was my own song for most of my revolution-rooting life.
But then I lived the zombie apocalypse.
I walked unlit streets lined with piles of rubble and ruined things once someone’s treasures, past houses unglazed and unshuttered, windows and doors transformed by a universal equalizer to lifeless eyes and silent, screaming mouths, through the inescapable pall of death and rot.
In that level land I found friends made mad by loss that couldn’t be made whole, for whom the only logical answer was the worst goodbye. Others saved what they could and built new treasure with the hope of each bare improvement.
And yes, there were even a few, mostly strangers, seeking the great level place they’d always dreamed of, singing praises to New Days and Years Zero in the New Level Jeruselem, free of the zombie.
That was ten years ago. The rubble is long gone. The streets are lit. In most places. The eyeless ghost houses are refitted and straightened and recolored. In most places. Many are finer than they ever were and surrounded with stores and eateries offering goods never seen in those places. And the people who lived there can’t afford to live in them. Or shop in those stores.
Blocks where people once cowered behind glass and shutters and family and tradition and music and culture and drugs and violent bluster, hiding from the zombie, are now clean and new and lit and sanded and stuccoed and painted and edged with tasteful accents. Bright paint defines places to park fine cars and lanes reserved for expensive bicycles.
Strangers who never would have dared walk those streets in daylight have moved in and gather in loud, new bars late into the night, then return home in relative safety under new, efficient streetlights to houses whose former owners can never return.
Because the zombie doesn’t die in the apocalypse. He’s undead, remember? He always returns, stronger. The leveling only gives him room to work.
Naomi Klein didn’t know the half of it. She talked about big players, Halliburtons and Goldmans. But the zombie virus can infect anyone, even nice young folks who only want to find a house they can afford. In a neighborhood that will have to be made safe. With stores and eateries and bars and parking spaces and bike lanes.
And, with those utterly reasonable human desires and the best will in the world, they feed the zombie.
If there is one lesson to be learned from “I am Legend,” it is not the beauty in the shattered world where Will Smith’s character lived, but what he did there: worked tirelessly, day after day, to find a cure for the disease that turns gentle, curious, hopeful, vain, naive, terribly ordinary people into zombie carriers.
That is our task, too. And I fervently hope we can find that cure. Because I have actually seen the zombie apocalypse and what comes after. It’s not better. It’s just the same. With bike lanes.