Zombie Summer

The 1950s atomic monster movies expressed widespread anxieties about nuclear apocalypse that were otherwise suppressed by a combination of societal (and especially political) pressures, and psychological denial.  So what are the buried fears that the persistently ongoing fashion for zombie stories might express?  

 I wrote about this in 2017 in terms of super rich individuals and corporations (bloodsucking vampire capitalists) versus the mass of everyone else—the economically and therefore societally vulnerable and insecure, sometimes called the precariat (the zombies.)  The metaphor and the relationships work when considering the origin of the zombie figure in Haiti, with tales of plantation owners using magic to resurrect the newly dead and use them as slaves. Early Hollywood movies adapted this premise.

 Today’s zombies are said to have their direct origin in George Romero’s 1968 film Night of the Living Dead, which itself has spawned a series of films, apparently still ongoing.  Though in that first movie the “living dead” are not called zombies, this has become the contemporary definition for other films and television shows. 

The socioeconomic interpretation still works, and the Romero films found other applicable metaphors, like zombie consumers in a shopping mall. But maybe there’s another newly relevant metaphor as well.

  In the 50s and early 60s, psychologist (including those employed by the government to study the situation) were surprised by the apparent lack of societal reaction to the spectre of possibly world-destroying nuclear weapons.  Some of the first suggestions of fears were embodied in the seemingly innocuous atomic monster movies. 

 The same might be said of the muted response to the possibly world-destroying effects of climate distortion. While political denial clearly benefits fossil fuel megacorporations and the politicians they own, it might also be a convenient cover for the personal, psychological denial we all must engage in, at least from time to time, in order to stay sane.  But persistent, extreme and even organized denial may have particular toxicity. 

 There is a sense that denial itself can turn people into zombies, both of the Haitian kind (slaves to wealthy economic interests) and of the Romero kind: people who are in a sense already dead but still walking, still struggling to survive. 

  Now the weeks and months of intense heat experienced by so many this summer suggests a more physical resonance, an embodiment of climate distortion effects. Specifically, the zombie figure suggests the effects of relentless extreme heat on human beings.  For relentless heat dulls the brain, saps vitality and will, until people begin to feel and even look like the living dead.

 It could be that these physical effects of extreme heat have escaped the consciousness of recent generations, with the omnipresence of air conditioning.  Prior generations understood it—it’s present as another character in several Tennessee Williams plays, as well as the courtrooms of To Kill A Mockingbird and Inherit the Wind.  I suppose my generation was the last in the US to grow up without air conditioning in every business and public building and every automobile, as well as most homes. Except of course in poorer places, where the past lived on. 

 But even if the medical community is somewhat baffled about the effects of atmospheric heat on the human body, somewhere in the unconscious that knowledge is visceral.  Too much of it for too long and you not only feel like a zombie, you begin thinking and acting like one.

 This zombie summer is unlikely to be the last, and so our fears for that future might be expressed in these figures of ghoulish entertainment.  

Too Big Not To Fail

In his last book and final apocalyptic vision in which he forecasts the end of the human species, H.G. Wells includes a one-page chapter titled "Race Suicide By Gigantism," in which he asserts that a species that predominates for awhile often ends by growing larger and larger before going extinct.  "In the record of the rocks it is always the gigantic individual who appear at the end of each chapter."

Wells does not elaborate on why this applies to human beings (a problem as well with the rest of this short book, Mind At the End of Its Tether.)  It would be curious if he meant it applied to human bodies physically--not when Wells wrote this book at the end of World War II, especially not in England and Europe, where food shortages and warfare had the opposite effect.

But it occurred to me reading this recently that it may well apply to human bodies now. In 2002 a CDC study found that the average American adult was slightly taller than in 1960, but a lot heavier--by 25 pounds.  The trend towards heavier continued in a 2015-16 study.  Weight increased particularly among whites and Hispanics; for all populations and both genders, the average weight gain was around 30 pounds from 1960.

And it's not just Americans.  Another study found that globally, the average adult was 1.3% taller and 14% heavier in 2014 than in 1974.  Perhaps this is why the portrayal of future humans in the popular 2008 animated feature WALL-E caused such a shock of recognition as well as controversy.

This increased weight comes at a cost, not only in individual health but in resources used and needed.  That 2014 study also found that energy consumption increased by over 6% as a result.  But there is also the need for more food and the result of more refuse.  WALL-E posited a future in which garbage has taken over the planet, which doesn't even have plant life left.  Meanwhile a spaceship full of fat humans are splayed inert in mobile chairs, slurping Big Gulps and downing Big Macs, circulating through a huge shopping mall amusement park, manipulated by an A.I. mall manager.

That future factors in another postwar trend: the human population explosion, from 2.3 billion people in 1940 to 7.7 billion now.  The US population has itself more than doubled from when Wells was writing and I was born, from 141 million to 327 million now.  That's 186 million more people (which is more than the total population in 1960) in the same space (though the addition to the Union of Hawaii and still lightly populated Alaska makes some difference.)

These are not just numbers.  Numbers can be deceptive--they may not show why they seem to show.  But the change is there to see, if you've lived long enough to see it.  To me the difference is striking, even from the 1970s and 80s when I spent a lot of time trolling through shopping malls.  People are just way bigger, and there are a lot more of them.

This all contributes to the other kinds of gigantism that Wells saw building in his own time.  The immense resources needed to make the planes and tanks, ships and bombs that were used in World War II suggested the scale of human exploitation of the planet.  The scale of that continuing and growing exploitation, and the future resources destroyed in the process, is the first cause of the mortal threat to humanity and life as we know it on Earth.

It is appropriate to consider this on this Fourth of July weekend, which like Christmas and most other official holidays, is more an increasingly manic and desperate celebration of ever-swollen excess than anything else. Particularly this year in Washington.

Once you start looking for it, gigantism is everywhere. Americans are not only bigger, but these days they are back to demanding bigger vehicles--no longer the cabin cruisers on wheels of the late 50s and early 60s, but ever new and larger trucks and vans and their various crossbreeds.  Considering what it takes to keep up with this physical inflation, it's no wonder there is rapidly decreasing room for anything else.

Cities are becoming larger, even in proportion to population growth.  New forms of mining for oil and gas as well as minerals destroy and pollute vast areas of land and water.  Those Big Macs require the destruction of huge tracts of rainforest for cattle. The unimaginably large oceans are incredibly overwhelmed by garbage and pollution.

Outsized political rhetoric not only overwhelms realistic subtleties, but by its very gigantism it becomes necessarily--and often transparently--phony and false.  What used to be called The Big Lie is small potatoes in the newsfeed, allowing such outrages as American concentration camps on the southern border.

Even our entertainment gets bigger and more costly all the time.  I used to enjoy popular movies such as superhero films, but now that their budgets literally would pay for actual spacecraft, as well as addressing crises identified in increasingly wasteful mailings from worthy organizations, I can't watch them.

Increased human weight is not all due to Big Macs and Big Gulps.  A 2015 study found that people of the same age who ate the same number of calories and exercised as much as did people in the 1980s are heavier anyway.  Factors that may account for the difference include chemicals and other pollutants, certain prescription drugs and reduction in microbiomes, the population of genes from microbes contained in the human body.  All of these, in turn, can be see as results of societal gigantism.

The dinosaurs failed when confronted with the results of a gigantic catastrophe--the impact of a huge asteroid.  Smaller creatures survived.  But physical size may not be the only or most important factor for humans.  The size, power and interdependent complexity of global society makes it stronger in some ways, but a lot more vulnerable in others.  A huge earthquake in the wrong place could fracture the global economy enough to affect billions.  And with nuclear weapons around, there's no telling where spiraling consequences end up.  This applies as well to the slower motion challenges of the climate crisis.  This summer has already seen killer heatwaves in India, record high temperatures across Europe, and in Alaska and the Arctic.

"The planet spins, climate changes, so that the old overgrown Lord of Creation is no longer in harmony with his surroundings," Wells wrote in 1946.  And there were still 31 years to go before the invention of the Big Mac.

Zombies v Vampires

The Republican attempts to kill healthcare and millions of Americans along with it have several times been given up for dead, but they keep coming back, led by McConnell, a description of whom as "reptilian" gets us in the ballpark but understates the reality, as abetted by the snarling Homegrown Hitler. A new poll this week shows that HH is dangerously close to being weakly approved by one-third, with his strong base down to 25%, a few ticks away from Nixon's at the moment he resigned. He has lost ground in all the battleground states he won, and half of those polled don't believe he'll make it to the end of his term. In other words, politically he's dead. And yet, there he is.

And there he or someone like him will always be, because they are one version of the living dead. They are the Vampires.

Vampires, from their earliest 19th century emergence in popular storytelling, were always aristocrats: Count Dracula and so on. Even in more recent imaginings in decadent New Orleans or among suburban teens, they are among the 1% or so. Blood-sucking capitalists, vampire capitalism. Today they are the Plutocrats--a perfect name for them. Pluto the god of the underworld, where the gold is, and the dead, so he is the god of both wealth and death.

The very rich have always pulled the strings but now the US has an officially plutocratic government of billionaires. It used to be that the laws against conflicts of interest kept the very wealthy out of government, but it turns out there are no such laws after all, and the wealthy get to keep their businesses  and use their high government positions and access to the federal coffers to make more money. As Jonathan Chait points out, our apprentice dictator defines conflict of interest as not swearing loyalty and fealty to him.

Presiding over all this is the adult family of the apprentice dictator, all of them pretty obviously vampires. I mean, look at them.  (But not here--none of their photos have appeared on this site since election day, nor any of their names except within quotations.  Nor will they ever.  I'm not feeding them their lifeblood if I can help it.)

The other undead are the zombies. As reimagined by George Romero--who died last week--they are the living dead who swarm in huge groups, eager to eat the brains of the living, turning them into zombies.

 Zombies have captured the popular imagination in recent years, and no wonder. If vampires are the 1%, zombies are the 99%, fighting each other for the dregs. Zombies are "the precariat"--holding precariously onto some semblance of respectability-- or those who have already fallen off the precipice. To be joined by 16 to 26 million of the precariat, depending on which Republican unhealthcare bill eventually becomes law, if any.

So who are the brainless living dead out to eat everybody's brains? We're tempted to suggest they are the people who show up at Homegrown Hitler's rallies. The adults at least--turning the Boy Scouts into Homegrown Hitler Youth I hope was not as real as it was scary.

Here the origins of the zombie myth is instructive. It comes from Haiti, where through sorcery, plantation bosses were able to dig up fresh corpses and turn them into slaves to work the fields, or commit crimes if needed.  Zombies were portrayed as mindless slaves of their masters in stories before Romero's Night of the Living Dead.  And though it seems to have created the template for all the succeeding zombie dramas, nobody called them zombies in that movie. They were mostly called ghouls.

In political and economic life, the rich few have been able to expand power by getting the unrich many to fight their wars, and to keep power by somehow convincing them their plight was caused by others even more unrich than they.  The Vampires have been using their Zombie armies for centuries, and their Zombie voters.

Romero actually made a related political point in Night of the Living Dead (as Brent Staples pointed out recently) by showing the living in endless squabbles and conflict when confronted by the relentless undead, and the hero who leads them --a black man--is shot dead by someone in the posse, who assumes he is a zombie.  Staples:

"But for Mr. Romero, these effects were incidental to his broader theme: how mutual contempt and tribal self-interest so often prevent people from banding together in the face of a mortal threat. The flesh-eating dead, at least, come together in mindless self-interest. But the embattled residents of the farmhouse bicker and betray one another even as the darkness closes in. Mr. Romero viewed them as a metaphor for a society so deeply invested in petty enmities that it failed to see it was being swallowed alive."

The metaphorical equivalence of Vampires as the plutocratic wealthy and Zombies as the unrich came to me some months ago, as it must have to others--like s/f writer Kim Stanley Robinson, who came up with roughly the same formula and actually trademarked the title Zombies V. Vampires.

Right now it seems the Vampires still have a tight hold on their Zombie followers, but they know that could change, and recently a self-identified Plutocrat came out in public and said so. Nick Hanauer in Politico:

"Since Election Day, I’ve been overwhelmed by anguished calls, emails and conversations from you, my wealthy friends, who, for the first time, are confronting the real possibility that our cozy utopian, urban, pluralistic lifestyles may be in peril. I share your fear. And with good reason.

Three years ago, in these pages, I warned you that the pitchforks were coming. I argued that 30 years of rising and accelerating inequality would inevitably lead to some sort of populist revolt that would disrupt the fantastic lives we elites enjoy. I cautioned that any society which allows itself to become radically and indefensibly unequal eventually faces either an uprising or a police state—or both.  And here we are."

All the rich may fear an uprising, but not all of them, I fear, fear a police state.  Though given ample opportunity to see a more equal society works better for all, many of them can't stop sucking all the blood they can get.  If there's a tax they must avoid it or end it.  There isn't a wage that can't be lower. There isn't a lie that can't be spread if it means a destructive industry can squeeze out more money for a little longer. And if there's a way to even temporarily keep raking in the blood with slave labor overseas, they do it, and pretend it's not their fault, it's that dreaded Invisible Hand, against which they are powerless.

Now the Vampires, pretending to be on the side of the Zombies, are in power, and the comparative economic quiet could well be deceiving--it's only been six months but with the progress made by the Obama administration being reversed, and even older institutional structures being smashed, the damage may be suddenly obvious, and it could be quite bad quite quickly.  It may take more than the promised industrial jobs not materializing, but even that could make the Vampires sweat, if the Zombies get restless.

Then we'll see, but Zombies v. Vampires may not be a fantasy after all.