“What’s with all the zombies?”
One of my favorite political pundits David Sirota wonders, “Maybe the undead creatures surfacing everywhere in pop culture have something to do with Washington and Wall Street” in this Salon.com piece:
What’s with all the zombies lately?
That could be a question about one of the hippest retro fads that pop culture has going these days. Inspired by horror genres of past, zombies have lurched back to preeminence in books like “World War Z,” video games like “Left 4 Dead” and blockbuster films like “Zombieland.” Even the highbrow producers at National Public Radio recently devoted a segment to a University of Ottawa study titled “Mathematical Modeling of an Outbreak of Zombie Infection.” Indeed, the undead have become so popular, they’ve spurred “zombie walks” in cities and spawned Weird Al-ish parodies through Jane Austen knockoffs like “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” and bands such as the Zombeatles (with their hit “Hard Day’s Night of the Living Dead”).
Frighteningly enough, though, that question about zombies could also be asked of America’s political culture.
It was only a year ago that “zombie” first entered the colloquial economic lexicon during the collapse of the financial institutions that were cannibalizing the economy. From a balance-sheet perspective, many of these firms were dead. But they were quickly reanimated as zombie banks with trillions of taxpayer dollars.
The column goes on. And it’s political. The conclusion?
Here we are, a year after a financial implosion that should have driven a stake in the heart of free market fundamentalism. Here we are, a year after an election that was supposed to pour holy water on Wall Street vampires, exorcise the economy’s demons and challenge the ancient mummies of neoconservative foreign policy. Yet here we are, with virtually nothing changed, watching the same zombie crises indomitably stumble forward.
And so what do we do? We flee to entertainment venues that let us enjoy the campy thrill of confronting the undead — even though we’ve lost the ability to do that in real life.
“The zombie is a way for us to explore massive disasters in a safe way,” Brooks says. “You can’t shoot the financial meltdown in the head, but you can do that with a zombie.”
I have a more mundane question: Have zombies replaced vampires as the hot new undead?