Z is for Zombies

 Perusing the internet the other day, I came across a list of futuristic weapons that are being developed and tested throughout the world. These weapons range from lasers, to sonic emitters, to microwave guns. Some of these weapons are already in use within various military and police forces. Regarding zombies, I think they could have some very interesting and useful advantages over regular weapons.

Dazzler  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzler_(weapon)


The Dazzler is a gun that emits light of a certain wavelength that, when directed towards a human, causes intense discomfort and temporary blindness. This weapon is in use, and has been utilized by the US military on a number of occasions. This weapon could be used to incapacitate zombies and make them much less of a threat by getting rid of one of their only abilities besides walking and biting, and possibly smell. This weapon is designed to only cause temporary blindness, but stronger versions could feasibly be made. In 1995, there was United Nations ban on weapons that could permanently blind. The reasons are obvious; a blindness gun would probably be the most unethical weapon ever created. However, when used against zombies, I'm sure this moral issue would disappear. If made stronger, this weapon could easily blind a whole horde of zombies. One could then get creative and try to utilize the blind zombies in some way, or just waltz around casually and bash their skulls in.

Active Denial System   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Denial_System

The Active Denial System is a riot control weapon used by the US military and other institutions prone to riot-like activity such as prisons and embassies. This non-lethal weapon is usually mounted on a vehicle, where it can be aimed where needed. It works similar to a microwave oven; emitting energy in a beam of high-frequency waves. A microwave emits the energy at 2.45 GHz, however the ADS creates a much stronger beam; emitting energy at 95 GHz. When hit by the beam, humans feel an intense sensation of pain and discomfort in about 3 seconds, as they are literally being cooked. These waves only penetrate so far into the skin, however they can cause burns if left active for a longer period of time. This weapon's effects on zombies would depend on how much they could feel pain, and if that would deter them at all. If so, zombies would simply become confused and incapacitated, leaving them open to attack. If zombies didn't care about pain, then you would have slightly cooked zombies eating you. However, like the Dazzler this weapon could potentially be upgraded to a more lethal version if the need arose.

Lightsaber

The other two are actually possible, however who can deny that running around slicing zombies apart with an ever-sharp light sword wouldn't be fun? Lightsabers would be useless fighting against human enemies, because they would shoot you in the face (unless you're a Jedi, and you're not), however zombies are a different story. They would be distracted by the pretty colors, and then left defenseless as you slashed them apart. You could even throw in some pointless spins and flips, because hey, why not?
You might say, "that's stupid, lightsabers aren't real." to which I would say, "neither are zombies."

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/tweets-of-the-dead!/id608096158?mt=8

Check out this app for iOS devices. It is an FPS game where zombies are created every time someone tweets the word zombie. Pretty interesting combination of social media and the undead. Just went free today!

The Zombie Survey is now officially un/re/whatever LIVE, and you should GO TAKE IT RIGHT NOW!

Here's a short version: http://bit.ly/170mO67.

After you've taken it, pass it on to as many people as you can. Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Craig's List, texts, phone calls, actually talking to other people -- SPREAD THE LINK, SPREAD THE LOVE.

This is a proposed design for skyscrapers that "could protect humans from an extreme natural disaster and sustain them long enough to start civilization over again." Obviously, zombies are an unnatural disaster, but I see no reason why we shouldn't begin constructing these RIGHT NOW.

Read more about the Zero Skyscraper here.

George Romero

Zombies have taken a prominent part in popular culture thanks to two men: George A. Romero and Michael Jackson. In 1968, Romero released Night of the Living Dead. This movie was followed up 10 years later by Dawn of the Dead, which picked up where the previous movie left off, at dawn. The Romero series focuses on zombies attacking a city. Most of the citizens are turned and attack outposts of hiding humans. Sexual tension ensues.

I had the happy accident of stumbling into a spontaneous conversation with a fellow writer type. We naturally spoke of writing, and I confessed that I do not write poetry. The following is an experiment, a writing exercise, if you will. Proceed with caution.





Soprano

Heaviest of weights rests upon these shoulders
Crafted not from steel
But Dread,
And logic of consequences
Hindsight, instead of fore

Method of loci
Peg and Link
Strategies for competition
Mental Olympian
         they called me

Now the history of the world
Has changed me,
Stored in my Head,
I'd rather lock it all away
In the nearest closet.

Those don't exist anymore
Everything is on display.
We have no secrets,
We share it all,
New World calls for new laws.

Heaviest of weights rests upon these soldiers
I send out to keep us safe
Supplies are needed,
        of course,
But also information:

Is he out there, still
Or has he turned...



Bass

We have made soldiers
From scraps and rubble
Motley crew of every caste
Can't be choosey
        Our species is on the brink...

Go! Bring your best,
This one's for the Gold!
To come back empty-handed
Is to not come back at all
       Your species is on the brink!

Without us they would starve
Or the Ghoul Cough would get 'em
Filthy black ash made wet by lungs
Spat back out into buckets and rags
       Their species is on the brink.

Food, medicine, whatever we can find
We go silent and smooth
Eels sliding through burnt-out ruins
Scavengers in a grey wasteland
      Our species is on the brink-

Wait, hand signals Stop
Movement under the wreckage of a car
Not a scraping shamble
Quick flash, maybe prey
Fall back, can't take any chances
      The species is on the brink




Tenor

What isolation does to mind
And how quickly the shift occurs
From reality to half-blind
To music of shambles and blurs

The wreckage became a new home
Undercarriage became the sky
Night came, without the starry dome
Day broke, much later to the eye

Think of her, will she send them here?
What will they see if they find me?
Broken man, consumed by his fear
Or War Hero, Let's Set Him Free!

Let them find me, let them come in
Invade my castle, my island
Take me back, to t'other prison
At least we're Together, piled in




Alto

Shamble on
Brothers and sisters of the day and night!
Clothes tattered? Remove them!
Brain scattered? Feed it!

True clarity comes not from the heart
but from the brain meat
Made from insubstantial stuff
The fuel that powers this mind is will alone

The weak were said to inherit the earth
I say the Hungries are the next leap
We operate with pure instinct
We have no morals to stand in our way

The time is now, let us band together!
Let us feed and be merry!
If you will nod your heads in prayer with me:

Thank the almighty powers of nature and consequence
For allowing us to thrive in a world pitted against us.

Let us converge on the meal that has been offered to us:
Man meal trapped under wreckage.

Feast with me, fallen men, women, and children,
And gain your clarity!

Whilst reading World War Z, I frequently found myself forgetting that zombies aren't real, or at least, not yet. I felt as though I was reading something legitimate, like peering into a document from the future or some kind of alternate universe's past. And something about this quality of “real-ness” in World War Z made it difficult for me to read for long periods of time. I remember reaching the halfway point after several hours of reading and wanting to slip under the covers with hot cocoa, luxuriating in modern comforts, as though it were me that had had a rampaging zombie break through my picture window (so much for cardio).

This is what I find so interesting about Max Brooks’ book. It reads so believably, that it exhausts us in the way that reading a government document about plagues and epidemics might, although albeit World War Z is a heck of a lot more entertaining. It's a book that appeals to anyone who has wondered about what a zombie apocalypse would “look like” on a global scale. It’s a whollop of a zombie novel, in part because it is so ambitious in scope and so viscerally realistic.

As I was reading, I thought about why it was I found World War Z so believable. What made it feel real? How did Brooks craft his book to make you into a believer? I have a few theories.

Structure

I figure we’ll start with the obvious. World War Z isn’t written like a conventional novel. The book seems to be drawing inspiration from the Dracula-esque epistolary novel, but is (obviously) significantly updated in terms of form. After all, ain’t nobody got time to write letters to their fiancé in a zombie apocalypse. Zombies don't exactly bide their time. The difference here is that World War Z is an oral history, structured on the page as interview transcripts and short memoirs, with a believable foundation upon which the zombie legend can stand: that the book is the rejected pet project of a government official, and the first recorded history of the Zombie War.

This structure, which veers sharply from a traditional story arc, or a traditional protagonist, distances you from the work, in a sense. The structure (a series of interviews) makes it more difficult to immerse yourself in characters, and instead forces you to immerse yourself in the overall premise - the thread which weaves together and helps you to make sense of the various vignettes.

Allusions

Some of the interviewees in Brooks’ book seem to be allusions to real-life people. The one which struck me as most obvious was the “Whacko,” or former Vice President, who featured in the interviews that took place in our very own Burlington, Vermont. The “Whacko,” bears a pretty striking resemblance to our former governor, now the stuff of modern legend for his unseemly downfall during the run-up to the 2000 elections, Howard Dean. In World War Z he describes himself thusly, "I'd been a rising star, at least until I 'self-destructed.' That's what they said about me, right? All the cowards and the hypocrites who'd rather die than see a real man express his passion" (146-47). Later on the same page he is described as a "screaming radical." Similarly, the president, often referred to as “the Big Guy,” by the Vice President * cough * Howard Dean * cough * seems an awful lot like Colin Powell, who also happens to ties to Jamaica. (151).

Brooks also name drops constantly, which sets us firmly in our own world, with plenty of pop culture references thrown in, just in case the grounding in present day and myriad of historical references weren’t enough. In one interview with a former fighter pilot in Tennessee, the X-Wing fighter (a la Star Wars) is brought up. In subsequent chapters there is mention of Megatron from the Transformers series, "Hello Kitty," the television show The View and Gilligan's Island. All of these small details, as well as allusions to people, places and things we might or might not be familiar with (such as the Vice President from Burlington), build a world in which zombies become distinctly and eerily more plausible than we might otherwise have imagined by creating characters in which we recognize bits and pieces of not only ourselves, but of our society and culture as well.

Voice

While reading World War Z, I was particularly impressed by Brooks’ ability to imagine and execute so many different narrative voices. From the inventor of Phalanx, Breck Scott, who's disturbing, and yet unsurprisingly cavalier tone showcases the story of those who stood to profit from the disaster (there's always someone, isn't there?) to the feral child, Shannon, who though in her early twenties, speaks like a five-year-old and mimics the moaning and groaning of a zombie, to the no-nonsense style of the various soldiers and military professionals who feature in the book, this sense of a diversity of "voices," creates an illusion of authenticity and reality - as though the story's plausibility is strengthened by the sense of it being a shared one, a collective.

Parallels to Real-Life Pandemics

Here I’m thinking in particular about the multitude of personal and government accounts reflecting on the Spanish Influenza of 1918, although many of the recent pandemic scares (SARS, Avian influenza, H1N1, antibiotic-resistant superbugs, etc.) seem to parallel certain interviews in Brooks’ novel in terms of similarity in tone (sterile government pamphlets and the sensationalist media stories alike).

Here's some background info, in case your recollection of pandemic flu history is a little spotty: the Spanish Influenza killed more people than the first World War. Apparently, to this day no one is quite sure how many people died, but an expert who spent his life studying the flu (MacFarlane Burnett) has estimated that the worldwide death toll from the pandemic was at least 50 million and more generous estimates speculate as many as 100 million. To put those numbers into perspective, that's at least 1/5th of the global population at the time. We never get a precise estimate of the death toll in World War Z, although according to a Zombie Wiki, "in North America alone there were stated to be 200 million zombies. It is also stated that half of China's population was infected, adding about another 600 million zombies" (Zombiepedia). Regardless, let's just say Spanish Influenza was pretty impressive for a relatively commonplace, real-life little 'ol virus.

There were also similarities in the way in which society, the media and people in positions of authority (the government, the police) handled the news of the flu. In World War Z, Breck Scott develops a phony vaccine for the zombie virus. In 1918, syrups and other tonics abounded that claimed to prevent or cure symptoms of the flu. In World War Z, Brooks describes the unreliability of the news media, particularly in the first half of the book. In 1918, there was a similar attitude, "many times public health officials knew the truth but did not tell it. This was the case in Philadelphia," and "Newspapers were unbelievably bad sources," writes a panel member of a recent Dept. of Health and Human Services workshop on the pandemic. Also similar were the strategies for containing the damage. Eventually during the Spanish Influenza outbreaks, it become clear that "social distancing," that is, quarantining and isolating those infected, was the best method for diminishing the virus' spread. This might seem obvious to us today, but previous to the 1918, the West hadn't seen a pandemic like the Spanish flu since the Bubonic plague.

If you're interested, there are a handful of interviews with Spanish influenza survivors on YouTube, many of which have elements that remind me of the accounts of survivors in World War Z, as well as a documentary called "We Heard the Bells," which originally aired on PBS: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbEefT_M6xY.

Sources:

United States. Department of Health and Human Services.Pandemic Flu History. Web. .

"World War Z." Zombiepedia. N.p.. Web. 21 Mar 2013. .

So, I was in Barnes and Noble the other day and before settling down to do some reading I was perusing the children's books, (as one does) with an friend of mine who is an education major. For her 'homework' she had to bring a children's book to class and read-aloud. So hard, right? Well, it took her for-frakkin-ever to pick out a damn book. As we were walking around I jokingly said that she should find a zombie book to read to her 'class' of 21 year olds. Two minutes after that I was looking along the far wall and find this:

Finding yourself alone and trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic, zombie infested world can be a tricky situation. As we have seen in several zombie texts, including Maureen F McHugh's The Naturalist and Courtney Summer's This Is Not A Test, being able to scavenge for supplies effectively is a skill that is crucial to survival. The following is a compilation of the top ten things I would like to stumble upon in such circumstances.

10. Matches/Lighter Fluid
The ability to start a fire is a key to survival. Warmth, light, protection and smoke signals are things people in any survival situation value.




Beyond being a great way to relax, cure boredom, and even make friends in some situations, alcohol can be put to good use. As seen in The Naturalist molotov cocktails can be an effective zombie deterrent. It can also be used to start controlled fires if matches or lighter fluid is hard to come by or even disinfect wounds or sanitize certain items.

8. Rope, Duct Tape, Fishing Line
While it may seem a bit tedious to grab such basic things, items like these can be used to repair basic tools, make a quick escape or even rig a trap or alarm system. While I wouldn't recommend stashing such random items to the migrant zombie survivor, those who have established shelters should consider stocking up on such materials when available.


7. Vision Complements
This category includes binoculars, flashlights, or even night vision goggles if your the luckiest scavenger in the history of the world. Anything that gives you the ability to scout your surroundings from a safe distance can be extremely beneficial under the circumstances.


6. Communication & Information
Portable radios, cell phones, or even walkie talkies are worth a look at if found. Chances are most will be broken or out of batteries, but anything that can potentially give you information about potential safe zones, zombie weaknesses or survival tips is worth tinkering with.


5. Clothing & Bedding
Slaying zombies can be a messy business. Having clean clothes to change into can be essential to mental and physical health given the limited hygienic opportunities in a post-apocalyptic environment. Blankets, pillows, sleeping bags can also be good finds if you have the proper shelter to utilize them.


4. Medical Supplies
Basic medical supplies such as bandages, medical tape, pain killers, anti-bacterial solution for cleaning wounds, and gauze can be critical in life threatening situations. Whats the point of protecting yourself from zombie attacks if your going to die from infection the next time your hand slips trying to open a can of food.




3. Weapons
Depending on the circumstances, guns can be your best friend or your worst enemy in a zombie apocalypse. On one hand, a firearm can be a great safety net in the case of an ambush or some unforeseen encounter with the undead. On the other hand, overuse of a gun could potentially attract others causing your problems to multiply rather than disappear. Either way blunt objects, such as baseball bats, crowbars, and metal pipes, can be almost equally effective and are more commonly found.
                                          
2. Food & Water
This one is pretty obvious. Canned or dehydrated foods (a can opener would also be something to hold onto if found) and bottled water are the best things to find of course. A healthy stockpile of food and clean water is the basis of long-term survival in any situation.


1. Long-Term Shelter
While all of the items above would be very valuable to a survivor, many of them can be cumbersome and difficult to travel with. A long-term, well protected home base enables the individual to stock pile each days loot and create a solid nest-egg to sit on while waiting for help to arrive. In the end the mental comfort of having a safe place to hang your hat in dangerous environment can be more valuable than anything.

We won't be meeting on Tuesday, March 19th because I have come down with a nasty case of the zombies.

I'll see you all on Thursday. Provided I can find something (hand-holding, romance, the love of Rob Corddry?) to reverse the zombification and bring me back to health and living.

Yours in braaaaiinnnnnghghshjhsfkjhsdkjfhkjsdf

     Fast forward through the Workaholics episode, "In Line" written by Adam Devine, and you will come  to a part where Adam's character (Adam) has mistakenly wandered into a "clean needles" line. He has followed a pale, lethargic wanderer who he presumes is an avid fan of the new zombie game that is to be released. As he waits in line, he grows impatient and begins interacting with what we as an audience understand as drug addicts, tasting the "fake blood" off of one addicts face and commenting on how fascinated he is at the dedication people take to make their fake blood taste so real. Quick to try to make friends, Adam asks his line-mates (and obvious comrades) where he could score something to "Shhmmmmeee" flashing a wad of cash. This is the only moment where we see any affect from the addicts, as their eyes light up and they persuade him to follow them to a back alley-way.

     Adam takes a puff of what he believes to be marijuana, but it's revealed to him that its  PCP, and that he should hand over all of his money including his wallet if he wants things to go over smoothly. There is a cut to a close up of Adams face, where (off camera) a strong red light is positioned in front of him facing him. The light creates an eeriness for the following cut, which is his psychedelic trip; a reverse shot revealing the addicts as zombies. He freaks out, and the chase soon begins.

    This episode directly addresses the addicts as zombies metaphor. Like zombies, addicts lack agency in their decisions. This social commentary allows the audience who's used to seeing the main characters destroy their brains, understand a dark reality to their antics. I love how zombies can be used deter physical and mental negligence.



Although it makes running through the streets blasted off of PCP seem entertaining, don't try it. 

This is a question for everyone who are also fans of the Sam Raimi classic series. The Evil Dead, culminating with Army Of Darkness, is probably my favorite horror series of all time. I never really thought of it as a zombie series, though. So, I ask of you, do you think it's a zombie film series? For me, it was never approached as that. It was a story filled with either a lot of random gore (Evil Dead) or a lot of slapstick Three Stooges humor (Evil Dead 2/Army of Darkness). Technically, the dead do rise from the grave, but my thought was everything was magical and demons were the reason behind it. I never thought zombie, but maybe it is zombie. What do you think? Also, is the remake going to be more zombie than the original? Or, has it always been zombie? I truly wonder.

...so if any of you are interested you can take this opportunity to work on that cardio while also honing your zombie-dodging skills.

I stumbled on this somehow and I gotta say, it looks awesome.  People can sign up as either humans and zombies, who can either be fast-moving or slow-moving.  Humans have to make it through the course without losing all 3 of their flags that represent their vital organs.

http://www.thezombiemudrun.com/

Here's the video for it:

     Most of the stories in our class fall into two very general categories. Those that feature serious, generally gritty zombies, and those that satirize the former. I would like to talk about a third category: the B(if we're being generous)-zombie.
    Many of these films are rightfully dismissed simply as bad attempts to make a genuinely serious apocalyptic narrative. Whether it's due to filming, acting, or plot, there really isn't much to redeem them beyond a certain "so bad it's good" entertainment value. One of countless examples would be John Carpenter's 2001 masterpiece, Ghosts of Mars, starring Ice Cube and Jason Stathan, among others. Or just about anything that shows up on 'fearnet'. I want to stress that I absolutely love many of these movies, they just don't represent what I'm trying to get at.
     However, I think there is a subset of B-horror monsters that have genuinely defensible, if campy, value. Whether it's superhero, combat or horror movies, It seems to me that there is a strong realist/extrapolation trend in most genres today. The B-creatures I will talk about go to the other extreme, overstating chaos, violence and frequently gore to an almost surreal extent. Any movie like this walks a fine line, but for me one of the best  examples for zombies is Planet Terror by Robert Rodriguez. Some other  not-strictly-zombie examples would be the Evil Dead series, Starship Troopers or (maybe closer to just 'bad', but I'd stand by it) Jeepers Creepers. These movies have plenty of satirical/and humorous elements, but they aren't really "parodies". In Planet Terror we have plenty of zombie tropes, from encountering the first few walking dead, to emergency rooms being over-run to desperate last stand. But what sets its apart from being a standard satire is the uniquely outlandish turns the plot takes, and the cartoonish style of it's violence. *Spoiler, such as it is, in white text*: There is no zombie cliche' for a standoff between survivors and the partially zombified remnants of a special forces team that killed Osama bin Laden, or Ash Williams chainsawing his way through a medieval undead horde.
     It seems to me that stories like these take a kind of expressionist view of horror, saying much more about how we depict evil or how we characterize our protagonists/villians than any particular metaphor or statement about the human spirit. If stories like World War Z are an extrapolation of our world, these types of narratives seem to me like extrapolations of the horror/sci-fi genre as a whole.

...in fairness, there's also probably a level at which many of these stories are making a point about taking anything too seriously, so here's some hyper-dramatized, irreverent B-horror in song form:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzouD2Ssg8s
   

When I sat down to watch "In Line," the new episode of Workaholics, I still had no idea what I was going to write my blog post about. Little did I know, zombies would show up just a few minutes into the episode (I mean, show up on TV, not in my living room). In the episode Blake, one of the main characters, sends his best friend Adam to save him a place in line for the midnight release of a zombie video game on his behalf. Adam isn't familiar with the game and doesn't know where the store is, so Blake tells him to just look for the people waiting in line dressed up like zombies; Adam runs off down the street looking for the game store with the long line. Because he's running late and in a rush, he's not paying very close attention: he sees a long line of zombies (tattered clothes, scabs and other injuries all over their faces and bodies, complete lack of affect), joins them, and starts making conversation. But then the camera pans out, and we see that Adam is not in line at the video game store with the pretend zombies, but instead is waiting in line at the free needle exchange with the real zombies.

                   One of the last shots of the episode; drug addict "zombies" chasing Adam

The whole situation leads to hilarity (with some mugging and accidental PCP usage thrown in), because it's taking place on a Comedy Central TV show, but it really made me think about the zombies of addiction, the zombies who walk amongst us every day. We touched upon this issue when we discussed "Corporate Zombies and Zombie Litigation," which includes a section entitled "To Be a Confirmed Drug Addict Is to Be One of the Walking Dead." This section includes an except for a 1962 court case in which the judge is drawing a gory parallel between a zombie and a drug addict:

"The teeth have rotted out; the appetite is lost and the stomach and intestines don't function properly. The gall bladder becomes inflamed; eyes and skin turn a bilious yellow. In some cases  membranes of the nose turn a flaming red; the partition separating the nostrils is eaten away--breathing is difficult...Good traits of character disappear and bad ones merge. Sex organs become affected. Veins collapse and livid purplish scars remain. Boils and abscesses plague the skin; gnawing pain racks the body. Nerves snap; vicious twitching develops. Imaginary and fantastic fears blight the mind and sometimes complete insanity results...Such is the torment of being a drug addict; such is the plague of being one of the walking dead" (ZAU 78-79).

But hard drug addiction doesn't just zombie-fy the body, but also the mind: addicts lose their capacity for higher thought, lose their capacity to judge consequences of their actions, lose volition. They lose their affect and their agency and become controlled by their "zombie master," their drug. They are zombies in the realest sense; they are zombies in every sense, except that they're not actually reanimated corpses, but we're talking reality here.

I think that this phenomenon goes beyond hard core drug addicts to addicts of any kind, including alcoholics. I was talking recently to one of my friends whose older brother has struggled a lot with depression and alcoholism, as has she. He had been getting better for a while, and so he moved out west to start a new life for himself. He had been doing well and living there for a while, so she had been thinking of moving out to join him when she got a call. All within a few days he had gotten a DUI, broken his hand badly and needed surgery, and he was going to need to take at least a month off of work to recover. He wanted her to move out there and take care of him. Although she had been excited at the prospect of moving out to be with him, and she wanted to help him, she realized that, given the circumstances, it was impossible. He was sliding back into zombieism, he was losing control, he was giving in to his zombie masters. She wanted to help him, wanted to pull over and pick up backpack guy, take pity on the hitchhiker, but she knew that if she went out there to try to help him, she would get bitten too. His addiction and his depression would grab hold of her and infect her and then there would be no one to care for either of them.

I think part of the reason we love talking about zombies is that we can speculate about them all day, and then go back home and sleep soundly at night, knowing that they aren't real; they're scary, but they're safe. Except that they're not, and  the real zombies among us are the one we should be concerned about: the ones with hearts and souls, the ones that maybe can be cured.

When trying to decide what to write my post on this week I stumbled upon a TedxBinghamton University Talk given by an international politics professor named Daniel Drezner from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.  In this video, the author of "Theories of International Politics and Zombies", discusses a whole slew of topics related to zombie resurgence in our popular culture but mostly focuses on the negative consequences of our society's obsession with the living dead.

In the section of his talk that I am focusing on he wonders if by reading and watching so many zombie narratives we are actually starting to prematurely think in an apocalyptic manner.  He states that we are now living in a world where we have lost faith in civil society, the government, and our leaders to handle emergencies properly and argues that we are already living in an apocalyptic world because of this.  By consuming so many stories about the inability of humans to adapt to a world where the living dead rise we actually start believing the analogy that humanity can't cope with any major biological or environmental threats.

At the end of his argument Drezner states that we need to appreciate our own abilities to adapt to different situations and re-assert order in our society, which most zombie narratives don't express. One text that doesn't fall into this category, and Drezner recognizes as such, is World War Z.  In this book, although we are only half way through it as a class, it is clear that life is going on after the zombie apocalypse and that order has been restored in the world.  It is not even seen as a zombie apocalypse but rather World War Z, just another war to add to the list.

Looking past the exception of World War Z, do you agree with Daniel Drezner's argument that zombie apocalypse novels and films lead us to underestimate humanity's ability to adapt and cope in times of immense struggle and change?  Furthermore, does it matter?