Oh brother. You know the ‘Zombie Apocalypse’ meme is getting out of hand when the survivalist black-helicopter crowd is latching on to it:

The walking dead. A global crisis. The remnants of America. Around the globe, the dead are rising to devour the living. Hospitals are overrun, and martial law has been declared. The streets are in chaos. Society is disintegrating. In a small south Texas town, the mayor has rallied his citizens against the living dead and secured their borders. Isolated in the countryside, the community holds their own. But when two strangers from San Antonio stumble into town, they bring news of a global peacekeeping force sweeping toward the city. Led by a ruthless commander, the force is determined to secure the republic of Texas on its own terms, and establish a new, harsh government for the plague-ravaged nation. Will the independently fortified Texas town hold out against the flesh-eating zombies and the tyrannical foreign army traveling down the road?

The book in question is called “Down the Road: On the Last Day” and is a sequel of sorts to a previous South Texas Zompocalypse story. An Amazon review lets us know that, yes, this really is a book for the nutbag crowd who think that any day now the UN will topple the mighty American empire and force us all to send our kids to Commie daycare, or something:

As they are trying to make their way through this new and horrific world they discover that UN troops have essentially “invaded” Texas in a government authorized effort to suppress the zombie threat and to round up and cordon off the living human survivors in FEMA camps. The two escape the nefarious UN soldiers and head to Beeville, a small town that has thus far held its own against the encroaching doom of the undead. They warn the town folk of this new menace and our story takes us up to and including the conflict between the town that refuses to surrender and the UN Troops sent to either wipe them out or force them into their concentration camps. The story focuses mainly on the citizens of Beeville, telling their individual stories and tying them all together as they fight to survive.

…

We are reminded again and again that FEMA, Homeland Security, and the military are all just vicious and brutal thugs in their efforts to suppress both the undead and the living. Add to the mix in this book the UN Peacekeeping forces who have been dispatched to Texas to get rid of everyone who stands in their way. We are treated to a sociopath of a leader, Captain Phillip Carson, and his gleefully malignant foreign troops who rape and execute a bloody swath across south Texas, all under the guise of regaining control of our nation. The comparisons to Nazi Germany and the suppression of the Jews are agonizingly obvious here-people are loaded onto cattle cars, anyone who resists is dealt with swiftly and violently, and they all end up in concentration camps.

Of course the politicians we are made aware of in this book are all sanctioning these efforts. President Herbert M. Walker (huh?), who presided over the nation during the attacks of 9/11 has agreed to allow the UN Peacekeepers on our soil. Former President and now UN Secretary General Jefferson Williams (who?) is also there to speak up in favor of this move, along with Massachusetts Senator Ted Kinney (uh…) and New York Senator Carl Shumer (ohhh kay). The thinly veiled fake names was a bit off putting, especially since the author mentions at one point that one of the characters started becoming mistrustful of the government during the Clinton administration. Would that be Jefferson Williams or William Jefferson Clinton that this person is referring to? Sorry, I know this is nitpicky but again it was rather distracting to me.

This book might actually be worth reading, for you masochists out there; it could well be our generation’s Eye of Argon.

As a Poli-Sci guy, let me dust off my B.A. (and common sense here) and provide a counterpoint to the dingbat lunacy described above.

1) While the UN does have a relatively small peacekeeping force, it does not actually have its own soldiers; they are all sort of donated/on-loan from member states, and peacekeeping actions are approved by the Security Council, on which the United States is a permanent member with veto powers. The book seemingly gets around this by having the US President call them in, but one has to wonder why; they are, militarily speaking, not even in the same *league* as our own armed forces. Did the Marines all go on vacay during the Apocalypse? Don’t the member states who contribute soldiers to the UN have their own ‘Zombie problem’ to deal with, this being a ‘global crisis’ and all?

One additional, somewhat humorous detail: the UN forces are, as noted, for ‘peacekeeping’. What does that mean, exactly? Well, it means they stand between two angry groups and keep them from fighting, more or less… and both sides have to agree for them to be there, generally speaking:

While the peacekeeping force is being assembled, a variety of diplomatic activities are being undertaken by UN staff. The exact size and strength of the force must be agreed to by the government of the nation whose territory the conflict is on. The Rules of Engagement must be developed and approved by both the parties involved and the Security Council. These give the specific mandate and scope of the mission (e.g. when may the peacekeepers, if armed, use force, and where may they go within the host nation). Often, it will be mandated that peacekeepers have host government minders with them whenever they leave their base. This complexity has caused problems in the field.

When all agreements are in place, the required personnel are assembled, and final approval has been given by the Security Council, the peacekeepers are deployed to the region in question.

Does this mean that the UN got the Zombies on board with this plan? They are the second side in this conflict, right?

Somehow I doubt that’s how it goes in the book.

2) The FEMA camp thing is a reference to a long-running and utterly insane extreme right wing paranoid conspiracy theory here in the United States. Basically there are, supposedly, a number of ‘camps’ around the United States where, any day now, our government is going to round up everybody who isn’t slightly to the left of Lenin and confine them, or possibly, gas them like badgers. Crackpot loons have been passing these things around for years, and the only problem is: these camps don’t exist.

For an utterly hilarious (I mean literally, I laughed out loud several times) tour of these ‘FEMA camps’, check out this Popular Mechanics post.

Among the supposed FEMA camps in the US are a *North Korean gulag*, a train repair depo and a large National Guard base.

Seriously.

3) The politicians being skewered above hardly ever agreed on anything. President Walker is presumably supposed to be G.W. Bush (George Walker Bush) or his dad (George Herbert Walker Bush) or both. Carl Schumer is obviously Senator Chuck Schumer, who wouldn’t sell his country out to anyone except Wall Street, and Ted Kinney is presumably Senator Ted Kennedy, who has the distinction of being no-longer-alive, though not a Zombie so far as we’re aware here at the ZRC.

For the record, the current UN Secretary-General is Sec. General Ban Ki-Moon. There has never been a Secretary-General from the United States, let alone a former President. If you’re wondering though, there was a President with a similar name to the Sec-General here: William Jefferson Clinton. You probably knew him as ‘Bill’. (The amazon review mentions this as a possibility; I think we can assume he’s correct)

So Bill Clinton took over the UN and he, G.W. Bush and two fairly liberal US Senators sold the United States down the river when our entire armed forces were off somewhere building sand-castles. Now it’s time for the UN Peacekeepers, who in reality are mostly poor soldiers from the Global South, to round up the remaining Living American people into FEMA camps and, if we’re lucky, gas us. Only some stalwart small town South Texans stand between the Zombie hordes, international pinkos and your Mom and her apple pie.

Riiiiiiiiight.

It looks like the ‘Put Zombies Into Absolutely Anything’ genre of books is still going strong, and more’s the pity; if nothing else it means the ZRC’s backlog won’t be getting dealt with anytime soon.

Groan.

Tags: Books

This entry was posted by John Sears on Monday, January 17th, 2011 at 11:38 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.