I have fond memories of my four years at Indiana University. Well, four years in school for me, then living on campus for a while with the art director, but you get the idea.

Indiana University has a fairly prominent student paper, the Indiana Daily Student. As the title suggests, it is written and published by students, and comes out daily, so they have a lot of space to fill, and a great deal goes to student written columns and op-eds.

Which brings us to the following verbal atrocity:

Like many others in the past decade, I fell under the siren song of the zombies.
One of the outgrowths of the current “zombiemania” is creating survival plans for the zombie apocalypse.

This phenomenon can likely be traced back to “The Zombie Survival Guide” and “World War Z,” both books written by Max Brooks. Zombies and the resulting apocalypse were a fun hypothetical to think about, but enough is enough. Let’s find something else to cynically exploit.

…

There are far too many zombie-focused pieces of pop culture, and it’s reached a saturation point. It’s time to put the zombie concept to bed for a while, lest it lose its luster, or as much luster as a reanimated, cannibalistic corpse can have.

The popularity of zombies is threatened by the same downfall of so many other cultural artifacts: audience fatigue.

…

hat being said, there are many medias that use zombies in a novel and interesting way, such as the 2004 film “Shaun of the Dead,” the 2009 film “Zombieland” and the ongoing comic-based TV series, “The Walking Dead.”

What made those pieces of work so interesting is they took a fairly tired concept and infused new life, whether through the use of humor or in the case of the comic, exploring the darker side of humanity and how humans behave when society crumbles.

The mind boggles that one short op-ed could be filled with so much misinformation.

First, the bigoted phenomenon known as ‘Zombie Survivalism’ may have come back into vogue thanks to Max Brooks but it easily goes back farther. George Romero pioneered the behind-the-barricades approach to inducing drama in Zombie films in the 60s and 70s after all. What Max Brooks did was apply a thin veneer of literary respectability to the daydreaming practice.

Second, don’t you just love the genre of media criticism that says ‘Something is too popular so I believe it should go away to keep it fresh’? Is this hipsterism or just an annoying trend that pops up whenever anything bubbles to the top of the zeitgeist?

Third, I love that Andrew Crowley believes that ‘The Walking Dead’ pioneered the exploration of how society collapses under the strain of a supposed Zombie Apocalypse (the ZRC of course prefers the term ‘Global Reanimation Block Party’). A novel observation, and surely correct.

I mean, it has to be the early-2000s vintage Walking Dead that popularized that use of the Zombie as metaphor for the fragility of the social order, and not:

-Night of the Living Dead (1968)
-The Omega Man (1971)
-Dawn of the Dead (1978)
-Day of the Dead (1985)
-Return of the Living Dead (1985)
-Demons (1985)

You get the idea.

All this mockery is leaving aside that Zombies in fiction predate Romero in American fiction by many decades, or that the Zombie Apocalypse is easily seen as a modern update of the classic plague fear story genre, ranging from The Decameron to A Journal of the Plague Year to Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death or Stephen King’s The Stand.

And of course, from a Zombie Rights perspective, the whole discussion needs to be bookended with a note that, contra Mr. Crowley, Zombies are people too, not merely cannibalistic Undead monsters to be feared in genre fiction. For that matter, it would help if he in fact had more than a very passing familiarity with the genre before castigating it (which is really my job at any rate).

But ZRC columnists can’t be choosers, sometimes.

A larger question than why a student chose to write a bigoted and poorly informed Anti-Zombie screed is why the Editors of the IDS chose to run it. I mean, are they really so desperate to fill column inches that they will push any old unimaginative and shallow prejudice out the door?

For shame, IDS. At least in my day you tried not to be patently offensive.

Tags: Books, Comics, Journamalism, Max Brooks is a Jerk, Robert Kirkman, Romero, Social Justice, Television

This entry was posted by John Sears on Sunday, July 17th, 2011 at 1:10 am and is filed under Zombie Media. 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.