Read a really childish and defamatory essay in the New York Times by one Charles Duhigg called ‘Coming Soon: Invasion of the Walking Debt’ today that bears paying attention to for yet another example of the attempt to tie Zombies to something people dislike, this time a bad economy and arguments in Congress over the debt ceiling:

AMERICA has always had an apocalyptic strain. Yet it also seems to believe that if, or when, The End comes, it will still come out on top.

During, say, zombie movies, we Americans identify with that tough guy on horseback — the survivor with the Stetson and the rifle. It’s always the other guy, that poor sap sitting next to us, we think, who would become the half-eaten corpse.

I’m pretty sure you’re talking about ‘The Walking Dead’ there, and that’s a tv show, not a movie.

In “Zone One,” a forthcoming novel by the Pulitzer Prize finalist Colson Whitehead, a virus turns most of humanity into flesh-eating crazies; the narrator hunts stragglers around Wall Street. In “The Walking Dead,” the hit television series set in a zombie-infested America, an image of Atlanta’s abandoned financial district conjured an end-of-world vibe. Nothing says apocalypse, apparently, like a city without functioning A.T.M.’s.

See? You knew that it was a tv show. Also, great, more ‘high-brow’ Anti-Zombie novels, delightful.

Which raises the troubling possibility that what is happening now could stretch on for years. People could remain out of work, businesses could be starved of capital and politics could impede a lasting economic recovery.

At least killing zombies feels like a job.

To you, maybe. To a moral person it should feel terrible.

In a conclusion about how life goes on even after painful defaults on debt, the author talks about New York City and its default in the 1970s, which leads to this passage that he apparently thinks was very witty:

Out of the ashes of default, the yuppies rose — and, eventually, the banking and hedge fund classes that helped give us the late, great bubble.

On second thought, maybe we’re better off with the undead.

Hahahah, see, because Zombies are awful, but Yuppies, I mean, c’mon, right? *snort*

Dear dark gods the stuff I read for this job.

Needless to say, the casual libel against Zombies offends us, as does this attempt in an endless series of slanders and libels to tie Zombies to something the author dislikes.

For shame, New York Times. For shame, Mr. Duhigg.

Tags: Don't Use the Zed Word, Journamalism

This entry was posted by John Sears on Monday, August 1st, 2011 at 3:11 pm 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.