ZombAlert Pendants Offensive and Narrow-Minded
Don’t get us wrong; here at the ZRC we believe that Zombification, like any other medical procedure, should be undertaken only after due consideration and with properly informed consent. We also recognize and respect an individual’s wish not to become Differently Animated, no matter how ill-informed and self-destructive that particular wish might be.
At first glance then, these ZombAlert pendants, which can inform friends and family how you want your wishes to be respected in the event of a Death-Pending-Reanimation situation, would seem to be acceptable products, right?
Wrong. See if you can spot the problem(s):
If you were bitten during the Zombie Apocalypse what would your final wish be?
The quick Double Tap?
The classic Decapitation?
For your loved ones to Attempt To Cure You?Well, now you’re covered if they forget to ask.
Optimystical Studios is proud to launch the ZombAlert line!Each ZombAlert© pendant is individually cast by hand from top quality lead free pewter.
Once cast & cleaned the pendants are stamped with your choice of final wishes.
We currently offer: Double Tap, Decapitate, or Attempt To Cure.
Well, for starters, except in those locations where assisted suicide has been legalized, I doubt that the first two instructions are even *legal*. That would seem to limit how broadly these pendants can really be adopted.
Secondly, don’t think we haven’t noticed the ‘Double Tap’ reference to odious and offensive Anti-Zombie ‘comedy’ “Zombieland”. It’s remarkably glib to address serious questions of personal autonomy and medical treatment with a reference to Woody Harrelson’s latest sociopathic star vehicle.
Finally, after Attempt to Cure, where’s the option to get a Voluntary Zombie option? That’s the real outrage here for the ZRC, bad Anti-Zombie jokes and questionable legal implications for doctors aside; ZombAlert doesn’t even *acknowledge* the possibility that someone might, in fact, be fine with, even desirous of, becoming a Differently Animated member of the community!
Is this really so hard to believe? Many’s the day I, have in fact, considered the advantages of Zombification. Baron Mardi hasn’t gotten back to me on rates but I’m definitely keeping his services in mind in lieu of a traditional Will and Testament.
I fail to see why death should separate me from my DVD collection, plus it would help to keep the Art Director honest. No worries about spiking my beverages with poison here, no sir! Not if I would just come right back as a Zombie.
This glaring oversight, or more likely, intentional exclusion of the Pro-Zombie portion of the Living Community, severely compromises the entire ZombAlert concept for the ZRC. I think it’s safe to say, until a revised and Zombie Inclusive version of the product line is issued, that we can give officially these ZombAlert pendants our lowest rating, that of Living Supremacist.
Naturally, we await a response and any attempt to remediate this sorry situation.
About The Author
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by BuyZombie, April Horinek, AD, Zaph & EB, Zaph & EB and others. Zaph & EB said: RT @BuyZombie: Hey @Optimysticals . .. the guys over at ZRC had an interesting writeup on our article on your ZombAlert http://bit.ly/grEIPP [...]
I am sorry that our ZombAlert pendants have been taken to suggest we at Optimystical Studios are Living Supremacists. While I personally don’t wish to know how the other half lives, and proudly sport a ‘Double Tap’ ZombAlert pendant, I feel there are many options for how one can be ‘dealt with’ if involuntarily infected.
Our ZombAlert line has just recently launched with our three most requested backs. As such, at this time we are taking orders for the three stock backs you mentioned; ‘Double Tap’, ‘Decapitate’ & ‘Attempt To Cure’. We will however be happy to take requests for custom backs.
We have had custom requests for ‘Allow To Roam’ and ‘Keep As Pet’ at this time. We would be happy to add to our custom back offerings a message that would allow those who wish to become voluntarily differently animated.
As far as legal implications, if a person is infected and becomes a zombie, (also oft referred to as the undead) they are no longer living. As such the options for ‘Double Tap’ and ‘Decapitation’ no longer fall into the category of murder or assisted suicide. If a loved one is able to perform the requested act before the infection renders the victim dead or undead, then yes, there might be legal implications. However as these pendants assume an apocalyptical scenario, I think law enforcement may have more pressing issues.
If anyone has any questions about our stance on Zombies, final wishes in a Zombie Apocalypse or options for the ZombAlert pendants we can be reached through our website: http://www.OptimysticalStudios.com
EB:
We’re happy to see that you’re open to dialogue on this issue, but I don’t think that you have quite grasped the depth of our concern about your product and its implications for Zombie Rights. ‘Allow to Roam’ and ‘Keep As Pet’ both ignore the agency and individual rights of Zombies, implying that they are at best farm animals or creatures one might keep around the house on a leash, a notion that we’ve been fighting against here at the ZRC for some time.
The legal implications are not as simple as you might think. Dead people have minimal rights (though not non-existent; see things like anti-desecration laws for example), but Undead people exist in a legal gray area at the moment, a gray area we here at the ZRC are seeking to eliminate in favor of full legal suffrage and equality. Undead is not equal to Unperson.
Your pendants presuming an apocalyptic scenario is another problem. Why is it that so many people think the Zombie Apocalypse is always nigh, anyway? It would be the first one in five thousand years of recorded history after all, and there have been stories of the dead coming back to life in various guises for almost all of that period. It seems particularly unfair to the Modern Zombie to presume that, against all historical evidence, their mere existence is the harbinger of doom and anarchy.
Regardless, thank you for your time and response.
[...] kind of response. The folks over at Zombie Rights Council wrote a review of the product entitled ZombAlert Pendants Offensive and Narrow-Minded. As requested we wrote and posted a response: I am sorry that our ZombAlert© pendants have been [...]
I don’t think that ‘Allow To Roam’ or ‘Keep As Pet’ take any agency from an undead personage. If someone does not wish to be allowed to roam or kept as a loved undead member of the family (like many people relate to family pets) they wouldn’t request that as the backer of their ZombAlert pendant.
I don’t see how you can assume that no one would want these options any more than I shouldn’t assume that no one would want to be Voluntarily Zombified. By making such assumptions you undermine the rights of those people both pre and post reanimation that you state you are working for.
Specifically in reference to ‘Allow to Roam’, this is meant as a request to be allowed to go about ones business without harassment.
I feel that if you are working for removing the gray area around the undead that you should also work to allow an undead personage the right to have their undead status removed through the means of their choice (including ‘Double Tap’ and ‘Decapitation’) for those who do not wish to exist in a reanimated state.
In reference to the apocalyptical scenario, I feel that there is no reason to not assume that a large-scale emergence of zombification would not lead to some form of societal shutdown. Our society believes in many things that will cause the apocalypse. These include; global warming, the four horsemen, nuclear war, robots, and various sorts of mental and physical plagues. Saying one should not believe that the large-scale emergence of zombies would cause an apocalypse of some level, because it hasn’t happened yet, doesn’t take into account the changing nature of our world. Many things haven’t happened in the last 5,000 years, but that doesn’t mean they can’t or wont. Assumption of a pending Zombie Apocalypse is no different than the assumption that life will no longer exist on earth when the sun gets around to exploding.
I am glad you are willing to allow us to state our position on these things. I believe you are doing good work. We just want others to be able to have their final wishes honored what ever those may be.
I don’t think you can credibly state that ‘Keep as Pet’ respects a person’s individuality, and no matter how much some families like Fluffy or Bowser, the status of a pet is not the same, culturally but especially legally, as that of a person.
‘Allow to Roam’, while not as explicit, does strongly imply that Zombies are more like wild creatures than people, who are far more rarely described as ‘roaming’. Also, ‘Roamer’ is a hateful term popularized by The Walking Dead, and so when used in conjunction with Zombies carries additional and negative heft. This is of course not your fault, and Robert Kirkman should bear the shame, but it is worth considering.
I don’t deny that some Living people, presumably your target audience, might want to own those options, but our work here at the ZRC is to convince them that their desire to do so is rooted in outmoded and prejudicial conceptions of the Differently Animated.
The Zombie Rights Campaign doesn’t take a particular position on suicide, but I don’t think that suicide is precisely what we’re talking about with the ‘Double Tap’ or ‘Decapitate’ pendants, because by definition, they are asking for outside assistance. The purchase of such a pendant, much like a Life-Alert bracelet, is predicated on the notion that a person using the pendant will be unable to communicate their wishes (hence the need for a permanent signifier of those wishes, easily understood by others). If a Zombie needed assisted suicide they could simply state their wishes in writing with their doctor, which I gather is the general procedure in places where it is legal to do so.
We feel this perceived need for a failsafe post-mortem communication aid is also based in large part on the widespread and erroneous notion that Zombification automatically equals becoming an uncommunicative, unthinking husk who wanders (roams?) the Earth in search of brains.
As for the Apocalypse: widescale Zombification should, if anything, greatly improve social stability. For every person who comes back as a Zombie you have one fewer corpse to be processed by our elaborate and antiquated funereal industry, one fewer plot to dig or urn to fill, and one *more* taxpaying, contributing member of society than you had in the baseline. The large-scale emergence of Zombies presumes the large-scale emergence of Death, which we already, regretfully, deal with on a daily basis, and that particular problem would be greatly alleviated by the so-called ‘Zombie Apocalypse’.
The primary impediment to realization of the enormous potential social and financial gains of the ‘Zombie Apocalypse’ is that people have been hard-wired by our violently Anti-Zombie culture to avoid seeing these benefits and instead fear the Undead as monsters.
As for the Apocalypse, some fears are clearly more rational than others. The fear of nuclear war today, except in a limited exchange scenario between India and Pakistan or Israel and its neighbors, is fairly low, but during the last century the world stood on the brink of complete annihilation of all human life for about four straight decades. Global warming, on the other hand, is not a potential apocalypse but a currently-ongoing one, with massive loss of life already occurring around the globe as extremely powerful storms and droughts destroy agriculture, while heating melts the ice caps and devastates the ecosphere. Likewise, although the sun will never explode (it’s too small for a supernova), the best theories in astrophysics state that it will eventually swell to a red giant phase and consume the Earth, at which point, most likely, all life on it would perish. This is solid theory rather than fearful conjecture.
Contrast that with the horsemen of the apocalypse or a robot apocalypse or a Zombie apocalypse, for which there is not only no evidence that it has already commenced, but no realistic or immediate scenario by which it might. Heck, even some Zombie movies concede this point; ‘Shaun of the Dead’ presents a fairly realistic assessment of how long it would take a well-organized first world military to respond to a traditional ‘Zombie Apocalypse’. We have millenia of experience killing bipedal intelligent life forms, there’s no reason to assume that wouldn’t, tragically, translate to a ‘Zombie Apocalypse’scenario.
We thank you for your input and dialogue as well. It’s not that the ZRC is fighting against ‘final wishes’ being honored (though why assume your wishes before Zombification are your ‘final’ ones anyway?)
The ZRC just wants to inform the Living of the accurate circumstances of Zombification, and improve the Zombie state of being in our society such that the mere thought of it won’t drive so many Living people to such dark and unfortunate conclusions.
[...] Debate on ZombieRightsCampaign.com Don’t get us wrong; here at the ZRC we believe that Zombification, like any other medical [...]
[...] Debate on ZombieRightsCampaign.com Don’t get us wrong; here at the ZRC we believe that Zombification, like any other medical [...]
While the people over at Optimystical Studios have mention time after time that they make custom backs for whatever a person may want as their final wishes in the case of reanimation, you have ignored that and continued to argue for the sake of getting the last word. People, in sound mind and body, can make a request to be cremated after death in a Last Will and Testament, or to have their organs donated, and yet being “Allowed to Roam” is a hot topic for you? I thought you said you wanted to preserve the rights of the living and the undead? It seems that by fighting this you are only going against yourself and your cause (i.e. people decide for themselves what actions should be taken after reanimation (their rights as humans, living or dead)).
Please understand that the individuals at Optimystical Studios are trying to mass produce the pendants and for the sake of demonstration have used the most common requests to help other people make their decision.
Thank you for your time.
-Vega
I think, Vega, it is you that have not been following the conversation very well.
Our objection is to any company aiding and abetting the hateful and very common negative stereotype that Zombies are creatures without agency or will or intelligence of their own, that they are ‘Roamers’, in the common parlance. The fact that Living people might choose to indulge this prejudice doesn’t excuse selling them their hate fetishes any more than it would excuse opening up a laundry dedicated to getting Klan robes their gleaming whitest.
Indulging the lowest common denominator, then turning around and blaming that denominator for your actions, is both facetious and hypocritical. If you’re selling the problem specialized implements to make the problem worse, then you are also part of the problem. A vital part, in fact.
[...] Great – although we had some early opposition from the Zombie Rights Campaign. We originally only had three standard final wish options: “Double Tap”, “Decapitate” and [...]
Here’s a blog post on the legal rights of zombies:
http://marymocklaw.com/totally-random/legal-questions-to-ponder-in-a-zombie-apocalypse
[...] Great – although we had some early opposition from the Zombie Rights Campaign. We originally only had three standard final wish options: “Double Tap”, “Decapitate” and [...]