Zombie finale!

So, a few weeks ago, we learned that zombies are a curiously popular part of contemporary american culture. After that, we learned one reason why: we're elitists at heart. This week, y'all will get my second argument for why we like zombies: we're germophobes.

germ-o-phobes

Swine Flu, SARS, HIV/AIDS, Mad Cow Disease, and Avian Bird Flu are all modern (ish) illnesses. Remember them all? I bet you do. The media probably loves these stories, as they affect every one of their viewers and readers. Who cares if SARS largely broke out in Asia? IT COULD GET HERE! Who cares if the Swine Flu is essentially the flu, but stronger? IT COULD GET YOU!

As a society, we seem to be driven by a fear of illness, and I don't blame news and healthcare industries for capitalizing on that fear. I'm not going to bother with research here; we all know just how massive the healthcare industry is. Watch TV, look at the covers of magazines and you'll see how important our health is to us. I'd say it's linked with our elitism (we're such badasses that we can kill everything but heart disease and obesity), but that's another rant.

In the history of mankind, we have never been cleaner. We have never known as much about diseases and the human body as we do right now. We have never had the kind of technology and capability to fight diseases as we have right now. We have never had such a high level for our common understanding of sickness as we have right now. But still, we're afraid. I won't explore why we have hypochondriacs (woo! spelled that right the first try! woo!), germophobes, and such a focus on cleanliness in our modern world. I won't explore that here, because right now we're all about zombies.

So, we all agree we're a bunch of germophobes, walking around with our own little personal bottles of hand sanitizer?

**crickets**

taken straight from the CDC's website!

Modern, popular, successful zombie stories source their zombies from viral outbreaks pretty much across the board. Look at 28 Days Later (they don't SAY zombie, but they're friggin zombies), the Resident Evil video game series, World War Z (the mediocre film for sure), and The Walking Dead series (both TV and graphic novels): they all depict a zombie virus. Those are off the top of my head, but come on, that's a pretty big theme here.

Now, zombism doesn't have to be viral; it doesn't have to be a disease. But it is.

The history of the concept of zombism is pretty cool, but I'll just give you a summary: voodoo. Zombism was an affliction from, you guessed it, a witch doctor. You could enslave a person after death through the use of some handy verses and herbs (verses and herbs... just say that out loud... sounds cool, don't it? Sounds like a good title to a book about a pot-smoking pastor or a contemporary washout hippie band... I digress...).

Clearly, the origin had little association with diseases, conceptually. But that kind of zombie doesn't look much like what we recognize as zombies, so what about modern works of fiction? In both Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, they never really nail down the source of zombism. There are talks and allusions to Venus probes, but really people are too busy surviving and freaking out to find any answers. But, in Dawn of the Dead, one theory is proposed: Hell is full, overflowing, and invading the living earth.

That doesn't sound like any disease I know of.

I don't know exactly when zombism picked up a viral origin (it annoys me that I don't know that), but I do know that it's a more modern concept. And I do propose that the introduction of a "zombie virus" into the lore served it well, and has become a part of its modern canon. Curiously, it's an instance of art being shaped by society; our fear of viruses and disease is expressed in modern zombie fiction. This fear is linked with our own elitism, and we see that zombie movies do two utterly important things: they sympathize with our terror and encourage our ego. They mimic our weaknesses and our strengths, and this is why they're so suddenly popular.

Click the ads, and hopefully I'll write more than once a week. Life's been happening. However, I'll leave you with this (you may have to squint to see it clearly, but it's hilariously awesome):

Leaving, part One (Bonus: sawn-off review of "World War Z")

You ever get the sense that a state is convincing you to leave and never return? Not in the sense of being railroaded out of town, or tarred and feathered, but little things.

[Scroll down for the spoiler-free sawn-off review of World War Z]

I was driving a route I've gone about once a week for the past two years, which half of Conway drives to work and back in Little Rock, when I almost got into an accident. Part of me isn't surprised, because when I moved here, my insurance rates jumped up a good chunk. That suggests bad drivers, sorry, and it was confirmed when I actually saw people "drive." Forget about the rushing through yellow lights, or even outright blowing through the reds, that's too expected for people here. No, I saw a guy make a U-turn in the middle of a busy road, weaving around what traffic he wasn't blocking! He was ten feet past the intersection (which allows U-turns legally, but that's another story), and just fifty from an actual parking lot in which he could safely turn about. But no, he HAD to turn RIGHT THERE. 

That's one story from this week, and one smidgen of evidence suggesting Arkansas needs to require a driver's education class.

Thankfully, I wasn't near a collision there. A few days ago, however, I was almost in a pile-up. Yep, thanks to some late braking by the pair of idiots in front of me at the time, we all had to engage in a tactical swerve to a staggered-line formation for safety. They went left and right, and I went right then left and deftly avoided the semi to my right and the ditch to my left, all while pulsing, pumping, and finally slamming my brakes to keep myself out of their cars. I thanked the god of anti-lock brakes and the god of attentive drivers for existing, that day (they happen to be the same god (God), who happens to be the God of Everything, which includes anti-lock brakes and attentive drivers). And of course, I do what everybody does when the cause becomes apparent: I looked. Did I see a grisly car wreck? How about our president, handing out money? Or perhaps Johnny Cash, not so dead? Of course not. So what caused the unnecessary and sudden slow-down? A young girl got pulled over. She was wearing jean-shorts that looked homemade. That's about it.

At least it wasn't nothing (that's happened way too often already).

Then later, THAT SAME DAY, I was turning right, onto a main road, when Bozo McOld decided to pull out in front of me from the bank opposite me. It was an aggressive maneuver, which I can respect, but it did require that I slam on my brakes (and same for Dude behind me) when he realized what he was doing and then immediately apologized by SLAMMING on his brakes in the MIDDLE of four lanes. I'm not kidding; he took up the entire street. Now, had he gunned it from the get-go, everything would've been fine. So it just goes to show you that half-measures don't cook, and that it's better to be an ass-hole than just an ass.

That's not the worst, though. Once, I saw a driver work VERY VERY hard to pull a u-turn to go the wrong way down an offramp. He worked for that shit. And there's a particular stretch of highway in Little Rock that I've witnessed, I kid you not, a delivery truck (big sized) pointed the WRONG WAY (toward me!), and suddenly fix his error and about-face. That was in my first month of living here (welcome to Arkansas; we don't require a driver's education course).

And that's just the road-safety stuff.

Today, I saw World War Z (It was okay, but not nearly dark enough to be a proper zombie horror, and not light enough to be a proper zombie comedy. Shaun of the Dead, Zombieland, 28 Days Later, The Walking Dead: those are proper zombie movies/shows and you should watch them all twice. This movie fell short of greatness, but was good for eight bucks' fun. Not worth 3D, but worth the big screen.) After the (decent) movie, there was an encounter between two women in the audience that was honestly more tense and exciting than anything that happened on screen. Many a "fatass" was slung in that discussion, and I was convinced that yes indeed, Arkansas is convincing me to never return.

The places we live, they shape us, but there isn't much of Arkansas I want to take with me wherever I go (that stuff will be covered on a later post; this one is about bad drivers). As always, I'll close with this: Click the ads! All of them! Many times!