The Watching Dead

This past Sunday night I did something that was quite rare for me—I went along with the crowd and participated in the same activity as probably the greatest percentage of my fellow countrymen were at that particular moment. Specifically, I watched the Season 3 premier of everybody’s favorite zombie splatterfest, The Walking Dead. Amazingly, not only was it the highest rated cable teevee show, EVAH, but it even beat out the ratings of all three major networks during its time slot, to include an NFL game being broadcast on NBC.

I say amazingly because although I myself have been a bit a of a zombie aficionado ever since the first time I caught the original George Romero classic, Dawn of the Dead, on VHS back when I was in college, I never would have expected the zombie genre to (ahem) rise up and become anything more than fodder for B-movies and short story horror anthologies. It is one thing for a guy like me who grew up a horror fiction geek to (double ahem) eat this stuff up, but when my wife tells me as she did yesterday that most of her girlfriends were discussing the show on Facebook I feel safe in assuming that we are witnessing the emergence of a genuine cultural phenomenon.

If you haven’t yet watched the show, the one thing that cannot be said is that it’s a sanitized version of a zombie apocalypse. There are plenty of gruesome close ups of guts and gore of the type that not too long ago were restricted to R-rated movies. Sunday night’s premier was in fact one of the more violent episodes, climaxing with an in your face shot of one of the living survivors having his leg gruesomely amputated with a hatchet in an attempt to save him from the virus that causes the dead to rise.

Oh sure, you can gripe about some of the tiny details that the show gets wrong like, for example, the living survivors’ seemingly magical ability to execute perfect zombie head shots with their sidearms without ever missing, even at a distance and while running. Ever done a headshot drill at the firing range? I have, and let me tell you it isn’t easy to do even at close range while stationary, not under duress and with the target not rushing towards you determined to rip your guts out. Another quibble is how cavalier the survivors are about getting zombie gore all over them while fighting with swords and blunt weapons, even though the contamination of one little scratch on their skin could be a potential death sentence in that situation. And don’t get me started about Herschel’s “magic shotgun” in the last episode of Season 2. I know the man is a Christian and all, but the number of rounds that came out of that thing without reloading puts the old “loaves and the fishes” story to shame.

Nevertheless, these are mere quibbles. I came here to praise or at least analyze The Walking Dead, not to (ahem again) bury it. Take it from me, the show is worth your time if you are into good zombie stories, or if you just want to scratch your head for awhile and try to figure out just what the heck is going on with our culture.

We’re a nation that has become so good at lying to itself that most people are unable to recognize what the truth even is anymore. The Hologram of the American media spends 24/7 blowing sunshine up the skirts of the masses in an effort to convince them that everything is hunky-dory and that they should get their fat asses out to the mall and consume, consume, consume. Nearly everything in our popular culture, from “reality” television shows, to American Idol-ized music, to endless superhero action movies and dimwitted romantic comedies, to trashy “young adult” novels, are not only relentlessly aimed at the lowest common denominator, but almost completely crowd out any works of artistic quality with the seemingly specific aim of desensitizing those portions of the brain that engage in critical thinking and decision making.

The underlying message is quite simple: work, work, work so you can spend, spend, spend and we will all live in a more prosperous tomorrow with even more electronic gadgets to ruin our attention spans and keep us fat, dumb and if not happy at least not out rioting in the streets demanding change. And if you can’t afford it right now, the banksters will keep right on lending you the money so you can have your instant gratification while being tied by your debts even tighter to a system that is slowly destroying your health, your security and your future. Not that you’ll ever notice, because you are too busy worrying about the supposedly fierce rivalry between the utterly vacuous Mariah Carey and the even more vacuous Nicki Minaj, and if you start feeling depressed about all of this there are plenty of pills we can dope you up with to help you accept your lot in this disposable society.

Yet despite this gargantuan effort to anesthetize the masses, end of the world and dystopian visions have never been hotter as a form of mass entertainment. It all reached a crescendo this past year when The Hunger Games displaced Harry Potter and Twilight as the movie (and book series) the teenyboppers just HAD to see. Nowadays, there’s a version of the apocalypse for every audience and world view, from the Rapture fantasies of the Left Behind series to Colson Whitehead’s literary zombie novel for New Yorker readers, Zone One. And countless millions of people are no doubt holding their collective breath to see if the ancient Mayan doomsday prophecy comes true this December.

So why, in the face of all the propagandizing efforts to the contrary, have Americans become so obsessed with the end of the world? Could it be that many people sense deep down in their bones that we are teetering on the precipice of an epic civilization ending disaster even if they won’t consciously admit it? Perhaps so. You would have to have the emotional intelligence quotient of a slab of granite not to feel that SOMETHING has certainly gone wrong with our decadent and depraved society.

Interestingly, the marketers have caught on to the appeal of the apocalypse phenomenon. The Walking Dead premier itself had about six commercial breaks for all manner of useless products interrupting its one hour broadcast, which creates quite a jarring viewing experience especially since, as Romero recognized 33 years ago, zombies are the perfect metaphor for the mindless consumer. There was even a contest you could enter to win the brand spanking new Hyundai the living characters were driving during the episode. Nice to know that when the world ends, a Korean automobile plant will apparently be the only safe haven available anywhere in the world.

No doubt most people watching the show imagined themselves in the place of Rick and his plucky band of survivors, with no awareness that in the real world their behavior is much closer to the deadly horde, consuming all in their path in a desperate attempt to maintain their unsustainable lifestyles. The only difference is that there is not an elite group of puppet masters in the form of the oligarchs controlling the actions of the undead. All in all, I don’t know what is worse, that we so easily buy into a predatory system that is slowly killing us, or that we do so to enrich the very jackals who manipulate us into going along with it. But hey, on next week's show, Rick and the gang will surely finish clearing out that prison, and then maybe they at least will “safe,” if only for a little while.


Bonus: "I learned everything from George Romero"

There is No Hope, Only Denial

image: "There is no hope...and you know it now, like I do, don't you? There is no hope for any of us."

There is a memorable scene in the climactic episode of the first season of the otherwise erratic television series, The Walking Dead, in which the last surviving doctor at the Center for Disease Control blurts out to Deputy Sheriff Rick Grimes and his ragtag band of zombie apocalypse survivors, "The world runs on fossil fuels...I mean how stupid is that?" right before the generators at the CDC facility run out of gas, extinguishing forever the last hope that a cure might be found for the plague that has turned humanity into mindless, flesh eating corpses. It's just one scene in the series that has resonance in the real world as we are living in it today. Another is in the second season when God-fearing farmer Herschel Greene has a drunken epiphany and confesses to Grimes that he has lost all hope for the future.

For 16 months now I have been writing this blog and attempting to document what I see as the hopeless predicament faced by our industrialized society and America in particular as we confront the multiple scourges of peak oil, resource depletion, overpopulation, climate change and environmental degradation. One thing you may have noticed if you have been a regular reader of this blog is a distinct lack of proffered solutions to our collective predicament. Quite simply, that is because I do not have any solutions, or at least not any that I believe have any chance of being accepted by enough people to matter. Beyond making adjustments in your own life to ensure that you don't fall between the cracks during this "zombie economy" period in which the lights still come on at night, I am firmly of the belief that there is not a whole lot you, me or any other single individual can do. We are merely passengers on this runaway train, and the engine room is as off limits to us as the dark side of the moon.

The impending end of our modern way of life is unlikely to come tomorrow, next week, next month, next year or even within the next few years, but the long term trends could not be more obvious or unavoidable. And while at this late date it might still be theoretically possible with the remaining reserves of fossil fuels available for mankind to manage a powering down in such a way that avoids a world wide calamity and mass die off, that would assume a collective wisdom and willingness to participate in shared sacrifice that sadly our species just does not seem to possess. As long as there are sociopaths who strive for dominance--and they seem to have taken over a vast majority of the leadership positions in the world today--there is no chance of awakening the mass consciousness before it is too late.

Back in June I made the decision to take a break from blogging and then reduce the number of posts here at the Downward Spiral. My motivation was in part so I could do a little more living and spend a bit less time tied to computer keyboard. That part of the plan has actually worked out fairly well. My other reason for doing so was that I had hoped that reducing my relentless obsession with the future might brighten my outlook a bit. That part hasn't been nearly so successful. Even though my thinking has evolved from those dark days of the fall of 2008, and I no longer see a fast collapse of civilization as being a likely outcome, my hopes that by pulling back a bit I might find reasons to be at least a little bit more optimistic about the eventual endgame have not borne fruit.

The same old question that has been nagging me for the past four years still remains: just how quickly are things going to devolve? Well, if I knew the correct answer, I could probably make enough money to ensure that I would be one of the lucky few around the middle of the 21st century who still manage to die of old age. It would seem, for example, that a U.S. presidential campaign could not possibly become more trivial and devoid of substance than the sham we are going through right now. That would seem to indicate that by 2016, a full eight years after America's economy became irreparably broken, awareness that the old paradigm of economic growth is dead should be widespread enough that the powers that be will be forced to snuff out the remaining facade of representative democracy in order to maintain their control. But then again, four years ago I would have said the same thing about the elections of 2012.

The fact is that no one knows how long we have left before things really start to unravel, and anyone who claims they do is completely full of shit. I've said this before, but author Jim Kunstler was very wise to describe what we are going through as a LONG emergency. Nevertheless, getting back to the main theme of this post, that does NOT mean that I see any possibility of redemption when 99% of the population (the REAL 99%) remain utterly oblivious and in deep denial about what's coming (and even the 1% who do know continually argue and fight amongst themselves as to what can or should be done). Thanks to the desire of our "leaders" to keep the game going as long as possible, we'll likely keep on bumbling along until one day we can't any longer. And that is the most definitive prediction about the future that I am willing to make.


Bonus: "This is what takes us down...This is our extinction event"

Book Review: Zone One by Colson Whitehead (and a Site Announcement)

"To Kaitlyn, the scourge came from a different population. She aimed at the rabble who nibbled at the edge of her dream: the weak-willed smokers, dead beat dads and welfare cheats, single moms incessantly breeding, the flouters of speed laws and those who had only themselves to blame for their ridiculous credit card debt."

There is just something primal about a great zombie story. Maybe it's because zombies touch the deep fear many of us have of ever being singled out for destruction by a crowd of our fellow citizens, or maybe it's because zombies make the perfect metaphor for our brain dead, out-of-control consumer culture, but it is probably no accident in these paranoid times that the zombie has risen (so to speak) from B-movie status to become a very prominent icon in our popular culture.

That said, and take this as coming from someone who considers himself a bit of a zombie aficionado, most zombie novels (ahem) stink. They are often either self-published and atrociously edited and/or, the hero/protagonist is portrayed as some cartoonish action figure mowing down legions of the undead and ushering his little band of survivors to safety. Left unexplored in such books is a thoughtful examination of what it would be like to actually live in a world overrun with the undead. The one previous novel that explored such territory was Max Brooks's sublime World War Z, which stands as a towering monument among the vast wasteland that is zombie literature.

Well, now we can add a second entry to the list of great zombie novels. Colson Whitehead is probably the most talented writer to ever tackle the genre, and his writing style more resembles someone who produces short fiction for the New Yorker than someone who writes with too much testosterone and not enough (double ahem) brains. Zone One starts off kind of slowly, and much of the action takes place in a series of flashbacks, but it picks up steam and towards the end begins to deliver a series of strong stomach punches to the reader.

The story's protagonist, whose true name is never revealed but who goes by the ironic nickname of Mark Spitz, has been assigned as a sweeper, disposing of straggling numbers of the walking dead from lower Manhattan as part of a project by the newly reborn U.S. government to retake the island and once again make it suitable for habitation by the living. Mark Spitz and his fellow sweepers move methodically from building to building, ousting and dispatching the occasional animated corpse while dealing with their own tormented memories of the Last Night and everything they have lost and have witnessed since then. A constant theme of the novel is whether the survivors should let themselves hope that civilization can really be reborn, or whether they should remain within their hardened psychic shells (suffering from variations of a malady wryly named Post Apocalyptic Stress Disorder, or PASD) until the war against the undead has truly been won.

As all good zombie stories should, Zone One contains plenty of wry social commentary on the times in which we live, satirizing everything from the militarization of our society to the banality of reality television. The plot, despite the many detours through each main character's personal history, builds to a appropriate and logical climax. My one forewarning is that this is a literary zombie novel, and the style of writing may be a bit off-putting at first (this could also be why it has such a low average customer review rating on Amazon). Overall, Zone One is a very appropriate story that seems distinctively tailored to times in which we live.


Site announcement: I will be out of town starting tomorrow until after Labor Day (September 3rd). There will no posting and there may be long delays in moderating comments (depending on my Internet connectivity) during this time.

Bonus: "All we want to do is eat your brains"

BroadSign International Files for Bankruptcy

There is no truth to the rumor that falsely reporting a zombie outbreak is the real reason behind this story from Bloomberg:

BroadSign International Inc., a maker of software for operating digital signs, sought bankruptcy protection from creditors and said it intends to auction almost all its assets.

The company, based in Boise, Idaho, listed debt of $10 million to $50 million and assets of $1 million to $10 million in Chapter 11 documents filed today in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Delaware. Two affiliates also sought court protection.

“The most effective way to maximize the value of their estates for the benefit of creditors is to complete a prompt sale of substantially all their assets,” BroadSign Chief Executive Officer Brian Dusho said in court documents.

BroadSign and its affiliates are insolvent and income is “insufficient to continue their operations without an infusion of further capital,” Dusho said. The company will seek court approval to borrow as much as $328,295 to help fund operations until it completes the sale.

The company’s software is used to manage digital advertising across formats such as billboards, kiosks and public transportation. BroadSign operates displays for airports, subway systems, highways or supermarkets in Canada, the U.K., Scandinavia, Spain and Singapore, according to its website and news releases.

Sounds like BroadSign is well on its way to being dead. We'll see if it remains buried.


Bonus: "All we want to do is eat your brains"

Bankrupt Chain Restaurants Are Still Holding On

I've posited the theory previously on this blog that there are a lot of companies out there, particularly in the consumer portion of the economy, that are just hanging on by the skin of their teeth hoping that a real economic recovery will take place soon and allow them to survive. All it will take to kill many of these concerns is another major economic shock wave. Well, more evidence of this phenomena was reported last week by CNBC in a story about how many bankrupt restaurant chains are so far refusing to go under:

You see them all across the country, in shopping malls and street corners, suburban towns and city centers: zombie restaurants.

Many of the undead are part of familiar chains that filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection this year: Friendly’s, Chevys, Sbarro, Perkins. The zombie restaurants, barely bringing in enough cash to cover basic expenses, always seem to be one sizzling fajita or glazed chicken skewer away from a merciful end, but somehow keep hanging on — leaving too many restaurants chasing after scarce dining dollars.

“There’s a lot of walking dead,” said Bob Goldin, executive vice president for Technomic, a consulting firm that works with restaurant companies. “A lot of chains, they hang in there and they’re hard to kill off.”

Consumers, who have generally cut back on the number of meals out since the recession [cnbc explains] began, are benefiting from the proliferation of zombies. Healthy and failing restaurants alike have been forced to discount relentlessly to lure diners. But for the restaurants, particularly small independent operators, the competition from the undead is a nightmare that just won’t end.

Heh - given how many times I've used the term "zombie economy" on this blog, I love that CNBC is now using the same metaphor.

So who are some of the walking dead?

When Friendly’s Ice Cream, the chain based in Massachusetts, filed for bankruptcy protection in October, it said it would close 63 underperforming restaurants. But the company said it would continue to operate 420 stores, and a spokesman said it was making plans to expand again.

In California, Real Mex Restaurants, which owns several chains, including the midprice Chevys Fresh Mex, closed just 30 outlets after it filed for bankruptcy in October. It continues to operate 156 restaurants.

After Sbarro, the Italian fast-food chain, filed for bankruptcy in April, it closed 31 stores in the United States, but kept the doors open on 429.

Some chains are even trying to make a comeback:

The imbalance does not seem likely to end soon. Indeed, one midprice chain that everyone thought was dead and buried — Bennigan’s — is now coming back from the crypt.

Bennigan’s declared bankruptcy in 2008 and abruptly shut down the approximately 240 restaurants operated by the company, though some franchise-run Bennigan’s restaurants stayed in business.

Now, a group of investors has resurrected the franchising company and plans to open a small number of company-owned restaurants and dozens of new franchised outlets over the next five years. Paul M. Mangiamele, chief executive of Bennigan’s Franchising, said he had come up with a new design for stores and a revamped menu that would inject new life into the brand.

This is what the past three years of insane federal deficit spending has bought us, a temporary reprieve from the crash in which the dimwitted continue to make plans as if nothing has changed. Just more sheep for the slaughterhouse when the next big leg of the downturn finally begins.


Bonus: Welcome to Zombieland

Saturday Night Video: "Dead Set" - Best. Zombie. Movie. Evah.

The holiday shopping season is in full swing here in the U.S. Black Friday was a particular disgrace, featuring shootings, pepper sprayings, taserings and a variety of fistfights, most happening at Walmart, interestingly enough. The insane You Tube videos of Black Friday shoppers trampling each other in an orgy of mindless consumerism always reminds me of zombie movies.

So in that spirit, I thought I would link to the full video version of Dead Set, which for my money is the best zombie movie ever made. It first appeared as a five-part teevee show on British television, but the whole thing sans commercials is only a bit under two-and-a-half hours long. Dead Set ups the ante on Romero's Dawn of the Dead by placing its initial outbreak survivors on the set of the British reality show, Big Brother. The acting, writing, production values and the (ahem) bitingly dark humor are the best I've ever seen in the genre, and that includes its American teevee counterpart, The Walking Dead.

Enjoy!