"Fear is a primitive impulse, brainless as hunger, and because the aim of horror fiction is the production of the deepest kinds of fears, the genre tends to reinforce some remarkably uncivilized ideas about self-protection. In the current crop of zombie stories, the prevailing value for the beleaguered survivors is a sort of siege mentality, a vigilance so constant and unremitting that it's indistinguishable from the purest paranoia." — Terrence Rafferty, New York Times
© Zombie Wikia
What do zombies have to do with the U.S. government's plans for dealing with a coronavirus outbreak?
Read on, and I'll tell you.
The zombie narrative was popularized
by the hit television series The Walking Dead, in which a small group of Americans attempt to survive in a zombie-ridden, post-apocalyptic world where they're not only fighting off flesh-eating ghouls but cannibalistic humans.
For a while there, zombies could be found lurking around every corner:
wreaking havoc at gun shows, battling corsets in movies such as
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and
running for their lives in 5K charity races.
Understandably, zombie fiction plays to our fears and paranoia, while allowing us to "envision
how we and our own would thrive if everything went to hell and we lost all our societal supports." Yet as journalist Syreeta McFadden points out, while dystopian stories used to reflect our anxieties,
now they reflect our reality, mirroring how we as a nation view the world around us, how we as citizens view each other, and most of all how our government views us.Indeed, the U.S. government has spent a lot of time and energy in recent years using zombies as the models for a variety of crisis scenarios not too dissimilar from what we are currently experiencing.For instance, back in 2015, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention put together a
zombie apocalypse preparation kit "that details everything you would need to have on hand in the event the living dead showed up at your front door." The CDC, in conjunction with the Dept. of Defense, even used zombies to put government agents through their paces in
mock military drills.
Fear the Walking Dead — AMC's spinoff of its popular
Walking Dead series — drove this point home by dialing back the clock to when the zombie outbreak first appears and setting viewers down in the midst of societal unrest not unlike our own experiences of recent years ("a bunch of weird incidents, police protests, riots, and ... rapid social entropy"). Then, as
Forbes reports, "the military showed up and
we fast-forwarded into an ad hoc police state with no glimpse at what was happening in the world around our main cast of hapless survivors."
Forbes found
Fear's quick shift into a police state to be far-fetched,
but anyone who has been paying attention in recent years knows that the groundwork was laid long ago for the government — i.e., the military — to intervene and lock down the nation in the event of a national disaster.We're seeing this play out now as the coronavirus contagion spreads.
Comment: See also: