shade balls & bungee guts zombie

Race and Apocalypse: Two Scenarios

Olympic swimmer Mark Spitz and a still from Zombie Flesh Eater

The following is a excerpt from page 231 (of 259 total) of Colson Whitehead's book, Zone One. In this book a plague that turns humans into zombies has taken over the globe. The zombies are referred to in the book as stragglers (who are undead, but don't move) or skels/skeletons (zombies who move, bite, and spread the virus). The dialog here is between two characters (Mark Spitz and Gary) who are clearing any left-over skels or stragglers in a "Zone" of Manhattan. Gary has just been bitten and subsequently given a large dosage of pills and morphine. Mark Spitz is keeping him conscious by re-telling the story of his nickname.

... People were becoming less than people everywhere, he had thought: monsters, soup.
     Seven Gold metals? Eight? Here was one of the subordinate ironies in the nickname: He was anything but an Olympian. The medals awarded to Mark Spitz were stamped from discarded slang. Mark Spitz explained the reference of his sobriquet to Gary, adding, "Plus the black-people-can't-swim thing."
     "They can't? You can't?"
     "I can. A lot of us can. Could. It's a stereotype."
     "I hadn't heard that. But you have to learn how to swim some-time."
     "I tread water perfectly."
     He found it unlikely that Gary was not in ownership of a master list of racial, gender, and religious stereotypes, cross-indexed with corresponding punch lines as well as meta-textual dissection of those punch lines, but he did not press his friend. Chalk it up to morphine. There was a single Us now, reviling a single Them. Would the old bigotries be reborn as well, when they cleared out this Zone, and the next, and so on, and they were packed together again, tight and suffocating on top of each other? Or was that particular bramble of animosities, fears, and envies impossible to recreate? If they could bring back paperwork, Mark Spitz thought, they could certainly reanimate prejudice, parking tickets, and reruns.
     There were plenty of things in the world that deserved to stay dead, yet they walked.

This is the first mention of race, or racism, in the book.

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And, this text is lifted from a post (by user JIR) on SurvivalBlog.com. It addresses the idea of the "unwashed masses", otherwise known as the Golden Hoard, who will flow from urban centers en-masse once the apocalypse strikes and modern amenities (food distribution, electricity, waste management, etc) are cut-off. "Originally the Golden Horde referred to the Mongol Armies of the 13th century that conquered territories from Northeast Asia to Eastern Europe to Siberia to the Black Sea. They eventually controlled over 2.3 million square miles. They were known for vicious raids and sometimes complete massacres of civilian populations." (Preppingtosurvive.com)

I agree completely with you on relocation to safer areas and stocking a remote retreat in the hinter-boonies. That’s the optimum solution and in worst case situations, it’s really the only solution likely to work long term. Any of your readers stuck in less than optimum situations are going to make a valiant effort to survive, but their odds are not as good. I am one of these folks. I worry about the golden hoard more than anything else. I would like to pass on some thoughts on the subject of what the unwashed masses will be doing after TEOTWAWKI [The End of the World as we Know It].

This quote doesn't overtly address race, but it does attend to prejudices of urban versus rural peoples. And, as Mark Dery (author of I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-by Essays on American Dread, American Dreams) has pointed out, descriptive terms for people, such as hoard, "sheeple", unwashed masses, Mongols, and urban, used on these blogs by mostly white and male survivalists point in the direction of discrimination against the other.

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When I had my on-campus interview at Rollins College I met with a couple representatives from the Diversity Committee. The asked me about how diversity played into my pedagogy, which was no problem for me, but I didn't have any answer for how diversity was addressed in my research and artwork. To paraphrase, one of the interviewers said that not only white people are effected by climate change and/or the possible "EOTWAWKI". 

These two apocalyptic scenarios, one fictional and one anticipated, paint different pictures of what race dynamics post-disaster could mean for humanity. In one racial tensions seem to have subsided in the face of "the end". In the other, people seem to be planning an impending scourge of urban flight. This is a topic I will explore more for my work. 

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from page 72 of World War Z, by Max Brooks

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cursed crew from Pirates of the Caribbean, under water and moonlight

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underwater zombie from Shock Waves

CDC, redesigned to fit it's connotations

“CDC does not know of a virus or condition that would reanimate the dead (or one that would present zombie-like symptoms),” wrote agency spokesman David Daigle in an email to The Huffington Post.

But ever since cannibalism reports have been swirling as a result of the “Miami Causeway Cannibal,” “zombie apocalypse” has been on the tip of everyone’s tongue. It was reportedly the most Googled term on Friday morning.

First there’s the “Miami Causeway Cannibal,” you know, the naked guy who beat his victim to a bloody pulp and then refused to stop ingesting his flesh until cops shot him to death. Not to mention that when authorities commanded the “Miami Causeway Cannibal,” Rudy Eugene, to stop eating his victim’s face, he growled at them as pieces of body tissue dangled from his mouth.

Next came the deranged story of a Texas mother who decapitated her son and ate parts of his brain and three of his toes, according to The Huffington Post. 

There was also the Maryland college student who reportedly admitted to killing his roommate then eating his heart along with parts of his brain.

Let’s not forget about the New Jersey man who continually stabbed himself in the abdomen, threw his intestines at officers and needed two cans of pepper spray to be subdued before they rushed him to the emergency room or the 22-year-old Japanese artist who had his genitals removed and then cooked them for five diners at a lavish banquet.
-http://archive.longislandpress.com/2012/06/04/zombie-apocalypse-cdc-releases-statement/

Monster Theory

...America, a society that has created and commodified “ambient fear"-a kind of total fear that saturates day-to-day living, prodding and silently antagonizing but never speaking its own name. This anxiety manifests itself symptomatically as a cultural fascination with monsters-a fixation that is born of the twin desire to name that which is difficult to apprehend and to domesticate (and therefore disempower) that which threatens. And so the monster appears simultaneously as the demonic disemboweler of Slasher and as a wide-eyed, sickeningly cute plush toy for children: velociraptor and Barney.

Note from the author: Portions of this preface and of chapter 1, “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” have twice been delivered as part of conference presentations. Invariably the audience giggles at the juxtaposition-so seemingly absurd-of the friendly mascot of PBS (Barney) and the equally but oppositely fictionalized dinosaur who thinks like a human and shreds flesh like the Alien (velociraptor). “That's not funny,” I chide them, knowing full well that it is; what anxiety, then, do we hide by the laughter? What does the dismissal by declaration of absurd mismatch allow us not to have to think about?

- from Monster Theory: Reading Culture, by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

deadified

"dead yourself" Top Voted images

The Sexy Dead

previous references: #1 & #2

why did i just now figure out that this calendar and video exist!

Porn of the Dead promo image

zombie dildo off of etsy

zombie temp tats

got these in the mail today - they'll wait in my studio till i return from Chicago with a set of male mannequin legs

all perishes

The fear of death is indeed the pretense of wisdom, and not real wisdom, being a pretense of knowing the unknown; and no one knows whether death, which men in their fear apprehend to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good.
-Plato, "Apology," Dialogues, 399 B.C.

What is death at most? It is a journey for a season; a sleep longer than usual. If thou fearest death, thou shouldest also fear sleep.
-St. John Chrysostom, Homily, c. 388

When there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the Earth.
-Peter (Ken Foree), "Dawn of the Dead," 1978

All perishes and passes that we see with our eyes. The wealth of this world wanes into wretchedness. Robes and riches rot in the ditch. . . . Their gold and their treasures draw them to death.
-Richard Role (c. 1300-1349), Selected Works of Richard Role

busy bunny

my week is packed and i'm running around every day - more than once today i thought it was monday - plus i had zombie dreams all night, not normal ones though. the kind where zombies are elsewhere and i and a bunch of others are living in dark and decrepit buildings, eating food and wondering when it will run out.

so i need a bunny

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            ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

On the road beside it, BLOOD.

    FADE IN:

1    EXT. THE EMPTY STREET OF A CITY - DAY

No people. A FEW CARS AND TRUCKS are parked at odd angles, abandoned.
A TITLE FADES IN, one phrase at a time.

FIVE YEARS...
SINCE THE DEAD FIRST WALKED.

2    EXT. THE CITY - DAY

We hear THE SOUND OF A STRONG WIND. DEBRIS flutters through the streets. A LARGE ALLIGATOR slithers into frame, stops and looks around.

MONTAGE: as MORE GATORS explore the empty streets, knocking over GARBAGE CANS, upsetting the MANNEQUINS in A DEPARTMENT STORE WINDOW. A GATOR crawls out through the open doors of AN ABANDONED BANK. LOOSE BILLS are dragged along under the animal's tail. They flutter away on the WIND.

3    EXT. THE CITY - DAY

GATORS crawl over A '79 CADELLIC. A FEMALE SKELETON sits slumped over the steering wheel. In the back a BABY'S BONES are strapped into AN INFANT'S SAFETY SEAT. One of the gators THUMPS its tail maddeningly against the windshield. ANOTHER TITLE APPEAR:

FLORIDA - 1987

4    EXT. THE CITY - DAY

CLOSE ON A SECTION OF PAVEMENT as we hear THE SOUND OF SLUGGISH FOOTSTEPS approaching. A SHADOW appears at the bottom of the frame. It gets longer and takes on the shape of a man.

TIGHT ON THE AFTERNOON SUN, blinding us. Into the FOREGROUND lurches THE FIGURE which cast the shadow. Glare obscures all facial detail until the head jogs into position directly in front of the fiery ball in the sky. Then we see its hideous, dead eyes, its blue-grey colour, the blackened wound where a large portion of jaw has been ripped away. This is a ZOMBIE! A MUSIC CHORD SOUNDS and THE MAIN TITLE
APPEARS:

DAY OF THE DEAD
 

28 Weeks Later script