“Heads up! Look alive! Don’t turn your back! It’s coming.”
Readers of the Simple Reality books know that the zombie metaphor is often used to express the darker side of human behavior. Despite the fact that the zombie metaphor has been used in films since 1932 and along with the vampire metaphor in fiction well before that, most Americans probably don’t grasp why the blank-faced shufflers fascinate us or what the deeper meaning of these metaphors is. One American, however, seems to come closer than most in understanding why we need to sound the alarm at the approaching hordes of the staggering undead.
We are referring to the author of The Zombie Survival Guide and The World of Z, Max Brooks. Max is the son of the writer, director Mel Brooks and the late actress Anne Bancroft. Billed as “the world’s leading zombie expert,” Brooks has been traveling around spreading the alarm about the coming of a kind of perfect storm represented by the metaphorical zombies.
“W.W. Z.” was featured on a reading list put together by a former president of the U.S. Naval War College, and Brooks has lectured at various army bases on zombie preparedness. He’s a zombie laureate, our nation’s lone zombie public intellectual, touring everywhere from Long Island to Ireland to Sugar Grove [Illinois] to prepare humans for the coming zombie plague.”
Like many of us, Brooks, realizing that we are not living on the planet in a sustainable way, experiences “high anxiety.” If his neurotic hyper-vigilance is not occasioned by literal zombies, what is he afraid of? “‘Since 2001, people have been scared,’ he explained. ‘There’s been some really scary stuff that’s been happening—9/11, Iraq, Afghanistan, Katrina, anthrax letters, D.C. sniper, global warming, global financial meltdown, bird flu, swine flu, SARS. I think people really feel like the system’s breaking down.’”
Indeed, the global village community is “breaking down” but that’s hardly anything new. Fans of Simple Reality recognize Brook’s scary specters as symbols of, creations of and reactions to our own false self. We are literally scaring ourselves, that is to say that Max Brooks is a zombie. It does seem a little crazy that we would behave in a way that would cause anxiety for ourselves and others, but then, madness is an apt label for life in P-B.
“‘Max could have been great at comedy,’ says his father. ‘He was going along those lines with S.N.L. [Max wrote sketches on Saturday Night Live for two years, 2001-2003], but his targets were bigger. His world is bigger than mine. The zombies aren’t comedy. It has to do with life-and-death survival, the modus operandi for the need to survive. Not to be happy—that’s something else. To survive.’”
Max Brooks is indeed “onto something” but he hasn’t quite figured out what that something is. He is only getting vague images, pulses from his self-created neurotic imagination. Brooks, The U.S. Naval War College and the U.S. Army are getting “freaked out” by the zombies contained in a story that exists only in their own minds, images emanating from a nightmare. They are trying to craft a modus operandi in reaction to “forms” they sense are “out there.” The “something” out there is “no-thing.” Nada. Phantasmagoria. Fighting the zombies, vampires and ghosts emanating from our own minds filled with fear will lead to chaos and destruction—our destruction.
Perhaps Brooks doesn’t realize it but he is agonizing over the “theodicy question.” Why do bad things happen to good people? Philosophers and intellectuals in the West have failed to give a satisfactory answer to this question without copping out and saying that only God can answer that question. Siddhartha Gautama had more faith in humanity and articulated the response to the reality that “life is suffering.” Max Brooks would do well to begin reading one of the several good books that translate the Buddhist Sutras and the Dhammapada into simple English. Dr. Walpola Rahula’s What the Buddha Taught is an excellent book to start with.
And, of course, humanity’s survival is exactly what the articles and essays found in the books of the Simple Reality project are about. What exactly threatens our survival and specifically what to do about it make Simple Reality a kind of “Perfect Storm Survival Guide” for the people of the global village? We could begin by ceasing to imagine that life consists of chasing and biting one another. What an utterly silly scenario for adults to create and derive their identities from.
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References and notes are available for this essay.
Find a much more in-depth discussion in the Simple Reality books:
Where Am I? Story – The First Great Question
Who Am I? Identity – The Second Great Question
Why Am I Here? Behavior – The Third Great Question
Science & Philosophy: The Failure of Reason in the Human Community
