Kurt Schlichter ruminates on our current obsession with zombies. Not long ago, many mainstream stories focused on foreign threats or nuclear fallout. Today, we entertain ourselves with mysterious outbreaks that turn people into flesh-eaters.
“What does it say,” Schlichter asks, “that our collective subconscious senses less of a threat from fanatical outsiders who, in the last couple decades, have killed thousands of us via terrorism, than from each other?
. . . The foreigners are a threat, but that’s under control. What is out of control, or what seems like it is out of control, is our society itself.”
Our enemies used to be nation states that were of the same order of magnitude as the US. The Empire of Japan, Nazi Germany, and then the USSR, may it rest in pieces. They were a credible threat, especially the last one with mutually assured destruction.
Now we’re talking about non state actors that in most cases don’t even control territory. Losers that need to result to suicide tactics. Sure, there is a threat, but if they can kill a few thousand Americans in a decade, it is a tiny one. So to get a real threat, we need to think of fantastical occurrences.