Monster mash …

… The Walking Dead in an Age of Anxiety by Michael J. Totten, City Journal Autumn 2014. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.

 Angst about the end of civilization has pervaded popular culture before. When I was growing up during the Cold War, I believed—deep in my teenage bones—that I might never graduate from high school because the Earth might first be incinerated in a nuclear holocaust. Novels like Nevil Shute’s On the Beach and Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon and movies like WarGames and The Day After terrified me because they seemed plausible—though, since they were fiction, they also offered a way to overcome that fear. With the end of the Cold War, however, the threat of total destruction eased. Political theorists talked about the triumph of liberal democracy and the opening of a new age of peace and prosperity. Postapocalyptic scenarios on film and television were rarer and tended to be set in the future, as in 1999’s The Matrix. Zombies weren’t really part of the picture.

Totten has to be a good deal younger than I am. I am old enough to remember going through nuclear drill in grade school — you know, crawling under the desk. I think I read On the Beach when it cam out (in 1957). I also worked off and on for several years as an editor in the field of arms control and disarmament — my first job after college, in fact. And I was never remotely as terrified as he says he was.I would, however, be mostly terrified doing his kind of high-risk journalism. Go figure. Anyway, I haven't seen any of these zombie shows. Zombies don't interest me, and the Apocalypse has a happy ending. Interesting how people can buy into zombies, but not the Resurrection.