Braaaiiinnnsss!: From Academics to Zombies

Zombies on Broadway

99 Zombies on Broadway Anthony Wilson The entire history of humanity is littered with the results of the two instinctive reactions any individual takes to any change in his or her situation: fight or flight. Survival by violence or survival by discretion as the better part of valour. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, Western civilization as a whole had re-created these responses at a societal level. To any major change or threat, Westernized humanity now had two reactions: we destroy it, or we make it famous. Or both, in either order. We can see this in many of the pivotal events of the early part of the century. Within two or three years of the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York, two nations were being destroyed by disproportionate force given their original involvement, and films were made so that the populace could munch on popcorn while sharing the vicarious thrill of being a firefighter on the forty-ninth floor. Alternatively, one could consider the fall of the vampire movie by 2014 with the advent of the fourth Twilight film. After nearly a century of entertainment , this movie was so irredeemably hated by everyone that the entire genre came to the point of collapse. Zombies on Broadway 100 Indeed, again and again throughout recent history, the combination of idolizing and then subsequently or simultaneously destroying rears its head, but in few places has the combination been so starkly drawn and vivid as in the zombie crisis of the past twenty-five years. Indeed, a quarter of a century further down the line, it is difficult to put ourselves into the mindsets of those who were there when it began. It is almost laughable, given what came later, that, upon discovery of the first cases of zombification, the general reaction of the press and the governments of the world was a kind of amused cynicism: zombies were entertainment , so far as everyone knew, and the “real” kind—for those who even believed that it was anything more than a publicity stunt to start with—were treated as entertainment even then. As we all know—and as many learned to their cost—it quickly became far less funny. We’re not here to dwell on the decisions made and the extreme and arguably knee-jerk reactions taken by some of the governments of the day. We are certainly familiar enough with those stories; everyone has a story to tell and, of course, what remains of Pittsburgh will forever be a reminder that, when the chips are down, humanity’s most obvious principle is to hit the problem with large bombs until it goes away. Of course, we were saved by the stratagem of inoculation, and the world was saved by scientists. The team of geneticists , viral biologists and mathematicians who led this research were, of course, famous for their allotted fifteen minutes but, being scientists, were swiftly forgotten. Very few in the general public, even now at this slim distance, can name all four— Vanderdeken, Vaughan, Chen and Smith? (yes, even with the trademark question mark in her name)—and in this they are not dissimilar to J. Robert Oppenheimer, whom very few people can name as the inventor of the nuclear bomb. Having avoided extinction—or, at the least, total zombie conversion—humanity now had a major shake-up, perhaps the most dramatic and drastic since the extinction of the Neanderthals , and we treated it as perhaps we should have come to expect. The initial panic reaction gradually subsided and, although we had stood on the brink, the general consensus was Anthony Wilson 101 that it probably couldn’t have been as bad as everyone said it was going to be, for the simple reason that we had all survived. There was even a reaction suggesting that total zombification had been the scaremongering of scientists, and possibly zombieism itself had even been designed by them to make money for themselves. There are, of course, conspiracy theorists everywhere. But the success of the containment of zombieism, and the absolute halting of the spread of the disease through both the inoculation stratagem and a massive—and very expensive— series of awareness campaigns, unfortunately did nothing for those who had succumbed already. Although we are able to suppress their urge to kill, scientists were then, and continue to be, unable to find a method of reversing...