And Now, A Book Review...?

There’s a guy who lives down the street from my grandma who is growing pot in his garage.

My grandmother is utterly convinced that he and his associates are out to get her.  She thinks that they eavesdrop on her conversations and follow her when she goes out to eat.  Because, y’know, they’re druggies.

My grandfather died of lung cancer at the tail-end of the 1970s.  He was an alcoholic.

Both my grandmother and my grandfather grew up in Minnesota.  He came from Duluth, she came from the backwoods along Lake Superior, not far from a river called the Temperance River, so named because the river was peculiar for its lack of a bar where it spills in to the lake.

My grandmother was born right around the time of America’s pointless experiment in Prohibition.  I suppose it’s too much to ask that she remember the time of bootleggers[1] and Al Capone, as she spent the first decade of her life in a place that barely had roads and probably sorely lacked for speakeasies.  But to me the idea of pot being illegal makes about as much sense as Prohibition.  I don’t smoke pot.  But I know one thing: pot is a harmless drug and potheads are more likely to annoy you to death with inane ideas that only seem profound under the influence[2] than shoot you.

Yet it seems to me as though my grandmother should be thinking of this in terms of the terrible idea that was Prohibition than some idea of a bad element[3] moving in to start gang warfare around her little rural cottage.[4]  The reason she’s so freaked out can be summed up in four words:

The War on Drugs.

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Now I know what you’re thinking right now.  You’re thinking, “Yeah, that’s great, but what does it have to do with zombies?”

Why?  Because zombies are so hot right now.  I hate the fact that zombies are huge right now, because zombies are a completely uninteresting monster, yet they’re all the fuck over the place as if they’re the coolest thing since Power Wheels or Hungry Hungry Hippos or whatever the kids thought was cool three years ago (Tamaguchis?  Pokemon?  Chia Pets?  C’mon, somebody help me out here).

Now, this isn’t to say that I completely hate the zombie thing.  I loved Shaun of the Dead.  I own Zombieland on DVD.  But I enjoyed those movies because they weren’t actually about zombies.  They were about a world that contained zombies.

This is a small nuance, but an important one.  And it’s usually the small nuances that make all the difference.

The movie monster reflects a fear that everyone viewing the movie has on some level.  Of all the fears represented by the movie monster, the zombie’s is the most existential, the least personal, and in that, the most personal of all.  The zombie represents nothing so much as death itself.

Think about it.  The zombie has no personality.  The zombie has no thought.  All the zombie wants to do is feed, and in feeding, make you become the same as it.

But there are two moments in every zombie movie that define that existential fear.  You know them.  The first comes the first time the protagonists are confronted by the fact that one of the zombies is actually someone they know.  It’s a father, a sister, a friend shambling towards them, attempting to destroy everything they are.  The second is the person who gets bit but tries to hide it from everyone else.

Everyone sees death personified.  Someone tries to avoid death through denial.  It doesn’t work.  It never works.

This is why the greatest use of the zombie genre is to ask the question, “What do we do when we’re surrounded by death?”

Because there is no deeper, more profound, and more important existential question we can ask.  We are all surrounded by death.  Everyone will be a zombie some day, even if the dead never again walk out of their graves.

There’s a reason why the zombie story is usually the story of teamwork in the face of overwhelming odds.  The tough lone survivalist finds there’s nothing better than having someone trustworthy to stand next to.  The person found cowering in the back of an empty store turns out to have the courage to stand and fight to protect a new friend or love interest.

But, of course, there’s always the person with the dark secret or the person who can’t hack it and runs at a crucial time.  These are the twin fears that always bring the team to the verge of ruin: fear of that which is overwhelmingly dangerous about the self and that which is overwhelmingly dangerous out there, in the abyss.

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It’s easy enough to dismiss Mira Grant’s Feed and its sequel, Deadline.  It’s got two conceits working against it.  First, it’s another zombie book.  Second, it centers around super awesome action bloggers.

But Feed and Deadline aren’t actually about the world after The Rising left the world filled with people terrified about running in to the walking dead.  They're about the world after 9/11 left the world filled with people terrified about running in to terrorists at the mall.

It’s about my grandmother sitting on her porch, terrified because a guy down the street is growing pot in his garage.

It’s about how fear becomes a commonplace way to control people who just want to be scared.

Go.  Read it.  It’s better than anything I can say about it.

Chances are I’ll be back to talk about something similar.  I’ve spent a lot of time reading on trains of late…

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[1]By the way, correct me if I’m wrong here, but weren’t the Dukes of Hazzard bootleggers?  I mean, I know that Uncle Jesse was an old bootlegger, which makes sense.  But were them Duke boys supposed to be bootleggers, too?  How the fuck does that make sense in the 1970s?

[2]True story: I have inane ideas that seem super profound without actually smoking pot.  And I’m fucking annoying.  All.  The.  Time.  I don’t need pot to be a pothead.

[3]Of course, she was worried I’d move to Dallas and “fall in with the wrong crowd.”  I was nearly thirty when I moved to Dallas and one of those college educated professionals.  So this story is probably about how my grandmother worries pointlessly about stupid invented shit than what I want it to be about.  But I’m still going to tell it, because fuck you, that’s why.

[4]Also, too, there’s something she should be way more worried about: it’s statistically probable that there’s at least one meth lab in her area.  But for the love of all that’s good in the world, DON’T TELL HER THAT.[5]

[5]Also, it occurs to me that this now makes it seem like I’m saying that alcohol and pot are okay, but meth isn’t.  You’d be correct.  The line that makes the most sense to me is that tobacco, alcohol, and pot should be on one side of a line, while meth, cocaine, and all the other “hard” drugs should be on the other.  I suppose it’s an arbitrary line, but pretty much everyone draws that arbitrary line right there and I get the impression that there’s a good reason for that.

That said, I’m not sure how I feel about peyote, LSD, and the various other hallucinogenic drugs.  If there’s no major long-term damage, I say, “Have at.”  If not, then whatever.  But, of course, “major long-term damage” can also very easily include things like “lung cancer” and “cirrhosis of the liver.”  And, when it gets right down to it, many of the arguments against keeping drugs illegal boil down to the issue of gangs and societal breakdown.  That can be pretty much answered by pointing to the bootleggers and what happened post-Prohibition.

So, I guess what I’m saying is this: if there’s an argument out there for why the line between pot and the drugs to which pot is apparently supposed to be a gateway is both arbitrary and stupid, I’m willing to listen.  But I’m not going to go too far to seek one out, since I really don’t care about this on anything more than an academic or rhetorical level.  And I’ve got plenty of other academic and rhetorical shit to think about.

Comments

[jessa]

It's totally fair to be more worried about living near a meth lab than living near a pot farm. Meth labs have a greater propensity to explode, but there isn't any danger like that from a neighbor who grows pot.

[The Everlasting Dave]

The sort of people who use the term 'gateway drug' and mean it have a low opinion of users, first of all. To us, high is high, and we're so stupid we won't notice if our pot is laced with something more malicious. Now the first hit off that laced bowl, they don't think we would say "Shit, someone put something nasty in my pot. Maybe I should not smoke the rest of this." No, we would finish off the bag and want more, and from then on only buy our 'pot' from that dealer, until one day we decide to cut the charade and just start buying rocks. That is how marijuana is a gateway drug. And there are plenty of legal substances that have the same problem, except not imaginary.