Zombie Apocalypse in a ‘DC’ Comic

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Ludwig von Mises Institute :

Zombie Apocalypse in a ‘DC’ Comic

Mises Daily:Friday, September 20, 2013 by Paul A. Cantor

 

All my life I have been watching the U.S. federal government steadily increase its power, but I never expected to see it expand into the comic book business. Imagine my surprise, then, when I found a comic book — excuse me, a “graphic novella” — on the official web site of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a minor masterpiece of the horror genre entitled Preparedness 101: Zombie Pandemic. Evidently the political principle “never let a good crisis go to waste” extends even to fictional crises. Perhaps inspired by its appearance in the last two Perhaps inspired by its appearance in the last two episodes of the first season of AMC’s popular television show The Walking Dead, the C.D.C. decided to make its own contribution to the growing body of apocalyptic zombie narratives, and to score some propaganda points for itself in the process. Unsurprisingly, on its own web site the C.D.C. manages to do what it — or any other government institution — conspicuously fails to do in The Walking Dead, namely to come up with a quick solution to the plague and work to cure it.

 

The fact that the C.D.C., a unit of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, chose to jump on the current zombie bandwagon in American pop culture tells us something: More is at stake in these apocalyptic, “end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it” narratives than their simple shock value. For all their ghoulishness and gore, these zombie narratives raise some fundamental issues, above all the question of the relation of government to social order. Is central planning by government experts the solution to human problems (as the C.D.C.’s comic suggests), or does government intervention in human affairs generally make matters worse (as we will see The Walking Dead implies)?

Next Week: The Walking Dead and a Refuge from the Modern State