Exposé on Fake Outrage? How Dare You!

Chicago's Toe-Sock Gets the Joke
A brisk wind off the northwest shore of Lake Michigan drives sleet into the faces of thousands of fans. They shiver in various combinations of midnight blue, brown, and orange. For many hours, devoid of cover or respite, they have been waiting in the parking lots that surround Soldier Field like so many concrete ice-plains.

They huddle around smoke-pits and drink massive quantities of beer, which seems to warm them up while dilating their blood vessels and making the prospect of hypothermia that much more probable.

They are like the Mongol hordes crouched around their camp-fires, greedily devouring the spoils of recent victories and eagerly anticipating those to come. They have been waiting for several hours and will be waiting several more before they are allowed to file into the stadium to watch the event they are here for, the game they paid a ridiculous amount of money to attend, the NFC championship game between their beloved Bears and the upstart, feel-good story of the year, the New Orleans Saints.

A rare breed of fan stands out like gold dinghies in a sea of brown and blue. Those bold enough to follow their team to an opposing team's stadium. A small number of Saints fans have braved the weather and the drunken Bears fans to watch what, in all probability, could be the last game their team plays all year. They endure verbal abuse, suffer the threat of impending physical violence, and are assaulted with fan-crafted signs like:

"Bears finishing What Katrina Started."

I must say that when I saw this sign displayed prominently alongside Al Jones' recent article in the Sun Herald, I laughed.

Seriously, I'm no monster, but a joke is a joke, and in the fine tradition of South Park, The Onion, and the Colbert Report, this outrageous prophecy struck me as witty.

Did the folks who read this slogan—Bears and Saints fans alike—honestly believe that it was created out of a sincere desire for disaster? Did they read it as a command for rampaging brown bears to descend upon the recovering gulf city and finish off the victims of the greatest natural disaster in US history? Of course not.

Is the taste of the slogan questionable? Perhaps. Will it outrage those with thin skins? Absolutely.

Because if there is one thing professional sports leagues are in the business of perpetuating—other than illegal substance abuse, unplanned pregnancies, domestic violence, and inflated egos—it’s fake outrage.

Fake outrage!? How dare you!

Yes, fake outrage.

Many people, media pundits especially, fail to realize that sports exist for one reason: Entertainment. And to think that the concept of entertainment is limited to the playing field is complete folly.

Fans easily get sucked into all of the extraneous 'stuff' that goes hand-in-hand with professional sports. People revel in the drug scandals, the arrests, and the outrageous behavior of figures that have become this century's equivalent to medieval jesters. And just like jesters of old who could do what no one else in their right mind could do—insult the king, mock unassailable institutions, etc.—professional sports players appear to have cart blanche when it comes to acting like complete jackasses.

Decent, intelligent fans see through this sort of thing and laugh, shrug their shoulders, and wish most folks would ignore such behavior and let it slip quietly away. But many fans become outraged!

Sort of.

Because they aren't really outraged!

They are being entertained by sports, albeit peripherally. And to perpetuate the circle of fake outrage we need the media to deliver to the rubes what they so badly want.

Fake outrage!

As such, Jones' article in the Sun Herald is a complete joke.

So let me get this straight. Some Saints fans traveled to Chicago for the most important game in either team’s recent history and expected to be greeted as equals? Of course they were going to be heckled! Did the fact that their city was recently ravaged by a category 5 hurricane exempt them from the abuse every other team's fans would have expected in their place? Are you kidding me?

Were any visiting fans physically assualted? Jones never tells us, but my guess is no. A drunken fan can compete alongside the Terrell Owenses of the world in the Universe's Biggest Jackass competition, but it takes a special sort of sociopath to commit violence toward another human being. If physical hostility did occur, then perhaps Jones' story would have held a little water. But as it stands, his article is yet another dull contribution to the barrage of "which team's fans are the most uncouth?" stories endlessly recycled every year from here to ESPN.com to eternity.

Well, which fans are the most uncivilized? Oakland fans? Eagles fans? Browns fans? Oh, that's right—I guess we'll never know. And why is that? Because all the real fans could care less what the scurrilous sign-makers are doing.

They’re too busy watching the actual sport everyone supposedly loves so much.

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Review: Pan's Labyrinth

Toe-Sock In the Maze of Good & Evil

Villains are never quite as villainous as when we find them at home within the quaint confines of a fairy-tale.

In fairy-tales the moral gray tones that make up the bulk of our 'real world' ethical spectrum are boiled away and all that is left are Good and Evil in their rarified capitalized incarnations. Good becomes sparklingly noble, painfully virtuous, and more often than not, boring.

Evil, a force that is often exaggerated to begin with, gets amplified to the nth degree. The violence that fairy-tale villains employ is utterly base, excessive, over-conceived, and many times, artistically delightful. Sure their smiles may be wicked and cruel but at least they appear to be having a good time as their challengers toil away, never letting us forget how difficult it is to be truly just.

In a fairy-tale, just about everyone owes allegiance to one side or the other. But there are ways that a storyteller can muddy the waters. One way of subverting this black-and-white moral matrix is to introduce a child. Children are neither Good nor Evil. They are innocent. It's small wonder that we find so many of them leading us through enchanted woods and haunted labyrinths.

Enter Ofelia, the 12-year-old protagonist of El Labertino del Fauno (Pan's Labyrinth in America), the latest film by director Guillermo del Toro. Set in post-civil-war Spain, the film attempts to blur the boundaries between fairy-tale and reality. The story commences with the arrival of Ofelia and her very pregnant mother at their new home, an old mill in the mountains that has been fortified as a military outpost.

Ofelia's new stepfather, Capitán Vidal, distributes rations to the surrounding villages and leads his soldiers on expeditions into the woods to hunt for rebels. The Capitán is comically Evil in all the best ways. He is at turns horrifically violent, hasty, and thickheaded. He's unbelievably trusting of subordinates who hang around only to undermine his iron fisted rule for the cause of the Good. He tortures his victims and murders innocent people. All in all, not very nice.

Capitán Vidal is quickly established as Ofelia's chief antagonist. She escapes from his fascist household into the forest and is swift to find a nearby labyrinth because, um, what good is an old mill without its accompanying giant stone maze?

There, Ofelia stumbles upon an ancient prophesy and is initiated into an epic quest. To be reclaimed by her real father as the princess of the underworld, she must complete three tasks. Her forays into the labyrinth, although dangerous and terrifying, provide a welcome relief to her life at the mill where she must relentlessly evade her step-dad's fury. The film oscillates between events taking place in the 'real' world and those occurring in adjacent fantasy realms. These other realms literally exist in the margins, magically concealed behind secret doors that only Ofelia can open.

Even though the fantastic realms have been marginalized, del Toro is careful to blur the separation between the real world and the fantastic in subtle, disconcerting ways. Bullets from the rebels in the forest whiz by just as loudly as the faeries zooming around the labyrinth. The quests Ofelia must accomplish are simple and dire, mirroring the assignments that the rebels need to carry out to survive. These cinematic details, plot lines, and obstacles are designed to echo one another. They remind the viewer that, although these worlds may be separated spatially and behave by different rules, they share violence and the ever-present threat of death.

On an aesthetic level, Del Toro's creatures are wondrously imaginative and horrifying. They steal every scene. The fairies are simultaneously humanoid and deceptively bug-like. A large bloated toad turns one's stomach. The faun is a sight to behold; his character suggests incredible gentleness and compassion while betraying a potential for the most brutal of violent acts. Most horrifying, the Pale Man and his domain are the stuff of nightmares. He is a creature of the old Germanic fairy-tale tradition, the kind of corrupt monster with no redeeming qualities who feasts on infants. He may never be defeated, only eluded time and time again.

It is unfortunate that due to a marvelous trailer and previous experience with de Toro's equally stunning Devil's Backbone, I had built this film up to be some sort of life-changing event.

Pan's Labyrinth was great, but not quite the mind-boggling masterpiece I dreamed it would be. And it will no doubt be a masterpiece to many. At the very least it is a film everyone should see. See it for the faeries if nothing else.

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From the Diamond to the Runway

Project Runway: Toe-Sock's First Time
Fashion generally disgruntles me. I come from a long line of men who believe that to be fashionable is to be invisible. In other words, if your clothes are attracting the glances of the multitude, you’re clearly doing something wrong.

This means you, young lady in the gladiator-style sandals. It is already hard enough to make feet presentable and you have to go and remind me of Russell Crowe? For shame. Of course, men do have things a bit easier in the sartorial arena. The simple pairing of a black tee-shirt and jeans has the remarkable ability to render a man invisible AND increase the likelihood he will receive that appreciative glance from ’lil miss doe-eyes over there.

A black tee-shirt and jeans say many things about a man, including, "I am not trying very hard and am thus very secure in my masculine charm, forsooth no desperation here!" Well, it’s unlikely my tee-shirt and jeans ever said the word “forsooth,” but they did laugh heartily at the fellow bellying up to the bar in slacks and a salmon-colored dress shirt. "Hey business-man! I don't care what they told you at the boutique, that shirt is pink. PINK." Anyhow, lest I stray too far a-field of my point, let me restate the obvious: Fashion has secured precious little space for itself in my life. Which makes it all the more preposterous that Project Runway is my favorite show on television.

I know what you are thinking: Reality televison? Fashion!? The Bravo network!!? Have you gone soft on us, Toe-sock?

Ye of little faith, fear not—it is still possible to maintain masculinity while indulging in the delight that is Project Runway. Do you know how hard it was to type that last sentence while flexing and scratching myself at the same time? While Heidi Klum and company are galavanting around the runway on Wednesday evening, you’ll find me drinking a cold one. And I'll probably catch Sportscenter after Runway wraps up. And in a perfect world those model ladies would walk down the runway at the end of the show to Le Tigre or Company Flow instead of whatever euro-trendy electro-candy is popular at the time.

What I'm trying to say is that it isn't an anomaly for a heterosexual man to be into Project Runway. Ladies, park your husband, your significant other, your landlord, or the mailman in front of the television and you'll find that the anomaly is the straight man who doesn't find Runway every bit as compelling as Lost or those spaceship shows on the Sci-fi channel.

*Picture the following text billowing up out of a hazy 'flashback' style sitcom fade-in*

I remember when I lost my Project Runway virginity like it was just yesterday. It was a cold, cold night but my baby made me some chicken potpie. She also mentioned that "some show" that she very much enjoys was premiering that night and that I should watch it with her. She explained the premise and somewhere between designers and judges, I lost interest. "Let me grab my Dostoevsky," I exclaimed with a condescending look. Moments later we hunkered down on our creaky green couch. The program began and instantly I was hooked.

It was the premier of Project Runway: Season 2, in which all manner of hipsters and homosexuals, arrogant upstarts and slim young things congregate for a chance at $100,000 and a mentorship at the Banana Republic Design-a-torium. Immediately, their television personae coalesce. There's the gangly mean guy with all the facial hair and tattered more-is-more style. There's the ridiculously short Asian woman with the clean lines agenda. There's the guy they kicked off last year before he had a chance to prove himself (Daniel Franco, where did ya go?), the kid fresh out of design school, a half dozen others you know never have a chance... and of course there's Andrae.

I repeat, I'm hooked. My copy of The Brothers Karamazov lies untouched on the coffee table. I begin extrapolating theories as to who would win it all and whining that there are at least a dozen more episodes before I'll even know who’s in the running for Fall Fashion Week.

At this point, I'm sure you are all wondering what exactly makes Project Runway so great.

But, really: what doesn't? I mean, we're talking dresses made from groceries, for goodness sake! Each episode has all of the fun engendered by ingenious design projects coupled with the docu-drama of Real World-esque in-house squabbling. There are heroes and villains, guys to laugh at, and underdogs to root for. And on almost every show, the dress you think should win doesn't for inexplicable reasons. The judges are uncompromisingly harsh and the designers’ back-room impressions of said judges uncompromisingly hilarious. Needless to say, I now count the days between episodes.

Now that the show has returned for Season 3, my life is a bit more complete. It seems there's a little fashionista-bug in my Cleveland Indians Baseball cap after all.

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In Defense of Baths

ToeSock Takes to the Tub


Quick, think of the first five things that come to your mind when I say the word “bath.” Ready? Okay, go!

1. Romans
2. rubber ducky
3. bubble (as in bubble-bath)
4. -tub (as in bath-tub)
5. totally, ridiculously awesome and more cleansing than a shower.

Now that’s a ringing endorsement if I ever heard one. Not too many things have that kind of associative star power backing them up. Just look at the lovely list that comes to mind. Nothing compares to the quiet dignity of a bath. No-thing com-pares. For example the top five things people most often associate with an entity as unequivocally lovable and cute as little baby puppies?

1. snuggly
2. yelping
3. mount saint wrigglesworth III
4. pound- (as in pound-puppies)
5. urination.

As you can see, not as nice. Most people already consider baths to be much lovelier than little baby puppies or showers. This is common knowledge. Intelligent folks—those "in the know," those who are hip and cool, and down with the language of the streets really 'heart' baths. "Showers are for suckers," they say while standing laid-back against a graffito-tagged brick wall with cigarettes dangling from their lips. But there are a select few who would beg to disagree.

Now I know what you’re thinking. You can't fathom the idea that a rational human being capable of speech and basic motor skills could come to the conclusion that showers are somehow more pleasant or 'better' than baths. But these people exist! I encounter them every day. This manifesto is for the select few who think that the ineffective watery mist-like provision of a showerhead is somehow more sanitary than a good, wholesome bath. Obviously I'll make converts of them all.

Picture this. You're standing in the bathroom after a long day at the office/tollbooth/bar/brothel. If you are a man and/or unattractive you’re wrapped in a nice plush towel. If you’re a hot young lady, the towel is obviously superfluous. You stopper the drain in your bathtub and crank the hot water way up. The pleasant thundering of the water soothes your frazzled nerves. You haven't even gotten in and already the bath is working its magic. You open the cupboard and fish around for your bottle of bubble bath. You pour in just the right amount of the delightful smelling liquid. It is an understated aroma of soap and unicorns. You imagine the princess from the Legend of Zelda might smell like this.

You go through your bath checklist. Bottle of beer? Check. Paperback novel that has been dropped in the bath five times before? Check. Rubber\ ducky or an assortment of other bath friends? Check. Plush towel within grasping distance? Check. Absence of cell-phone, television, any and all food items? Check. By this time the suds and water have risen to the appropriate level. Are you ready? It is time.

Now the true power of the bath is decentralized, its greatness being a many-headed hydra of wonderment. The first aspect of the bath's greatness is its storied history. Baths have been the preferred means of cleansing oneself since the dawn of time. Adam bathed. Eve bathed. Lilith bathed. Sometimes Eve and Lilith bathed together. Jesus was a friend of the bath as well. He even performed a few minor miracles involving baths. When Cripply Joe wandered in from Hepshetzutsville, Jesus turned wine into bubble bath and behold! Cripply Joe's dirt was banished to the realm of wind and ghosts. And he could walk again without a limp. All due to bath's life-restorative properties.

The Romans brought the bath into its heyday, a heyday that has never really passed. Roman senators lounged around the bathateriums for hours, bad-mouthing the Caesar. The English almost destroyed the ritual of the bath. Under their far-reaching empire you couldn't travel three hectares without encountering an Indian, an Islander, or an American Colonist who frowned with puritanical lips of disapproval upon their colonizer's unkempt non-bathiness. And that brings us pretty much up to modern times. In the future I've heard we will have zero-gravity baths where you can float in and out of an amorphous water-blob whenever you wish. Now that's something to look forward to.

The second aspect of bath's greatness is its unbeatable clean-ability. Your body just can't help but give up its stubborn dirt accretions when it is completely submerged in watery goodness. By comparison, your average shower is much less effective. Do you know how many pores you have? Scientists estimate the average person to have eight bazillion pores. These same scientists then studied the splatter ratio of ten different brands of showerheads. What did they find? On a body composed of such an amazing amount of pores even the most comprehensive of showerheads only covered ninety percent of a human being's epidermis. That leaves a stunning one hundred and seventy bagillion pores unwashed. And human beings are lazy. Most aren't going to go out of their way to sweep those tiny droplets over their remaining skin. Baths know all about human laziness and do the work for you. The longer you soak, the less that dirt will be able to hang on.

Now I find that the most common complaint of non-bath types is this. "How can you stand just laying around in your own filth?" My answer is three-fold.

a) just how dirty do you believe me to be? I don't work in the mines. I don't win marathons and have jars of celebratory jam poured over my victoriously fit body. And I'm not your local poopsmith. I'm just a regular Joe with a regular day's worth of dirt. Not enough to pollute an entire bathtub.
b) Warm water opens pores and frees dirt. Said pores remain relaxed and don't re-acquire the now free-floating specs of dirt. As the free-floating specs wander about they are completely consumed by the molecular soap-beasts that patrol the tub's high seas. With all that soap in the water I assure you it is cleaner than when I first got in.
c) The warm water also performs wonders on aching muscles and sore joints. Can that puny mist from your showerhead claim this capability? I think not.

Now I know that the many benefits of bathing seem too good to be true. I bet your head is spinning about like a whirligig wondering how could you have been wasting all this time showering? I can't help you answer that. Not everyone is right all the time. But now you can be right for once in your sorry pathetic existence. Just make sure not to overdo your newfound pastime. Don't let your fingers and toes go all pruny, 'cause that is pretty gross. Just as the social drinker's two or three beers encourage him to be a scintillating public speaker while four, five, or ten beers turn the very same drinker into an incorrigible drunkard, so too will a bath's salubrious effects be enervated by over-doing it. Know when to say when. Know when it’s time to toss in your rubber ducky and reach for the plush towel.
Remember, always bath responsibly.

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REVIEW: Black Swan Green

Toe-Sock takes on the kunstlerroman

*Fine as a stolen pack of L & B ciggies*

You don’t need a roving band of gypsies to tell you that growing up means feeling out of place all the time, but David Mitchell’s excellent fourth novel has this and then some.

The story of a British child-poet’s emergence into adolescence during the early 1980’s, Black Swan Green belongs to a genre that English geeks call kunstlerroman, German for “Artist’s Novel.” This type of novel, epitomized by James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, follows a young person’s development into an artist through his curious rejection and infatuation with commonplace life. Within the belly of said beast, a reader will generally find the protagonist doing most of the following:

a) Protagonist comes to terms with himself in regards to others. This most often entails the child realizing he is a bit different than most other people. He is treated accordingly (i.e. rottenly).

b) Protagonist comes to terms with his society in regards to the world. Youth realizes Britain/Ireland/Mozambique is not the end all of humanity, that nationalism is well and good, but blind nationalism is fatal foolishness. (Incidentally, I use the masculine pronoun simply because Mitchell's protagonist is male. Not because I believe artists are more likely to be men, though it must be hard for the ladies to be artists, what with spending all their time in the kitchen fixing me sandwiches.)

c) Protagonist comes to terms with his sexuality.

d) Protagonist comes to terms with his art.

At some point in your own life, you’ve tackled points A-C. And if you— yes, you young pre-professional— are reading this article, then you’ve probably spent a great deal of time considering ‘D’ as well. Come to think of it, you probably really mucked up ‘C’ in the process. These familiar world experiences are what make the kunstlerroman such an engaging type of novel. It’s all about that bastard knight of empathy, what Adam Smith defined as “fellow-feeling.” I don't even know you, but I'm sure that growing up sucked for you. So when you read about some kid whose life isn't going so swimmingly, you will exclaim something akin to “Jiminy Cricket! That's very similar to what happened in the 5th grade only with more pantsing and fewer folk medleys!”

But herein also lies the problem¬—it can be deceptively easy to hook a reader with empathy. A hack need only make the trials and tribulations of his protagonist generic enough and everybody can relate. “We’ve read this story before” syndrome may also present itself. I don't know how many more times I can read about some tormented young writer wrestling with his muse where said muse turns out to be “Syphilitic Betty” the town streetwalker. The point is that, while engaging, the kunstlerroman’s stimulation of fellow-feeling in the reader can be both an easy out and a means toward Been-there-done-that-ville.

David Mitchell subverts these potential problems by making his narrative world realistically familiar *and* compellingly unique. You had many problems growing up— braces, coke bottle glasses, hand me down clothes, club foot, etc.—but I bet you didn’t stutter. And even if you did, you never had to deal with Hangman, an entity whose sole purpose in life is to mortify you at the most inappropriate moments by physically stealing away certain letters like ‘d’, ‘n’, or ‘s’. If it took you a week and a half to say “dinosaur,” you’d be miserable too. Hangman is one of several entities (a group rounded out by Maggot and Unborn Twin) that ‘speak’ to the protagonist, Jason Tyler, in his interior monologue. Though, in essence, all of these characters are Jason, they have a diabolically good time playing off of one another and making his life as miserable as possible.

Mitchell also escapes dull generality by setting his character’s uncomfortable growth in a vibrant, rich world of gypsies, Spooks, and undead ice-skaters. I would argue that it is the peculiarities of the narrative, the items which are so oddly unique, that are the most effective at enabling us to empathize with Jason. An excerpt of the latter’s confrontation with a not quite dead schoolmate:

The afternoon’d gone and the sky was turning to outerspace when I noticed another kid on the lake. This boy skated at my speed and followed my orbit, but always stayed on the far side of the lake… My first thought was that he was a kid from the village, just mucking about. I even thought he might be Nick Yew ‘cause he was sort of stocky. But the strange thing was, if I looked at this kid directly for more than a moment, dark spaces sorta swallowed him up. The first couple of times I thought he’d gone home. But after another half loop of the lake, he’d be back.
Go Home, urged the nervy Maggot in me. What if he’s a ghost?
My Unborn Twin can’t stand Maggot. What if he is a ghost?
“Nick?” I called out. My voice sounded indoors. “Nick Yew?”
The kid carried on skating.
I called out, “Ralph Bredon?”
His answer took a whole orbit to reach me.
Butcher’s Boy.

Readers of Mitchell will also find that he has more or less dumped his trademark playful narrative structuring. His previous novel Cloud Atlas reads like a set of Matryoshka nesting dolls, with one story framing another framing another, etc until we are literally 6 or 7 stories deep. The complex structure of Cloud Atlas has its strengths and weaknesses. Invariably you will find one or two of the threads more interesting than others, and it remains somewhat nebulous why this series of stories needs to be told in such an elaborate way. As a whole, though flawed, the work is undoubtedly ambitious. By contrast, the single, meticulously well crafted voice of Black Swan Green seems even more effective at telling such a personal story.

Has this story been told before? Yes. You may have even lived something like it. Is it necessary to tell it again? Absolutely.

**Recommended, but not necessary, pre-reading: Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce and Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

If you enjoy this title I'd suggest: The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman

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Meet Toe-Sock Doug

Douglas (Doo-glasz), aka "Toe-Sock Doug," is a post-collegiate, pre-professional twenty-something writer-architect-bookseller living in the Windy City. A graduate of Syracuse University and the University of Chicago, Toe-Sock Doug is JBB's resident zombie, robot, dinosaur, boy-stuff expert. He enjoys birds, music, and motion pictures, and has taken the trolley to work. We all ask: "Why can't they be more like Doug?"

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Why Zombies Are So Great

An Analysis of the Undead
by Toe-Sock Doug

Ahem. Alright. Let’s do this. Time to inject some testosterone into this dainty girly-blog. Time to finally do our namesake, the mighty Jack Black and his body, proud. I shall begin this, a stirring treatise affirming the irrefutable greatness of the Living Dead, by quoting a character from the work of… uh… Truman Capote? I believe it was his conflicted belle, Holly Golightly, who said (and I paraphrase) “All men like horses and baseball.” To update this to represent the modern man, I would immediately append “as well as dinosaurs, robots, and zombies.” For what man among my lofty tribe can claim to be uninterested in either of these subjects? Not a one, I assure you. So now, without further non-verbal grunting and exaggerated chest-beating ado (but with parenthetical digression a-plenty) I will attempt to explain just why zombies are so great.

For reasons unknown, the dead have returned to walk the land of the living. At first, we hear news of just a few scattered, isolated incidents, but things quickly get out of hand. Cue violence and gore as much brain eating ensues. But all is not lost. A few tattered remnants of humanity remain and a resistance movement or two forms. Cue additional violence and gore and end on uncertain terms. Roll credits and repeat (for in the realm of the zombie there is always room for a sequel or three). Such is the plot of a zombie narrative. A wee bit predictable, you might say. Of all the wack-ass genre stylings, why does this story keep getting told? Just what is it about the Living Dead that horrifies, fascinates, and entertains us enough to keep their decomposing malodorous corpses hanging around?

(Before I go into specifics, permit an opening caveat to the zombie-centric. This is a well-informed but incomplete analysis. Let’s call it an introduction. Zombies 101. I could expound vaguely on the origins of zombies: their African hey-day, how they crossed the Atlantic, arrived in Haiti only to grow intimately involved with Voodoo, were re-imagined in the 60’s by George Romero and were co-opted ever since.

But enough zombie pre-history.) This article is based upon my completely random conglomeration of zombie lore gleaned from some of the most popular and interesting zombie narratives of the last forty years. So don’t go all “How could you forget BrainFeast 7!? It’s such a classic!!” Save your obscurantism, Jackson.* I’ve tried to keep this ungainly project well-rounded by using source material from as many different art-forms as possible. I reference film (Night of the Living Dead, Evil Dead 2, 28 Days Later), cartoons (The Simpsons “Dial Z for Zombie”), the short-story and the novel (Stephen King’s “Home Delivery” and Pet Cemetery, respectively), and the graphic novel (Robert Kirkman & Tony Moore’s The Walking Dead). Having dealt my critics an undeniably mortal blow, on with the show!

Reason #1: Zombies are great because utopias kick ass. All Zombie stories are utopian. It’s etymological: U-topia = “the great place.” Just ask Sir Thomas More, Francis Bacon, Karl Marx, Aldous Huxley and, to a lesser extent, the dudes that came up with Fru-topia soft drinks. In order to establish your utopian community you need a ground-clearing tabula rasa moment, which very few scenarios accomplish quite as well as a zombie holocaust. It doesn't matter why the dead have returned to feast upon the brains of the living; the creative mind is more concerned with their production than their purpose. These hideous creatures are spawned in far-out ways, running the gambit from nuclear radiation, scientific and military experiments gone awry, celestial misalignments, magic spells, Love (ironic, right? and also ingeniously employed with a little help from an Indian Burial ground by both King and the Simpsons) or the fact that Hell is now full and the sprits of the damned are forced to return to their decomposing, corporeal containers for one last dance on Earth.

Reason #2: Zombies are great because destroying existence kicks ass. What the Living Dead effectively accomplish is to destroy existence as we know it. No more morning talk radio, or lines at the supermarket. Your credit score is now somewhat less important than finding food that has not gone rancid, or a place to sleep, safe from the wanderlust of animated corpses. This is essentially the glorious and excessively destructive part of the French Revolution all over again. And it’s only a matter of time before some savvy leader (a white man) gets a posse together to establish some sense of normalcy in a world gone to shit. Normalcy in this case is code for “severely screwing over minorities.” If you are a black man, you will likely get “accidentally mistaken for a zombie” and lynched. If you are a woman, chances are you will also get screwed over, quite literally. And children? Please. Suffer the little children as they fall prey to parental incompetence only to become zombified and return to spade their dim-witted mothers a dozen times in the chest.

True, a utopia has never been a great place for non-white men– but minorities worry not. Like the society replaced by the zombie-engendered utopia, white men will still heap sufficient troubles upon themselves, all on their own. For this foundling utopian community is by no means a sure thing. Just ask the Jacobins who may not have had flesh-eating zombies to deal with, but still found themselves fighting off one counter-revolutionary movement after another with the help of their good friend Capt' Guillotine.

Reason #3: Zombies are great because they must needs ultra-violence in order to be dispatched and, as Alex from A Clockwork Orange taught us, excessive violence most certainly kicks ass. Guillotines being scarce in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, many survivors opt for shotguns, which just as effectively sever that intimate bond between the head and the rest of one's corpus. Having established the zombie narrative’s proclivity for utopias, we can also affirm: Zombie culture is a critique of Late Capitalism. A rather transparent and unflattering critique, at that, which leads to… Reason #4: Zombies are great because Late Capitalism decidedly does not kick ass. What are zombies if not the perfect embodiment of the lower middle class American blue-collar wage-slave? Zombies exist only to consume and reproduce, and the American middle class appears to be doing a bang-up job accomplishing this task as well. Granted, this treatment of the average man is deeply jaded and hopelessly elitist, but who can disagree with at least the pretenses of this analogy after witnessing just two minutes of the stock footage from any Wal-mart at 5:00 a.m. the day after Thanksgiving? Soylent Green isn’t people— zombies are people!

In order to firmly link the character of a zombie with the admittedly stereotypical lower middle class American, perhaps this is a good time for a zombie character trait summary.

I. Zombies are completely mindless. They cannot solve even the most rudimentary logic games. Some movies and stories exploit this fact to brilliant black comedic effect. (Reason #5: Zombies are great because comedy engenders laughing and every time a child laughs a fairy is born.)

II. Zombies are creatures enslaved by their basic animal need to consume. They have no other desires. Be careful– it is easy to surmise that zombies actually try to reproduce or conversely, destroy things that are not zombies. But don't be fooled, these are the mere side effects of the zombie's sole drive to consume. If a zombie didn’t have to eat, it most likely would be on the lazy boy watching the game, trying to ignore your pleas for attention while you slave over the hot stove, fold the laundry, or burp Junior so that he doesn’t vomit all over the place.

III. Zombies are dead. The bodily functions of a human that has died and become a zombie have ceased. Therefore, zombies do not need to breathe and they cannot feel pain. The young people of today will try all sorts of illicit substances in order to achieve just such a physical dislocation. (Reason #6: Zombies are great because they beat you at your own game. Sorry, young-people-of-today.)

Well I’m running out of time, space, and energy and, very zombie-narrative-appropriately, I have not planned any sort of formal conclusion. As such, you might find any number of sequel articles re-postulating the greatness of the zombie, from Reason #7: Zombies are great because they can’t have children to Reason #29: Zombies are great because they blaspheme religion by making the ‘afterlife’ somewhat less than heavenly, straight down the line to the oft overlooked Reason #104: Zombies are great because in the moonlight they dance better than you do. Thank you for indulging this old man’s fondness for the Living Dead and like the topic on which I’ve preached, I’ll more than likely return to eat away at your brains with more mindless musings.

*Eds. Note: Toesock Doug is not specifically referring to a reader named Jackson, but is using the name as a general address, much in the manner of "chief," "scout," or "dude."

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