Political Philosophy

Book Review: World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

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What is is about flesh gobbling zombies, anyway?

They seem to cause an endless fascination in most people, these mythical monsters from Hollywood. I can attest from personal experience that they have even influenced those of us concerned with armed self defense, and a more hard headed and practical group cannot be found anywhere. It is common for a skilled amateur gunsmith, after rebuilding a firearm into an accurate and rugged weapon that is perfect for emergency use, to proudly announce to all and sundry that it is now “Zombie ready!”

Zombies might resonate in our culture and our psyche, but it is rare to find a serious literary work that concerns the hungry dead. That is why I was surprised to see that my local library had picked World War Z by Max Brooks as the featured book of the week. I decided to pick up a copy and give it a whirl, hoping that I wouldn’t find it to be as dull as I do most horror fiction.

I needn’t have worried. World War Z is a fast paced and interesting read, one that I would recommend to a wide audience. It was so gripping that I found myself burning through the work, polishing it off the very day that the postman delivered my copy. The few people to whom I have lent the book have reported similar reactions.

The setting is an alternate world that is identical to ours in every detail but two. Those details are that no one seems to have ever made a flesh eating zombie film a la George A. Romero, and a virus that allows the dead to walk in eternal mindless hunger is very real.

The book is arranged as a series of very short interviews, all of which are conducted ten years after the end of the titanic struggle against the zombie plague that almost destroys humanity. The style is notable for it’s spare use of the language, conveying a great deal of information in a very short time. As in any successful horror tale, the stories are told in very broad strokes so the reader can fill in the details with their own imagination. The effect is, at times, actually chilling.

So you know that I enjoyed the book, and you know that I recommend it to those who might find horror fiction interesting. But why would I write about such a work here, at The Chicago Boyz, a political blog? Come with me below the jump and I will tell you.

I had a slight taste of things to come while reading the introduction to the book. The author states that life expectancy in the United States hadn’t risen to pre-zombie levels even with the introduction of “universal health care”, but the reference was tossed off in a single sentence and not mentioned again. I was extremely wary when I saw that the first chapter was an interview with a Chinese doctor, but I was relieved to see that it didn’t deteriorate into a Liberal rant against our system of health care. It is much more subtle than that.

Mr. Brooks obviously has a serious Liberal bias, which isn’t surprising considering that he works in show business as well as being the son of two very successful performers. It certainly isn’t the central part of the book, to his credit, but it does creep in every now and then like a limbless zombie inchworming it’s way across the floor. It can distract if you aren’t expecting it.

Like the time that the author conducted an interview with a former White House mover and shaker, a real Machiavelli who pulled the strings of the President himself, who is now reduced to shoveling cow poop in the new world order. Or the way that the administration the poop wrangler worked for deliberately and cynically colluded with an evil pharmaceutical company to sell the American people a false zombie vaccine so they wouldn’t lose an election, neither one caring that American lives were lost as long as the voters were reassured and the pharma executives reaped obscene profits. And there is the way that Americans were so fat and divorced from reality that we had lost all of our practical skills, and the illegal immigrants trapped on this side of the border during the zombie plague had to school us in what we needed to do to survive!

But what was really annoying, at least to me, was the view that Mr. Brooks has of the men and women who serve in our armed forces. Hard-bitten generals almost break down and start to cry when they talk of how “our last brushfire war”, an obvious reference to Iraq, so demoralized the public and drained both our stocks of weapons and the morale of our soldiers that the United States military was spent and helpless before what are little more than slow moving organic robots. A female Air Force officer who worked her way up to piloting a super advanced F-22, one of the most driven and professional individuals that would grace the service, is so distraught and emotionally jangled after having to bail out over zombie country that she has a nervous breakdown before her boots hit the ground. Professional psychologists are assigned to every unit, carefully watching the troops so they can lead the crazies to the rear after they inevitably break from the brief stress of combat.

The good news is that every chapter is very short, usually five or six pages. Even if Mr. Brooks decides to give vent to his Hollywood fantasies about soldiers or Republicans, you don’t have to suffer through it for very long. And, as I said above, it isn’t the main focus of the book so even dyed-in-the-wool Conservatives can enjoy it in spite of themselves.

More Zen Meditation

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Following on the last post, here’s another one from the Zen Master:

If multiculturalists are correct that that the non-Western cultures are of greater moral stature than the oppressive West, then why did none of the non-Western cultures ever practice multiculturalism ?

Quite honestly, I don’t care if a culture practices inclusion, as long as it advances science. As it so happens, cultures that do practice inclusion do so because their mindset is eclectic and evolutionary (in terms of ideas), which also happens to be the best societal fit for the scientific mindset, but the multi-cultural part is an unanticipated side effect that ultimately I do not give a rat’s about.

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Corporate “Power”

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In this thread over at Reason’s Hit&Run, commenter Taktix asks:

Will someone please define exactly what “power” a corporation yields over me (eminent domain abuse doesn’t count, as it is power reserved for the government).
 
McDonald’s has never given me a speeding ticket, Coca-cola has never busted me smoking a joint, Microsoft has yet to throw me in jail for buying a Mac.
 
What is this corporate power? Advertising? If you’re so fucking dumb that you obey every advertisement you see, then I suppose it’s not difficult to believe that companies hold power over you!

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A Jeremiad Against the Establishment

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My friend Bruce Kesler sent me an article by Dr. Angelo Codevilla, “American Statecraft and the Iraq War“, a senior scholar at The Army War College, that appeared under the aegis of The Claremont Institute. The critique offered by Codevilla is scathing; in many places his argument is quite insightful and in others, his heavily state-centric approach to international affairs shares the blindness of the elite he criticizes. An excerpt:

“The occupation was unnecessary to any rational American purpose. As President George W. Bush spoke on April 30, 2003, under the banner “Mission Accomplished,” representatives of the State and Defense Departments in Iraq were putting the finishing touches on the provisional government to which they were to devolve the country’s affairs two weeks later. There was to be no occupation. Iraqis would sort out their own bloody quarrels. The victorious U.S. armed forces, having turned Saddam Hussein’s regime over to its enemies, would challenge the Middle East’s remaining terror regimes to adjust their behavior or suffer the same fate. But even as Bush seemed to be recruiting a sovereign Iraqi government, he was interviewing the disastrous Paul “Jerry” Bremer to be Iraq’s viceroy and preparing United Nations resolution 1483 to “legitimize” the occupation. The Bush team then declared that occupying Iraq was necessary to transform it into a peaceful, united, liberal democracy, whose existence would coax nasty neighboring regimes to be nice. Bush had acceded to the private pleadings of then-Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, as well as of British Prime Minister Tony Blair-whose advice reflected the unanimous wishes of Arab governments. While the administration’s newly minted mission was abstract and inherently beyond accomplishment, the Arab agendas-which had nothing in common with Bush’s-were intensely practical. And they prevailed.

The occupation of Iraq should go down in history as a set of negative lessons about war, the relationship between ends and means, the need for unity of purpose and command, and dealing with the world as it is rather than as one imagines it to be. The occupation, a confection of the U.S. foreign policy establishment’s hoariest recipes, is yet more evidence of that establishment’s bankruptcy. Media myth notwithstanding, the administration’s neoconservative component was sidelined as the occupation began. Bremer’s political advisor was the realist Robert Blackwill of the Council on Foreign Relations, and his military advisor was Walter Slocombe, a liberal internationalist from the Carter and Clinton Administrations. By 2007 the occupation’s military policy was being shaped by Stephen Biddle, another Kissingerian realist from the Council, for whom success means persuading somebody to accept America’s surrender. Bush confused statecraft, the pursuit of the country’s interests, with administrative politics-the consensus of constituencies in the bureaucracies (and their contractors), the prestige media, and the academy. As the disaster became undeniable, no one in the establishment dared to try to measure the occupation of Iraq against the standards of statecraft. “

Codevilla skewers the ideological assumptions of Washington officials and intellectuals from the Neocon Right, to the Liberal internationalist Left, to those of Realist scholars and diplomats. Kesler, in a post at Democracy Project, incisively interprets Codevilla’s philosophical approach to foreign policy analysis:

” Codevilla is a student of Machiavelli, who described the rules of the game of power. The rules may be used for good or ill, but to negate the ends accomplished by the necessary means is to create weakness and allow the field to those willing to use the rules for ill ends.

“a prince … cannot observe all of those virtues for which men are reputed good, because it is often necessary to act against mercy, against faith, against humanity, against frankness, against religion, in order to preserve the state.”

Codevilla takes the US severely to task for its failure to follow the rules in Iraq and the broader Middle East. His critique should be read in full. It’s not what most, either conservative or liberal, neocon or realist or defeatist, are accustomed to hearing. But, it cuts to the heart of our bleeding for four years, and the limited best outcomes we face. Codevilla has been consistently opposed to our entering Iraq, seeing bigger game afoot, and the confusion of our aims. He’s been proven correct, so far. His forecast, therefore, should be taken seriously. Most important, his indictment of our befuddled policy class requires a new realism in Washington.”

A weakness in Codevilla’s analysis is that while he correctly identifies the culpability of regional Arab states and Iran in sponsoring and tolerating terrorist groups and argues for meaningful penalties to be applied to such regimes, he overestimates the competency and resiliency of these states and simply dismisses the extent to which globalization has made non-state actors functionally independent of state patrons, who are quite helpful operationally but are no longer the existential requirement they once were in the 1970’s. Economics and network-theory are entirely absent from Codevilla’s analytical framework and while Islamic religious identity is admirably included, it is considered a primarily reactive (even understandably so) phenomenon, which even a casual study of the 120 year evolution of Islamist ideology would refute. States still rule all, in Codevilla’s vision, an assumption that deserves careful reexamination.

Nevertheless, a worthwhile and thought-provoking critique.

Cross-posted at Zenpundit