Austin's Zombie Apocalypse
Zombie movies exist for a reason. Which is...?
Good News: Hey, good news! Remember that SXSW panel about disinformation I asked you to vote for? It got accepted! Way to go!
Bad News: I need to put this newsletter on hiatus for a bit. I’m working on a book project and need to devote all my spare time to that.
Read: the new narrative about climate change, the impeachment procedure, a website that automatically removes backgrounds, the origins of Patient Zero, how to break into private WhatsApp groups, the bad news about air pollution, whose endorsements matter the most to Democratic primary voters, the surprisingly small number of political tweeters and the good news about them, how many people Popeyes is hiring because they’re bringing back the chicken sandwich, the new secessionist movement in Canada, the good news about the hole in the ozone, why open-office plans are unproductive, the biggest trigger to subscribing, and why the Secret Service interviewed Eminem.
Watch: Schitt’s Creek Season 5.
Listen: to Prince’s 40-year-old demo of “I Feel For You”
But first: Did you ever wonder why we have zombie movies in the first place?
We tell certain stories for a reason. Some people speculate that true crime is popular because it teaches us how to be prepared. Vampire movies peak when society re-examines sexual norms. Political fiction exists to criticize the status quo in a way that the news can’t, or won’t. And romance novels are here to reassure women that men aren’t all trash. So why, I wondered as I took my sons to see Zombieland: Double Tap, do we even have zombies? To paraphrase Raymond Carver, what are we talking about when we talk about zombies?
The first people to talk about the undead were enslaved Africans in Haiti in the 1700s. Zombies were manifestations of their misery, it seems. When Night of the Living Dead came out in 1967, Romero cast a black protagonist. In fact, the slavery roots of zombies might be why he did so, though he claimed he cast the black stage actor as his leading man simply because he gave the best audition.
After Night of the Living Dead, black people were not totally written out of zombie pictures, but from then on they could only be the Other, the scary sort-of humans. Subsequent zombie movies played on different fears—climate change, contagion, total societal collapse—but mostly it’s white people trying to escape and then kill the sort-of but not-quite humans with the faces darkened with blood, rot, and filth. They’re still symbols of man’s inhumanity, and we’re still terrified of what we’ve done, projecting our guilt and disgust onto the zombies.
Zombieland: Double Tap, perhaps intentionally, leans into that racial aspect. Take a look at the cast below. Notice anything? Rosario Dawson is the only actor of color. Perhaps, given the movie’s themes of duality and othering, they knew what they were doing casting pretty much nothing but white people against a race of superpredator zombies. Perhaps they were just unconsciously acting out the paradigm. Maybe they’re just weirdly racist, because honestly I’ve seen episodes of Friends with more diversity.
Actually, check this out: The top picture is the cast of Zombieland:Double Tap. The bottom picture was the 2016 GOP presidential field. I mean, damn.
Most of you know that I’m based in Austin, Texas’ liberal enclave of hipsters and breakfast tacos. We’re famously tolerant of aberrance here. “Keep Austin Weird” was a slogan the local retail association came up with to get people to stop shopping in big box stores, but it fit they way Austin welcomes people on their own terms. Shortly after I moved here in the ‘90s, a homeless transvestite named Leslie Cochran became a local celebrity for walking around town wearing nada but high heels, a g-string, and a tiara. He once came in third in a mayoral election and was a paid spokesperson for a dot-com. There’s even a plaque memorializing him on West 6th Street. The Austin Chronicle once gave him the Best of Austin award for best drag queen “Oh, that’s just Leslie,” we’d say when out-of-town visitors were shocked at seeing so much naked man butt on Congress at noon. He was part of the story that Austin told about itself.
Austin has doubled in size since then, and now we have about 2,000 homeless people in town, which isn’t a lot, but very few of them are adorably transgressive mascots. Most of them are people down on their luck. Some of them have problems that, if you or I were experiencing them, would require serious mental health care.
And there are a lot of people who get up every day trying to get them off the streets and into permanent housing, where it’s much cheaper to get them the help they need. When I worked in the Mayor’s office, I learned a big impediment to housing the homeless were apartment managers who didn’t want to rent to people with criminal records. The problem is that homeless people would get tickets for sleeping in public, skip their court dates, and end up with criminal records effectively for being homeless.
A city audit identified this as a big hurdle to housing the homeless, so the city council ended the camping ban—at which point most of the homeless in Austin moved out of the woods where they’d been hiding out and into tents in highway underpasses. It was like all of a sudden they were everywhere, their faces darkened and leathered, behaving erratically, contrary to the unspoken rules of public life. Many of them, with their hair a mess and dressed in filthy throwaway clothes, looked a fright, and it goes without saying that the homeless are disproportionately African-American. The evidence of them was everywhere: tents along highway underpasses, poop in the gutters, needles on the sidewalks. They staggered in the morning, picking fights with each other as well as regular citizens at bus stops. It was all very we/they. We were scared. They were everywhere.
It’s not that we are bad people. It’s our brains. They’re just wired that way. Any behavioral scientist—and one does subscribe to this newsletter, so check me on this—that our brains, and specifically our amigdalas, are sensitive to disgust, novelty, and fear. So if a bunch of scary people show up picking fights at bus stops and pooping in the street, anyone’s brain is going to get hung up in the fight-or-flight stage. Consequently, our brains “other” the homeless, classifying them as an infestation of vermin. The first reaction is to demand someone get rid of it. It, not them.
People freaked out way out of proportion to their number, at least in contrast to the vast and seemingly permanent tent cities on the west coast. The first media reports took on a hysterical tone as if covering an epidemic or a crime wave, neglecting most often to interview anyone experiencing homelessness. The Governor retweeted a false report that a homeless person caused a traffic accident. One guy was assaulted, and it made the news because he said the guy could have been homeless. People were looking for reasons to be afraid of them, these not-quite humans suddenly among us, staggering towards us with their human-but-also-not faces, asking not for brains but money.
Not everyone freaked out. The Mayor, who also subscribes but is reading my opinion here for the first time, made the argument that the way to solve homelessness was to get them housing, and that there weren’t suddenly more homeless people in town. They were just visible now. I have another friend, N.R., who has made it a practice to talk to people experiencing homeless and relaying his conversations on social media in hopes, I suppose, of helping others to see that these are simply people in desperate situations. The comments these posts get are not uniformly encouraging, nor do many reaffirm our common humanity.
Those reporters who did go to the trouble of covering the homeless as if they were pitable people suffering horrible misfortune couldn’t believe how uncaring their fellow citizens were, how angry they were at having to see people sleep in tents under highway overpasses. They tell me this is the hardest story they’ve ever covered, and they’ve covered hurricane evacuations, a serial bomber, and the 2016 elections. Sometimes they go home and cry. Telling this story about us is exacting a toll on them. That’s how awful we are now.
Some politicians saw an opportunity to capitalize on this. Local Republicans, including one who subscribes to this newsletter, started a petition drive without much of a point except to get attention that they were against all these homeless people laying about. It’s possible they were harvesting email addresses so they could raise money to elect Republicans here, but I’m neither so cynical as to believe they would do that or so optimistic to think they could elect any Republicans here anymore.
Republicans aren’t popular in this county, which went 50-50 for George W. Bush in 2000 but now doesn’t have a single elected Republican countywide. One Republican who does live here is the Governor, who was once suckered by Russian bots who, convincingly impersonating outraged Republicans, claimed that Operation Jade Helm 15, a planned military exercise in Texas involving the Green Berets, the Navy SEALS, U.S. Air Force Special Operations Command, the Marines, and the 82nd Airborne Division, was a U.S. military takeover of Texas.
So the Governor in his wisdom asked the commander of the Texas State Guard to keep an eye on Operation Jade Helm. It’s important to remember that the President at the time was a black man, the existence of whom drove many to madness. The sovereignty of Texas, I am pleased to report, was not violated, nor do I expect did the Green Berets et al gave a Tinker’s damn what the Governor thought.
The Governor, driven to and fro in a chauffeured SUV, must think that a hobo apocalypse is upon Austin. Earlier this month he sent the Mayor a letter demanding that he and the city council “demonstrate consequential improvement in the Austin homelessness crisis” by November or he will have “no choice other than to use the tools available to the State of Texas to ensure that people are protected from health and safety concerns caused by the Austin homeless policies.”
He cited “violence, used needles, and feces littering the streets of Austin and endangering Texas residents” and listed several law enforcement agencies to deal with those issue. Housing and social services went unmentioned, and unofferred. He wants to clear them out, to remove them, from underpasses of highways under state jurisdiction.
In truth, there has been an increase in crime, according to The Texas Tribune, though it’s not exactly what you’d expect.
Austin police Chief Brian Manley presented the crime data comparing summer 2018 to summer 2019 at Thursday’s City Council meeting.
Manley reported a 15% increase in violent crime and a 20% increase in property crime where the suspect and victim were both homeless. In cases with a homeless suspect and a non-homeless victim, violent crime increased by 11% and property crime by 2%. And in cases with a homeless victim and a non-homeless suspect, violent crime increased 19% and property crime increased 42%.
So here’s where we are. Some people, including the Mayor, see the homeless as the least fortunate among us, as humans who need homes, not to mention addiction treatment and other mental health care services that, by the way, many people with homes do as well. They were here all along, say these people, you just couldn’t see them before when they were hiding in the woods.
Others, including the Governor as well as several friends of mine who are not by any means uniformly conservative, look at the sudden appearance of the homeless in Austin as a safety issue. They—the homeless, not the Governor—pose a danger to the public. The homeless, they say, need to be cleared out. Most of these are sincere reactions entirely explained by cognitive science. Brains just work that way, looking at people experiencing unimaginable hardship and seeing a zombie apocalypse.
What I’m reading
Telling a better story about climate change might be the thing that saves us.
I thought I knew what the procedure for impeachment was, but I knew about 15% of this.
Want to remove the background on a photograph automatically? Use this website.
I didn’t know about the origins of the term Patient Zero.
A surprising number of drivers would be willing to give up their cars to use transit.
Journalists found a super-creepy yet totally obvious way to break into private WhatsApp groups.
Well, this sucks: “Following a 24% drop between 2009 and 2016, air pollution increased 5.5% in 2017 and 2018, a new analysis of EPA data shows.”
Massachusetts is considering outlawing the b-word, which begs the question: If they outlaw hate speech in Boston, what will people say?
Whose endorsements matter the most to Democratic voters probably won’t surprise you, and while Hillary’s will help you in the Democratic primary it’ll hurt you in the general, which isn’t a huge surprise either. But AOC’s very newsy endorsement of Bernie? Damn.
97% of political tweets come from 10% of Twitter users. Contrary to the stereotype of hacktivists who engage in online activism but don’t do anything real, the more you tweet about politics the more likely you are to engage in political activities, such as attending a rally or donating to a campaign.
Wow. Popeye’s is hiring 400 more people because they’re bringing back the chicken sandwich that is supposed to be so good.
By the way, apparently the average open rate for newsletters in the media and publishing industry is 21.9 percent, and the click rate is 4.6 percent. The average open rate for this newsletter is just under 50 percent, and the click rate is usually around 25 percent.
Canada, what’s up with #Wexit?
Want some good news? The hole in the ozone over the South Pole is the smallest it’s ever been, even smaller than when it was discovered in the ‘80s.
Latest studies indicate: What makes open-office plans unproductive might not be the hot desks but the loud noise.
News nerds: Can journalists be influencers? Is David Fahrenthold this era’s Robert Caro? Promotions and free trials are the biggest trigger to getting readers to subscribe.
Last word: The Secret Service interviewed Eminem because of his anti-Trump lyrics. It gets dumber: The investigation was instigated because TMZ asked for comment about whether the Secret Service was investigating Eminem because of his lyrics, which I will reprint here: “Donald Duck’s on as the Tonka Truck in the yard. But dog, how the fuck is Ivanka Trump in the trunk of my car? ... ' cause I feel somewhat responsible for the dumb little blonde Girl, that motherfuckin ' baton twirler that got dumped in the pond, Second murder with no recollection of it.” They literally made a federal case out of that.
What I’m watching
Guys. Guys! As close readers of this newsletter know, I was late showing up to Schitt’s Creek, a quietly hopepunk show about a formerly rich family forced to live in a podunk town the patriarch once bought as a gag birthday gift. The show is sarcastic and cutting until the undercurrent of affection pulls you under. Sometimes, as with this one scene in Season 4, you drown in the good stuff when everything is stripped away except naked sincerity. Season 5 of Schitt’s Creek has a couple such scenes. OK, three. And oh my lord, the season finale. Sometimes I’m glad I’m alive just to see what people are pulling off these days on the television.
What I’m listening to
Before it was a 1984 Grammy-winning r&b hit for Chaka Khan, before he recorded it as a disco song on his second album, before he even had his first big solo show in his hometown, 20-year-old Prince recorded an acoustic demo of “I Feel For You.”
And folks, it’s good.
What do you think of today's email? I'd love to hear your thoughts, questions and feedback. I might even put ‘em in the newsletter if I don’t steal it outright.
Enjoying this newsletter? Forward to a friend! They can sign up here. Unless of course you were forwarded this email, in which case you should…
If this newsletter is of some value to you, consider donating. Honestly, I’m not doing this for the money. I’m writing this newsletter for myself, and for you. And a lot of you are contributing with letters and by suggesting articles for me to post. But some of you have asked for a way to donate money, so I’m posting my Venmo and PayPal information here. I promise to waste every cent you give me on having fun, because writing this newsletter for you is some of the most fun I’ve had. Venmo me at @Jason-Stanford-1, or use this PayPal link.