Zombie Jamboree

4 2 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE FEBRUARY 2 0 1 2

Culture

Unraveling the Undead

Our obsession with zombies, from the Congo to Hollywood

by MARIAN KESTER COOMBS

Like humans, zombies came out of Africa.

There they led rich lives being worshipped as

Congolese snake gods (nzambi). The ability

of certain snakes to use poison to paralyze

their prey was ritualistically imitated by tribal priests,

who then proclaimed themselves able to resurrect the

dead as well. In such vodoun or Obeah cults, the term

nzambi migrated in meaning to “spirits of the dead.”

Transported to the Americas, vodoun took root in

Caribbean slave culture, mating with indigenous religions

to spawn zombies, zumbies, jumbies, and duppies

and spreading northward to the continent. By the

17th century vodoun was strong enough to trigger

the Salem witch hysteria of 1692. Tituba, a Carib Indian

slave bought by Samuel Parris in Barbados and

brought to Salem, filled her young mistresses’ heads

with vodoun notions like invocation of the devil,

possession, trances, animal familiars, and the sticking

of pins into “poppetts” (dolls) made to resemble

enemies. The girls’ psyches broke down, alternating

between hysterics and catatonia. Tituba was among

the first arrested and was the first to confess, in lurid

detail—yet she survived while 24 others did not.

In this case the ancient European belief in witches,

lingering just below the surface of 17th-century Protestantism,

reacted violently when brought into contact

with the live coal of African sympathetic magic.

Although Arthur Miller would have us believe (in

“The Crucible”) that the fault lay entirely with the uptight,

theocratic “parochial snobbery” of the Massachusetts

Bay colonists—frustrated folk keen to punish

and avenge—in Salem, at least, culture shock played

a major role.

Richard Hughes’s novel A High Wind in Jamaica

(1929), set in the 19th century, opens with a British

colonial family so spooked by vodoun influence that

the mother insists the children be shipped back to

England for their souls’ salvation. “Duppies cannot

be mistaken for living people,” she discovers that her

children have been instructed, “because their heads

are turned backwards on their shoulders, and they

carry a chain: moreover one must never call them

duppies to their faces, as it gives them power.”

The popular cult of the zombie began shambling

forth in the 1920s, when Jazz Age hipsters turned their

fevered attentions to the West Indies. These slumming

lords and ladies thrilled to scenes of forbidden Obeah

rituals and inspired Hollywood to get into the act. In

1932 the first “voodoo” film, shot in 11 days on a budget

of $50,000, was titled “White Zombie”—once the

zombification of white people occurs, of course, attention

must be paid! Bela Lugosi plays a ghoulish character

who commands an army of the living dead forced to

“work in the sugar mills and the fields at night.”

The Zombie cocktail debuted in 1934 at Don the

Beachcomber’s, an L.A. watering spot, after a customer

reported that he “felt like a zombie” after swilling Don’s

mix of dark, golden, and white rum, cherry brandy,

orange or papaya or pineapple juice, lemon juice, and

grenadine on the rocks. Esquire called the Zombie the

“mother of all freak drinks,” and so it remains, listed on

menus with the campy caution “Limit Two.”

In 1956 my parents vacationed in Jamaica and

brought back maracas and a delightful 78: “Back to

back, belly to belly/ I don’t care a damn, I done dead

a’ready/ Back to back, belly to belly/ It’s a jumbie jamboree

…” The artist listed was The Charmer, backed

by Johnny McCleverty and the Calypso Boys. “The

[Mighty] Charmer” was the stage name of Louis Farrakhan,

ne Louis Eugene Walcott, whose mother had emigrated

from St. Kitts to New York City. The song was

first performed in 1953 by Lord Intruder; its “jumbies”

danced in a Trinidad cemetery, but The Charmer’s 1954

version moved the action to Woodlawn Cemetery in

Brooklyn. The Kingston Trio and Harry Belafonte were

among those to cover the tune.

Meanwhile zombies continued their advance as cultural

icon primarily onscreen. No count can be made

of these B- and C- and Z-rated movies—“Zombieland,”

“Kung Fu Zombie,” “Zombie High,” “Zombie Strippers,”

“Zombie Honeymoon,” “Zombie Campout,”

“Zombie Beach Party,” “I, Zombie,” “I Was a Teenage

Zombie,” “I Was a Zombie for the FBI,” “Zombie Holocaust,”

“Zombie Women of Satan,” “Space Zombie

Bingo,” “Redneck Zombies,” “Fast Zombies with Guns,”

“Motocross Zombies from Hell,” “Hot Wax Zombies

on Wheels”—just a splattering of those with the z-word

in the title, which excludes the George Romero, “Evil

Dead,” and “Resident Evil” film franchises, not to mention

AMC’s hit TV series based on Robert Kirkman’s

graphic novel The Walking Dead. There is even a genre

of Nazi-zombie films such as “Zombie Lake,” “Oasis of

the Zombies,” and “Dead Snow.”

From the ’30s and ’40s we have “King of the Zombies,”

“Revolt of the Zombies,” and “I Walked with a

Zombie,” all now considered classics by whoever deems

zombie movies to be classics. But “Valley of the Zombies”

in 1946 may have introduced an innovation: zombie

bloodlust. “Will science triumph against the evil

thirst of the undead?” shrilled the promo.

The original image of the zombie was a biddable,

entranced robotic worker, raised from the grave to labor

without complaint or compensation. Like its more

murderous brethren the Mummy, or the Somnambulist

from “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” this horror tapped

into two of humanity’s deep and historically justified

fears, of being enslaved and of premature burial. The

image of zombies as flesh-eating ghouls—the original

Arabian ghul partook only of the dead—had yet to be

established. But somewhere along the evolutionary line

there appeared a hybrid creature, both cannibal and

undead, bastard offspring of a duppy and a vampire,

with an inborn taste not just blood but human flesh.

(As another forebear, Frankenstein must receive honorable

mention for its versatile monster, at once Golem,

botched abortion, problem child, sin against the Creator,

science project run amok, and renegade zombie.)

If there is anything people fear more than death and

the dead, it is being eaten, especially eaten alive. Eat or

be eaten is the law of nature, and deep down we have

not forgotten. As many have observed, the horror of

“Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1956) was not of being

eaten but of the individual being replaced by a soulless,

mass, robotic sameness – the horror of egalitarianism

taken to extremes. The modern zombie apocalypse

goes beyond the terror of conformity to the terror

of consumption. It is a brilliant fusion of two skincrawling

horrors, corpses and being devoured, with

a third—being hunted by your own flesh and blood,

your neighbors and fellow countrymen in

invincible multitudes.

Director George Romero, the godfather of cinematic

zombies, wrote the current narrative with “Night of

the Living Dead,” shot for peanuts in the Pennsylvania

countryside and released in 1968. The elements of the

contemporary zombie are all present: (1) Radiation

bursts from outer space have reanimated the brains of

the unburied dead, (2) making them ravenous for living

human flesh, and (3) stoppable only by a round to

the brain. (4) Their bite infects and zombifies the bitten,

and (5) they are on the move, in revolt as it were—conquering

the world of the living one victim at a time.

Since ’68 the zombie apocalypse storyline has exploded

in all directions. There now exist schools of

zombiology: fast vs. slow zombies, extraterrestrial radiation

vs. earth-borne virus as the etiology of zombification,

all-flesh diet vs. brains only—there is even a lively

debate over whether zombies have souls. Social satire

using the zombie trope began with Romero’s “Dawn of

the Dead” in 1978 and extends from Britain’s “Shaun of

the Dead” to Cuba’s very first entry, “Juan of the Dead.”

The most fun is to be had when the topic is taken

(semi-)seriously. In 2011 the Centers for Disease Control

viewed the zombie apocalypse as a way to teach

pandemic emergency preparedness: “You may laugh

now, but when it happens you’ll be happy you read

this…” Survivalists are overjoyed to welcome fans to

their world of “41 Crucial Items You Cannot Survive

Without When the Fight for Food Begins.” Sites like

SurvivalOutpost.com and ChaosPlanning.com paint

a picture of “violent mobs” of “savage beasts” “battling

to the death over a loaf of bread.” Cognitive

neuroscientists have likewise seized the opportunity

to parlay interest in “brains” into interest in their profession—

they playfully posit a Consciousness Deficit

Hypoactivity Disorder to explain zomboid behavior.

The zanily earnest Zombie Research Society (“What

you don’t know can eat you”) dedicates itself to minute

examination of everything from “Zombie Decay

Theory” to “Zombie Hunting Behavior.” And so on.

But do zombies have a basis in fact? Reports of

Haitians buried in a cataleptic states and later revived

for enslavement—for example, the 1980 case

of Clairvius Narcisse—have been credible enough

to prompt several scientific investigations. One of

the best known is that of Wade Davis, a Harvard

ethnobotanist who wrote The Serpent and the Rainbow

in 1985. His quest for zombinol, the “zombie

poison” he hoped might have applications for anesthesia

and prolonged space travel, was actually

successful in isolating several toxins with the property

to yield the results Friar Laurence described in

Romeo and Juliet:

When presently through all thy veins shall run

A cold and drowsy humour; for no pulse

Shall keep his native progress, but surcease;

No warmth, no breath, shall testify thou liv’st;

The roses in thy lips and cheeks shall fade

To paly ashes, thy eyes’ windows fall

Like death when he shuts up the day of life;

Each part, depriv’d of supple government,

Shall, stiff and stark and cold, appear like death;

And in this borrowed likeness of shrunk death

Thou shalt continue two-and-forty hours,

And then awake as from a pleasant sleep.

Most rich and strange of all zombie references,

though, is this from the website GlobalSecurity.org:

[The] trance-producing potion might seem to be

a creation of the imagination, if it were not for

the fact that many observers of Haiti from early

colonial times down to the early 20th Century

had vouched for the evidences of its use. Such a

poison was necessary to the cannibalistic Voodoo

devotees of slavery days, because slaves, as

valuable chattels, were carefully enumerated. The

chosen victim, usually a child, was dosed with

the poison that brought on a condition simulating

death. The master, satisfied that he had lost

one of his human animals by natural causes,

ordered the burial. Afterwards, the victim was

resuscitated for the sacrifice, since the Voodoo

rites require a living, conscious offering. …

The formula of the poison was obtained at four

widely separated localities in Haiti. The consistent

ingredients included one or more species of

puffer fish (Diodon hystrix, Diodon holacanthus

or Sphoeroides testudineus) which contain tetrodotoxins,

potent neurotoxins fully capable of

pharmacologically inducing the zombi state.

Why GlobalSecurity.org requires a report like

this… maybe we don’t want to know. At any rate, let’s

conclude with a look at what the zombie meme symbolizes

today.

The central horror of the zombie-apocalypse narrative

is that zombies resemble and are your own recently

departed near and dear. That ambivalence has

been present all along, but more and more today the

moral status of the zombie is being probed. If carnivorous

animals can’t be accused of murder when they

kill to eat, why should zombies be, cursed as they

are with the need to cannibalize? Can zombies be

tamed, trained, rehabilitated, even cured? Can they

be taught to eat chicken, or vegetables? The cannibal

history of mankind is revisited here to a disquieting

degree.

Some have explained the zombie-apocalypse phenomenon

as fear of alien invasion or global plague or

even plain old urban anomie. But Max Brooks, author

of World War Z, notes that humans have always had

good reason to fear the horde: huge, human, and hideously

hungry. Right now this horde is our fellow man

in the form of millions faced with starvation in the developing

world. In the age of mass transportation and

communications, they are no longer content to sit and

wait for death. “They” are coming. The real-world images

are haunting: gaunt figures wearing ragged clothing,

disheveled, scrambling over fences and clawing

through tunnels, lurking in the darkness waiting for

a break…

There is never just one meaning to a symbol as

rich as the zombie. People have feared many things

in many different guises over the centuries, but some

fears are eternal and universal. Fear of the dead’s resentment—

survivor guilt—is one enduring terror.

Zombies as Morlocks, have-nots overflowing into

the realms of plenty, tap into our sense that we may

not be able to hold onto our post-industrial advantages

much longer. Is there a remedy for the zombie

apocalypse other than a bullet to the brain? There

had better be. But the narrative so far has failed to

imagine one.

"Animal Lexicon" is available here!

My longterm project, ANIMAL LEXICON, is now in its third edition and will be for sale through this blog.

It's a handmade book, 136 pages in length, 8.5" by 6.5" in size, stitch-bound, with original and public-domain artwork, including some hand coloring and stamping. The book is a humorous yet massively informative lexicon of English words and phrases based on the animal kingdom, arranged by taxa - that is, Kingdom/Phylum/Class/Order/Family/Genus/Species.
The cost is $20 PPD.

Here's what a cover looks like:

And here are a few pages from the inside:

And a few more:

Available in a variety of colors:

Blue, too!

And a few more pix for the road:

To order a copy, the address is ANIMAL LEXICON, 1470 Crofton Parkway, Crofton, MD 21114. Checks and money orders welcome.


Thanks!

Marian Coombs

--------------------------------------------

Some commentary:

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• Janet Kester Peoples of the world, this Lexicon was inspired by an animal god
  -- you must have it!

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xoxoxox,
S

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Theses on the Scheme

Credit rating agencies like Moody's and Standard & Poor's seem to be a player in the overall financial dilemma. They give the speculators, usurers, demagogues and thieves cover for their activities until it's too late.

Credit of course means belief. Creditworthy means believable. If you can't believe the connoisseurs of Belief, you'll have to believe your own senses.

There is no point in calling what's happening a dilemma, a problem or even a crisis. Because it is criminal, and even illegal, it should be called a scheme at the very least. Scam sounds too cute. It's been a long con. Conspiracy, or merely confidence game? Perhaps both.

The debt ceiling is obviously not a ceiling at all nor a limit of any kind. It exists to be exceeded. Even a fig leaf serves the purpose of hiding something. The debt ceiling no longer even hides anything. Like the agencies, it is an element of the Ponzi scheme.

The U.S. is "in danger" of having its credit rating downgraded from Triple A to Double A. Obviously even this rating is far too high; the rating should be BS, or at least BR for "bankrupt," because we are - bankrupt, that is.

A lowered credit rating will mean having to pay a higher interest rate to borrow. Why should the U.S. not have to pay higher interest to borrow? Higher interest is intended to curb borrowing (supply and demand). Isn't it a good idea for bankrupts to curb their borrowing?

What will happen if the U.S. defaults? First, it would not happen immediately, as there is so much revenue pouring in and already on hand. But default would mark the beginning of the end of government by Ponzi scheme. It is probable that we can't even begin to end it without taking the hit of default. Default is that cold shower of Reality that our "leaders" have been desperate to avoid for so many years now. Since the U.S. is not good for its debts, default merely acknowledges that fact. Isn't the first step in ending addiction the recognition that the addiction exists?

By saying "We are not Greece," Obama confirms that we are Greece - we are all Greece now. Dilemma ... problema ... krisis ... schema ... It's all Greek to us.

The Formula

A beautiful summer it has been on this beautiful planet. What "summer" is on the other planets and their moons, one shudders to contemplate. What "summer" is for stars without planetary systems is even more problematic. I guess you have to be there.

I dreamed last night that I dressed up in an expensive outfit, got my hair and nails done, etc., strolled out in my designer stilettos and was immediately taken for Somebody. They asked how I had become so successful, and I answered, "I just decided that everything about Life is wonderful, awe-inspiring, blessed, a gift and a joy," or words to that effect.

I woke up feeling great! Now the trick is to remember the formula.

Divide et impera

"Divide and conquer" is as old as the hills, which is why it's rendered above in Latin. The imperial Romans used it and so have all successful rulers of mankind. It's a classic strategy for gaining and holding on to power.

In the classless U.S. we call it class warfare, and it's been operating brilliantly since the era of Andrew Jackson to keep us headed in the direction of plutocracy. It's a simple formula: I resent you for making $7,500 bucks a year more than I do, you resent some guy for having a "Cadillac" healthcare plan, that guy resents me for not being "under water" on my mortgage, still another guy resents both of us for our "gold-plated" pensions.

It's chump change they've got us squabbling over, folks. Sure, public employee unions are by no means "heroic laborers" in the mold of coal miners, longshoremen, weavers, textile workers, teamsters or steelworkers. But that doesn't mean they're the enemy either. However "lavish" (compared to what?) the deals union leaders have cut with their state employers, it's just stupid to scapegoat other working people as the cause of all our financial woes. For one thing, they're not. For another, it's class-warfare, divide-and-conquer rhetoric, and we're falling for it. Again.

We need more unions, in fact, not fewer. Most existing unions may well be corrupt, job-destroying slush funds for politicians - but they are among the last forms of self-organization We the People have. A society without grass-roots, local, voluntary associations (if you ever studied history, they used to call them Friendly Societies, and along with churches and synagogues they were the origin of credit unions, savings and loans, insurance companies, unemployment and disability compensation, fire departments, schools, hospitals, homeless shelters and many other fine things) is a society already divided and conquered. Think thrice before you support breaking up Big Labor. Organize yourself instead of disorganizing others.

Another example of that insidious D&C rhetoric: The New York Times is not what you'd think of as a populist broadsheet, so when it runs articles like "Enriching a Few at the Expense of Many" (April 10, 2011), you have to wonder. Companies should exist, the article argues, for the benefit of shareholders, not insiders. Shareholders and investors are the owners of a company; "excessive" executive pay robs these owners of their fair share of company profits and may even bankrupt the company in the end.

The general outrage at "Wall Street" in the wake of the Great Recession of 2008-present takes a similar form. People feel they have the right to condemn private corporations for "overcompensating" their CEOs and other top employees. The government should "do something" about it.

Hell, the government would love to. They're always trying to take over the private sector and dictate its every move. The populist ressentiment spawned by the 2008 crash finds favor with an administration whose upper reaches are more populated than ever by literally dozens of revolving-door alumni of Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, etc. Capitalism for the ruling class, socialism for the masses - that's what we need to be looking at, not who got some chump-change million-dollar bonus. If shareholders own these companies, let them deal with how much the brass gets compensated. It's amazing how laserlike people's attentiveness becomes when their own money's at stake.

The point is, rich people aren't the problem. Personal wealth is not the problem. Most of us want to get rich; just because someone else is rich doesn't mean you can't be rich as well. Not only do most rich people get rich from being smart and inventing things and processes - and then invest their riches to create goods and services and jobs - but people ascend to riches and topple from riches all the time. It is not a static category.

More crucially, there's a difference between being powerful and just being rich. The powerful are rich, but not all the rich are powerful. Archimedes, the famed Greek mathematician and inventor, once stated that if he had a place to stand and a lever long enough, he could move the earth itself. It's not how much personal wealth you possess, but whether you are in a position or are motivated to leverage it: to wield it like an instrument, a weapon to force "change," to crush opponents, to buy loyalties, to suborn consciences, to seed the media with Big Lies, to scare off advertisers and investors and supporters, to sap the value of currencies, to suck dry any remaining pockets of independent power, to orchestrate fictitious conflicts, to betray secrets, to corrupt ideals - and to rip off the little people of all nations.

Some of these leveragers aren't even super wealthy. All they've done is maneuver themselves into top decision-making spots at big foundations and trusts and hedge funds. A few billion bucks in the right hands is a great force-multiplier, a major magnifier of intent.

To return to the financial crisis, the state could gouge all the "excessive" cash out of every millionaire and all 400 billionaires in America, and that still wouldn't cover the interest on our sovereign debt for a single year. And the following year when the state returned for more, there would remain neither golden eggs nor geese for them to seize.

We need to ask different questions and quit lapsing into the same old tired whinging about who's "working class" and who's "bourgeois," who's "underprivileged" and who's "overprivileged." I frankly can't think of anyone more overprivileged than a U.S. congressman, except maybe the president. The main question we need to ask is:

To whom do we owe this amazing treasure trove of $14+ trillion? Who are they, where do they live, and where did they get those trillions - quadrillions - to lend to us and to the rest of the world? What do they expect for their unwanted largesse?


Here's the compound interest formula:
It's an exponential function.
It adds up dizzylingly fast.
And it's all perfectly legal!


The U.S. economy is now the biggest Ponzi scheme in the history of the planet. It works something like this:

The government demands to spend fantastic amounts of money on whatever Good Works pop into its head. The money is created out of thin air by the Federal Reserve. The government then owes the money to the Fed (and our close friend China, among others). The government taxes individuals and businesses to pay back the debt - or actually, just the interest on the debt, or debt service, because they are in no position to pay back principal at this point. So the Fed gets repaid with real money in exchange for the fiat, ersatz, unsecured, digitized currency they've issued. This is a major way the transfer of wealth from working people - blue collar, white collar, professional, small business and corporate - occurs.

The debt service portion of the budget is far more untouchable than entitlement and defense spending. At least the latter two budget segments are mentioned as cuttable now and again. Debt forgiveness is unmentionable. Unthinkable!

But what would happen if we tried to renegotiate or even repudiate all that accumulated, compounded, usurious indebtedness, all those loans so heedlessly made in our and our children's and our grandchildren's names? What would happen if we declared bankruptcy, defaulted, just walked away? Who would come after us? The IRS? That handful of old guys at the Fed? The tanned septuagenarians of the Council on Foreign Relations, World Bank, IMF, Trilateral Commission, Club of Rome or Bilderberg Group?

Where are their legions? Do they command an armed force, which after all is what lurks behind all "promises to pay" and the "full faith and credit" of the financial system? Would their behest be enough to send troops on the march against fellow Americans?

The only threat mentioned when - horror of horrors - anyone brings up the "specter of default" on the sovereign debt is that the banks would quit lending to us. Perfect! We don't want to borrow any more. We didn't want to borrow any more $14 trillion ago!

Some believe we need our own billionaire, a People's billionaire, someone who can't be bought and can't be ruined by the scratch of a pen like the rest of us can, who will represent the little people of this country and stand up for us against the Great Indebtors. This is the allure of a Perot, a Bloomberg or a Trump.

But maybe we don't need such a savior. Maybe we can walk away, just walk away and see what happens. File Chapter 7-11 or whatever number it is. Push the reset button. Do-over. Clear the screen and reboot. You can come out now, all is forgiven ...

Is any banker going to starve because Citigroup took a bath on its bad investments? More likely a whole lot of little people will starve if we don't get out from under those suspiciously sacred obligations.

Forgive and forget: it could be our only way out.

Salt of the Earth

SALT is a mineral (sodium chloride, NaCl) that most forms of terrestrial life need to survive. The idiom that means you are "entitled to live" is "to be worth your salt." Several cultures welcome guests with a dish of bread and salt - bread for hospitality and salt for friendship.

The hierarchy of eating at a table was long described as sitting "below the salt" or "above the salt." The value of salt and its scarcity in the ancient world were such that the Romans paid their legions partly in sal, root of the word "salary." (It is also the root of the word "salacious.") The discovery that salt preserved perishable food ("curing") was a key element in the transition of humanity from hunter-gatherers to agriculturalists.

"To rub salt in a wound" is painful, but helps the wound heal. Rome made sure that Carthage would not rise again by sowing its lands with salt ...

Our blood, our sweat and our tears are all salty. So is the fluid that sustains us before birth - a brew that harks back to the oceans whence we came.

The human tongue possesses specialized areas for the tasting of salt. A salt craving arises just like thirst and hunger when the body senses its lack. Animals travel thousands of miles to reach deposits of salt. Drawing dramatic attention to the need for salt: In Werner Herzog's "Aguirre, the Wrath of God," the Spaniards root like hogs to get at a vein of salt in the ground, and in Peter Weir's "The Way Back" at least one man becomes obsessed with salt even as he wastes away. In my own family there are two salt-cravers and two salt-take-it-or-leavers, so there is probably a genetic basis for degrees of salt-savoring.

Places all over the world have been named for their abundance of natural salt - Tuzla in Bosnia, Salzburg in Austria, French Lick in Indiana (see poem by Stephen Vincent Benét below), Saline in Kansas, Big Lick in Tennessee, Paint Lick in Kentucky, Beaver Lick in Missouri and so on. One source notes that

The Romans ... called [the Celts] Galli or Gauls, coming from a Greek word, used by the Egyptians as well, hal, meaning 'salt.' They were the salt people. The name of the town that sits on an East German salt bed, Halle, like the Austrian towns of Hallein, Swabisch Hall and Hallstat, has the same root as do both Galicia in northern Spain and Galicia in southern Poland, where the town of Halych is found. All these places were named for Celtic saltworks. ... Like the ancient Chinese emperors, [the Celts] based their economy on salt and iron ...

(from Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky - great book!)

The word "hal" is preserved in the name for rock salt crystals, halite. (I wonder if it might also be the root of "Hail," healing and health.)

Desperate quests and wars and endless caravans have been launched to secure supplies of salt, and riots have erupted over taxes on salt. Surveyors in early America were instructed to "to make note of (the following): the quality of soil and the situation of all mines, salt licks, salt springs and mill seats which may come to your knowledge and are to be regarded and noticed in your field books.”

The Egyptians used what they called natrun (from the Wadi Natrun or Salt Valley, a source of naturally occurring sodium carbonate) to preserve mummies, which is where sodium got its chemical symbol Na (via the borrowed Greek nitron and Latin natrium).

Generations of schoolchildren have thrilled to the realization that sodium - a soft, light, sinuous silvery-white alkaline metal that explodes on contact with water - combines with chlorine - a burning greenish-yellow halogen gas - to form common ordinary table salt.

Sodium chloride not only preserves food and pharaohs but is essential to

transmission of nerve impulses around the body, regulating the electrical charges moving in and out of the cells. It also controls our taste, smell and tactile processes and helps our muscles, including the heart, to contract.

Chloride is important for a range of vital processes including digestion and the absorption of potassium into the body. It also helps the blood to carry carbon dioxide from respiring tissues to the lungs and preserves the acid-base balance in the body.

When the immune system is under attack, chlorine helps to fight off infection since hypochlorite, a chlorine-containing compound, forms in white blood cells and either attacks the germs itself, or helps to activate other agents that carry out the same function.

(from "Salt and Physiology" by the European Salt Producers' Association)

I've been thinking about Salt now that bans on added salt are being contemplated by various levels of government. The thinking is that money will be saved that would have been spent on the consequences of high dietary sodium, which some studies blame for hypertension and its attendant ills. Not all scientists believe sodium is the culprit, though. And clearly a lot of people ingest copious amounts of salt all their lives without ill effect.

The spectre of a Salt Czar has been raised, in any case. Considering the vital importance of salt to human history and the human body, it might not be a good idea to let any group, no matter how "well-intentioned," dictate whether we may savor our salt or not. We have learned the hard way the we must take schemes for the Improvement of Mankind cum grano salis.* One man's flavor is another man's poison; to each his own; there is no accounting for taste - nor should there be. For "if the salt hath lost its savour, with what shall it be salted?"

*with a grain of salt

American Names
by Stephen Vincent Benét

I have fallen in love with American names,
The sharp names that never get fat,
The snakeskin-titles of mining-claims,
The plumed war-bonnet of Medicine Hat,
Tucson and Deadwood and Lost Mule Flat.

Seine and Piave are silver spoons,
But the spoonbowl-metal is thin and worn,
There are English counties like hunting-tunes
Played on the keys of a postboy's horn,
But I will remember where I was born.

I will remember Carquinez Straits,
Little French Lick and Lundy's Lane,
The Yankee ships and the Yankee dates
And the bullet-towns of Calamity Jane.
I will remember Skunktown Plain.

I will fall in love with a Salem tree
And a rawhide quirt from Santa Cruz,
I will get me a bottle of Boston sea
And a blue-gum n***** to sing me blues.
I am tired of loving a foreign muse.

Rue des Martyrs and Bleeding-Heart-Yard,
Senlis, Pisa, and Blindman's Oast,
It is a magic ghost you guard
But I am sick for a newer ghost,
Harrisburg, Spartanburg, Painted Post.

Henry and John were never so
And Henry and John were always right?
Granted, but when it was time to go
And the tea and the laurels had stood all night,
Did they never watch for Nantucket Light?

I shall not rest quiet in Montparnasse.
I shall not lie easy at Winchelsea.
You may bury my body in Sussex grass,
You may bury my tongue at Champmédy.
I shall not be there. I shall rise and pass.
Bury my heart at Wounded Knee.

What Is a Zombie, and Why Does It Want to Eat Us?

The New York Times ran an article in its December 5, 2010, edition --

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/05/arts/television/05zombies.html --

arguing that Zombies are in vogue because they remind people of their own repetitive, mindless everyday lives:

What if contemporary people are less interested in seeing depictions of their unconscious fears and more attracted to allegories of how their day-to-day existence feels? That would explain why so many people watched that first episode of “The Walking Dead”: They knew they would be able to relate to it.

A lot of modern life is exactly like slaughtering zombies.

The author goes on to suggest that such modern tasks as deleting unwanted email resemble Zombie-killing in that they're simple, easy, mechanical - and yet endless: "The zombies you kill today will merely be replaced by the zombies of tomorrow."

I have a different interpretation. I think horror is all about our fears, whether unconscious, preconscious, semi-conscious or conscious - that's why it's horrific.

What do Zombies do? They eat you. You can't feed them anything else, like apples or dog food, or get them to feast on one another. No, NO, they want to eat YOU out of house and home and all your substance. They want to turn your vibrant, thriving individual person into a heap of decaying remains.

The most ghastly thing in the world to just about every human being is a corpse. We fear Death and we are terrified of the Dead.

The second most ghastly thing is the prospect of being eaten - not just eaten, but eaten ALIVE.

The Zombie Apocalypse brilliantly combines these two horrors, but adds a third element: a MASS of Zombies, slow-moving and defenseless but so numerous and ravenous as to be unstoppable.

Why is this vision so compelling? Because in the back of our minds, we know that there really is such a threat. We are constantly warned about it and commanded to feel responsible for it, and even told we deserve to be destroyed by it. At the same time we aren't supposed to talk about it.

What is this threat? The near-starvation of millions in the "underdeveloped" world. No longer are teeming poverty-stricken masses sitting put and quietly dying as they wait for rescue. In the age of mass communication and mass transportation, they are on the move.

They have already begun coming. As the horror movie line goes, "They're HEE-ere ..." We see images of them all the time - thin bony people wearing ragged clothes, scrambling through tunnels and across fences, lurking in the darkness waiting for a break, taking huge risks to reach the (over?)developed world and -

grab a bite to eat.

The best-quality Zombie treatments at least hint at the uneasy relationship between the Living and the Undead, the Pure and the Infected. George Romero kicked off the franchise in 1968 with plenty of tragedy and irony. Shaun of the Dead managed to tame his Zombified "mate" Ed and turn him into a tolerable telly-watching companion. I didn't go to see "Zombieland" because the trailer showed Zombies being simply soullessly mowed down. But American Movie Classics' new series "The Walking Dead" is showing signs of sensitivity to the fact that there but for fortune and a drop of blood or saliva may go any of us: its Zombies need more to be put out of their misery than brutally terminated.

The tension between the person the Zombie was and the Thing to which it has been reduced makes for great if horrifying storytelling. As with the tension between human and machine ("I, Robot," "The Terminator," "A.I.: Artificial Intelligence," "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?"), we yearn to respond to any humanity we detect, even in cyborgs or the Undead. It is a bitter lesson when we learn we can't afford to do that.

Who will win World War Z? Is there a remedy for Zombie invasion other than a bullet to the brain? I wonder what popular culture is telling us.