September 11, 2007

Here's your alternative history question to ponder

Colin Powell elected president in 1996.

Discuss.


There was actually an interesting angle on this in the novel I just finished reading World War Z. WWZ is a fascinating work of alt-history that stands right up there with Philip Roth's The Plot Against America. Where Roth takes the genre of memoir, and tells the story of his childhood growing up in Jewish lower-middle class neighborhood in north Jersey, but gives it the twist of Charles Lindberg being elected president on a Hitler-sympathetic platform in 1940, World War Z takes the genre of the Ken Burns-style documentary narrative, and tells the story of.....the world war against zombies. Okay, I lost some of you right out of the gate with the mention of Zombies (or "Zachs" as the soldiers refer to them), but WWZ is not some pulp zombie horror mashup. It's a cautionary tale about globalization, information war, overreliance on technology, environmental degredation, and loss of common sense and practical survival skills. The story is told looking back on the Zombie Wars ten years after victory was "declared." The narrator interviews a wide variety of survivors who played instrumental roles in the war, from the Chinese military doctor who treated "Patient Zero" from a supplanted village near the Three Gorges Dam resevoir, to the Australian astronaut left stranded on the international space station, to an American soldier who fought in critical engagements, to ordinary people who survived the horrors of the Great Panic and learned how to fight back against an enemy with no remorse. The author nicely eschews falling for a War of the Worlds answer: there is no "cure" for the virus that causes the dead to rise, and, ten years later, they haven't figured out exactly how the virus works, or what could be a "cure" for it other than destroying the brain of the infected. The plague spreads in a way that would be totally unsurprising to anyone who has read "The World Is Flat" and is only pushed back when different nations each fix on a Rourke's Drift style strategy. Colin Powell is alluded to (not by name) as the man who becomes president during the crisis, and aquits himself nobly. The image alone of the zombies attacking out of the water alone gave me the creeps three nights straight.

world war zombie.jpg

Definitely a Three Orgles read.

BRAINS.....BRAINS....YIPS from Steve-O: Holy crap, but The Colossus has had Zombies on his, um, brain for quite awhile now.

Posted by Steve-O at September 11, 2007 11:35 AM | TrackBack
Comments

Are we talking a regular Powell or a zombie Powell? Either way, I think we would have ended up going to war with Saddam -- regular Powell because of the attempted hit on George Bush in Kuwait + the WMD argument (he was likely to be no more skeptical as Pres than he was as SecState). And in the case of Zombie Powell, because the war would give him the opportunity to feast on Iraqi brains.

Mmmm . . . Iraqi brains . . .

I think about Zombies quite frequently, actually.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Acolossusblog.com+zombies

Posted by: The Colossus at September 11, 2007 12:03 PM

What about a zombie Powell vs a mini Ditka?

Posted by: rbj at September 11, 2007 01:22 PM

See, RBJ, it's to air questions like that that the LLambutchers exist.

Answer--MiniDitka.

Posted by: Steve the LLamabutcher at September 11, 2007 01:57 PM

I read it a couple of months ago, and I heartily concur with your analysis. But you forgot to mention the funniest part (other than Iran & Pakistan getting panicky over the zombies coming over their borders from China & India & nuking each other): President Powell's apparent VP is none other than......Howard Dean. No word on whether Howard's unbridled rage helped clear any of the zombie hot spots. And don't forget the "On the Beach" style love scene between Bill Maher & Ann Coulter. That was creepy, yet funny.

One minor quibble: I wouldn't call it a "Roarke's Drift" defense, unless the troops at Roarke's Drift left some unprotected civilians at a distant outpost to draw the zombies away from the stronghold. The whole point of the "South Africa Plan" defensive strategy was that by leaving fortified groups of civilians outside the major strongholds, the zombies would focus on the smaller groups and give the army time to refit & go back on the offensive.

The part where the Ukranian soldiers watch as their command uses chemical weapons on a group of refugees to help sort out who among them is infected was pretty hair-raising, as was the account of the Indian Army's stand against a horde of zombies in the Himalayas.

The analysis of the "Battle of Yonkers" seemed dead-on, and the mistaken emphasis on million dollar flashy technical weapons versus a $0.25 bullet rings true. I liked the line about how "shock and awe" battles were useless against hordes of the living dead.

RBJ, is the mini-Ditka in question also a zombie? Because if he is, that would be quite a formidable combo.

Posted by: Russ from Winterset at September 12, 2007 05:46 PM