Re-emerging Relevance: Did we just re-live the apocalyptic novel World War Z?

An Oral History of the Zombie War, the book follows the pattern of Studs Terkel's The Good War: An Oral History of World War Two2 by reporting documentary-style on a global zombie pandemic through a series of first-person interviews with survivors. "3 Students assigned to read the novel for English composition and rhetoric class have sometimes questioned World War Z's sense of realism, arguing that while the style of writing draws comparisons to nonfiction, the outrageous events are uber-fictional. [...]isn't the human factor the only true difference between us and the enemy we now refer to as 'the living dead'?"5 As I re-read World War Z during the Covid-19 pandemic, I considered how key scenes and characters mirrored the current and real threats to Max Brooks' notion of the "human factor," not only in a literal and physical sense through the virus, but also by diminishing our abilities to care for our most vulnerable and to interact civilly with those who hold perspectives other than our own. "12 In October 2020, the American Hospital Association called the accusations "malicious, outrageous, and completely misguided," and both they and the CDC issued lengthy explanations of how underlying medical conditions and deaths due to Covid-19 are reported.13 Early in the pandemic, Brooks was treated by media as something of an expert on apocalypse;while researching for World War Z, he had studied diseases such as the Black Death and influenza, toured the CDC, and examined disaster preparedness plans. "19 It's worth noting that quisling is a real term, meaning a traitor or one who collaborates with an enemy and named for Norwegian war-time leader Vidkun Quisling, who collaborated with Adolph Hitler.20 America 2020 exhibited many examples of this zombification of citizens' thinking: followers or supporters of a particular candidate or philosophy were called "sheep," for example, which became a social media insult complete with an animal emoji meant to inflict further offense.