Goodbye to All That

I'm trying to finish up a zombie trilogy I contracted to write. I've enjoyed myself and it's some of the best writing I've ever done. But after this...I'm done with zombies. Most of the zombie books I encounter are political tracts for gun-crazed right wing racist maddies--that seems to be the audience for these books. Quite frankly, there's not a whole hell of a lot of difference between your average zombie novel and THE TURNER DIARIES. So, after this, I'm done with the zombie fiction ghetto.

I've talked about this subject before and took quite a lot of heat for it. I've only ever deleted a few comments to this website, and those were all racist screeds and personal threats I received for writing about how most zombie fiction is right wing and racist, or at least particularly appeals to that crowd.

So, after I finish these stories, I'm going to avoid the zombie apocalypse as a subject for my fiction. It was fun for a while, but it's obvious to me where it ended up and I don't want to work in that little subset of horror fiction any longer. As with most of the self-published books I see, I don't want to be associated with most of the zombie novels I've read. There are some genuinely creepy folk walking around in that field.

Talk about your mindless, undead monsters ready to kill and eat you...

 A pair of racist gun-crazed fuckwads.

The "N" Word

I was raised in a home that was pretty much devoid of racism (and religion). If I could look back and say that there was any racism at all in the household of my parents, it would be of the condescending type—as that exhibited by many white progressives of an earlier era that they would take care of black people and help guide them.

The first time I heard the “N” word (that I can recall) was when I was about five years old. I was at the home of some distant relatives and saw two kids at the split rail fence separating their yard from the one next door. Two kids about my age were at the fence so I went over to talk to them. Soon, we were chatting away, and all I cared about was making new friends. Quickly, though, the resident kid at the house we were visiting walked up. He was a distant cousin a couple of years old than I.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“I’m talkin’ to these kids,” I told him.

“These are niggers! What are you doin’ talkin’ to niggers?” He turned to the little kids on the other side of the fence. “Go on, niggers!”

I’ll never forget that the kids smiled and then turned and ran away into the shade of their own yard. Even then, I was upset, not understanding what was going on, and I had never before heard this word that my cousin had used on the other children.

“My daddy says your family are all nigger-lovers.” And he walked away to vanish into his house.

For myself, I quickly located my father and was only too happy when I discovered that he was ready to leave, having conducted whatever family business he was about, and we climbed into his pickup truck and headed home. Along the way I asked him what a “nigger” was. He told me that it was a very nasty and evil word and told me never to use it. “Never,” he repeated.

I never did, except later in life, when I found I couldn’t get around it in portraying the language of certain fictional characters. You can’t bury the damned thing, any more than you can delete any number of hurtful and nasty ideas. All you can do is ignore it when possible and vow not to use it as it was intended—a way to dehumanize another person.

As I grew up, it almost became something of a badge of honor that my family were often referred to as “nigger-lovers”. My parents were always outspoken on civil rights for all people in a time and place that made such speech very dangerous. That my dad ran a local business that was dependent on the goodwill of the community made their speech all the more courageous. On that issue, I am quite happy to have grown up in such a home.

In recent years, as I have become more and more focused on the destruction of the ecosystems that support all of the life of our planet, I have often been accused of being a “tree-hugger”. As if this were a negative thing. And I was reminded immediately of the days when my parents, and myself, were labeled with that earlier epithet, and how similar in sound are the two terms.

I accept the sentiments of both.

Racist bastards.

For several wonderful years, I lived in a place called Gilmer County in the mountains of northeast Georgia. It was wonderful because I lived on 120 heavily forested acres that my parents had bought there. Our house was way down in a deep valley surrounded by old hardwood trees beside a spring-fed stream and our driveway was a mile long. Our nearest neighbor was two and a half miles distant. The nearest paved road three miles. The nearest public phone more than five miles away. This was the 70s, when there was only one option for phones: Ma Bell. They couldn’t figure a way to turn a profit by running that much line to our house, so they didn’t.

At any rate, I loved growing up there. I was so close to the hills and the trees and the wildlife I came to love. I even made a few friends there. But, largely, the people of Gilmer County were a horrid lot. It’s no wonder that James Dickey used Gilmer County as the template for the location of his monster-story, DELIVERANCE. And the people he wrote about in that novel…well, I lived among them, and he was not kidding, and he was definitely not writing in metaphor when he described those creeps.

But, because of the friends I did make in that place, and because of the beauty of the county, I still have some nice memories and some kind feelings for the place. So I found an online forum for the county seat of Gilmer County: Ellijayforum. I hooked up there with an eye toward finding out what had changed in the decades since I moved away, and what remained the same.

Sadly, what had remained the same is that a fair portion of the population remains (as then) hideously racist. Gilmer County was easily one of the most monstrously xenophobic places I’ve ever visited, and definitely the most xenophobic I’ve ever lived. A huge chunk of the native folk there are suspicious of every outsider, and distrustful of them to an almost pathological degree. And, of course, as the county then was 100% Anglo, the poisonous race hatred could almost be seen to be dripping from the rotted fangs of the inbred, mouth-breathing white boys.

At any rate, I started reading and posting at the Ellijayforums and quickly discovered that the place was crawling with the same racist assholes who had lived there when I was a kid. When I lived there, they would openly brag how they would (and did) murder anyone of color who tried to move into the county. Today, these same racist dogs have to put up with Hispanic citizens in their county, because the folk who run the apple orchards and other large businesses there want migrant laborers to settle down and fill the job vacancies. With the rich bringing in these new “coloreds”, the monster racists are left to gnash their green teeth and spew their venom. They soon were using the forum to scream about “the Mexicans” and the “brown-skins” and announce their “Minute Man” meetings.

Alas, the forum owner tried to clean up the board. Apparently they didn’t want the town to be known as a center of vile racism. But they couldn’t police the board fast enough, and so it was taken down, and now, this is what remains of it:

http://www.downtownellijay.com/forums/

Kind of a clever solution, but it’s sad to see them shut it down. So it goes. The bad guys can gather at the local Shoneys and Heil Hitler among themselves and commit buggery in the woods.



Let ‘em rot.