Stevie and I recently finished HBO’s The Last Of Us. If you haven’t watched yet, I can’t recommend it enough. (**I don’t think there are really any true spoilers in this post, but I suppose read with caution if you?**) Part zombie horror, part neo-western, part love story —there’s something for everyone in this series. Plus, you get to enjoy all the abounding Pedro Pascal lore, memes, and thirst traps.1 The show follows the journey of Joel, a survivor-turned-smuggler, and Ellie, a teenager who might just be the hope of the entire world. The two are headed westward across what-was-once-called-America, dodging killer cordyceps in the form of infected runners, clickers, bloaters, and hiding from something even worse: humans.
Over and over throughout the series, it is made clear that the most terrifying monster that exists isn’t the fungus, but the surviving people. FEDRA, raiders, reactionaries, and revolutionaries — “the infected are bad, but at least they're predictable. It's the normal people that scare me.”
Apocalyptic literature and films are filled with this theme: when this world is destroyed, people will become monsters. The best of us will be driven to commit crimes of survival; the worst of us will engage in horror for sport.
When this world breaks, people become monsters.
At this moment, I’m writing this blog post from a coffee shop in a very rich, very white part of town. I’ve been sitting alone at a 4-top table, a family of 3 walks in — there are no seats open for them. They hover around my table as they wait for their coffees. There’s a seat for one at the bar. I’m happy to move. I stand and move towards the mother of the group — she visibly jumps as I address her, clutching her purse.
I can’t make this up.
I offer my table, she misunderstands. She thinks I’m complaining that she’s crowding my space. I try again to explain, and she interrupts to say, “no, we’re just getting our drinks to go since there’s no room here. Sorry we’re in your way.” Her initial nervousness has turned to irritation and snark. She still thinks I’m fussing. I move to the bar anyways. With a look of bewilderment, she takes my seat with her two teenagers.
We’re afraid of one another.
Turn on the news or open up the NextDoor app. We narc on one another, we advise one another to call the cops at the slightest alarm, we greet strangers on our doorsteps with threats. We’re terrified of other humans.
Sometimes, for good reason.
In America, violence is the water we’re all swimming in. Women text their friends the locations of their first dates, “if you don’t hear from me by X time, there’s an issue.” Public libraries are now a hot spot for Proud Boys and other fascist militias. This past week, six students were taken into police custody at my school district for making threats about shootings or bombs. Six.
Stories of apocalypse are marked by scenes of grotesque violence. But that grotesque violence is here — and when I say here I am speaking specifically about my country. In fact, America is a violence. America has been the first and only nation to detonate a nuclear bomb as an act of warfare. America enslaved an entire race — the Nazis took their notes from her blueprint for segregation. America enacted a genocide from sea to shining sea, forcibly removing families from their homelands and marching them deathward. Every day, America’s invisible hand of the market puts a gun to the working class’ head to say: “work or die.”
When this world breaks, people become monsters. When this world breaks? Friend, some of us are already behaving as monsters. The world we currently inhabit is already irredeemably fractured.
Post-apocalyptic fantasies don’t fascinate us because they give us a glimpse of a world where america crumbles and money is better burnt than spent, they fascinate us because they show us our current empire as it actually is — without the glitter and convenience and distraction. They invite us to truly stare back at the abyss our rulers created out of manufactured scarcity and microplastics. The monsters of this realm are less of a product of human nature, and instead a response to the manmade horrors that surround us: poverty, warfare, alienation, genocide, climate disaster…
When our government crumbles, when the empire falls, when the military and police finally retreat, what should we expect? I think there’s good evidence to think we’ll find something beautiful among the ruins. Robert Evans does a great job telling the real life stories of community care and mutual aid in the wake of disaster during “The Good Side of the Second American Civil War” episode of It Could Happen Here. In particular, his research examining what happened inside the Superdome — despite nonexistent security — is particularly illuminating & makes for a worthwhile listen. Here’s a small excerpt:
For a very long time it was taken as a given that Hurricane Katrina had brought anarchy in it’s wake. And actually, that is sort of true, but the reality of the situation is that anarchy isn’t always terrible. Louisiana National Guard Colonel Thomas Beron showed up to the Super Dome five days after the Katrina made landfall. He’d been primed by dozens of horrifying headlines to expect piles and piles of corpses. His convoy included a refrigerated eighteen-wheeler and three doctors to work as a makeshift morgue and process the dead. He arrived expecting at least 200 bodies. He found six. Four had died of natural causes, one from an overdose, and the other from a suicide. No one had been killed inside the Superdome. There was very little evidence of any violence there at all.
Evans’ reporting on the matter is compelling, and if you’ve ever worried about what disaster might mean for your neighborhood, give it a listen. Turns out, there’s been a lot of documentation and research done on one strange phenomenon: when america’s shoddy systems fail, people work together to prevail. The Last of Us even nods at this reality — the few times we meet people living outside of authoritarian or hierarchical societies, they are living happy, meaningful lives: from a queer partnership to the communist village of Jackson.
“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” This world is fractured, broken, dying. Between now and what we might build, we find monsters.
the final assault on the viability of the earth […] is being called the Anthropocene: a crisis caused by human activity that puts human life at risk. This is an affront! Because it is not “humans,” is it? Because “We,” “people,” did not do this. […] It is not “humanity” that poisoned so much earthly human and non-human life, but a small and highly powerful minority of humanity, and the order they have imposed on all earthly life. […] Some re-framings I find especially compelling: the Plantationocene, the racial Capitalocene, the interminable disaster […] was not caused by humans in any even sense of the word. It was forged, in fact, by the violent ejection of some, most, of the world’s inhabitants from the conception of who is considered to be a human.2
The death rattle of empire is terrifying, but it is certainly not more horrific than the futurity of racial capitalism. Now is the time of a small but powerful minority acting as monsters. Tomorrow, a new world, for us and all earthly life.
Comrade Pedro Pascal is “the child of socialist political refugees.”
Rehearsals for Living, Maynard & Simpson.