Recently I started playing  Valve Software's new zombie fighting game, Left 4 Dead. I had my eye on this one for months and was interested playing it, because I like fighting zombies. (I also call this "research".) This was the fifth zombie fighting game that had come out in as many years, but the first I could actually play. I realized then that interest in zombies, which was previously a cyclical thing, had achieved a permanence in pop culture.

Zombie movies come and go and historically so has interest in zombies. Recently there has been a surge in zombie movies, one that shows no sign of letting up. In addition to the big budget Hollywood films, there is a never-ending stream of independent zombie movies--zombie films favor The Everyman kind of actor (AKA fat or unattractive actors), are by nature low budget, and your small town at 6am can stand in for a deserted town in which almost everyone has been turned into shambling, hiding zombies. Zombie films are the new Westerns, an idea most of me agrees with, but that makes the part of me that loves Westerns cry.

Daydreaming about what to do when there is a zombie uprising had previously been part of the cyclical zombie fad. But this time it doesn't appear to be going away. If anything, it appears to be growing every year. I've been waiting for it to go away, but it hasn't, so I guess it isn't a fad anymore. When I was in high school, back in the Eighties, we talked about zombies. There were only a handful of films featuring zombie uprisings. We would hang out in someone's basement, sitting on a broken sofa, sipping from a Big Gulp while pondering what would happen when the zombies showed up. This was the sort of conversation that stayed in the basement, the men's equivalent of the heart to heart talk about feelings at a girl's sleepover. Nobody wanted to admit at school that they thought about fighting zombies.

But times have changed. No longer a fad, Zombie uprisings are now officially out of the basement and onto, among other places, the Internet. Thanks to the Internet, interest in zombie fighting has achieved a certain permanence. On message boards devoted to guns, knives, survival gear, disaster preparedness and the military, invariably some brave soul starts a thread simply titled "zombies". If the moderators find zombie talk offensive--or more likely just plain annoying--the thread will get locked and then heaved in the trash bin. But if the ground is fertile, the thread will grow, and even spawn complimentary threads. One will be a post-apocalypse meet-up thread in which Barry from Montana will invite people to converge on his farm. (anyone who reads the address will not remember once he has turned into a zombie...so far as anyone knows.) Another thread, usually titled something like "My Zombie Fighting Weapons" will feature real-life guns and swords, photographed with the cleanest carpet in the house--usually by the closet--serving as a backdrop.

It takes a critical mass of four straight men to start talking about a zombie uprising. (Three men might make a comment about zombies, but you really need four to get a conversation going.) Once that happens, sooner or later, the four men will start talking about what they would do when the dead start walking.  This is more likely the younger the straight men are, though even men as old as 50 have probably given a zombie uprising some thought, having been in their teens and twenties when George Romero was making his best zombie films. (I would be embarrassed to talk about zombies with anyone over the age of 60, but then again maybe that's just me.)

Thinking about zombie uprisings is exclusively the domain of the straight male. It is the domain of men who think the world is slightly more dangerous than the rest of society thinks it is. It is the domain of men who unapologetically still see the world in caveman terms, where killing and protecting are the most important things men do. Women are completely apathetic to the potential threat. (Women are not faulted for having the foresight to consider zombies, but will still have to do their own killing in the zombie uprising, whether they realize it or not.) Gay men really couldn't care less. History will judge whether or not both ignored the threat to their peril.

It is surprising how seriously some people taking the threat of zombies. Despite the fact that there is no conceivable way the dead can be reanimated and turn into flesh-eating monsters some people take "the threat" seriously. The threat, it could be argued, however remote is so grave that at least a little bit of thought should be invested in it. And some do. If you advertise on Craigslist for some volunteers to come and help you dig an anti-zombie trench around your city or town on a Saturday afternoon, you had better show up, because at least a few guys will. If you don't, you're likely to be the object of an irate Missed Connection, and there won't be any space for you on the last bus out of your zombified town. (In fact, you will be on the On His Own No Matter How Hard He Begs list.)

Why zombies? Fear of zombie uprisings goes back to the monarchies and the feudal system, when few ruled many. If you were one of the few, you feared a peasant uprising. It kept you up at nights, worrying about the little people suddenly turning against you. They're not very dangerous, individually, but in large numbers they start to look like trouble. Even worse, if they run into another peasant who hasn't given much thought to turning against you, they could convert that person to the cause and they'll want to get you, too, and so on, and so on, until everyone is like them. Then, after they get you, they're have the run of things--a directionless, chaotic run devoid of civilization or order. They'll be eating each other before you know it. Does this sound kind of familiar?

Zombies are the ideal enemy. They're not on the rampage because they're black, white, Republican, Libertarian, Palestinian, Chinese, man, woman, straight, gay, or "questioning youth". They're all of those things, and more. They're on a rampage because that's what they do--rampage--and they want to open up your skull and eat the gray insides. It's still okay to hate people--or rather zombies--for that. (For now, anyway.) There are no complex socioeconomic, ethnic, religious, or other issues to get in the way. There is no higher understanding, or truth, that were it to be discovered would make everyone happily get along. Zombies make it easy for you: it's either you or them.

Zombies are the ultimate threat: they emerge from nowhere. The likelihood of them emerging was low, but it was the worst threat imaginable. You used to trust Earl, but then he turned into a zombie. Thanks for nothing, Earl. Zombies represent a betrayal of the entire order of things--starting with the rule that that the dead can't come back to life. From there, it only gets worse. Destruction of society. Cannibalism. Having to kill loved ones.  Noble indeed is the man who stands between the world as we know it and a world like that.

Zombie fighters are the 21st century heirs of Davy Crockett. They are the militia, standing guard against a day that never comes, quietly waiting, because explaining what they are doing to mixed company is potentially embarrassing. They store guns and ammunition stocked in the closet under the prom suit, and if they have enough foresight, a samurai sword for good measure. They are frontier scouts, exploring the new frontier of a zombie infested post-uprising world. The so-called "final frontier" of space has proven a disappointing bust for the everyman--except as a source of the zombie plague--so the everyman has created his own frontier--his neighborhood, minus civilization, plus zombies. And they envision battles much like the Alamo, but with a different outcome, again and again, until the world is cleansed of zombies.

It's no surprise that zombie uprisings have achieved permanence on the American subconscious when it did. Generation X, sandwiched between the Boomers and Gen Y, never had a war of it's own. Whence is our threat? Even the Cold War got taken away from us. By the time 9/11 came around, most of us were too old to be useful on the battlefield. We were comfortably settled with careers and children and bad knees and even the president wasn't encouraging us to sign up. Many straight men in this country long to prove themselves, not necessarily in a zombie outbreak, but in ways that they can't even contribute any more. When joining the army to fight Al Qaeda is as unlikely as fighting a zombie uprising, you might as well fantasize about the zombies. You can keep your day job.

There is a certain megalomania in worrying about a zombie uprising. Zombie uprisings are always something that happens to you, not somebody else. Most people, believe it or not, sat out World War II in relative safety. And yet whenever someone talks about zombie uprisings, they're talking about something that will happen to them personally. The reason for this is simple: the zombie uprising is not a fear that those who think about it wish to avoid. Rather, zombie uprisings are things that are aspired to.  People really do want to do battle with hordes of the flesh-eating undead, against a burning backdrop of civilization in collapse. People pray that the apocalypse never comes, but if it does, please, oh please, let it come in the form of flesh-eating zombies. These same people don't give any thought at all to other potential game-changing crises, for example, nuclear war. Nuclear war is not something that ordinary people can get into. It is the realm of government. What do you expect Joe Sixpack to do about it? He can't do anything about hardly anything on a life-affecting scale anymore. But he can do something about zombies. In the zombie uprising, government has already failed.

A zombie uprising is where heroes are made, in a convenient, familiar setting. Your entire community--or rather, what's left of it--will be there to witness your heroism and sacrifice. It validates man-skills considered outmoded and slightly creepy by some in the modern world and rewards them with survival. A zombie uprising is the perfect place to show off your strip mall dojo Krav Maga skills, where the value of all those trips to the shooting range becomes apparent, and where you can show the world that you really did buy three semiautomatic pistols, four fighting knives, a replica samurai sword, and a bo stick to fight zombies after all.

Most people who post pictures of their zombie fighting arsenal don't really take the threat of zombies seriously. Very few of them do, and those people are crazy by anyone's definition. Posting pictures of swords and guns is a further indulgment of the fantasy, and is a tongue-in-cheek way of defending the purchase of a replica samurai sword or your third hand gun. You don't need an excuse to buy a replica samurai sword, but some men abhor a lack of practicality in anything, and even a facetious justification is better than nothing. It also makes the weapons somehow safer. Oh, heavens no--this isn't meant for hurting people--it's for meant for killing zombies.

Daydreaming about zombie fighting is fun because it transforms the people that merely annoy us in our day-to-day lives into mortal threats to our safety, and thus we have every right to kill them. One day, they're ordinary--if irritating--people. The next, they want to devour your flesh, and it's open season. In my zombie apocalypse, I look forward to a reunion with the construction crew across the street that has been working on the same building for two years, the person who keyed my car, the Yuppies who talk incessantly on their cell phones about inane bullshit on the express bus after work--anyone with a Blackberry, actually--delivery truck drivers, loud, drunken pub crawlers who wander through my neighborhood after midnight, and the jerk restaurateur across the street.

It's easy to get carried away with the zombie thing. On a Facebook forum devoted to Left 4 Dead, someone asked, "What guns would you want to use in a real-life zombie uprising?" I shook my head at some of the choices: people arming themselves with submachine guns and .50 caliber sniper rifles. I couldn't resist commenting. ".50 sniper rifles are heavy and uncomfortable to carry, in my opinion. (This was true--I really have handled .50 rifles.) Anything that makes you slower than a zombie will eventually make you one." I was particularly proud of that line. I then described my own firearms and how they would be useful to fight zombies. The next day, I realized that a link to that discussion was on my Facebook page. Where my mother in law could read it. I quickly sent it away. But I left the comment up.

It's time for zombie obsession to be de-stigmatized. In this day and age where people openly and with a straight face will admit they believe in "The Secret", how can being obsessed with zombies be so bad? Millions of people believing the universe will give them anything they want if they only ask for it can serve no public good --except, perhaps, if it works in preventing a zombie uprising from happening. Men who are ready to fight zombies are an untapped asset that we should consider in resolving the current economic crisis. Right now in America I estimate there are a million or more men sitting around with machetes and hunting rifles, already psychologically primed to fight against impossible odds and win.  How could they possibly help? I don't know, but they could explain it to us.

Last night I spent an hour and a half on Left 4 dead's multiplayer version, alternately running to and away from hordes of zombies. It's quite good. I carried a shotgun and two pistols, and between my fellow survivor-players and I we killed hundreds of zombies. I find I particularly like butt-stroking zombies in the forehead until the tops of their heads fly off. I kind of like this shotgun. Maybe I'll get the real thing. I could keep it in my closet, next to the bedroom, where the cleanest carpet in the house is.

Yes, de-stigmatize the zombie threat. Let the bo sticks and samurai swords into the sunlight. When that happens, I'll have a few more things I can admit to you.