I am not a Harper enthusiast, but I'm thankful for the 'lite' part of 'Bush lite'. It was bad enough being in bed with an elephant—being in bed with an elephant zombie is really, really creepy.

- Mary Pringle

That's a great find of more meta-commentary. I don't know about super-scholarly, but Cracked can be very interesting, a finger on the pulse of pop culture mayhem. I don't understand its compulsion for lists and numbering things though.

The 'new' drugs they're referring to are bath salts - the latest in any number of idiotic ways to do yourself some real damage.

What I find interesting (in a ghoulish sort of way) is that the CDC had published a zombie survival guide last year, as part of a disaster preparedness program. It was an ironic repurposing of the zombie meme. But what I also find troubling about the labelling of these incidents as zombie-like (and then the resulting chortling on the internet about zombie outbreaks, ho ho, it's starting) is the apparent invisibility of the victims. The man who was attacked in Florida faces a very long and difficult recover; he will never be the same, physically, and probably emotionally. The man who was dismembered in Montreal was murdered. The staffers who opened the box are traumatized, and understandably so.

The zombie meme seems to be a convenient way to look away from victims. In the zombie narrative, victims are seen as people who were less prepared, who took unnecessary risks, or who were just too feeble to survive in the post-apocalyptic world - they didn't have the 'right stuff' to become tough, hardened survivors, ready to take on anything. It's a strange way of viewing vulnerability - victims are reimagined as liabilities to themselves and the people around them.

THAT is what I find troubling about the zombie meme. It seems to be the latest in a narrative of callousnes, which also seems to fit with our current colletive, cultural logic.

"Victims are reimagined as liabilities": You make a vital point, and it's very well put.

The zombie apocalypse as a "narrative of callousness" corresponds very well with some of this research group's founding premises about the function of this fantastic figure for neoliberal hegemony - which Greville Rumble, quoting Honderich, rightly calls "a 'vicious' system" (175).

The problem with the libertarian argument is that it allows for a perfectly just society within which there are people who have no food, no healthcare and no education (Honderich, 2002, pp. 43–44). So ‘in this [formulation of a] perfectly just society [there are people who] have no claim to food, no moral right to it. No one and nothing does wrong in letting them starve to death’ (Honderich, 2002, p. 44). ‘This’, says Honderich, ‘is vicious’ (2002, p. 44). (171)

See:

Rumble, Greville. “Social Justice, Economics and Distance Education.” Open Learning: The Journal of Open and Distance Learning 22.2 “Ethical Issues in Open and Distance Learning” (2007): 167-76. Web. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02680510701306715