What I'm Doing: Pondering Zombies

What I'm doing is being sick, my fifth day––with a cold, I think. Or is it a touch of the flu?
I'm not sure, but the treatment in my long lasting but mild case is the same––rest & fluids.

I'm eating oranges, drinking Breathe Deeply tea, and reading World War Z, by Max Brooks, for the third time––marveling that it's just as good this time around.  

I put this photo ^ on FB, and a friend commented that Max Brooks is the son of Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft.
I had no idea!
That explains it--whacky classy brilliance.

This time I'm noticing how well this story of a worldwide zombie plague lines up with our realworld problem of climate change--especially the beginning of the book about how the early signs were ignored.

Speaking of climate change, did you see the cover of Time magazine naming Greta Thunberg Person of the Year?
I immediately thought of the painting "Wanderer above the Sea of Fog" (c. 1818) by Caspar David Friedrich, which I first saw as a  book cover for Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

Like Nietzsche, this painting is interpreted all kinds of ways--
is the figure the conquering hero of all he surveys?  [according to an article in History Today, Hitler saw the painter's works this way];
or is he insignificant compared to the grandeur of nature, seeing only through a glass darkly/ a sea of fog?
The Time cover designer must have meant the latter...
(Don't you think they HAD to have known the painting?)

I've been wondering, why is THIS girl, Greta T.––out of all the young people speaking up about climate breakdown––the one who has most caught the public's attention?

Ideas, anyone?

I don't know, but I wonder if part of it may be that she has a rather bland young face--like my Orphan Reds, or Tintin. (Amazingly, Tintin is literally Greta T's middle name.) People (including me!) often are surprised that the girlettes' expressions seem to change in differing circumstances, though their simple faces remain the same–-so, they work so well to tell stories.
Of course Greta Thunberg makes some famously great expressions, like her "death-ray" glare in the direction of Trump. 

But still:

I went looking for info on the phenomenon of the appealingly bland face and found a New Yorker article "The Comfort Zone: Growing Up with Charlie Brown" (9/21/04), by Jonathan Franzen mentioning the comfort of such faces:

"The most widely loved faces in the modern world tend to be basic and abstract cartoons:
Mickey Mouse, the Simpsons, Tintin, and, simplest of all—barely more than a circle, two dots, and a horizontal line—Charlie Brown.
"It’s precisely the simplicity and universality of cartoon faces, the absence of Otherly particulars, that invite us to love them as we love ourselves.
"Our brains are like cartoonists—and cartoonists are like our brains, simplifying and exaggerating, subordinating facial detail to abstract comic concepts."

Someone on FB responded with a sad/crying emoji, but no comment--I'm not sure what they meant, but perhaps they saw this as meaning we see "The Others" as unlovable?

I didn't take it that way (though of course we are biologically wary of the unknown)---rather, that these are the blank pages in which we read ourselves. Like emojis, their existence doesn't deny complexity (though if all we had were emojis and cartoons, that'd be a problem of course).

People read Greta Thunberg all sorts of ways--from heroic Joan of Arc to a demonic Midwich Cuckoo--so she's sort of a mirror of the viewer––but I don't think they find her baffling.
Unlike, say, Emma Gonzalez with the bafflingly short hair, she doesn't confuse some people of my generation who get confused by things like gender complexities. Though Greta T. does talk about things like indigenous rights, they are secondary (though related) to the climate emergency:
Your house is on fire, she says. Haircuts are irrelevant.

Another attractive quality, if you find it attractive, is her lack of irony, in this age of irony. There are no sock monkeys in Greta T's speech. You might not agree with her, but you can understand her single-mindedness. 

I've liked her fine, but I'm already onboard with her message--though I admit she challenges me to do more. Or, to do less, like to eat less meat.

What made me begin to pay closer attention is the way she has twiddled Trump's tweets attacking her. I am in awe of how beautifully she's done this.
As you know, she has simply absorbed his (and others') inane descriptions of her into her own Twitter bios. 
(So, there's a bit of irony I guess.)

This whole scenario--a Twitter battle between the leader of the free world and a sixteen-year-old girl––is out of some dystopian novel alright.

My favorite tweak was Greta T's silent correction of Trump's errant capitalization. After he tweeted that she has "an Anger Management problem", she changed her bio to read, "A teenager working on her anger management problem."

Tweaking aside, she is refreshingly plainspoken about Trump's attacks:

"I honestly don't understand why adults would choose to spend their time mocking and threatening teenagers and children for promoting science, when they could do something good instead. I guess they must simply feel so threatened by us."

I guess so too. That, or zombies ate their brains.