Strom Thurmond's Zombie Wanders the Lower Ninth:
The zombie corpse of Strom Thurmond has a taste for dark meat. The legend going around is that the animated and surprisingly spry body of the dead Dixiecrat-turned-Republican Senator roams the abandoned streets of the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans, searching the houses endlessly for bodies he can dine on. Indeed, some believe that there are bodies that will never be found because zombie Strom Thurmond has thoroughly engorged on them and digested them in his rotting guts. Whenever former residents of the Lower Ninth, scattered to the whims of evacuation buses and relatives, in Houston, Atlanta, Baton Rouge, want to scare their children, they say that zombie Strom Thurmond is gonna get them.

It wasn't like this, of course, early on in the disaster. Surely, the cataclysmic destruction of the neighborhood awoke the two-year dead man. His body, so filled with chemicals to keep him alive for the last decade or so of his life, was amazingly well-preserved, stronger even, from the rest. But it was a long walk for a zombie from a grave in Edgefield, South Carolina to New Orleans. In the time it took him to dig himself out and creep across five Southern states, the pictures and stories of the poor and black created something of a second storm in the political landscape, where government officials and pundits alike were asking what can be done to help the destitute, old and new, what can be done to stop us from having to see all this dark impoverishment, that it might actually require more than just hoping they disappear again.

But then zombie Strom Thurmond arrived in the Lower Ninth, haunting the mold covered houses, digging through rubble, finding the bodies that didn't float up, wrestling alligators for particularly fat tasty women he can fuck before engorging, pulling out the limbs of children from under fallen roofs, eating delicious flesh of the men, hiding from the occasional recovery team, sometimes even dragging a corpse he found behind a crushed car. Zombie Strom Thurmond is covetous of his African American meals.

As zombie Strom Thurmond dined on his damp delicacies, he helped reduce the images, the stories, the number of times we all had to hear about bodies being found in some horrible circumstance. And once the bodies disappeared, the backlash began against all that caring, all that revelation of the pathetic abandonment of the poor and black. It was as if zombie Strom Thurmond willed it into being: we showed we cared for a little while; now we can be true to ourselves.

And thus. And thus. And thus. And thus. So it was, so it shall ever be.

Zombie Strom Thurmond is loose now. He's still picking through the ruins of the Lower Ninth. He's become a bit more brazen, stomping around in daylight, moaning that he wants more, his hunger never dying, his body never decaying.