Zombies are fun.
Dressing as one for a costume party on Saturday's Zombie Fest in front of Prince George city hall is a chance to celebrate Halloween anytime during the year.
Zombies are scary, with their oozing wounds, pallid skin and relentless hunger for brains and flesh. Whether they are the slow, lurching kind of The Walking Dead or the superhumanly strong and quick kind of World War Z, zombies are not easily defeated. A few brave souls may survive but once zombies show up, billions die and the world as we know it is gone.
Although zombies and their cousins, like
Dr. Frankenstein's monster, date back more than two centuries, the idea of zombies is much older. Humanity has always been frightened of the faceless horde.
China built a wall to keep them out and the Roman Empire fell, plunging Western civilization into a thousand years of darkness, because of such an invasion. More recently, the aboriginal populations of North America no doubt saw those pale European explorers in zombie-like terms, not unlike how those same explorers saw all of the dark-skinned inhabitants in all of the previously undiscovered lands of the Earth.
Modern popular culture is obsessed with zombies, but those waiting for the zombie craze to run its course will have their brains rotting in the ground themselves before it passes.
From ancient times until now, the zombie metaphor works on numerous levels, tapping in to primordial fears from the deepest recesses of our lizard brains. Zombies are destruction, disease and death, not just of our physical bodies but our language, our culture and our traditions. Zombies aren't evil per se. They don't even know they're zombies. There is no demonic mastermind behind them, pulling their strings, programming their thoughts. They are mindless killers and, in most stories, have no communication, no language and no thoughts other than their desire to satisfy their hunger for the living.
Zombies aren't going anywhere because we see them everywhere, even the people who say they believe zombie culture is stupid, silly and/or a bad influence on the kids.
The radical Muslims think the Christians and the Americans are zombies and vice versa.
The Islamic State thinks everyone is a zombie except for themselves.
The Republicans believe the Democrats are zombies and vice versa.
More than a few Americans think everyone elsewhere are zombies or at least infected.
Supporters of Donald Trump think Hillary Clinton's supporters are zombies and vice versa. Zombie really means "other" and the dire threat these "others" pose to the remaining chosen few.
Trump believes America is not just surrounded but riddled with zombies. These zombies are coming for America with their guns and their bombs and their violence and their terror and their different languages and colours and histories and traditions. They are coming to get Americans, their guns, their children and everything they hold dear. To listen to Trump is to believe zombies are real and only he has the cure to stop the spread of the zombie apocalypse in its tracks.
Based on what he's said so far, that cure involves walls, cops, jobs and tax cuts.
Clinton and the Democrats are hardly better. They think Trump zombie will somehow form a dictatorship once elected and the Republican zombies will take away their abortions, their same-sex marriages, their Obamacare, their Social Security, their Netflix and their unique, special identity.
Even within the parties, the zombiefication of opponents is a common tactic. Ted Cruz refuses to endorse Trump because he doesn't want to be a "servile puppy."
Bernie Sanders is endorsing Clinton for the presidency but only because Trump zombie scares him way more than Clinton zombie.
In Canada, it's no different. Just substitute the above names with Trudeau, Harper, Mulcair, Horgan and Clark.
Nobody really believes in zombies but everyone acts like they are real, pounding on the door to infect us and our friends and families with stupid, hateful, immoral ideas.
The sad irony seen in many zombie tales is how the righteous, so desperate and defiant to avoid a zombie fate, forego their humanity and lose their souls to survive. The Walking Dead describes both the zombies and the survivors alike. So it is in the real world.
-- Managing editor Neil Godbout
