Fear the Walking Living

My colleagues and I paused briefly in our never ending task of labouring for the glory of god and the profit of the company to discuss the issues of the day over a hastily snatched bowl of gruel.  We talked of the upcoming Trump presidency and our own nation's double dissolution with a reverse pike and much merriment was had by all.  Eventually, as is natural, the talk turned to zombies.

Those of you who have read my brief but excellent blog entry on the topic (http://neilbabble.blogspot.com.au/2012/04/its-zombie-saunter-slowly-away.html ) will know that I don't rate zombies all that highly what with them being slow, mindless and generally useless.  In a futile attempt to prove that I was wrong a foolhardy colleague pointed out that the most recent crop of zombie movies and tv shows had zombies of quite a different stamp.  Fast, ferocious and voracious these gruesome creatures have blazed a blood spattered trail across screens in recent years.  Wearily I pointed out that these were not traditional zombies but rather tended to be quite normal human beings infected by some sort of pathogen. 

Traditional zombies are corpses, mindless walking dead dragged from the grave by necromantic sorcery (or pressing debts) and doomed to wander (slowly) among the living in the hopes of encountering slow moving individuals with tasty brains.  TV shows such as The Walking Dead have nothing to do with these creatures at all.  Rather they are crammed with murderous disease carriers carving a swathe through normal civilisation.  Its as if somebody decided to do a re-enactment of the black plague with humans playing the part of rats (and also humans of course).

What I find odd is that nobody seems to have taken the new zombie paradigm to its natural conclusion.  What the heroes of tv shows like The Walking Dead are actually doing is going around murdering sick people.  When did this become something we cheer for?  And how soon is it before we get a tv show where the heroes are simply running down flu sufferers with their cars?  Got a sniffle?  Careful or some photogenic tv personality will hit you across the head with a baseball bat, burn your body and everybody will applaud and agree with each other about how wonderful and dramatic it was.

The thing about traditional zombies was there wasn't any moral dimension to killing them.  After all they were already dead and whatever soul they possessed had long since departed for less decayed accommodation elsewhere.  Now, apparently, illness is a justification for genocide.  On a positive note it does seem to imply that if a zombie apocalypse threatens all we have to do to deal with it is send death squads into all the hospitals.  I wonder how long it will be before somebody suggests we do that anyway as a preventative measure.