By Matthew Higgins
‘Right. Left. Right. Left.’
Slower than it took the actual zombies to walk, a compromised version of Zommunism in its coopted, sell-out neo-liberal attire began to take form.
First, politically correct laws made zombified access to shops and train carriages a part of every day life. This posed a significant threat to the elderly and depressed, who in apathy and decrepitude could barely outrun the deluge of lagging, mundane corpses.
Some saw the economic sense of turning themselves into zombies and just went along with the ride after university had ended. Nightmare became nuisance, convictions were relegated to the tedium of anxious concerns, as zombified bailiffs worked to evict jobless tenants resigned to the fait accompli of economic progress under the arbitrary dress code of zombification.
The Zombie dilemma had been yet another slow-paced existential threat to middle class life, far less substantial than anything as real or immediate as hand-to-mouth shotgun survivalism. Ray Mears continued to be televised.
The media-industrial complex would accumulate even greater amounts of wealth from this, as ‘incense schticks’ saturated the propoganda market on people’s blood spattered doorsteps from the latest Amazon delivery agents.
Tabloids capitalised on their front pages with the clownish ineptitude, of ‘useless’ politicians flailing under the beauracratic arms of corrupt corporate lobbyists, who failed to prevent – and seemed almost intent on evoking – the gradual zombification of the working unemployed.
Messages that could be relayed in basic sound bites, were simple enough for zombies accustomed to repeating the word ‘brains’ over and over again to memorise.
Subsequently, they appeared increasingly electable against the so-called “muppets in charge” who seemed powerless to prevent these zombies taking people’s jobs and limbs away.
In addition, morticians had done great work to maximise the presentability of these undead. Zombies did not age since they were already deceased, they only needed to be manicured once and that was all. They had the waxy appearance of photo-shopped skin that made them appear magazine-like, more human, more relatable, to the diminishing hordes of the traditional unemployed.
Perhaps these were the Zommunist revolutionaries afterall! Just more modest and pleasing to the eye than previously envisioned, with sound bites exchanged for flesh bites and so on.
Besides, the term zombie was now decidedly offensive and incorrect; these were the ‘deceased of living’.
The deceased of living would provide great arm gestures during their speeches, somewhat similar to a kind of double Nazi salute, but without the historical baggage. And they were always themselves: soulless creatures compelled beyond the grave to devour every ounce of living flesh in search of no end – offering them an honest outsider appeal above the standard of ordinary politicians.
But the Zombies were so well-groomed, that no one could quite tell who was a politician and who was a zombie anymore; this did not much matter, since society was past that.
The deceased of living continued to draw significant gains in politics, media, and feasting on undesirable specimen; such as the elderly, the unemployed, those who attended marches, homeless people, mad people, and youths who risked surpassing the limits of their curfew.
Soon, with huge swathes of the electorate demanding more brains, the first Zombie minister was elected to the house of commons, and soon after, several more MPs had been infected, until enough seats were evacuated to give a ruling majority to the Zommunist Centrist Right-Left party.
‘Right. Left. Right. Left.’
The tidal wave of progress seemed ineluctable for the eyes of industrialists, closer than ever before to the prospect of humans visiting Mars – to hide in terror – which had fuelled the capitalist imagination since its very inception.
To this day, Mars remains a lifeless little red orb, caked in the scorched blood of desert dwelling cadavers, who shuffle aimlessly forth without intention or logic, other than for ‘brains’, which they devour fully in their grasp with their incapacity to find better means for them.
‘More. Brains. Brains. More!’
And no one can determine whether these are real astronauts at all, or zombie pioneers. Not one individual has the power, or the belief, to assume their Hollywood birth rights and claim the zombie apocalypse as their own.
There is an idle decay, shuffling along in a twitching pandemic without cause or enthusiasm.
Businessmen are anxiously observed on rare summer days off work by those who fear the spread of infection.
Proverbial shotguns (art, music, theatre) are seated behind special permits; as the rights of human beings are overlooked and ignored, to squat wherever they please, to find a place where the zombies can never reach them…
There seems to be a hidden truth appeal in these Hollywood zom-coms.
Like unconscious documentaries, for truths rendered significantly more bareable under a curtain of fiction, something to perversely aspire to in a mood of alienation and despair, to view the world as it has been for some time.
A zombieland to either fight or succumb to in our ignorance.
A utopia that hovers just beyond reach, beyond the present way of seeing things, beyond the graves we dig for ourselves.
Pictures from: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-politics-31040301 and https://marcelopellegrini.wordpress.com/2013/12/05/hundreds-of-zombies-take-control-of-london/ and https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-the-zombie-pm-theresa-may-with-tory-mps-amber-rudd-and-boris-johnson-152756721.html