Are zombies the new aliens?
I love to consider the trends that are present in our world, or more particularly those that filter into our entertainment and media world, these are the ones with greatest influence today.
For most of the post war twentieth century aliens and cowboys featured very large in our thinking, thanks largely, to the prevalence of film and television pointing us there.
It seemed like this double directional threat to our safety gave us a false view of the past while, at the same time, presenting us with a very real current potential disaster. Maybe it was a direct reaction to the perceived real world threat from the shady world of communism. The real cold war was never so much about actual fighting as sabre rattling and ever larger payloads.
Apart from the Korean and Vietnam wars there were no full scale battles, that is not to minimise the very real casualties from both of these wars. Both in terms of deaths on foreign soil and the neglecting of returning veterans. Why is it we idolise the fallen but ignore the mental torture of the survivors?
It is not a new tactic to have a population on edge with perceived threat rather than actual iminient harm. Kings have used this as justification for destruction forever, just let your mind go to ancient Egypt and the Hebrew people, or Jerusalem in the first century or Serbia in the nineties.
It is a mercy for us all that common sense prevailed in 1962 when Russia sent missiles to Cuba in response to an American sponsored aggression the previous year at the Bay of pigs. The brinkmanship of Kruschev and Kennedy was exploited by Castro as an insurance policy which almost crossed the line from threat to reality. The result was decades of distrust and espionage that saw deaths on all sides and fear continue to grip a generation, Cuba had to wait until last year to be forgiven.
The rise of alien sightings seemed to coincide with the new obsession of space. We turned our attention outward for 40 years like some attempt at hope by averting our gaze into the inky abyss of space.
Unfortunately humans being human we saw a new threat out there where there was none. Having displaced the Creator a century before we looked instead for other solutions about our origin. What we had unwittingly done was to remove the security we so desperately seek by dismissing from our thinking the very one who gives it.
The whole alien sub culture remains strong in the minds of many, but to imagine that a species so advanced as to come here undetected from a galaxy so distant would come only to abduct cows, flatren our cereal crops and stick probes into our orifices is laughable.
Perhaps that is why we have returned to earth and the prospect that we will destroy ourselves. Not this time with thermonuclear weapons, but with viral warfare.
The research into genetics has brought some incredible advances in medical practice, but as usual, we can’t stop there, we mess with everything from grain to embryos, modifying and tweaking in an attempt to make life easier and better. Sadly, though, we are sowing a potential disaster, with antibiotic resistant strains of diseases increasing and possible catastrophic viral epidemics.
I don’t subscribe to the zombie apocalypse theories any more than the alien ones. The Haitians, who have a strong voodoo culture, are themselves largely sceptical of the possibility of such things, the percentage who would hold to this belief tend to be on the periphery. Any belief in zombies is that they are pretty benign creatures who are docile and subservient, rather than aggressive and cannibalistic.
The real walking dead in our societies are those who live half lives of mere existence, feeding on the banal and celebrity cultures as if it was all that there was to life. The strange irony of it all is that those who feed the fear in our world are the very ones creating it, and those producing the proliferation of zombie entertainment are making us stupefied with the continual watching of it.