It’s coming. As surely as Christmas, Sam & Dave, your in-laws and the scratch at the back of your throat that you just know is going to turn into a fully fledged gargantuan head cold; its arrival is both imminent and inevitable. There’s little that any of us can do other than to switch off the lights, barricade the doors and hope against hope for the best. Try as we might, some things can’t be stopped. Deny it all you like, but the zombie apocalypse is on its way, ready or not.
It’s coming. As surely as Christmas, Sam & Dave, your in-laws and the scratch at the back of your throat that you just know is going to turn into a fully fledged gargantuan head cold; its arrival is both imminent and inevitable. There’s little that any of us can do other than to switch off the lights, barricade the doors and hope against hope for the best. Try as we might, some things can’t be stopped. Deny it all you like, but the zombie apocalypse is on its way, ready or not.
This country is in danger of being swamped by Zombies. There – I said it. Eventually, someone was bound to pluck up the bravery to state the obvious. That this person should turn out to be me is a source for no small amount of pride (and, possibly, prejudice). I realise that such a statement might be considered controversial. But sometimes it takes a fair slice of courage if not the cloak of Parliamentary privilege to say out loud the kind of things that would never be uttered in polite conversation and are usually the preserve of slurred discussions over a wet table at your local drinking hole in the final minutes before closing time.
I appreciate that I’m being controversial. Indeed, I’m pretty much resigned to the fact that my anti-zombie campaign will be frowned at by the urban-dwelling, latte-sipping, left-leaning, cardigan-wearing, Q & A watching intelligentsia who own Jackson Browne albums and drive huge petrol-skolling four wheel drives with bald-faced, irony-free bumper stickers that decry climate change, but so what? Those people don’t live in the real world like you and I. Instead, they live in ivory towers that have butler’s pantries but nothing in the way of a bathroom mirror in which they could have a long, hard look at themselves.
It’s time that someone called a spade a shovel. Zombies have a culture and ideology that is incompatible with our own. They don’t support our way of life. In fact, as members of the undead, zombies don’t support any way of life at all. That’s why they shouldn’t be allowed to come here to steal our jobs and eat our brains. If they don’t like things the way they are, they should go back to where they came from. Granted, where they came from is approximately six feet under the pavement but it’s the principle rather than the actual distance that matters.
If you think that my unbridled attack on zombies is unfair, then consider the evidence. And when I say ‘consider the evidence’, I mean, pretend that everything I say actually has some scientific basis and is not just a random stream of repulsive alphabet vomit. The UN is a giant conspiracy. Climate change is a ruse invented by NASA and KFC to encourage sales of their original recipe chicken. Skittles are terrorists. Siri is stealing your dreams. Donald Trump is not a fictional character even if he and Sacha Barron Cohen have never been seen in the same room together. International banking families are conspiring to break up One Direction and are responsible for Taylor Swift’s rise to world domination. The list goes on (and can be downloaded from the Internet at your convenience).
Come to think of it, perhaps zombies are the least of our problems. For we live in a golden age where what passes for debate is something that once would have been mocked for being an evidence-free rant against the universe. Once, demented outbursts of this kind would be greeted by a refusal to make eye contact and a quiet shuffling of feet. Now they hand out ‘how to vote’ cards. It makes you wonder at how we’re ever going to get anything done if the rules of engagement are less stringent than those applying to ‘Uno’.
Before I go any further, I should make something of an admission. I don’t actually know any zombies. For reasons I can’t quite explain, our paths have never crossed. But despite the fact that zombies have never done anything personally to me, I find myself despising them nevertheless. It’s more than a matter of not liking them very much and far exceeds your garden-variety antipathy. Given my emotions, you’d think that zombies had just stolen my car park at Southland even though I clearly had my indicator on. It’s both irrational and immeasurable. Now that I think about it, there’s something so illogical, so unreasonable about my feelings that maybe, just maybe, it’s not them so much as it is me. Now there’s a thought.
Perhaps I ought to own up to the fact that I have an unquenchable prejudice against the undead. There’s something about things that I thought were long-gone and buried and then, without warning, turn up again that I find inherently unsettling. Whether it be on my doorstep or in the Australian Senate, I find it confronting. I must do better. In fact, I should go out of my way to make sure that people who come here feel welcome. After all, it was only two generations ago that my family turned up. Now we’re part of the furniture. I only wish that some of our new parliamentarians could find it in their own hearts to be a little more understanding. After all, when you think about it, some of our new Senators are not so very different from zombies; with the obvious exception that only one of them has a thirst for brains.