Love is All You Need

And God saw that the wickedness of man
was great in the earth, and that every imagination
of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually 
--Genesis (6:5) 

 Masks dropped away and real people began to appear:
cranks, imbeciles, the demented,
the vengeful, sadists, killers.
Modern society had created its own kind
and they feasted on each other.
It was a duel to the death...in a cesspool 
--Women, Charles Bukowski

But no matter what happens to the surviving humans,
there will always be the walking dead 
--The Zombie Survival Guide, Max Brooks 

 --Why would people watch a show about nothing? 
--Because it's on t.v. 
--Seinfeld (Hollywood episode)
___________________

For unknown reasons, Ranger viewed the t.v. series, "The Walking Dead" last week, a program about a politically-correct group of survivalists duking it out against the Undead. Think, being stuck in an endless loop of "Zombieland" with Woody Harrelson as Tallahassee, sans Bill Murray, and you get the idea.

It is a series which abides by one principle: killing is the only means to survival, and the killing is ongoing and never-ending; it is an NRA fantasy. But the one noteworthy part of the ordeal was his observation of the juxtaposition between the "Lawman" character whooping up on some slavering Zombie with a very big rock and the commercial which immediately followed.

The gruesome death scene was followed by an advert for Values.com, a group advocating the inculcation of, well, values into the body politic. A 15-30 second spot advocating for, presumably "good" values, versus and hour of relentless bloody-minded fear and violence. On the basis of time allotted, bad values wins.

Broadcasting on another channel in the same time-slot was "Criminal Minds", a program devoted to violence in the form of sadistic serial killers. What would have rated an "X" in Sam Peckinpah's day is just another day in televisionland, 2014.

Is the viewing public becoming more corrupt as reflected by its taste for horrific, spectacular violence, or does the media simply reflect in the micro the behavior of the nation (the macro)? Or is it that people have become so inured to sensory input, that they need shock treatment to register even the slightest blip of awareness?

What are these hyper-violent programs telling us? Do they serve to propagandize us that this is a very violent and unsafe world in which we live, demanding violent reactions? Is the purpose to keep the viewing public in a state of turmoil, and if so, why?

The Raw and the Cooked

--The Undead Meets the Unborn

The clothes that are considered right to wear
Will not be either sensible or cheap,
So long as we consent to live like sheep
And never mention those who disappear
--Leap Before You Look, W. H. Auden

Parsons was Winston's fellow employee
at the Ministry of Truth.
He was a fattish but active man of paralyzing stupidity
a mass of imbecile enthusiasms –
one of those completely unquestioning, devoted drudges
on whom, more even than on the thought police,
the stability of the Party depended
--1984, George Orwell (I, ii)

The image a society evolves of the relationship
between the living and the dead is,
in the final analysis, an attempt,
on the level of religious thought,
to conceal, embellish or justify
the actual relationships which prevail among the living
--Tristes Tropiques, Claude Levi-Strauss
____________________

Zombie (n.): an animated corpse brought to life
by mystical means like witchcraft

_____________________

After writing Zombie Zoo, Ranger was overcome by Easter excitement in his ville, which got his little Ranger brain to thinking: "Wasn't Jesus a zombie, too?" Throw in Lazarus and a few others who had also begun down that road of human destiny politely called, "decay".

Zombies have taken on a pall, but why should they be relegated to the marginalia of hoodoo or witchcraft when the devotees of our major religion stateside have a zombie as a savior? Why "Night of the Living Dead" or Woody Harrelson when we think of the undead, when we could just as easily put Jesus in that category?

Our ancestors burned women at the stake for suspicion of practicing witchcraft and we have always frowned on necromancy and necrophilia (though Ranger does have his own stories of approximation, ahem), yet we hypocritically turn around and have sunrise Easter services based on Zombiemania? "He is arisen" . . . from the DEAD!

And if you are Catholic or Anglican, you now "eat" of his zombiefied body 2,000 years on, once a week if you are faithful! People, if you take the words of the bible literally -- which is how you should, if you believe it -- how is this different than Idi Amin's cannibalism? Gross, yeah?

Some sticklers will say that zombies eat brains, and therefore, Jesus cannot be a zombie. But how do you know he did not eat sweetbreads, specifically, urdu, as it's known in Ranger's home neck of the woods? Does a belief in a Stone- or Bronze-Age god imply a loss of gray matter?

So why write about Zombie Jesus? Well, we shoot the Zombie Osama bin Laden in effigy (pretty stupid since zombies are undead, anyway), while we laud his killer-in-chief, Mr. Obama. Hillary Clinton recently commented they "couldn't breathe" for the 35 minutes they were watching his shooting -- not breathing is pretty zombie-like. However, both of those living people are more dangerous and zombie-like than OBL had the ability to be.

We fear the wrong zombies, and worship indiscriminately. Why is OBL feared, but not Bush or Obama, or any other U.S. leader?

Who or what is eating your brain? We are curious, and wonder if you are abdicating bits of it voluntarily for your own reasons.

Zombie Zoo

--Fr. Brownell's spring catalog

You can make a big impression or
Go through life unseen
You might wind up restricted and over seventeen
It's so hard to be careful, so easy to be led
Somewhere beyond the pavement
You'll find the living dead
--Zombie Zoo, Tom Petty

License to kill gophers by the government
of the United Nations.
Man, free to kill gophers at will.
To kill, you must know your enemy,
and in this case my enemy is a varmint.
And a varmint will never quit - ever.
They're like the Viet Cong - Varmint Cong.
So you have to fall back on superior intelligence
and superior firepower.
And that's all she wrote.
--Caddyshack (1980)

8. Keep moving, keep low, keep quiet, keep alert!
9. No place is safe, only safer.
10. The zombie may be gone, but the threat lives on
--The Zombie Survival Guide,
Max Brooks
__________________

Note the latest haute couture in the gun world: vanity magazine release buttons sporting death's heads, "infidel" and the biohazard symbol, showing the world what a bad MoFo you are. Then you have the commercial ammunition for zombies or varmints, depending upon one's needs at any given moment (perhaps the two are interchangeable, at times); terrorism is located somewhere in between these two.

And then, the targets. Seen this Wednesday at a gun shop in Jacksonville, Florida, witness the generic "Terrorist" target, looking suspiciously like Osama bin Laden, on sale for $79.00. In addition, large pallets of various ammunition were featured in the center of the store.

This seems to put the lie to the National Rifle Association's fear of the Obama administration's yanking of bullets for your guns. Not to worry, they -- the guns -- can still go "boom".

The Haitian Patient

I just want to celebrate another day of livin'
I just want to celebrate another day of life
--I Just Want to Celebrate, Rare Earth

They disguise it, Hypnotize it
Television made you buy it
--Hypnotize, S.O.A.D.

It's amazing how fast the world can go
from bad to total shit storm
--Zombieland (2009)
_________________

Ranger wonders why he is unaffected by the nonstop newsfeed of death and suffering in Haiti after last week's earthquake.

The barrage of painful imagery is ceaseless, yet the pain and suffering do not even register on my personal Richter scale. My mind completely blocks out and disregards the entire incident. I don't care. The only question is, WHY?

The event falls under the general rubric, "Act of God", when actually it is simply a natural disaster, a geological phenomena known as strike-slip fault, an event which was predicted last year. No gods at work here, though there sure are a lot of dead people.

Are we to mourn such natural events, resulting in large casualty rates paraded incessantly by our eyes, inhabiting our television sets? These events are unavoidable and predictable, and only good national pre-emergency planning could have alleviated the post-event suffering.

Meanwhile, the television in my living room has been disgorging catastrophic photos of an elective earthquake called the GWOT since 9-11-01. This discretionary disaster delivers daily death and destruction which cuts scythe-like through Afghanistan and Iraq, yet we cheer on and praise this deadly endeavor. Our movies are often violent death-oriented orgies paralleling our real life. Death has become our constant companion.

We have killed, wounded and destroyed as much as has this earthquake, but we revel in the glory of it all. We -- the U.S. -- are portable earthquakes awaiting our next victim.

This must be why my humanity is dulled, and nothing advertised during the news breaks will alleviate this fact. The man-made earthquakes in Afghanistan and Iraq have blunted the trauma and zombiefied my soul. This must be why the zombie movie is making such a fantastic comeback today.

We are the zombies, and Ranger is their leader since he feels nothing and doesn't even care. The Phony War on Terror (PWOT ©) has sucked me dry.