Zombie Plans

I suppose, with this post, I am determined to forsake any hope of maintaining my kid-friendly rating for this blog. Ah, well, the children must be warned before the great Zombie uprising.

Actually, this post isn't actually pure `pataphor. My God-brother, Mike, lent me a film entitled Zombie Anonymous. At the very same time, we had a going away party for a teacher of Paraalang Pinoy whose husband, besides singing a mean More than Words, with his wife aca-acamp-acom ... playin' da geetar, has a Zombie plan, including bicycles for rapid escape (off-road, because the highways are a sure to become a congested zombie-fest), plenty of water, and a bokken to buy some time ... he asked if I had one as well.

Me: No
He: Huh? Why not?
Me: Because I have 38 Zombie plans!

They are off to Japan ... look out for the siafu!

Let me pontificate here for a moment: it's called a Zombie plan because it's a plan to help you survive the zombie attack. So, following that reasoning, a zombie "plan" to infect yourself (believe it or not, I've heard more than a few variations of this one) to join or to rule from the horde is not a plan at all ... you may as well grab a picket sign stenciled with the solitary word: "Dinner" and paint a target on yourself.

The usual portrayals of zombies, fast or slow, are that of automatons. The movie Zombies Anonymous, however, poses that Zombies retain full memories and cognition of their former, and current, selves, without even the benefit of death as a transition. So the choices they make, the support groups they attend, the jobs they hold, the relations and religions they cling to, eventuate to a horrifying and nihilistic view ... of everything. In the other portrayals in the media, books and movies and the web, zombies are definitely 'It', never to be considered 'Thou'. This movie makes this very counter-assertion, the Zombies are no different than you, and one day, you'll wake up, dead, as one of them. 'It' is 'Thou'. With this assertion, the movie attempts a direct attack against the eternal 'I'.

*sigh* ... funny how in each generation there're the nihilists or existentialists or objectivists, and they all propose their version of "There is no God!" [Psalms 14:1] ... note the irony for that phrase is preceded with the Truth: "The fool says in his heart ..." and the following line is telling of these prophets: "Their deeds are corrupt and vile, not one of them does right."

I add my hearty assent with the following observation: none of these "realists" have had children. Sartre's "abandonment" (which I note with glee to his acolytes, and joy for him, that he abandoned this view of "abandonment" on his death bed when he returned into the communion, receiving absolution and last rites from a Catholic priest) and Rand's "producers and moochers/money or guns" perspectives of the world, albeit true up to a (very small) point when viewed through their very distorted lenses ("... but they sound so smart!") is the antithesis of hope. Why have children, when your very philosophy consigns them, at best, to despair?

So, they don't. So I wonder how, generation after generation, there seems to spring up from the slime, these "intelligentsia"? Do they spawn?

I also wonder how anyone with sons or daughters, brothers or sisters, parents, cousins, nieces and nephews, ascribe anything other than the proper fate to these black words (which, of course, is confutatis maledictus). As a Christian [Catholic, even] apologist, I'll happily enter into dialog with you, starting from First Principles, and I'll listen to you, for you are Thou, a child of God, deserving to be loved as God loves you ... that's where I'm coming from, the Fifth Way.

But, caveat philosopher, as pater familias, if you plan to impose your world view on my wife or children, a punch in the face is what I'll lead off with. Is that too violent for you? No, one need only look at the products of these world views (Hitler's Holocast, Stalin's decimation, the Khmer Rouge's killing fields, China's "reproductive policy", and in our own back yard, the robber-baron's "human resources") to know that there's a war on, and evil prevails when the good remain silent.

So there are my first four plans: Faith, Hope, Love, and a strong right arm. For the Zombies are real, and I won't let the walking dead, or, explicitly, those who have given up hope in this life (my prayer: "God, don't let me die until I'm dead!") obstruct or divert me or mine. Walking dead, you have been warned. For the rest of you undecideds, it's time to choose sides [Deut 30:19], and make your plans.

Good luck with it.