Zombies Don’t Need This Kind of Help
Google pointed me toward this Opinion piece in the Ottawa Citizen by one Roger Collier today, which purports to reexamine the negative attitudes so many hold toward Zombies.
Only of course, it does no such thing.
The first clue was in the title: ‘Zombies were people, too.’ (The capitalization is in the original, and I can only assume is a Canadian thing.)
No, Mr. Collier, Zombies *are* people too. That’s your first mistake.
Going into the meat of the column it becomes clear that Mr. Collier has considered himself to be very clever for using a lot of backhanded compliments on Zombies and setting himself up as some sort of faux principled centrist on Zombie Rights:
Is there any creature more misunderstood than the zombie? Are there any former humans so mistreated by the living? So they are dirty and smelly and unattractive. Big deal. Before my morning shower, I’m no prize myself. But people don’t scream and run away when I approach them. Why, then, do we act that way around zombies?
…
Hath not a zombie, amid its rotting organs, a heart that once beat as strong as yours doth now? If you prick a zombie, doth it not ooze? If you bisect it with a chainsaw, doth it not moan? (I realize that zombies moan constantly, but they seem to moan extra loud when you cut them in half.)
…
Why do we make life so difficult for reanimated corpses? According to a recent study from the Undead Research Institute, 98.7 per cent of people dislike zombies for the same reason: because they eat us.
OK, I get that. Nobody wants to be eaten alive. There is nothing people fear more, except public speaking.
Yes, you guessed it, this is a humor column that only purports to be speaking out in favor of Zombies, while in reality it simply capitalizes on the current Anti-Zombie craze, lazily parroting the worst and ugliest stereotypes about Zombies while cracking bad jokes at the expense of the Differently Animated.
Repulsive? Sure. But the worst part for me isn’t that you have hate speech being used as fodder for cheap laughs in the dying print medium; ultimately, Mr. Collier could have done more damage to the Zombie public image by standing on a street corner with a rolled up copy of the Ottawa Citizen and shouted his prejudices at passersby. (Or at least, he would have reached more people that way.)
What bothers me is that this fake defense of Zombies can’t bring itself to rise to the level of satirizing the awful treatment of the Differently Animated, nor even the way that ostensibly straight news outlets have fallen all over themselves to splash ‘Zombie’ into the headlines in an attempt at pumping up circulation.
No, Mr. Collier isn’t writing a meaningful satire, he’s cracking what he thinks are sly jokes as he hops on the very back of the bandwagon and follows meekly along with the craze. Any attempts in the column to distinguish his ‘wit’ from the innumerable other assaults on Zombies are misdirection, and not particularly effective at that.
The Zombie Community doesn’t need your particular brand of help, Mr. Collier, and I doubt that many Zombies would buy into your humor either. Recycling tired slanders against an oppressed minority isn’t funny, and play-acting at being the thoughtful adult just makes you look silly. Leave the Zombie Advocacy to those of us with the courage of our convictions, and find someone else to pick on for a change. Zombies have it hard enough already.
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