it takes a vigilance

"editorial vigilance is the price of zombie-free copy."

this post is not about zombies. 

i don't like zombies. i don't watch "the walking dead" or anything else zombie-related, even though zombies are the new vampires and therefore very popular with the popular kids.

my theory is that zombies are hollywood's stand-in for political conservatives, which is why so many people love watching them get whacked in so many creative ways.

"you peddle your guns and dump your oil and force your religion into places it was never meant to go. well, you've gone too far, right-wing brain-eater. eat this!"

cue ironic fusillade SFX and fade to white.

as noted previously, this post is not about zombies. it's about people who demonstrate an excellent grasp of the mindless, soulless, joyless behavior characteristic of zombies ~ and  are stubbornly ungrateful even as they're dragged kicking and screaming into the light.

case in point, this: an exxon pipeline burst this week in arkansas, flooding a suburban little rock neighborhood with more than 10,000 barrels of heavy crude.

with oil literally flowing down the streets of this tidy burb, rep. tim griffin (R-Bigoil) told residents ~ his constituents~ to get over it. "you want to drive cars? cars run on oil. oil comes from pipelines. speaking of which, i have to go cash this check from exxon." tim could have oil gushing from his mouth and he would still be telling people how safe pipelines are, and how terrible it would be if the keystoneXL project were not built. he'd probably have dead eyes and a creepy little smile on his face while he said it (but that doesn't make him a zombie, necessarily).

moving on...if the answer to petroleum disasters is "more oil," then shirley the solution to tens of thousands of gun deaths every year must be ~ more guns!

that is the conclusion of the NRA, purveyors of fine excrement for more than 140 years. in its recent report on preventing gun violence in schools, the NRA recommended ~ spoiler alert ~ more guns in schools.

the report (straight-facedly titled the "National School Shield Emergency Response Program") proposed "armed security officers in every school to increase school safety."

unstated in the report is the fact that more guns in a gun-sodden america will make us safer the same way more water will keep us from drowning.

random sidebar: who would benefit most from arming tens of thousands of "security officers" in every school in america? if you said "gun manufacturers" you win a stuffed likeness of nra zombie wayne lapierre (how you'll tell the difference between it and the actual wayne lapierre is still under review).

if you're interested, you may be able to find lapierre in nelson, georgia. there, he's likely licking the lapels of the the town's gun-lovin' city council, which voted this week to make firearm ownership mandatory.

america. land of the free, home of the government-mandated heat.

random sidebar II: i'll carry a gun when you force it into my cold, dead hand. but i get the first shot with my new nuke from north korea!

it says here that the adorable north korean military "has been cleared to attack the u.s. with nuclear weapons." most experts believe the north korean military is no threat to anyone but itself, but then again, neither was saddam hussein, and look how that turned out.

north korea's closest ally, china, reportedly is rolling its eyes at the hostile rhetoric. "we're swimming in american money right now, and will continue to do so for a long time ~ unless these clowns do something stupid," said no highly placed source in the chinese government. "we really wish they'd just shut up," the source did not go on to say.

with all this tension clogging up the aura-sphere, the good people of the GOP caucus in north carolina decided to propose something unexpected: a resolution declaring an official state religion.

"A resolution filed by Republican lawmakers would allow North Carolina to declare an official religion, in violation of the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Bill of Rights, and seeks to nullify any federal ruling against Christian prayer by public bodies statewide."

that's nice. isn't that nice? making north carolina safe for everyone to be a state sanctioned christian. government doesn't get to be more christian than that, does it? not without issuing mandatory gun permits, anyway. jesus would be so proud.

unlikely as it seems, there's a common thread weaving through these little anecdotes tying them together in a tapestry of...

...zombies. mindless, soulless, joyless creatures with little common sense and even less fashion sense. they slog through dark, dreary, desperate days, simultaneously wishing for and dreading their inevitable end. which, in the interest of all things light and lucid and healthy, can't come soon enough.

epilogue: there's a slight but measurable possibility that this post may have been about zombies after all.