Man-like creatures with gaze blank and pitiless as sand

Zombie: (zom-bee) noun; the body of a dead person given semblance of life, but mute and will-less, by a supernatural force, usually for some evil purpose.

Back in the Jurassic era, when I was trying to grow a decent set of sideburns, I put in a stint as a bar boy in a nightclub in downtown Toronto.  I learned a lot there, such as how to tell the difference between a quiet drunk and a mean one and … what The Jug was for.

The Jug lived under the bar out of sight of the customers. It was a big one, maybe 20 gallons, and it had a funnel jammed in its neck. One of my last jobs each night was to upend every supposedly empty bottle we had sold that day into the funnel. 

Beer, rum, wine, whiskey, absinthe, lemon gin, crème de cacao, sherry, port — all the dregs of every pint, mickey and 26-er went down the funnel and into the jug. Sounds chintzy, but you’d be amazed at the gallonage all those drips and drabs would add up to at the end of the day.

Mostly The Jug just sat there fermenting evilly, but every once in a while a customer — a college kid, usually, or someone else profoundly green — would order a specific drink and one of the bartenders would swing into action.  He would grab a tall glass, squirt in some pineapple, orange and lime juice, perhaps a shot of cheap bar brandy, a spoonful of sugar, a fistful of ice and then ... he would siphon off about three ounces of the vile magma seething in The Jug and add it to the glass.

The drink was, of course, a Zombie. A truly horrid alcoholic concoction designed for the Not-Too-Bright, the Suicidal or those determined to lose their virginity no matter what the cost.  It is called a Zombie because it renders the drinker near catatonic .

All this preambling reverie to pose a question: what’s with all the zombies these days? Google ‘zombies’ and you get over 21 million hits — and that’s without getting into zombie games, zombie songs, zombie movies — even zombie baseball.

We live in zombie times.  Look at the world financial situation. It cratered last year, only to be resurrected with massive transfusions of supernatural plasma (read, taxpayers’ dollars). 

And there it stands, tottering on the world stage, grunting and snorting incoherently. Zombie bankers walk among us.

Down in the U.S., zombie politicians thought to be dead and buried after the Obama victory have shoved back their tombstones to once again roil and heave across the landscape, muttering darkly of Kenyan passports, Marxist takeovers and Canadian medicine.

And here at home? We have our ongoing engagement in Afghanistan, the zombie war that won’t lie down. 

We have a zombie deficit, a zombie health care crisis and I haven’t even mentioned the Toronto Maple Leafs.

And then we have our leaders:  Stephen ‘Our-Lady-of-Perpetual-Minority’ Harper; Michael ‘the Undead’ Ignatieff, survivor of more knives in the back than a beef brisket at Swiss Chalet, and; Jack Layton, standing firm in the polls at 15 per cent. 

The Irish mystic W.B. Yeats was ahead of us all. Nearly a century ago he wrote a poem called The Second Coming. 

It prophesied the appearance of a man-like creature with ‘a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun’ stirring in the sands of the desert.

The poem asks:  “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

My money’s on a zombie.

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