Coming soon…

So, I was watching some program about Ötzi on the Nat’l Geo. Channel the other day* when I saw an advert for an upcoming series in February: DOOMSDAY PREPPERS!**

Ohh boy. *Eye roll* This should be fun. Granted, I’ve only seen one ad and poked around a bit on the Channel’s website, but I can already tell how the show will play out.  Obviously, based on the profiles on the site, they’re going to try to put each of these people in their own category: the survivalist party girl, the hillbilly prepper, the down-to-earth guy with too many knives in his bag.  They’ll be sure to put a big focus on Guns! guns! guns! (I’ll be curious to see if ammo! ammo! ammo!, or reloading get mentioned).  Likewise, they’re making a big deal about what specific type of scenario everybody’s ‘prepping’ for. Like, lady smiles into the camera and confidently declares ‘I’m so-and-so, and I’m hoarding silver for a global economic collapse brought on by hyperinflation!’ Except for the guy in LA who’s focused on earthquakes (which makes sense, because it’s California!), everyone else is prepping for some single event. That’s honestly pretty dumb, because in today’s world, Nothing happens in a vacuum.

What I want to know is, where’s the guy who says, “Hi, I’m so-and-so, and I’m doing this because I study anthropology and history, and watch films by George Lucas and James Cameron, and read Jared Diamond and Daniel Quinn and Tolkien, and I think our ‘civilization’ isn’t such a good thing. I’m transitioning to a radical, sustainable lifestyle for when 10,000 years of global Taker monoculture finally compounds and bites us in the ass.”

Oh, right, I forgot. I’m not on this show.

And so, because it’s 2012 now, and apparently Everyone’s getting caught up*** or cashing in**** on the whole TEOTWAWKI/Armageddon/Apocalypse/Z-Day/Mayan thing, I figured I would too.  I’ll try to make this a feature as this series airs, and report back with some hopefully-helpful-and-not-too-smug-or-snarky commentary.

 

*while the majority of their lineup seems to indicate their desire to become the ‘Drugs and Prison Channel’, their archeo-based specials are usually pretty well-done, and at least they didn’t suggest the iceman had anything to do with extraterrestrials, like the ‘History’ Channel would’ve done.
**Aurrrughh, I hate that word; it sounds like a teen stereotype from a high school in the future. Unfortunately, I don’t know if there’s anything better; ‘survivalist’ smacks too much of early-90s right-wing militia types. I guess ‘Prepping’ sounds more open-ended—‘preparing for’ and ‘getting ready for’ almost imply a definite nature of whatever-is-coming, or even a known timetable!
***For Christmas, one of our very sane and well-adjusted friends sent us—in addition to ‘normal’ gifts—a hardcover copy of Kunstler’s The Long Emergency, and several pounds of organic heirloom beans.
**** I’ve already seen Hornady ‘zombie ammunition’, Hogue ‘zombie’ pistol grips, and a Leuopold ‘zombie’ rifle scope.  I’m sure there will be much more to come.

Sky-god versus the Almighty Uterus

Let’s start with a nice quote from an interview I read with Gloria Steinem in TIME magazine a few months ago.

“…what I believe, which is that things are a circle, not a hierarchy: the women’s movement and the antiracist movement and the gay movement and the environmental movement are all linked.”  -10 Questions, August 15, 2011.

     I agree completely with Ms. Steinem.  I actually just finished reading an excellent book on pretty much this same topic, Riane Eisler’s The Chalice and the Blade. If you have any interest in women’s rights, anthropology, comparative religious studies, environmental philosophy, social sciences, or just history in general, I’d highly advise checking it out.  While parts of it are a little dated (it was first published in 1988) and a bit repetitive at times, give it a try if you’re into any of those sorts of things.  I’ll try to sum it up and not to bore you with too much anthro-talk.

     Basically, way back in the day, a big chunk of Europe and the Near East was following an amazing way of life.  While agricultural in livelihood (normally a red flag to me), these various cultures of ‘Old Europe’ were Earth-worshippers, which is to say that their religion was based around reverence for the life-giving and nurturing powers of what I call ‘the Feminine Divine’ (manifested in Mother Earth, Gaia, or the ‘Triple Goddess’ Wiccans are always going on about’, etc), apparently on equal footing with a sacred king.  Unfortunately for them (and us), about six thousand years ago who shows up on the scene but the Indo-Europeans.  These Caucasian guys come riding their horses into Europe and bring with them their dominating, warlike, male sky-gods (as in the case of Zeus/Jupiter, Babylonian Marduk, and the Abrahamic god), and commence to pretty much wipe out the tree-hugging Old Europeans (I say pretty much because it seems this female-empowering ‘partnership’ model managed to survive until about 1500 BCE on Crete, when that pesky megavolcano on Thera blew up and washed them away, or at least shook them up enough so that the Mycenaean proto-Greeks could come in and finally take over.)

And ever since then, the power has been held by the He-Man Woman-Haters Club. (You could probably get really Freudian with this, and say that the Dominator model of society stems from a bad case of Uterus Envy, or something).

    See, when your god is a vengeful, armed-with-thunderbolts, fond-of-smiting, bearded-guy-in-the-sky, your society is going to be all about those sort of things—namely, exerting control and making war on those who are different.  I’m not just talking about beating up on your brown neighbors and effeminate men, although that’s always been a popular pastime among Taker peoples; this also encompasses Nature, because if you believe your male god created the world, and your enemies believe their female goddess IS the world, and you’re okay with killing them, well then, you’re probably going to have no qualms about subjugating and controlling the earth either.

'Made to Rule', indeed. Fuck you, Creation Museum.

Ha-ha!  Seems I’m not the only one with something to say about our modern world’s approach to Time.
Mr Adam Frank of NPR’s science blog 13.7 recently posted a wonderful new piece on the unappreciated (by most) occasion of the Autumnal Equinox and everything that goes along with that.
Check it out HERE!

In the interests of promoting both our sites: my friend Liz over at WanderBuzz has just posted an interview with yours truly. 

Check it out for good ideas and insights into what makes me tick.

(I’ve touched on some of these topics before, but recent conversations helped me get the ideas more coherent.)

In the last decade or so, we’ve seen absolute glut of apocalyptic-themed media.  And I do mean glut: in film alone, we’ve seen three Adaptation Decayed <Blank> of the Dead from George Romero, 28 Days/Weeks Later, a “RomComZom” (Shaun of the Dead), serious drama The Walking Dead (adapted from the comic series), awkward comedy Zombieland, The Book of Eli, I Am Legend, The Road (from the excellently bleak Cormac McCarthy novel), 2012, a forthcoming Red Dawn re-make, and the list goes on.  That’s not to mention the dozens of video games, and the entire ouvre of ‘the world’s foremost zombie expert’, the eminent Max Brooks (more on him in a future post?).

Overall, I don’t think this surplus of PAW (post-apocalyptic world/wasteland) tales is a bad thing.  Anything that gets folks thinking about the state of our world and their own survival is good, in my opinion.  While I don’t have a problem with bringing apocalyptic themes into the public mindset, I usually don’t like how most of them play out…especially the zombie ones. Generally, the pattern goes like this: a group of Survivors get together, somehow find lots of guns (never any mention of ammo!), go to a mall (or pub or wherever), lock themselves in, and proceed to defend against the hordes until relieved by the Authorities, or until they’re all killed.

If you asked me, I’d say this approach is about the farthest thing from survival that I can think of, and it’s totally unsustainable.

Based on what I’ve read on survival message boards, it seems the majority of survivalist folks have this idea (based, no doubt, on the popular apocalyptic media they’ve consumed) of shouldering their tacticool 100-pound ‘I’m Never Coming Home’ pack, loading up their black plastic rifle with a thousand rounds of ammo (maybe some body armor too, just for fun), and setting out for their fortress retreat in the woods, where they will live on canned soup and astronaut food for the foreseeable future.
Apparently they all want to look like this guy:

My approach is quite different.  If shit goes down, and I have to ‘bug-out’, I’m pulling on my homemade leather shoes and a 1930s canvas rucksack—mostly filled with home-dehydrated fruits and nuts liberated from dumpsters (because I eat like a caveman)—rolling up a wool blanket and tarp for a bedroll, grabbing a walking stick, and cross-country hobbit-ing the fuck outta there (I’ve been told many times that my gear has “an old-school cool” vibe about it, and I’ll admit it’s no accident).  Instead of approaching an emergency as an act of war, I see it as an adventure.  I’ll head for the family farm, where I’ll set up shop, replant my garden, and continue living in the plain-livin’, quasi-permaculture sorta life I grew up with.  And y’know, I might just keep on living like that, even after whatever crisis abates.

Because, like Stewart Brand of the Whole Earth Catalog once put it:

“We have wished, we ecofreaks, for a disaster or for a social change to come and bomb us into the Stone Age, where we might live like Indians in our valley, with our localism, our appropriate technology, our gardens, our homemade religion – guilt-free at last!”

I’ve written about it before, but it just really distresses me how the current survival movement is based all towards ‘rebuilding’ the post-apocalyptic world.  And what are these people going to base their new world on?  The only one they’ve ever known…the one that turned them into time-clock slaves and disconnected (figurative) zombies filled with postmodern ennui: the one that collapsed in the first place!

Consider, for an alternative, possibly one of the most beautiful pieces of prose I think I’ve ever read: Chuck Palahniuk’s vision in Fight Club for a post-collapse world:

“…picture yourself planting radishes and seed potatoes on the fifteenth green of a forgotten golf course.  You’ll hunt elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center, and dig clams next to the skeleton of the Space Needle leaning at a forty-five degree angle… …stalking elk past department store windows and stinking racks of beautiful rotting dresses and tuxedos on hangers; you’ll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life, and you’ll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower.  Jack and the beanstalk, you’ll climb up through the dripping forest canopy and the air will be so clean you’ll see tiny figures pounding corn and laying strips of venison to dry in the empty car pool lane of an abandoned superhighway stretching eight-lanes-wide and August-hot for a thousand miles.”

If—and that’s a big if—we’re going to rebuild, we’re going to need some fresh perspectives.