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.

“…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.

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

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.

Apparently, the Army isn’t having a problem with grunts wearing these shoes while out on missions (which would be absolutely silly, but not for the reasons you’d expect), but instead when they’re out doing PT (physical training).  This is where I have to disagree with the ruling.  If you want your personnel to be in top physical condition, minimalist shoes —since there is no way on Earth the Army would let people train while actually barefoot (like hippies!)— are the way to go.  The benefits of this type of running have been espoused byplenty so I won’t bore you with a retread of the topic.  I usually run barefoot and I’ve seen the advantages, but I hate pushy folks who try to convert others to their way of thinking, so if somebody wants to give barefoot running a try, it’s up to them.

Actually, I kind of wish some Army guys had been running missions while wearing these kind of shoes before this ruling went out, so that I could point and laugh.

Not because of how silly a decked-out-in-full-battle-rattle grunt would look while wearing colorful rubber gorilla feet but because of how incompatible the conflicting ideologies are.

Your average Army man—wearing combat boots and body armor, carrying an 80 or 100-pound ruck and some kinda black rifle—is a product of the ‘civilized’ world’s military-industrial complex.  He carries everything he needs on his back.  He’s big, loud, and heavy, and you can be sure his feet strike heel-first when he runs.

Compare him to your barefoot Bushman.  This fast and light fellow carries little more than a bow and a handful of arrows, because as a hunter in his natural habitat, he is in his element.  Everything he needs, Nature provides.  He’s ‘uncivilized’, but he’s healthier and happier than you or I.  Emulate him.

The problem with the square is that it doesn’t really exist in Nature. Circles and hexagons in Nature? Tons of ‘em. Squares? Not so much. The natural world is, by its very nature, organic, irregular, chaotic, while the square—by its nature—is linear, efficient, unnatural…which is to say, civilized.

Now, how does the lack of squares in nature relate to time?  Let us remember that uncivilized Paleo-man saw time pass in the natural cycles of the square-free world that surrounded him: the 13 months of the lunar year, the four seasons of the solar year, etc.  While man lived in an unconquered world, he understood that the forces governing time were the same ones that governed the rest of his world: organic, cyclical powers.  He could see Time flowing all around him, just as could see Nature change from season to season.  Enter civilized man, who attempted to control time the same way he attempted to control everything else he knew: by putting it in a box.  The idea of the linear calendar is an invention unique to civilized people: Paleo-man understood that time flows organically, like everything else in Nature, and cannot be contained in a box.

So what can we do to overcome this Western obsession with controlling Time?
Get a new calendar.  Feel free to design your own, but here’s a cyclical year-at-a-glance calendar I put together, combining Gregorian, Solar (the Equinoxes and Solstices), and Celtic (still used archaically when we refer to ‘Midwinter’ or ‘Midsummer’s Day’) calendars to mark the seasons.

Fill it in with your own holidays.*  Feel free to keep using a civilized square calendar, but keep this one next to it. Want to combine Western and Eastern views of time? Print out a few, cut them out, and tape ‘em together in a spiral of years:

“You of the West…think of time moving in a straight line, from past to present to future.  Your eastern brothers regard time as a circle, returning endlessly in a cycle of decay and rebirth.  Both ideas have a dimension of the truth.  If you were to combine geometrically the movement of the circle with the movement of the line, what would you have?” In a helical model, “time moves on, but history repeats itself.”

*While I’m on the subject of Nature and Time, let’s have a few words on Tolkien and dates. Next time you read The Lord of the Rings, take note of on what days important things happen. Significant occasions match up within a few days of solar dates and/or Celtic holidays: the Fellowship sets out 25 December (shortly after the Winter Solstice), the Ring is destroyed 25 March (shortly after the Vernal Equinox), Aragorn is crowned 1 May (the Celtic fire-festival of Beltane, the first day of Summer), is wed on ‘Midyear’s Day’ (21 June, the Summer Solstice, although calendar errors usually report this as 1 July), and Bilbo and Frodo Baggins celebrate their birthday on the Autumnal Equinox, 22 September.

By using these specific dates, the Professor helps connect his heroes and their deeds quite firmly to the underlying powers of the Natural world which they struggle to uphold.

If you don’t remember, the credits depict the robots and humans returning to earth to rebuild their world together, depicted in a beautiful series of artistic styles, starting with cave-paintings and followed by Egyptian relief, Greek black-figure, Roman mosaics, Asian sketches, Impressionism, pointillism, and finally some Van Gough-esque oils.

This works on two levels.  First, the artistic style reminds us of the sum of our human history, which in the world of the film, has finally caught up with us, resulting in the human abandonment of a used-up, dustball Earth.  Second, the scenes presented in these artistic styles are (I think) supposed to show some kind of real sustainable future to which we should be attaining (or something).
But it doesn’t really work.

Here’s how it goes: the space-people and robots come back, live communally, start planting and irrigating crops, catch fish, and suddenly they’re rebuilding a pretty standard-looking city.  What’s wrong with this?  These artistic vignettes depict—in a stylized manner, of course—the process of ‘progress’ that terminates in our modern, unsustainable world—the same world the characters in the film left behind in the first place.  (On a technicality, I’d like to know where all the sea turtles and birds and fish came from in the first place, as the used-up Earth we see in the first half of the film is only home to a cockroach, and there didn’t seem to be much wildlife on the Axiom.)

My problem with the whole thing?  You really cannot expect a spaceship full of Wal-Mart-born-and-raised human jellybeans to suddenly care about Nature despite having never known of it, yet the film (and its credits) seem to suggest that simply by being exposed to a solitary live plant in a boot, humans’ latent biophilia will magically reemerge, stronger than ever, and give their society the strength to suddenly change course, overcome its Nature-deficit disorder and build a brighter, truly sustainable future.  Unfortunately, the problem is inertial: the longer a Nature-deprived lifestyle is allowed to continue, the harder it becomes to heal the gap.  And what’s even more troubling is that while the scenario presented by WALL-E may be science fiction, we as a society are heading down the same track.  It’s easy to look at the infantile human characters and think, ‘Oh, that could never happen to us.’  But, it could.  And, it is.

Since WALL-E’s success at the Academy Awards, the film’s writer and director Andrew Stanton has since explained how the even bigger woe of society isn’t just disconnection from Nature, but from each other as well:

“I think a lot of people attach a little too specifically to the ecological aspect or the complacency aspect of humanity. But I use those as devices to focus on the biggest issue, which is people caring about one another. People connecting with one another.” “Whether that’s literally love between two characters like robots or just you acknowledging that your neighbors (are) right next to you as opposed to being blocked between a cell phone or something. I felt that disconnection is going to be the cause, indirectly, of anything that happens in life that’s bad for humanity of the planet, so to me, my focus was connectivity.”

Mr. Stanton is absolutely right, and since our current system doesn’t seem to be designed with human connections in mind, it might be time for a new one…

However, while on distro duty at the very White “eco-friendly general store” one weekend, I came across the following comparison in a book titled “The Transition Timeline: For a Local, Resilient Future”, a passage that neatly explains my difficulty in making regular postings.

Conventional environmentalism:
-individual behavior
-single issue
-methods: lobbying, campaigning, protest
-‘sustainable development’
-fear, guilt, and shock as drivers.

Transition Approach:
-group behavior
-holistic
-methods: public participation, eco-psychology, arts & culture
-resilience/relocalization
-hope and optimism as drivers.

I had to laugh when I first read this, because the ‘conventional’ approach perfectly describes the tactics of TU’s environmental club, with which I was involved for four years.  While they had good intentions (save the whales, save the snails, save the bees, save the trees!, etc.), their focus on one issue at a time (usually mountaintop-removal mining) combined with this worn-out approach generally just resulted in a campus/public that writes off environmentalists as ‘hippies’, not wanting to be told what they shouldn’t do or what they should care about.

(I actually first saw this ad at the multiplex, ironically playing before–of all things–the extended cut of AVATAR.)

Watch it, and then tell me if there’s anything funny about this bit of narration:
“This was once a country where people made things…beautiful things…and so it is again.”

It’s a nice notion, and while I would like to believe it, I find it hard to do so considering that the line is immediately preceded by shots of ROBOTS ASSEMBLING CARS.

Besides, what’s all this nonsense about “the things we make, make us“?
We’re not really making things; these things might be made in the USA for a change, but we’re still just having machines make our machines for us…though I suppose that’s slightly better than having Chinese machines make our machines for us.