Doomsday Preppers: Brian Murdock

Up next is Brian Murdock, late twentysomething from Massachusetts.
His segment doesn’t have much material, most of it is occupied with generic ‘reality’ show drama, which I have no interest in.
He’s worried about a third world war looming on the horizon. Honestly, I don’t think it’s such an outrageous concern. In fact, my cousin told me about an article she recently read in a popular magazine that pretty much said a world war would be likely in the next forty years or so. Brian sees it beginning with an early US&A-on-Iran strike, followed by Tehran retaliating with a strike on Tel Aviv. I think that might be a little simplistic by not factoring in nations like Russia, backer of both Iran and Syria—and let’s keep in mind that as I write this, signs are good that Assad is preparing to deploy chemical weapons on his people, possibly forcing the hand of the US/UN.
Allow me to springboard. However and whenever stuff goes down, I remember Einstein’s famous quote, “I don’t know what weapons World War Three will be fought with, but I know that World War Four will be fought with sticks and stones”. That may be true—eventually—but there are several things wrong with our notion of being “bombed back to the Stone Age”. First, ‘Stone Age’ societies don’t just spring out of the ground, they’re products of three million years of evolution, and they’re societies that Our Culture has been doing its damnedest to annihilate for the last eight thousand years or so. How many people in Our Culture, given a core of flint and a hammerstone, could craft a workable projectile point? Hell, I can barely knap an Olduwan chopper if I’m lucky—something my ancestors 2 million years ago would’ve had little problem doing—and I study this stuff! Second, calling them ‘Stone Age’ is to misunderstand how these cultures work. Sure, stone plays a part, but it’s like calling our society the ‘Glue Age’—glue plays a part, but it’s hardly the foundation of our way of life.

Anyhow, Brian has an prediction about this forthcoming war—he claims that it will claim exactly 2.3 billion lives.

Huh. That’s oddly specific.

Because he lives near a major city, Brian is an ‘apartment prepper’. The narrator informs us that to get started as an apartment prepper usually costs $1,500. The very fact that this can be so easily estimated just makes me go ‘Ugh!’: It’s prepping-by-numbers; it’s like saying, ‘If you want to be ‘indie’, just buy x, y, and z!’ There is more than one way to ‘be prepared’ for unseen situations, and believe it or not, sometimes it has nothing to do with how much stuff you’ve bought.
Anyway, instead of being stuck in his apartment, Brian sells apparently all of his belongings for $75,000, and uses the money to buy an RV and 50 acres in New York. Awesome!, now I’m interested. Is he going to be a mobile, nomadic rubbertramp with the NY land as a home base? Is he going to use the RV as temporary housing while he builds his offgrid earthship?
Nope. He’s going to get a Columbian mailorder bride, bring her to Boston, and then whisk her off in the RV to the property in NY. Whoah-oh, culture-shock time!!!
Brian says he really likes this girl because “her culture’s way of life is already well-suited to prepping”. I hope that’s so, because I don’t see Brian doing much in the way of growing potatoes or raising goats and chickens. But apparently, the idea of ‘prepping’ is a foreign concept to Tatiana because back in Columbia, it’s ‘bad times all the times’! So, when the WW3 bullets start flying and she has to hit the ground, she should be right back in her element?

They do some target practice…shooting bananas. Way to waste food, bro.
The experts give them a 43 (including 4 points—a new low—on food storage), computed to eight weeks initial survival time. Now, we know the points don’t matter, but it still seems a little harsh.
In their post-filming update, we learn that they’re now married, and they’re planning to move into the RV in NY in a matter of days. Good luck, guys.

On Max Brooks, as promised

Like most of the media I’ve loved and internalized, the oeuvre of Max Brooks can be as shallow or as deep as you want to make it.  It speaks volumes to his skill as a writer that I’m able to ask, Is the message of World War Z ultimately conservative? Environmentalist? Nihilistic? None (or all?) of these? Who’s to say?—it’s up to the reader’s own unique attitudes and interpretation to decide.

Unlike a lot of the other post-apocalyptic media being produced these days *coughAMCWalkingDead*, Brooks actually addresses healthy long-term survival approaches for when the SHTF in his works, and I’m very glad that he continues to comically preach his message of zombie PREparedness at universities around the country.
Of course, everybody always just focuses on the ‘what to use to kill zombies’ chapters—and then becomes disappointed when he explains how M-16s, AKs, and rocket-propelled chainsaws aren’t ideal.  Want to have some fun? Hand the ZSG to a twelve-year old boy and see if he picks up on the multipurpose survival knowledge that could see him through hurricanes, earthquakes, or civil unrest.  He won’t, because it’s The Zombie Survival Guide.

But look beneath the surface, and it seems that Brooks’ overall blueprint in both the ZSG and WWZ is to form self-sufficient and sustainable communities out of the wreckage of the old world. Or maybe that’s just how I read it; maybe I’m seeing what I want to see.  Like I said, it’s up to the reader.

Unlike the victims who populate most other zombie media, Brooks suggests a proactive approach to survival, which essentially boils down to the old adage ‘Leave early, go far, stay long’.  He recommends putting together a team not—like everyone else seems to want to—of supercommandos, but of prepared, well-trained individuals with skillsets suited to self-sufficiency—doctors, blacksmiths, farmers—well ahead of time, and taking this team to a remote, predetermined destination far from civilization at the first sign of trouble.

One thing I especially love about WWZ is how timely it is, incorporating “modern fears of terrorism, biological warfare, overwhelming natural catastrophes, climate change and global disease.” As Brooks has explained in various interviews,

“I think the zombie craze is very tied to the times we’re living in. The last time we had a zombie craze was the 1970s, and that was a time of anxiety, a time when people really felt like the System was breaking down politically, economically, socially, even environmentally; there really was this feeling that “it’s not working anymore”, and people were really scared, and they wanted to explore their apocalyptic fears but they didn’t want it to be too real. …. I think we’re living in very uncertain times right now…there’s such anxiety, and we keep getting slammed. And so much of the problem seem so big, and we feel so powerless.  Who knows what a credit default swap is? I don’t!”

Although published in 2006, Brooks foresaw our Great Recession, the election of our first African-American president, and private space companies like SpaceX. In addition, he peppers the novel with wonderful satirical critiques (he is the son of Mel Brooks, after all) of modern society. Our celebrity-obsessed ‘reality’ TV culture, the corruption of Big Pharma, and the hubris of the Three Gorges Dam all get raked over the coals.  By poking fun at lots of Big Ideas (like the fact that whitecollar Americans can’t do anything for themselves anymore, or that our militaries are always fighting the previous war, or that our globalized, import-based economy has neutered the US&A), he effectively exposes the precipice upon which our modern world stands.

Of course, just because Brooks’ world is nearly overrun with the walking dead doesn’t mean that everything becomes primitive; Brooks still sprinkles high technology into his postwar world.  The depleted oceans are crossed on futuristic ‘infinity ships’ powered by solar cells and saltwater (or some such phlebtonium), modern dirigibles dot the skies, and civilian spacecraft taxi astronauts to the International Space Station.

However, what really speaks to me in Brooks’ writings is how DIY and decidedly un-hi-tech his recipe to defeat the undead is: go back to basics (“Everything had a kind of retro feel to it”). Tactics? Straight outta the nineteenth century: marching in two ranks, or ‘reinforced squares’. Weapons? Nothing tacticool, just a semi-auto rifle with a wooden stock “like a WWII gun”, and a glorified head-cracking shovel.
Simple, Efficient, and with a healthy worldview behind it, Sustainable.

“What we call human nature in actuality is human habit.”

Something that has always bugged me in my continuing preparedness efforts is the way that modern survivalists seem geared towards weathering any catastrophe, but with the end goal of ‘rebuilding society’ or ‘rebuilding the nation’; this usually turns into a discussion of the code of law in postapocalyptic bartertowns.

My problem with this?  Excluding unforeseen natural disasters, I would argue that any event which could seriously threaten our society would probably be due to 10,000 years of civilized life finally catching up to bite us in the ass.*  Any effort to rebuild would just be attempts to return to the only world the survivors had ever known—which is likely the same world that created whatever disaster caused the S to HTF.

Unfortunately, I’ve yet to see a real eco approach to preparedness/postapocalyptic survival.  The closest thing I’ve found is the book “The Urban Homestead”, in which the authors use tongue-in-cheek quips like “shitting in a five-gallon-bucket [composting toilet] will be the logical choice in the postapocalyptic world when there’s no water for flushing and the zombies are scratching at the door” to demonstrate their awareness of the simple fact that eco living=self-sufficient=long-term survivability.  Meanwhile, survival forums are full of gung-ho red-blooded Merkans who view composting toilets as hippie junk, and who plan on fighting zombies for their God-given right to waste valuable resources down the commode.

My interest in survivalism/disaster readiness stems from the hope that when shit does go down, I’d like to be around to help steer the rebuilding in a different direction, one which will hopefully prevent similar bad stuff from happening again in the future.  However, it seems that shifting the cultural mindset towards that different direction would involve moving away from norms that have been business-as-usual for the last few thousand years—patriarchy, stratification, large-scale agriculture, militarism, etc.

*Max Brooks’ World War Z is a great example of this—the Zed virus is introduced into the First World as a result of globalization, allowed to persist by Big Pharma, and spreads exponentially as a result of dense populations.

**^ title quote from Jewel Kilcher.