Inside The Well-Armed Mind

The always liberal New Republic claims that real American people just trying to defend themselves are racists, but as we all know, that makes them the racists, nyah nyah!

This is part of what makes the post-apocalypse such a desirable, ecstatic condition: You can maintain your scruples but act violently anyway, because you must. The apocalypse reveals the savagery at the root of human social life, and so it allows the strong to be strong, and the true survivors and leaders to shed their humility, failure, and anonymity and become who they truly are.

The Doomsday Preppers want to protect themselves and their families from the marauding hordes who have not prepared themselves, who will flee the doomed cities seeking food and shelter in the suburbs and countryside. This is the terror: of society collapsed, gone mad, reduced to violent, fatal encounters between strangers–the provident and improvident, those who know how to survive (and therefore are worthy of surviving) and those who don’t, those who foresaw and those who were complacent, those who valued their families and those who were careless, those possessing the moral judgment of true Americans and those who lived in the sinful cities. None of the Preppers on the program live in cities. None are African American, Jewish, Muslim, Asian, or Hispanic. It is a Tea Party conservative demographic right down the line. The hordes they fear are the very same aliens who reelected Barack Obama.

Every apocalyptic fantasy emerges not only from fear but also from desire: the wish that the catastrophe occur. The real-life Preppers look forward to the days of violence when they can shoot down the useless, starving urban refugees the way humans shoot down zombies. They’ve stocked their weapons and ammo; they train, they teach their children. The basic fantasy of justified violence in a world without social structures or law is the same as in “Walking Dead” and “Revolution.” These are fantasies of an imagined world in which genuine, just, democratic, caring social life on a large scale is impossible; that the real human reality is violent struggle and the survival of those who know how to use violence to get what they want.

The effete New Republican limits himself to high-brow cable tee vee drama when jumping to his conclusions, not the pseudo-factive end of the human/"civilized" world porn that's also quite popular (& preferable because everybody dies or is vaporized).Or everybody just, you know, disappears.Between zombies, Armageddon, Nostradamus, Mayans & the ephemeral nature of civilization & technology it's obvious Americans, at least, would just as soon it was over & done w/, already. This American for damn sure.