*That's some interesting stuff. I've seen the occasional Yugoslav guy who was something like a "prepper," but you never see many of them in the likes of Russia, Italy, Germany, Lebanon, the places with genuine repeated disasters that actually happen.
*Maybe he's right that there's something peculiarly "real-American" about that particular dress-up costume-play scene.
Stephen Marche attends a preparedness summit in Ohio
(...)
I like the preppers, I have to admit. They’re the MacGyvers of their own lives. But there is a sense that everyone is making it up as they go along. There hasn’t actually been a civilization-ending event, so it has to be imagined. All the classes are exercises in participatory storytelling; the audience knows the basic story but what the bug-out bag and the plans and the gardening advice provide is realism, the telling details that make the story credible.
When the preppers do bring up a scenario, it’s a nuclear EMP or a solar flare. It’s something that knocks out technology rather than, say, permanent winter. I guess sprouting isn’t worth much as a skill if there’s no sunlight for 20 years. Bug-out bags and survival caches aren’t worth much if the climate makes the entire surface of the Earth uninhabitable. But that’s human nature: we’re all preparing for the catastrophes we want rather than the ones we’re going to get.
Their version of the collapse is highly specific. It is a world without technology in which roving bands attempt to raid your hard-won supplies, and self-sufficiency and self-defense determine survival. It’s all suspiciously similar to what the American frontier looked like – or, rather, what the American frontier looks like in the movies. The students are often enjoined to “think like the pioneers”. The preppers and survivalists aren’t really imagining the end of America. They’re imagining it beginning again.
(...)
The first bestseller in the early American colonies was The Day of Doom, by Michael Wigglesworth, published in 1662. One copy sold for every 20 people in New England. It was reprinted four times in the 17th century and repeatedly at intervals throughout the 18th.
The Great Awakening of the 1730s, the first original American religious movement, predicted imminent collapse of all terrestrial power. Jonathan Edwards preached in Northampton, Massachusetts, that Americans deserved the end that was coming for them: “You are from below. We are born with an aptitude for hell. Its seeds are in us.”
Americans love this apocalyptic stuff. They always have....
