Crystal Ball
“You get the word passed to you. ‘Hey, uh – make sure your food and water and ammo last – we’ve been cut off.’
“You’re like, uh, that’s not good – I’m kind of in a desert. There aren’t a ton of things around here that we could use. It’s like going back to Boy Scout days.”
In 2003, Andrew Wark’s Marine unit was invading southern Iraq. He recalls it with a casual ramble that seems almost practiced. Within a day or two, he tells me, his unit was resupplied. But that was long enough for him to sense he’d been on the edge of what normally seems like a pretty orderly, if not quite relaxing, life.
Leon Ordnoff hadn’t met Andrew yet, but in 2003, he was in Iraq too. He talks fast. “You know, most of my twenties I was in a war zone. I did four tours of Iraq, one of Kosovo, one in Africa. Africa, we got left behind for like four or five days. There was an embassy bombing. The ships got spooked and took off and just left us there.”
Leon means two truck bombs that killed hundreds of people in Kenya and Tanzania on August 7, 1998. It was still three years before one of its likely perpetrators, Osama Bin Laden, would be known to all of America. That day, two countries saw how abruptly violence can rip through a city. Leon saw the fragility of a supply line.
“You just never really know, nobody has a crystal ball and can say what’s going to happen. You know what I mean? Make sense?” He doesn’t wait for an answer.
Andrew met Leon in a bar when they were the only two combat vets on base in Japan. Back then, they wouldn’t have called themselves survivalists. They probably didn’t even known what ‘survivalism’ was, but they would.
At the time, combat experience just gave them something to talk about. A few years later they were out, civilians. Andrew ended up doing communications design, which is close to what he did in the Marines. Leon stuck even closer to his military experience, with a Fresno-based gig at the Department of Defense. In 9-5 jobs, a little further from camouflage and carbines, societal breakdown still seemed possible.
“In the Marines,” Leon says, “the thing that was always secure was pretty much food and weaponry. When I got out we didn’t have an armory we could go to. We didn’t have a supply tent where we could go and just say, hey, let me have some food.”
“I said, let’s get a plan together just to be safe. We were voicing our opinions on some websites and forums and stuff, and we realized, hey, we’re usually the topic-setters on all this stuff. We’re usually leading the discussion, we’re usually answering the questions. Let’s just start our own website.”
When they did, they joined dozens of ‘survivalist’ or ‘prepper’ organizations nationwide that train to live through whatever’s coming. Theirs is called Tactical Survival, and it’s a Southern California group for figuring out how to survive if bad stuff happens. Their logo on meetup.com is a skull and crossbones. When you ask exactly what the bad stuff is, Leon and Andrew aren’t evasive so much as elaborately nonspecific. There are earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, power failures. They’d all demand a lot of you – keeping yourself fed, sheltered, defended. Make sense?
So Tactical Survival members go on hikes, study for their ham radio exams, and shoot targets in the desert. They test out gear and take classes at REI. This makes them sort of like the Boy Scouts, if Boy Scouts had houses and spouses and lacked a national organizing body.
You might think of them as a group of expert amateurs in a range of survival skills. That’s what ham radio, for example, is all about – you become certified to broadcast in private ‘ham’ frequencies through detailed federal exams. The question is: experts in what? It’s unlikely that any two would share the same training, partly because preppers come from vastly different backgrounds, and partly because each one is prepping for something slightly different.
It’s important to note, therefore, that none of this is perfectly defined. One will tell you about invasion and nuclear attack, and another will talk about economic collapse. Some preppers expect imminent and unprecedented disaster, while others, like Leon and Andrew, just say you’d take out insurance on your car – why not on your survival? But well-defined or not, there are conferences, magazines, and blogs aplenty that thrive on whatever impulse survivalists have in common.
And they do seem to share something. All of the preppers I spoke to felt they belonged to some kind of movement, maybe a growing one, defined by common concerns. They’ll disagree about what to call it, maybe. (For simplicity’s sake, I’m using ‘prepper’ and ‘surivivalist’ interchangeably here.) Self-perception, as much as outside definition, can classify you into survivalism – as it would in a political party or religion or hobby. You make yourself up.
Making It Up
The media, of course, are fans of any story that involves the end of the world. But they don’t tell it particularly well. Every so often a journalist hears about survivalism and tells its readers: “Area Grandma Likes Preserving Vegetables – and Guns”; “Guy Prepares for Disaster That Probably Won’t Happen”; “Hard Times, But Not For Gas Mask Salesmen.” Many of them link today’s survivalism to the fallout shelters of midcentury America. That’s a bit of a challenge, though, because it seems like a preppers become preppers when they understand themselves as such. Cold War-era disaster preparation, the kind that shows high school kids trying out ‘Duck and Cover,’ wasn’t a private self-identifier as much as a public recommendation.
Survivalism attracts the media because of its easy paradoxes and surface fascination. Somewhat understandable, because it makes for killer hooks – as in the heading of “The Yuppie Survivalists” in Details magazine: “They live next door to you, not in bunkers. Young, successful, urban ‘preppers’ are stockpiling for the apocalypse—and they think you’re crazy not to.”
These kinds of articles are happy to oblige the notion that survivalism is a rising trend. To a magazine, the only thing more interesting than a weirdo is a whole pile of weirdos. Practically, it’s quite hard to know whether survivalism really is growing. It would mean tallying a mindset, one that’s particularly challenging to explain. It’s more than counting bomb shelters, as you might have done in 1960. It is clear, however, that the efficiency and anonymity of the internet have made prepper voices louder and more widespread in the past decade.
To be fair, “The Yuppie Survivalists” did a decent job illustrating that you can live in a city, enjoy moderation in wine and politics, work in IT or engineering or furniture design, and still be a survivalist. I spoke to a woman in Tactical Survival named Chris May, who spends her work day trying to kill cancer cells in petri dishes. She voted for Obama, but doesn’t care much for politics. “There’s no such thing as a typical survivalist,” she said. “Get a group of us together and you can’t get us to agree on why we need to prepare. I have been in unproductive heated arguments over whether the group focus should be firearms training or 18th century primitive farming skills.” When I asked her in an email about her survival plan, she sent me 1200 words describing emergency items like ‘bug-out bags’ (BOBs) and solar car chargers.
Another member was particularly concerned about chemicals and processing in the food supply. He wanted to stay anonymous. He’s worked too many jobs to name, but most of them – like car repair and special effects – required improvisation and mechanical work. Because of that, for him as for many preppers, survivalism can be kind of fun.
The Details article managed to capture some of this kind of diversity. Like most media accounts, it wasn’t wrong. Just playful. When Andrew read it, he said: “Actually, not a bad story. But being in a high rise in the event of something really bad happening isn’t a great idea. No power, stairs blocked…now what? 2nd floor, jump it. 22nd floor? Ouch.”
When you look at the world through survivalist lenses, you’re sensitized to what seem like societal weak links. The electricity-dependent credit card machines. The gasoline supply chain. The tall buildings. Then you think about how you’d respond if the links gave out. It’s atypical, yes, to look at a high-rise and think about escape plans. The main thing is, it’s not playful.
Details says survivalists would call me crazy for failing to prepare, but Andrew saves crazy for a different group – a particular breed of survivalists. “I’ve been asked if we can teach how to make bombs. And I’m like, what? Huh? Like I even know how to do that. Sometimes Leon and I will talk to a guy at a function, and then go outside and smoke a cigarette and go, that guy. Was crazy. And I go, yeah. That guy was crazy.”
People Like Me
There are a lot of kinds of survivalists, and most of them want you to know that. It’s clear that preppers consider it important that you understand what they’re not. The one you’re talking to isn’t on the fringe – but there is a fringe to not be on.
Joe Nobody sees three species. He’s the author of a few bestsellers on survival preparation, like Holding Your Ground, a guidebook about fortifying your home from attack. When Joe’s not writing, he teaches courses on survival preparation in Texas. Like Leon, he works in private defense. As an author, he stays anonymous because of his work with government agencies. He did his classifications for me on the phone from Texas.
1) Anarchists. Those preparing and even eager for the fall of society. Often marked by radical religion or conspiracy theory; exhibit innate distrust of authority. May resemble the original ‘mountain men’ of the 1800s. Likely the smallest category; one would do well to avoid them.
2) Telepreppers. Those who prepare in front of audiences, as on The Discovery Channel. Like Bear Grylls (“Man vs. Wild”) they pride themselves on hands-on skills, knowledge of nature, and creative McGyverism in the face of short-term survival scenarios. Often found (deliberately) lost in the woods, stuck in an avalanche, or treading water after their kayak capsized.
3) People Like Me. Those who desperately hope the government will not fall, but judge the likelihood of such an event as high enough to warrant cautionary steps. Appear to be the vast majority; reasonable folks with reasonable concerns.
Like Joe, Leon won’t go near what he calls the ‘radical, conspiracy-minded survivalist.’ He’s slightly less repulsed by the ‘past-time survivalist’ – the armchair commandos who like talking a good game, but won’t spend a buck on real gear. Then there’s the ‘housewife prepper’ – who sure stocks up on food, but might not be so into the firearms. Leon’s careful not to denounce any of them, but it’s clear from his tone that these approaches don’t make that much sense to him. He wants to talk survival with people like himself: people who’ll stock food and water, grab some gear and also some guns, and carry a “realistic” head filled with know-how.
Classification is important partly because survivalists tend to be taxonomists – people who rate and classify survival gear and disaster scenarios, and like classifying each other as much as they dislike being miscategorized themselves. To be precise, most people interested in this stuff would object to using ‘survivalist’ and ‘prepper’ interchangeably. There’s good reason for their unease: survivalism is, almost literally, a loaded word with a very loaded past.
If you ever need to construct a Mark-I sub-machine gun, for instance, you might turn to a handy volume from the 70’s called The Poor Man’s James Bond. It’s a book written by Kurt Saxon, formely Don Siscco, with illustrated instructions to make homemade explosives and weapons. On the opening page of the revised edition are two columns. The left column describes the descent of 1980s society into crime, drug use, and moral complacency – in the face of which each citizen needs to take the law into his own hands. The right describes the stealthiest sources for weapons ingredients, like hobby chemical companies that advertise in Popular Science. Saxon claims to be the inventor of the word ‘survivalist.’
Saxon isn’t known to be a violent man, but James Oliver Huberty was. He sensed impending collapse, by nuke or Depression or government action. He stockpiled food and firearms in the early 1980’s. In 1984, he shot 21 people at a McDonald’s in San Ysidro, California. Then he killed himself. He used three guns and took more than an hour to do all this. Newspaper reports called him a survivalist. Most people gave up trying to explain why someone would do something so unfathomable. Explicable or not, his title of ‘survivalist’ became part of the massacre’s public narrative.
Are they survivalists? Maybe. They’re certainly part of the reason that many preppers won’t use the word. A sociologist named Richard Mitchell calls this the Huberty problem. In his book about survivalism and modernity, he recognizes the difference between Huberty and preppers that aren’t violent. “So why is he granted a place in this narrative? Because Huberty and his stories such as his have come to define survivalism in the public mind.” According to Mitchell’s research, two-thirds of the survivalists he surveyed owned firearms. Yet as he points out, when most people think of survivalism, they think primarily of guns.
Mitchell’s greatest insight may be that meaning in society is built of competing narratives. One man’s survivalist is another man’s lunatic; it depends who tells the story better. In those narratives, our minds learn by association – and we learn to accept ourselves by differentiation. History, then, is heavy for most survivalists. Participation is by definition symbolic, and by classifying we try to change the symbols around, to lighten history a little.
The media have their own trouble when they’ve tried to classify survivalists. For lack of a better place, the Details article ended up in the Culture & Trends/Career & Money section. The New York Times placed its 2008 article “Duck and Cover: It’s the New Survivalism” in Fashion & Style. (That article, by the way, also captured some of the diversity of today’s survivalists – but only as a surprising shift away from vaguely-described “doomsday measures once associated with the social fringes”).
When we run out of phyla to classify for our everyday experiences, it seems, we just stretch the old ones to make them fit. Classifications help define who we’ll listen to and who we won’t – whose stories are told and whose are ridiculed. Most of the time, our shorthand for this kind of sorting is ‘sanity’. The ones we call insane are the easiest to ignore.
Before Tactical Survival, Leon and Andrew were part of a different group. It was more hierarchical, Andrew says, and less into firearms. When a few of the members wanted to learn to shoot, the pair started teaching classes of their own. The group leader got upset. “Saying like, we don’t want to become militant – and I’m like, well I’m not really trying to become militant. People just want to know how to hit a deer. I’ll teach you that. He ended up telling us we had to leave the group because we were kind of on the fringe or something.” Every prepper is on someone’s fringe. “A lot of those people came and joined our group. That first group was a little bit out there for me.”
As it happens, Kurt Saxon, author of The Poor Man’s James Bond, also pointed a finger at what he thought was crazy. In his narrative about societal disintegration, he pointed at Huberty and away from himself.
I have to wonder who Huberty might have pointed at, if someone had asked him about craziness. Perhaps his actions were truly insensible, even to himself – or maybe he found a way to rationalize immense violence as a response to his vision of societal disintegration. To Saxon, Huberty was disintegration. Crazy, of course, is in the glinting eye of the beholder. Which is why people feel justified ignoring Kurt Saxon – he’s on the fringe.
The Sociologist and the Survivalist
When he was forty-two years old, Richard Mitchell wept against the dashboard of his car. He’d spent the weekend in Idaho with Eleen Baumann, his research partner, and a group of white supremacists who too bore the name survivalist. The leader of the gathering had spoken of killing Jews and black people. He had taught them to do it with bits of heavy wire. On Easter Sunday, packing up in his trailer, Rich heard children playing a game outside in the dust. “’Slit his throat! He’s a Jew! He’s a Jew!,’” they had yelled.
Mitchell is a sociologist, and this was what he studied. His task was to listen, to understand, and that weekend he couldn’t do it. As with Huberty, these supremacists were survivalists by practice. They prepared for societal disintegration; they shared common concerns. But did this make them survivalists by name?
Rich’s tears were data not about survivalists, but about himself. They described the difficulty of integrating that weekend into the rest of his life. And they beg the question: if you call them survivalists, are you inadvertently condemning preppers of a different stripe? The ones who too might have wept at the sight of such hatred?
Rich needed a new way to define and maybe explain survivalism. What he came up with comprised his book Dancing At Armageddon: Survivalism and Chaos in Modern Times. His is the best outsider’s text you’ll find on survivalists, driven by fieldwork stories and interspersed with the voices of heady but insightful social theorists like Max Weber and Georg Simmel. Its thesis is succinct: survivalism is much more than a sideshow curiosity, and can tell us a lot about the modern world. Rather, survivalism is a particular type of storytelling.
Preppers design stories about how things could end, and illustrate those stories through their skills and their stockpiles. “In survivalist scenarios what you have is what you need,” Rich said in 2001. Preppers talk about water shortages when they show you their water stash, he says; they talk about fallout when they show you their shelter. In a way, survivalism is optimistic – life can’t be overwhelming, because it’s possible to prepare for it.
In other words: stories define survivalism, and survivalists design their worlds to fit their stories. It’s as if the disorder is real once you’ve found a cure. This is a theory you can throw at just about any prepper, because every prepper that talks to you will explain why his preparation made sense given the state of things. Leon has his stories about mitigation in the face of risks; Kurt Saxon has his about weapons in the face of societal disintegration. The question is, is Rich calling them mere storytellers? If so, he’s contradicting himself – it would make them sideshow storytellers.
But I suspect that he isn’t. Because, first of all, nuclear war or food shortages are real threats, if hard to measure. More importantly, Rich’s book insists that survivalism is an adaptive and inventive response to modernity, not irrelevant escapism. Rich, in this schema, is a storyteller too, and not necessarily a more successful one. The limits of his story are part of the story; he knows his task is to fail the best he can at explaining survivalists.
Psychiatry aside, we tend to deem a man sane if his choices are in proportion to the actual world. Except we take in the actual world through stories – news articles, road maps, rumors, government reports. Without them, all I can know is the street I live on. Which means that a man is sane if his actions are in proportion with the stories he listens to.
If he listens to different stories than I do, then who’s sane? Do we decide to define sanity by the stories we choose to listen to? That’s a circle: we choose the right stories, and therefore are sane; were are sane, and therefore know how to choose the right stories.
None of this is to say that there aren’t real, empirical risks that we can see in a real, empirical world. They do. Rather, it’s to say that our margin of error in trying to know the empirical world is greater than the difference between Rich and Leon and Joe and I. And if I say Kurt Saxon and supremacists fall beyond that margin of error, that they exist in some category of their own, it’s mostly because I feel like thinking that. It’s hard to justify it more tightly than that.
It all broke down, I think, because in the first place Rich’s theory is a people theory before it’s a prepper theory. Simply put, people tell stories and like their world to correspond with their yarns. And if we can find our footing in a world so relative, then maybe survivalists can be storytellers without being mere.
Listening
“Is that what you want me to call you in the article?” I ask. “Ranger Man?”
“Jason’s okay too,” he says.
Ranger Man is driving in Maine to a quiet spot where he can “shoot up that armor vest I blogged about on Wednesday.” He runs SHTFblog.com. It stands for “Shit Hits The Fan” – a favorite acronym among preppers that denotes survival mode. “I guess I’d describe it as sort of, a rational, reasonable, personal and societal preparedness blog. It’s not over-the-top, you know I’m not talking about how to EMP-proof your 1968 Dodge.” Turns out his readership rakes in a good deal of ad revenue, and of late he’s been able to pay two people to write for him. Better than most American newspapers.
“What do you study down there?” he asks me.
“English.”
“Oh yeah? I was an English major in college.”
Jason throws out an ‘English major-ey’ theory that he thinks I’d like. You know zombie movies? They’re just a cover for working out survivalism in a socially-acceptable way. He wrote a blog post about it: “It’s easier for many people to joke with others about a zombie invasion and entering survival mode than it is to talk about what life might be like if a real, deadly flu pandemic hit, what would happen if grocery store shelves went empty and the electricity ran out, with no foreseeable help to come.” When we manage to talk about it, he’s suggesting, we do it through social codes and rituals. Otherwise we’d say nothing.
If zombie movies can teach us something or help us communicate, it’s because they offer an alternative to the daily life we know. And in that sense, Jason sounds a lot like Rich. “Survivalism, like art,” Rich wrote in Dancing at Armageddon, “promises what rational life does not, grandiloquent symbolic means of making a difference, personally and morally, in modern times….Imaginary sides are drawn, rules set, action consequent and lasting.” Talking about survival, then, imagines over the weaknesses in society. Perhaps it can help us fix the weaknesses. If not, it helps us ignore them.
There are plenty of things to say about both Jason’s theory and Rich’s theory, if you believe them. A few of them are: Dawn of the Dead. The Time Machine. Red Dawn. 1984. Atlas Shrugged. Star Wars. The Matrix. Lord of the Rings. Fight Club. Fahrenheit 451. The Road. Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid. The Twilight Zone.
I don’t mean that survivalist narratives should be classified as fiction, like the ones above. Rather, I mean that we’ve liked to imagine alternate worlds and harsh futures for a long time. Survivalists are not the only ones who’d think that on the frontiers of the West, on the flight deck of a spaceship, on the streets of dystopia, the rules are different, the dangers and the deeds are bigger. It’s not a coincidence that Joe Nobody’s first book of fiction is compared to a Western on the cover. It’s on these kinds of frontiers that people have worked out their ugly fears and wispy dreams. As in The Twilight Zone, these scenarios can be implausible, but they’re often close enough to make us wonder.
Jason is a news junkie. He likes Drudge Report, Fox News, CSNBC, Al Jazeera English, MSNBC. And BBC and NPR – the usual stuff, he calls it. Like many of the other preppers, he’s impressionistic, perhaps vague, when he’s asked what exactly he’s preparing for. Unlike Leon and Andrew, he thinks the chance for collapse is just way higher today than it used to be. Much of his concern has come from the headlines. Y2K, which “although it didn’t really materialize, really highlighted for me how reliant we are on fragile infrastructure.” 9/11 right after that. Hurricane Katrina. H1N1. “Kind of just a culmination. Got me thinking, what if two weeks from now…yada yada yada.”
He has a wife and two young kids. When I ask him about anonymity, he has two reasons: one, that if his name’s out there people will think him crazy. To explain the second, he mentions a classic episode of The Twilight Zone. It’s called “The Shelter,” and it follows a lone Cold War-era prepper in a neighborhood that thinks he’s paranoid. Spoiler alert: when the sirens start to echo through their sliver of suburbia, the neighbors come knocking on the shelter’s heavy doors. Ranger Man, like the guy in The Twilight Zone, is stocked for his family, and that’s all. So Jason doesn’t tell the neighbors. He says preppers would call that op-sec. Operational security. Yada yada yada.
Jason – Ranger Man – makes fun of everything. But at the moment he’s entirely serious. It’s his sincerity, actually, and the sincerity of people like him, that makes it so easy to call all of this an elaborate charade – to say survivalism is a way to elevate absurdity and child’s play. We can read survivalism as storytelling, the way Rich does, or we can read it as crazy talk. Is there some alternative? Can we refuse to read it? Maybe – as if the goal instead is to refuse analysis, reject theorizing. As if all you needed to know in the first place is that people like to gossip, yammer, blather, write – and that all anybody can do in response is listen carefully, or not.
Jason stays on the phone with me for a few more minutes. He says he’s parked at the gravel pits somewhere in Maine, way out in the willy waggs. “For me,” he’s saying, “the blog just started out for self-entertainment. Like tongue-and-cheek, a certain amount of truth to it but over-the-top too. Because I have a very dry sense of humor. As people started reading it I realized I should be a little more conscious of what I was presenting. It starts off kind of fun and entertaining and it becomes something you gotta do. It’s work.”
When we’re done talking, he’ll trudge across the gravel to pepper a kevlar vest with speeding bits of lead. Eventually he’ll convert that into words, which will tell the readers of his blog whether the bulletproof vest is any good or not. If I could listen to him do all this, I’d hear the crunch of boots on gravel, the explosion of gas out of a metal rod, the hollow clatter of bullet shells on stone, the hard strike of lead into body armor. And after a few moments maybe a soft impressed whistle or a disappointed sigh, which would tell me what he thought of it all.