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CHAPTER FIVE Survival IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT, AND WE FEEL FINE In the last three decades ofthe twentieth century, survivalism became a recognized social movement in the United States and the survivalist a familiar figure in news stories and popular culture. As the century came to a close, for example, the FBI continued to search for Eric Robert Rudolph, who was wanted in connection with bombings at Atlanta's Centennial Olympic Park and at an abortion clinic, among other places. Rudolplis success in evading capture in the North Carolina mountains, where he had gone to ground, was attributed to his experience as one who had trained ever since his youth for just such an emergency. Predictably , his success gave him an outlaw charisma in the eyes ofsome of those following the story. Characters like Rudolph have gained such a high profile that they have even received the honor ofbeing satirized on a hit TV series, King ofthe Hill. One ofthe good ol' cartoon figures on that show is an exterminator , Dale Gribble, who is as alert to the subtlest hints ofgovernment conspiracy as he is blind to the blatant evidence of his wife's adultery. Despite such satire, however, even Americans who live much more mainstream lives than those of Gribble (with his fear of black helicopters ) or Rudolph (who was trained early on in Holocaust denial) have demonstrated how attracted they feel to the survivalist ethos. Much as the prospect ofnuclear war in the 1950s and 1960s led many middle-class Americans to build bomb shelters in their basements and backyards, concerns about the social chaos that might cascade from the Y2K computer bug drove more than a few of them to stockpile water, beans, batteries , and AR-15s. As an organized social movement, survivalism may involve a miniscule proportion of this country's population, but the impulses behind it also move many other people, even among those who live in apartments with refrigerators that hold enough food to feed the troops for a day and half at most. Bernhard Goetz, who was acquitted for shooting four black youths by whom he felt threatened in the New York subway system in 1984, is the city mouse cousin to the country mouse of Randy Weaver, who shot it out with FBI marksmen at his mountain refuge in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, where he had barricaded himself in 1992 rather than answer a warrant for his arrest on a gun law violation.1 Popular understanding would have it that survivalism is a type of primitivism, one in which civilized life is reduced to its essentials in anticipation of TEOTWAWKI, which is "The End of the World as We Know It" in survivalist-speak. At its most extreme this goal finds expression in the attitude only half-jokingly represented in the "Kill 'Em AllLet God Sort 'Em Out" motto of T-shirts and bumper stickers.2 More generally, it is commonly thought that the ultimate goal ofthe dedicated survivalist is to live "off the grid": independent of the social, economic, political, and technological infrastructures of modern life. As I am concerned to argue, however, such an understanding of this movement leaves much to be desired. It fails to appreciate, for instance, that in its drive toward a state of imaginary simplicity survivalism is not a simple phenomenon. To begin with, its roots in Western tradition are dauntingly complex. They range from Ernest Thompson Seton's proto-Boy Scout manual, How to Play Indian (1903) and Henry David Thoreau's Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854) to Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719); they also extend out to touch on FrederickJackson Turner's frontier thesis, AdolfHitler's dream of a thousand-year Reich, medieval millenarianism, and the literary genre of the pastoral, to name but a few among its many ancestral grounds. In the contemporary United States alone survivalism has connections to phenomena as diverse as the communal experiments conducted by hippies and assorted others in the 1960s and 1970s, the Rambo movies of the 1980s, the Biosphere 2 experiment of the 1990s, and the smash hit of the summer 2000 TV season, Survivor. Despite this background, to which I can refer here in only the sketchiest ofterms, outsiders and those who identifY with the survivalist movement generally agree in regarding it as a marginal phenomenon. To the true believers this condition attends upon their status as the enlightened remnant destined to survive the coming Tribulation...

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