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Sunday, July 30, 2006
In Which de Selby Predicts the Future
Back during the Cold War, I made a pact with a couple of drinking buddies that when the trumpets of Armageddon started sounding, we would grab all the booze at hand and meet up at a grassy knoll overlooking an air strip at the nearby Air Force base. We wanted to maximize our chances of being vaporized, because we dreaded being among the inevitable hordes of mutant nuclear freaks wandering the countryside looking for human brains to eat. And what better excuse for a party?
I think we were in the minority, even among the zombie-dreading demographic.
You may not remember this, and it's not spoken of much anymore, but toward the end of the cold war, there existed a significant number of people who seemed to actually relish the thought of making it through the holocaust unmutated, and holding off the zombies with high-powered automatic weapons from the relative safety of their wilderness bunkers. They were called "survivalists", and there was a healthy cottage industry supplying them with armored shelters, land deals, underground fuel and water tanks, books and magazines, generators, freeze-dried foods, combat training weekends, and, of course, weapons. Lots of weapons and ammo.
There was quite a bit of variety in the motives and mind-sets of those folks. Some were apocalyptic Christians, some were race-warriors, some were Western cowboy types, some were Illuminati-theorists, some were commandos or wanna-be commandos, and many were some combination of those things. If there was any unifying characteristic they almost all shared, it was a distrust of Government. Government at any level, really, but especially the Federal Government of the USA. It was the culture that eventually gave rise to (among others) Tim McVeigh.
You may ask yourself, "Why aren't these people acting out (or at least talking up) their pathological fantasies of Patriotic Defense of American Freedom against the Jack-Booted Thugs of the Federal Government in the face of the most aggressively secretive and anti-constitutional administration this country has seen, well, maybe ever? Where is all the brave talk of Liberty in a time when Security has become a euphemism for Tyranny?"
Go ahead. Ask yourself that.
If the question perplexes you, you haven't been a student of the wide world of Conspiracy Theory. Oh, you may be up on all the latest stuff - Diebold ordered 9/11, Dick Cheney shot Haifa in the face, Condi Rice is hoarding all the oil in her tanker... but you're not accounting for One World Government and the United Nations. The Survivalist story goes that Evil Geniuses like the Council on Foreign Relations and the Bilderbergers (just two of many tentacles of the shadowy elite) have a plan to subjugate America under Foreign Rule, and their chief instrumentality for attaining this goal is the UN. The staunchly nationalist patriots of the Survivalist movement rationalized their opposition to the Feds by imaging a future (or furtively present) war on American soil against blue-helmeted UN troops, commanded by foreigners and falsely legitimized by traitorous "one-worlders" in Washington.
All evil flows from Foreigners. Thererfore, if it's anti-foreign, and especially if it's anti-UN, it's inherently good.
I honestly don't know if the higher-ups in the Bush administration subscribe to the One-Worlder Fount of All Evil theory, but their policies vis-a-vis the UN have certainly served to keep the lid on the most rabid Defenders of America.
Bush says:
- Screw the UN!
- Screw the UN, Saddam does have WMD!
- Screw the UN!
- Screw the UN, let's have a war!
- Screw the UN!
- Screw the UN, here's John Bolton!
- Screw the UN!
In this way, Bush has pacified a large, wacky, violent, and well-armed fringe group in our American midst. In fact, he has given them another, less explosive outlet for their activism in the form of the immigration "crisis", and the border MinuteMen. He doesn't get enough credit for that. Very clever. Probably Karl's idea.
The bad news (you knew there was bad news coming) is that these people have not gone away. They have not become more reasonable, and they have not stopped arming themselves. If there is ever a day in which the US reengages the rest of the world in a constructive way, they will be there, defending us by shooting at people, robbing banks, and blowing shit up.
That's the problem with Democrats. They're always causing stuff like that.
Don't say I didn't warn you.
- posted by de Selby @ 8:19 PM
