Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Noise, and the nearly nonexistent lefty survivalist
About a week ago, I finished Darin Bradley’s Noise, a novel about college students responding to — and some would say helping to precipitate — TEOTWAWKI (the end of the world as we know it, an acronym common on survivalist web sites, along with WTSHTF: when the shit hits the fan). In some ways, Noise is an infuriating novel. Bradley wrote it following the completion of his PhD in English literature and theory, and it shows. He writes in the postscript, “So I had a head full of cognitive theory and nineteenth-century American utopianism, and I had loads of free time.” The novel often reads as though Bradley had just finished Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and said, “Hmm, you know what? Not lyrical enough.”
That said, I loved Noise and recommend it without any other reservation. Alternating chapters relate the first person narrative of “Hiram” (who, with his college roommate “Levi” have adopted new names to fit their new identities in the post-WTSHTF world) and The Book, a cobbled-together guide to surviving TEOTWAWKI. The details of TEOTWAWKI — referred to in Noise as “the Collapse” — are sparse, but Bradley suggests an economic bust so profound that governments and law enforcement fragment, its individual subunits going rogue in a last-ditch effort to survive. Hiram’s chapters detail his and Levi’s efforts to “get the jump” (predict the Collapse so as to get a head start on last minute preparations), put together a Group, bug out of their college town of Slade, Texas, and make it to their Place, which they have called Amaranth. The Book chapters would make a fascinating read all by themselves, as they provide a manual for how to survive and ultimately thrive in the most ruthless of new (post-apocalyptic) worlds.
Hiram is little more than a boy. The memories he draws upon to ground himself in this new world are of his days in the Scouts and his all-nighters playing Dungeons and Dragons. Bradley masterfully orchestrates the interplay between Hiram’s memories, the dictates of the Book (theory), and the things he must now do (practice). To commit sometimes horrific acts of violence, he and the rest of his Group have adopted new names, wear face paint or masks, carry out their actions in a somewhat ritualistic manner, and afterwards reassure one another with, “What you did was right.” That last essential closer is what in my opinion makes this a truly haunting work, for it is the acceptance of the perpetrator’s new society, his Group, which makes maiming and murder not just socially acceptable but laudable to them.
This book has stayed with me. I won’t spoil the ending here, but I will say that the closing image was predictable yet still remarkably powerful.
And this book has played into some of my own fears and anxieties about the world and the shit we’re getting ourselves into. I’ve been beefing up our somewhat meager emergency kits, trying to think both of the relatively trivial emergencies like breaking down on a drive over the Grapevine in the middle of winter, and the big ones, TEOTWAWKIs. In the course of doing my internet searches, it soon became apparent that survivalist types are largely right-wing and, well, religious. And that led to what I had thought at first was an innocent question, but has turned more interesting than I’d first thought:
Are there any liberal, lefty, left-wing survivalists, or are they all rifle-toting God-loving Obama-hating rednecks?
No, they’re not all right-wing extremophiles. I’m going to stash here a link to the Radical Left-Wing Survivalist Blog. He’s looking pretty lonely over there, but at least he’s still posting semi-regularly. There’s also the Modern Survival Blog, which seems apolitical but wordy.
For every neutral or radical left-wing survivalist, there are many more at the other end of the spectrum. Take for example, Jim Rawles’ SurvivalBlog. In fairness, I haven’t spent enough time at Rawles’ blog to get much sense of his politics, but the man does fit the “religious” category quite well, listing the KJV Version Reference Bible with Apocrypha as first on his list of non-fiction survival “must-reads.” Nevertheless, the site is packed with tremendously useful information. For example, think fast: what’s the best thing to stockpile as currency for use in a post-apocalyptic world? If you said gold or silver or copper, BZZZZZZZ, wrong. The answer is ammunition.
While looking for the answer to my question, I found one poster on the Survivalist Boards who claimed you could not be both left-wing and a survivalist. Why not? Because lefties believe in sucking from the teat of Big Government, while survivalists are all about independent-thinking rugged individualists who can make it on their own no matter what. Yup.
Finally, it dawned on me, maybe not the answer but AN answer. I suspect I need to look into the sustainability movement. Sustainability implies, I think, an “off the grid” sensibility which jibes well with the idea of surviving TEOTWAWKI. A truly sustainable community, one which grows all of its own food, produces its own goods, provides its own services, and most of all derives its power locally (whether it be solar, hydroelectric, wind, or preferably all three) would weather an apocalypse quite well, I suspect.
So my plan would be to find such a community and either retire or flee there in case of, well, you know, anything really, really suckworthy. As a physician, I have a trade to barter. I should be useful.
Seriously, how many people’s survival kits includes surgical instruments, local anesthetic, scalpels, and suture?
D.
I can’t even remember now why it was that we set aside survivalist supplies. Y2k? The first Gulf War? Whatever. We had this huge crate full of canned and tinned goods, duct tape, plastic sheets, bandages, medicine, water, batteries, pet food. And it sat there unused for years. Last year we needed the room to store more of our grown kids stuff and the big survival crate was hauled out. Most everything was expired and useless. Even the duct tape had disintegrated to the point of being more gooey than sticky. Something had leaked something so caustic it ate a hole through the crate and down through the carpet. The good news: we never needed our survivalist supplies. The bad news: had we needed them, they unusable.
The diehards cycle through their supplies, use-and-replace, eat-and-replace. Can’t say I’d like to make freeze-dried food a staple of my diet.
Jayna is already in Tae Kwon Do and I plan on taking her to the shooting range. We now anticipate that the movie Mad Max was a documentary. We are trying to get prepared.
. . . and I’m going to go read Jim Rawles’s section on Survival Guns.
Okay, Rawles’s politics are now clear to me.
As if I ever had any doubt.
Inasmuch as survivalism is largely a modern American phenomenon, I suspect that anyone with a leftist bent what is practicing it picked it up by osmosis. I believe that survivalism itself is bound to the Republican party and the hard American right with strings of gunmetal and paranoid fantasy. All three of these (survivalism, hard Right, Republican party) have a juvenile fascination with the rugged individualist, a mythical creature who rides into town, steely-eyed, and guns down all the Bad Guys. Singlehandedly. With lots of guns. And gunfire.
This narrative doesn’t fit with the American reactionary Left, but the narrative itself is so pervasive and (as you note) so powerful that it reaches beyond the landscape of the Right. I think it isn’t so much that the American Right invented this myth – it is rather that they have taken a powerful myth, that of the self-reliant man, the lean wolf who battles alone in the cause of right, and coopted that myth into the modern misanthropic vision.
Because it is so powerful and so pervasive, I am surprised that there aren’t more survivalists on the American Left.
Interesting. Certainly in fiction, there is at least representation of the right (I’m thinking about Lucifer’s Hammer, for example) — but books like Noise and the much older Earth Abides are, to my reading, politically neutral.
But a left-leaning post-apocalyptic utopia . . . possibly a group of academics . . . I’m not sure that’s been done, and I’m wondering if it’s being planned in real life.
I would think cigarettes and booze would make for good barter, too…
See also http://www.theliberalgunclub.com/phpBB3
Even better, I suspect, would be to invest in a good still, learn how to cook moonshine, and put aside a store of gallon jugs.
I wonder if Foxfire ever did a bit on Moonshine? Oh yeah.
Thanks for the link.
The problem w/ the Foxfire series is that the books don’t tend to reflect the kinds of products & materials available today, particularly when it comes to food & booze. There are a ton of new books about craft distilling that are probably better choices…
Oh, and Zombie Squad is a good source for apolitical survivalist info, too.
Care to recommend a good book on craft distilling? Sounds interesting, and it appeals to my roots as a chemist (or, more properly, a child alchemist — since I was into mixing anything and everything).
Thanks for the Zombie Squad link.
I have this one on order: http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0968629210/ref=aw_cr_item_title?qid=1322204034&sr=8-29
I’ll let you know how it is…
Is home distilling legal now?
No, not really, you still need to follow the Fed’s rules. But many states have made craft distilling a lot easier to get into, so some of the barriers are coming down. For instance, Washington recently amended their liquor code to lower the license on distilleries from US$2000/year to $US200/year as long as 50% of the ingredients come from WA. The Federal tax and documentation requirements are still pretty onerous.
Dean, if it’s TEOTWAWKI, the Feds don’t matter anymore 🙂 But yeah, I’d have to check into California law. Weird that they care about stuff like this and not beer or wine home-manufacture. Maybe it’s the methanol worry? More likely a leftover of Prohibition days.
Probably a bit of both – certainly people do go blind from drinking poor quality shine from time to time.
Hey there! Thanks for the mention and link to my site. Yes, we left-leaning survivalists do exist, and there seems to be a growing number of us. Myself, I’m also a pragmatist, among other things. I’m happy to glean ideas from anywhere, even if I don’t necessarily agree with their politics. Sometimes I must hold my nose in order to get past the more odious parts, but there it is. And yes, we lefties do lean heavily on the “sustainability” side of things – having your guns & food stash is nice, but they’re going to run out eventually, and if you’re self-sufficient from the start, then you’re already a step ahead of the game.
(Liquor laws – they’re still worried about methanol, at least supposedly. They’re much more worried about taxes (1st “civil war” in the US was over alcohol excise tax–the Whiskey Rebellion).)
Cheers!
–Radical Left Wing Survivalist
Thanks for posting, RLWS. Yup, it really is necessary to do some nose-pinching. I was just reading Bruce D. Clayton’s foreword to Mel Tappan’s Tappan on Survival, and oh boy, talk about viewing history through right wing colored glasses. Here’s his description of the 1970s geopolitics: “The leaders of the Soviet Union were elderly ideologues committed to the triumph of communism through the destruction of the United States. They had absolutely huge arsenals of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons at their disposal, all aimed at us.” So the only mention of the US’s role in all this . . . is as the target of Soviet aggression. Riiiight.
On guns: I think Noise had it right. The guys sharpen and train with real swords. They definitely have the long haul in view.