Greetings, my dog.
Did you ever watch that program about doomsday preppers and/or survivalists? I think it was on Discovery or History Channel or the National Geographic YouTube?
Shit . . . was it on Playboy? Did Hustler ever have a channel? Remember USA's Up All Night?
At any rate, there was this program about a survivalist/doomsday prepper guy. He has lots of guns. Lots of pre-prepared meals in buckets and ration cases. Sorta like what those Christian fundamentalists sell on their call-in shows like you see in those Vic Berger videos. Our survivalist/doomsday prepper guy has a plan to dig a deep hole in the ground out in the desert. Into this hole he shall deposit a huge shipping container that has been modified into a survival bunker. Into this shipping container that has been modified into a survival bunker our survivalist/doomsday prepper guy intends to deposit himself and his family. Yes, he has a wife. She does appear on camera, so that is confirmed. He also has two sons.
A crucial sequence involves our survivalist/doomsday prepper guy taking his two sons out into the desert to shoot guns. If memory serves, our survivalist/doomsday prepper guy says that going out to shoot in the desert is better than joining a gun club, because you are subject to less rules out in the wilderness.
The two sons-who look to be no older than twelve-appear to be firing AR-15s or analogues of same.
Our survivalist/doomsday prepper guy is shooting a handgun. Off-camera, he accidentally shoots off one of his knuckles. Apparently, for reasons known only to himself, he held his hand in front of his gun prior to firing it and then he neglected to stop holding his hand in front of the gun when he decided to pull the trigger.
I am no firearms expert. But my working assumption is that a gun should be pointed away from your own body in order to reduce the risk of injury, especially when you are firing the gun. But, in general, if you are handling a gun you DO NOT point it at yourself or any other person or animal or object you do not wish to come to harm. But this is my admittedly simplistic, non-expert understanding of these matters.
Perhaps our doomsday prepper guy-for some reason I can no longer refer to him as a survivalist-is a sophisticated, highly theoretical postmodern gun user. Up is down. Self is other. Virtual is indistinguishable from reality. In fact, the relevant action seems to be taking place in the desert of the real. Micro is macro. Macro micro. Target is knuckle.
So, I approach this episode with the intellectual humility which is the fashion of our times, rather than pass the obvious judgment:
This man is no survivalist.
No, no . . . this man is clearly implementing postmodern survivalism, and I am far too simple-far too mired in my modernism-to grasp this truly deep shit.
Whoa is me.
POSTSCRIPTUS: Did they ever do a show about a bunker full of survivalist Playboy Bunnies, my dog?
