Prepperoni Pizza (alone in front of Night of the Living Dead)

Always three days late and a four-dollar bill short, I’m just getting to Kevin Sullivan’s insightful but mistitled “A fortress against fear” from the August 27 Washington Post (online here). And I wouldn’t have gotten to it at all, if one of my coffee buddies hadn’t recommended it.

Prepped

The article is all about “preppers,” those prepared for whichever man-made apocalypse is just around the corner. Preppers have the right extinguisher for every kind of fire, the shield for whatever shit hits the fan. Most live in what apparently has come to be known as the American Redoubt, which Sullivan describes as “a settlement of the God-fearing in a lightly populated territory that includes Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and the eastern parts of Washington and Oregon.”

        Except they don’t live there; they survive. That’s one of the two fundamental mistakes preppers make. They confuse living and surviving. The other: they also equate security with a well-supplied fortress that may be fire and shit-storm proof but doesn’t keep out fear.

When I walk down to the corner for coffee – as I will later this morning – and meet with whoever happens to be there and when we talk about the weather first, then about whatever is on our fraying minds, in our decaying hearts, or gnawing at our bowels, I am living – we are.

        When I drive my 4x4 back home and carefully lock, deadbolt, and chain the door behind me, then go down to my bomb shelter to check the freezer and oil and reload my guns, I am not. I may be surviving, but I am not living. It is the difference between sex with another person when you don’t care who hears and sex with a magazine when your mother might come through the door at any minute.

But, let’s say, down in my basement shelter, oiling my guns, I slide into my crank-radio a CD of Christian music and, unaccountably! among the slick, sick songs of praise, there is a poorly recorded, home-made track of a half-empty church singing, “A Mighty Fortress.”

For still our ancient foe

Doth seek to work us woe;

His craft and power are great,

And armed with cru-él hate;

On earth is not his equal.

Rita Hayworth in a strapless gown

Then I have to realize, don’t I, that the gun I am dressing can not kill what really ails me any more than reinforced concrete walls sunk deep under a back woods of the Idaho panhandle will keep him/her/it out. (Not that I actually live in Idaho.) (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)

        Even if secure meant only safe from harm, I am not secure even there. But secure means more than safe. Safe is to secure as wearing body armor to a riot is to wearing a ball gown to . . . well, a ball.

To sum up:

-       It is better to drink coffee with friends than to oil one’s gun alone.

-       Martin Luther wrote better hymns than Chris Tomlin does.

-       It is better to be secure in a strapless gown than safe behind the freezer, even if it contains a two-year supply of bottled water and venison jerky.