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ccohanlon · 3 years ago

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survival[ism]

The first real gun I ever saw - up close, I mean, not on television or anything like that — was a Beretta .22 semi-automatic pistol. All black, with diamond-shaped rubber inlays on the handle, it was so small it could almost fit in the palm of a child's hand, a discreet weapon which looked like a toy. I remember it made me nervous. Even unloaded, with its tiny magazine lying alongside it and the chamber empty, I couldn't quite shake the fear, something akin to vertigo, that the damned thing was animate, that it could go off on its own.

The Beretta was one of several firearms owned by a friend of mine in Los Angeles. He owned 30 or 40 knives too — World War I bayonets, switch-blades, Bowie knives and Filippino balasongs — but while he collected the cutlery for its own sake, the way some people collect antiques or butterflies or stamps, he made no bones about the firearms being around for self-protection. They were stashed all over his house — at the back of cupboards and drawers in his bedroom and study, even under the bench-seat of his Steinway grand piano — close at hand to deal with an intruder if, or more likely (in his mind) when, the need arose.

Not that this friend of mine was particularly paranoid, at least not in comparison with the rest of L.A.'s affluent whlte population. I soon learnt that, there, everyone coped best with the city's unpredictable craziness by adoptlng a siege mentallty: pull up the drawbridge and don't give the skells and psychos a chance. Owning a few guns was just a matter of being cautious, like always drivlng with the car doors locked, even ln broad daylight, anywhere outside Beverly Hills.

L.A. is crazy but I wasn't going to be sucked into it. I managed to reassure myself that as long as I didn't spend more than a fortnight there, and stuck close to the hotel swimming pool, I could probably avoid the locals' movie-stoked fetish for playing with real guns.

But I decided to buy one myself...just in case.

True pacifism is the finest form of manliness. But if a man comes up to you and cuts your hand off, you dont offer him the other one. Not if you want to go on playing the piano you don't. Sam Peckinpah, Playboy magazine, 1972.

I was told it was one of the more respected arsenals in the city but the gun shop I went to just off Hollywood Boulevard didn't bother to advertise that fact. The flat, un-named store-front was set back from the sidewalk behind a wide strip of concrete, a deliberate clearing or, more accurate1y, a DMZ between the steel-grilled and armoured-glass door and the street which offered no cover to anyone dumb enough to loiter with intent. The door was always locked. Customers had to press a buzzer to alert a sales assistant who would look them over from a window and, if they passed muster (in other words, if they seemed unarmed), admit them. The sales assistants were mostly bull-necked good ol’ boys with big pot-bellies and heavy lidded eyes, like hooch-swilling cartoon sheriffs from south of the Mason-Dixon line. Al had semi-automatic pistols strapped to their hips. Inside, the gun shop was a veritable supermarket for sudden, violent death. Two or three rows of glass-topped cabinets displayed every type of pistol, revolver, knife, blow-pipe and slingshot — this last, a highly developed version: a black alloy frame with a rubber wrist brace rigged with a hollow latex sling which fired quarter-inch steel ball-bearings and bore the ominous brand-name Black Widow. Dozens of rifles, shotguns, and even high-powered crossbows and sub-machine guns stood butt down and chained together in wooden racks along every wall.

"After anythin' particular?” one of the sales assistants drawled.

To tel1 the truth, I wasn't sure what I was after, if I was after anything at all, but I wasn't about to say “Just browsing, thank you” to this 280-pound redneck. Instead, I pointed at something which resembled an metal-plated milk carton or part of the drive shaft casing off a BMW motorbike, except that it had a hollow handle and a trigger, and asked, “What's that?”

His face lit up. “A Mini Uzi semi-auto. Fires nine millimetre Parabellum from a 20-round clip wilh a muzzle velocity of eleven hundred feet per second. Weighs 'round four pounds empty so it's heavy but real well-balanced. Have a hold of it. You'll see what I mean.”

I took fhe Uzi cautiously, like a kid being handed a guinea pig. I hefted it once from hand to hand and peered down the barrel through the ejection port. Not knowing what else I was expected to do with it, I handed it back.

"Nice huh?" he enthused.

"I guess.”

"Six hundred plus tax. You get one clip, an adjustment tool, a manual and a plastic case. There's a firing range downstairs if you wanna test it out. As long as you pay for the rounds, of course.”

Of course. But I wasn't convinced I needed an Uzi. "Maybe later," I said. "I think I'm looking for something, I dunno, a little smaller."

"No problem. You want semi-automatic or revolver? Something reliable like a Colt Python .357 or maybe a standard .38?”

"What about a Beretta .22?”

The sales assistant didn't bother to stifle his contempt. “Shit,” he sneered, “That's an old lady's gun, not worth a damn outside twenty yards. Stopping power, man, that's what you need these days.”

Stopping power. There was a deadly finality in the way he used those words and I had an abrupt, visceral understanding of what he meant. Death, quick and simple. Taking, say, a hollow-point .44 Magnum slug in the chest wouldn't just upset yor vital signs, it would knock your as-good-as-dead carcass off its feet. Spreading on impact like a squashed grape, the lead would tear an entry hole the size of a quarter in your flesh, then rip your sternum apart, probably puncture your lungs or heart, and sever your spinal cord before exiting in a bloody pulp below your shoulder blade.

"Yeah, stopping power. That's what you need,” the sales assistant repeated.

"Ugly notion,” I said.

He grunted with amusement. “These are ugly times.”

War is the enduring condition of man. It is part of the family, the crazy uncle we try, in vain, to keep locked in the basement. William Broyles, Newsweek magazine, 1984.

Even before I visited L.A., I had come across magazines like Soldier of Fortune, Survival Weapons, Survival Monthly and New Breed ("for the Bold Adventurer"). They were, still are, on sale everywhere in Sydney, at street-corner newsstands and suburban newsagents, even in the lobby of some of the better hotels. Imported monthly from — where else? — the U.S.A., these publications feature articles on everything from guerrilla warfare tactics in Afghanistan and coping wlth urban unrest in the aftermath of a nuclear war, to the stopping power — that word again — and adaptability of various pistol calibres (how could we forget that "the vital targets of combat pistol shooting consist of the brain, spinal cord and the long bones of the legs…") in between dozens of pages of ads for weapons, military paraphenalia, and mail-order books with titles such as Life After Doomsday and How To Kill. A cynic might describe them as stroke-books for the violently psychotic if it weren't for the curious mixture of cartoon-like bravado straight out of Marvel Comics' Sgt. Rock and folksy Field And Stream outdoorsmanship.

Soldier Of Fortune is the big daddy of them all. Created and edited by Robert K. Brown, a onetime U.S. Special Forces officer turned recidivist war junkie and Commie-baiter, its message, couched in the worst kind of jingoistlc propaganda and militaristic pap, is an almost Biblical warning to be ready for the worst which is about to befall us all. We live in a troubled age ... the end is near... the day of reckoning is at hand, we're told, as if it's something new and different and not just the same ancestral myth re-told to every generation affirming the ugliness of the human condition. But now, instead of repent and be saved, it's arm and protect yourself ("Don't get mad get even,” reads an ad in SoF's back-page classifieds. “Ex-Grey Seals 4-man assault team available. Qualified demolitions/weapons experts. Anything legal inside U.S.A., anything goes elsewhere.")

In short, survive.

Survivalism is the buzz-word, the Om-like mantra all these soldier-fantasy magazines have in common. Note 'survivalism' rather than just plain ‘survival’ — the -ism tacked onto it to give it the right flavour of pseudo-scientific purposefulness that no contemporary social fad can live long without. It also implies that what we are dealing with here is a complete ethos, a weltangschauung for the '80s, if you will, cleverly refined to assuage the nuclear angst of suburban middle-America. Survivalism is apparently the key to salvation, the means to overcome any threat, moral or physical, whether it's a Communist-inspired uprising (and two or more Latin Americans or Arabs having a drink together is evidence enough of a conspiracy) or nuclear fall-out. The information gleaned from survivalist read1ng is mind-boggling — how to winterise a 12-gauge shotgun, the quickest way to skin a bear, getaway driving in the family station wagon — and, who knows?, it might even be useful some day, but that's not really the point, as far as survivalist buffs are concerned. The point is that in a world where mass annihilation is just a matter of turning a couple of keys in a bunker somewhere, having even the most meagre means of self-preservation lets them kid themselves that they have a grip, however tenuous, on their own destiny and that when it comes to the crunch, they'll have a fighting chance against all that faceless destruction.

Harmless stuff, maybe. But if all survivalism amounted to was a kind of high-tech, urban cargo cult confined to Southern California, Ronald Reagan's home state, where carrying a gun is like wearing an amulet to ward off evil spirits — the greater the stopping power, the safer you are — then the rest of us could safely ignore it. Sadly, any idiot reading Soldier Of Fortune can make the lateral leap from an already doubtful philosophy of arm and protect to the instinct to kill or be killed, a throwback to baser territorial prerogatives and a primitive tendency to bloodlust. Because of this, survivalism sours. We're encouraged to stake a lonely claim to a place on this overcrowded planet and prepare to defend it to the death. It's a concept enshrined in the Amerlcan constitutlon and, if Jerry Falwell, Margaret Thatcher and Joh Bjelke-Petersen are to be believed, the Bible as well — "an eye for an eye” and so on — giving us the moral, although not yet the legal, right to shoot first and ask questions later.

Ugly days indeed.

Signs are, things are taking a turn for the worst. Like half-crazed laboratory rats which revert to cannibalism under stress, we are beginning to turn on each other with senseless acts of violence. A Vietnam veteran goes beserk with a sub-machine gun in a crowded MacDonald's restaurant in San Diego, killing and maiming scores of people before being nailed himself by a police SWAT team. A mlld-mannered man named Berhard Goetz is hassled by five young blacks on a New York subway; he draws an unlicensed gun from his coat pocket and shoots them dead (one in the back as he's fleeing) but a jury acquits him of second-degree murder to the applause of that city's subway commuters. Most recently, in one of those Norman Rockwell mid-western states, a scared kid stabs two bullies in a schoolyard with a double-edged blade, a so-called 'survival knife’ he'd bought in a local hunting shop.

Meanwhile, on the forested mountains of Humboldt County, California, and in the back-water swamps of Florida's Everglades and, who knows?, probably lots of other up-hollow places across the United States, Vietnam veterans and superannuated 'heads' from the '60s have taken to hiding — to grow sensimilla or smuggle coke or slmply cool out, as it were, in peace — and living outside the system. "Outlaws in Babylon," the writer Steve Chapple called them. Even in the cities and suburbs — not only in America; look at England, where Yorkshire mining towns and small Bedford villages have formed vigilante groups to combat threats as disparate as strike-breakers and hooded rapists — people are drawing very thin lines between security and sanity and beginning to play chicken with reality.

I would rather be judged by twelve than carried by six. An American policeman, quoted in Time magazine, 1981.

At the gun shop off Hollywood Boulevard, the redneck sales asslstant was talking about rifles : "The Colt AR15 and the Ruger Mini-14 are real favourites with buyers. The AR15's a semi-auto version of the Army's M16, see, so a lotta Viet vets go for it. Easy to shoot, easy to strip down.”

He cast a cautious glance around the shop before lowering his voice to add, "Truth is, some of them mess with the firing mechanism and convert 'em to full-on rapid-fire autos."

"Is that legal?" I asked. Silly question.

He shrugged. "The Ruger's got real popular since The A Team's been on T.V,” he said. “These kids from the Valley and executive-types in buttoned-down collars and Italian loafers come in here and lay down half a grand cash for the stainless steel version plus a couple of non-standard 2O-round banana clips. Hell, most of them don't know the butt-end from the barrel...excuse me a minute.”

The sales assistant had turned his attention to another customer, a grey-haired, strongly built man aged about 50 wearing a light-grey flannel suit and, yes, a buttoned-down collar and shiny leather shoes. But he wasn't an executive type. More like a cop or a military officer. There was discipline and an hard-edged severity in his manner, neither of which was a characteristic of Californian executives, most of whom were in the entertainment business and if they had a habit, apart from tennis, teenage girls and weekends in Palm Springs, it cost them a thousand bucks a week.

"Gimme a box of standard nines, please," the man said. He brushed aside the hem of his jacket to reach into his hip pocket for his wallet and I almost died of fright. He was carrying not just one, but two semi-automatic pistols — one in a leather holster clipped on hls belt, the other, smaller, shoved carelessly inside the waistband of his trousers. The sales assistant saw them too but he didn't bat an eyelid.

“See that?” he asked me after the nan had left the shop. I nodded. “Must've been a cop,” he said. "Either a cop or a very hip civilian. He'd have to be to walk around with a throw-down.”

"A throw-down?”

He gave me a look that dismissed me as a dumb-ass who had better get streetwise or end up dead. In a low growl which was his idea of a whisper, he explained. “An unregistered gun. If you're a cop and you shoot some poor schmuck makin' a run for it and he isn't armed, or if you shoot an unarmed intruder in your own home, you're lookin’ at manslaughter, maybe murder two. So you carry an unregistered gun and throw it down next to the body. That way, you can always claim self-defence.”

Ah, the American citizen's constitutional right to bear arms. He'll bear them whether he likes it or not, dead or alive.

The sales assistant cackled. "Liberty, justice and equality for all," he said. “Ain’t that what makes America great!” Having arms for self-defence is the natural right of resistance and self-preservation when the sanction of society and laws are found insufficient to restrain the violence of oppression. Sir William Blackstone, Commentaries, 1769.

It couldn't happen in Australia, I kept telling myself. No way.

Americans are crazy, everyone knows that. They're into every brand of pseudo-religlon and psycho-babble whether it's peddled by Reverend Moon, Ron Hubbard, Jim Jones or some johnny-come-lately with a ministry bought mail-order from the back of a cornflakes box. They're into jogging, est, stress therapy, primal screaming, tropical fruit diets, S and M, Scientology, Jane Fonda aerobics, junk food, jacuzzis, female body-building, cocaine, designer drugs, Star Wars, Dynasty, Deep Throat, Valium and low-carb diets.

And we're not.

The same with survivalism. It's a comfort to think we're too smart to be taken in by it ... isn't it?

I was sitting in a taxi on my way home from Sydney's Mascot Airport, half- conscious from jet-lag after 15 hours flying non-stop from the States, and the driver — "Call me Gino" — insisted on telling me a sorry tale about a mate of his who was badly beaten, and his cab broken up, by a bunch of vicious drunks outside a local rugby club.

"All because he wouldn't take eight of 'em up the Cross," Gino said. "Bastards. These things always bloody happen."

But not to him. Hidden in the arm-rest compartment between us on the front seat was a .32 callbre target pistol, loaded, according to Gino, who was a pistol club member and licensed to carry the gun. No-one was going to do him over and get away with it. An ambitious young fool tried it once: he leant over from the backseat, wrapped an arm around Gino's neck and threatened to crush his trachea if he didn't cough up the evening's takings. Gino jammed the .32's barrel up against the would-be mugger's nose. It frightened him so badly that he lost control of his bowels. Gino dumped hlm in a side-street gutter somewhere in the western suburbs — a pitiful bum in soiled underpants, blubbering obscenities at this mad Italian with a face like a spaghetti western bandit.

“I shoulda pulled the trigger,” Gino said, as cocksure as a man can be when he's armed — and you're not.

Welcome home.

When the going gels welrd, the weird turn pro. Hunter S. Thompson, The Great Shark Hunt, 1979.

A friend of mine 'phoned from the rainbow country last nlght. It was around midnight and he woke me from the best sleep I'd had since returning from L.A. But I was happy to hear from him nonetheless. The last time I had seen him was over lunch, six months ago, at a high-priced cafe in Sydney. He was working then as a research chemist for a multinational drug company and spent weekdays in a squeaky-clean laboratory with cages full of rats, which he used to test various toxins, narcotics and antibiotics. I liked him, even though he was very different to me — young, straight-arrow and ambitious, a career-minded guy with a doctorate in science.

But it seems he has undergone a change of heart.

Last month, he sold his bijoux Victorian terraced house in the clty and traded in his Porsche 911 for a Toyota Hi-Lux. He packed the few possessions he had decIded, out of sentimentality or practical foresight, not to sell, loaded them into the truck and headed north on Highway 1 unti1 he was within spitting distance of the border, well into the moist, verdant valleys west of Byron Bay. There, he bought a ramshackle fibro’ shack on a grassy knoll overlooking 40 acres of adequate grazing land. His parents thought he had gone crazy.

"I'd had enough,” he told me. "Every day the newspapers and the T.V. tell us how bad the world's become. People dying of hunger, another war or revolution, and all these half-assed politicians up to their elbows in slime. I didn't want to be a part of it anymore."

I know what he meant. I've had the same feeling myself sometimes. But unlike my friend, I've ignored the inclination to cut and run, to become another census statistic in the exodus to the lonelier outposts of this continent. These days, everyone is trying to duck the Damocles jack-hammer of the Apocalypse.

Not me. I flgure there is enough horror around without worrying about the end of the world. Nor, however, am I taking any unnecessary chances. I've moved out of the city to a big timber-framed place built back in the early 60s on a scrubby acre of headland 25 miles or so north of Sydney. It used to be the home of a notorious coke dealer who, pity, was offed on the doorstep last year by some strung-out punk wielding a shotgun. But I didn't know that when I rented it. I wanted the view. From every room, I can look north to an old lighthouse at the end of a peninsula and the green-black coast beyond, or east, to miles and miles of empty ocean. Only the Pacific stands between me and Valparaiso, Chile.

It's peaceful here and I intend to keep it that way. I've rigged alarms triggered by circuit-breakers on the doors and window, pressure pads under the carpet, and sonic sensors attached to the walls of every room. A simple switch illuminates the front and rear gardens with four quartz-halogen spotlights. I keep a loaded .44 Magnum Ruger carbine in the hallway closet and a double-bladed Gerber Guardian in a scabbard under the bed. Yesterday, a local dog-trainer phoned to tell me he'd found an affable German Shepherd which would make a very protective pet; I think I’ll build a kennel for him on the sundeck.

Survivalism, An ugly notion and, hell, these are ugly days, but I'm not going to be sucked into it.

First published (as Every Man For Himself) in the Australian edition of Penthouse, 1985.

#survivalism #preppers #guns #righttobeararms #USA #Australia #postapocalypse #dystopia

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