“…rogue cowboys are pitted against the authorities in the name of the Constitution.”
His vision seems to have the federal government still largely intact and operating. NSA still operational. Troops to confiscate known caches of food and ammo. blah blah blah.
So, what is their end game? Self-government? Will they then have a subsistence economy limited to cows-on-hand? Where will income come from? Who do they buy supplies from? Where do they sell whatever goods they produce (they’ll soon have eaten the cows)?
They really are a complete mystery. ISIS has oil and allies who pump in income to sustain it. Vanilla ISIS has a not very well thought out 18th Century fairy tale.
The ultimate irony is that even John Wayne thought he was JOHN WAYNE when, in fact, he was a draft-dodging, boozing, multi-married, serial adulterer, making money off of myth and limited acting skills.
Finicum’s 241-page apocalyptic cowboy thriller titled “Only By Blood and Suffering” is a how-to on surviving after a electromagnetic pulse or nuclear attack when your Escalade stops driving, the government has bought back all of your guns, President Bill Clinton signed away your country’s missile technology to the Chinese, the Supreme Court is loaded with lefty judicial activists and you don’t have an adequate amount of gold and “junk silver” to get by when the stock market implodes, interest rates balloon overnight and the value of the dollar collapses.
A parade of imaginary bogeymen to scare the right-wing paranoid, but too overly biased toward Western libertarian-based paranoia.
Where are the kids being brainwashed into believing that same-sex marriages and group marriage are superior to marriage of a heterosexual couple? Where are the spies in Christian churches, and the churches being shut down for anti-government activity? Where’s the sharia law? Where are the mobile abortion clinics roaming the streets like predatory bookmobiles? Where are the mandatory preschools, to get toddlers out of the home and indoctrinated by government specialists?
I appreciate that the author had the main character leering at the female mayor before offing her, but he missed a good opportunity to frame it as the inevitable and justifiable outcome of rejecting Bible-driven patriarchy. Instead, he went back to the property-rights well once again.
He needs a coauthor who is well-versed in the paranoid nightmares peddled by the nuts and the manipulators in the Evangelical community.
I think the best one could hope for, in the post apocalyptic world, would be to live like native Americans. I wonder how these guys fancy being on the other side of the cowboys and indians fantasy?
Hmmmmm… Arizona rancher, fantasizing about a ‘gubmitn’ official. I wonder if he has a fanboy poster of Michele Fiore (R - Nevada Assemblywoman) at his house.
I’m surprised that instead of saying “a figure that filled out her business skirts nicely.” he didn’t mention her having “birthing hips.”
Sounds like you grew up around the same time as I did, and our thinking on this has taken a similar path. I think most people from that era grew up thinking about the possibility of nuclear war and the prospects for personal and societal survival. Most of us didn’t obsess about it, but it was always at least there in the background.
But a few people just never grew up, they’re still living in their dark fantasy that someday – someday soon – they’re probably going to face the wholesale collapse of civilization and a desperate struggle for survival…and they’ve been thinking about it and preparing for it (however ineptly) for so long, that they actually welcome it.
Meanwhile, most of us think civilization is actually a pretty good idea, and we should just keep working on it, trying to make it better, and trying to avoid things like bombing ourselves into a new Stone Age or frying the planet with excess CO2, so that we don’t have to face the kind of catastrophe that these right wing survival-fetishists foolishly welcome.
I looked through a number of “bug out bag” requirements, most of which were meant to be human-portable. If you made one to fit every situation, you’d need a U-Haul just to get out of the driveway.
