04.01.13
All the weird, angry people…
Steve at Secrecy blog alerted me to Sunday’s episode of The Simpson’s, Homer Goes to Prep School, which pillories a subject familiar to blog readers. In it Homer Simpson goes to the local bar where he runs into a kook who asks if he’s ready for a world gone WROL, Without the Rule of Law.
This leads to enrollment in doomsday prepper training, with the cartoon show adopting all its idiot jargon: TEOTWAWKI (The End of the World as We Know It), and the bug-out place for When the S—- Hits the Fan.
Of course, there’s also electromagnetic pulse doom (triggered by Homer ignoring his work at the nuclear power plant), a bag of dried grain to eat, and an “unsourced” video showing American civilization collapsing like a “deck of cards” (one of which bears the name of Fed boss Ben Bernanke). A shout out to my home town, for reasons unknown, is briefly spotted in a future road sign: “5 Minutes to the Ruins of Pasadena.”
The Simpsons effectively insults the worst in American society, often delivering an overriding moral at show’s end. So it’s fitting that the tribe of white fascist neo-Confederate weapon-stockpiling survivalists who’ve tried to rebrand themselves as “doomsday preppers” come in for their fair share.
They certainly deserve it.
As I’ve written many times, it’s a tribute, of sorts, to the toxic and mind-rotting legacy of the Cult of EMP Crazy, the far right lobby of missile defense nuts who’ve labored for years to get white Americans worried that their civilization could fail at any moment due to electromagnetic attack. And they have been eminently successful in twisting an easily twisted subset of the Republican Party, paranoid John Birchers and Tea Party types.
I’ve written there are never are any liberals, progressives, or non-whites in the bug-out bunkers because part of the mythology of the Cult of EMP Crazy, and by extension — that of preppers, is they’ll be armed and ready to shoot the rest of us between the eyes when the world ends, and we allegedly come out of the burning cities for their stuff.
Marge points out to Homer that it’s not Christian to leave Springfield high-and-dry in a power blackout. So Homer steals the supplies from the prepper community and high-tails it home where everyone finds power has been restored and rioting did not break out.
Why?
Because all the “weird, angry people” left, remarks one character.
Homer Goes to Prep School is here.
More recently I commented on the collapse of the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy lobby, brought about by the electoral loss of one its stalwarts, Roscoe Bartlett, and general disinterest.
Along with the prepper movement, which continues its zombie shuffle through the cynical business of monetizing WhiteManistan’s freaks on reality television, the reputation is well and truly shot in the mainstream when your crazy hobbies and outlooks have been set up as objects for scorn, however gentle, by The Simpsons on Sunday night family television.
One member of the Cult of EMP Crazy — exclusively Republican — being made sport of in the Nashville Scene recently, for imagining the detonation of an e-bomb no one else seems to recall.