My Pal Grasshopper

I have a pal. His name is...well, that's not important. We all called him "Grasshopper".

Not because he was a Kung Fu master or anything; far from it. He continually got his ass kicked in fight after fight...

...but, again, that's not important.

I remember back in college, on a frigid, January day where the high probably topped out at -20F with a howling wind. We were going on a road trip.

Like a good North Dakota guy, I packed a bag of snickers, a box of scrap candles, a couple of blankets, and a thermite grenade for signalling.

Grasshopper saw me packing the supplies in my trunk, and started laughing in his peculiar, sarcastic fashion. "Oh, so you're going to be out there sitting in a snowdrift, eating snickers bars and huddled under a blanket, waiting for help to arrive?"

"Er, yeah".

Grasshopper snorted theatrically. "Woo hooo! Paranoia alert!"

It wasn't the last time.

Later that year, during the summer, he had "Atomic Cafe" popped in his VCR for the twentieth straight evening when we heard the sirens blowing - the high warble of the "Tornado Warning" signal. His girlfriend and I started for the basement.

"So what are you telling me?" he asked as he lolled back in his ratty Barcalounger in his Cheetoh-stained Bon Jovi T-shirt, "that you're going to sit down in that basement while the tornado goes overhead?"

"Um, yeah?"

He snorted theatrically. "Wow. You are paranoid! Hiding in the friggin' basement!"

A few years passed. We met at a reunion; after the festivities on campus, we met at a house down in the valley.

Around 2AM, someone turned to me and asked "Do you smell rotten eggs?"

I thought for a second - before the realization cut through my mild buzz. "Gas leak!"

The word spread fast; people put out their cigarettes and ducked out the door quickly - all but Grasshopper, who stood in the living room, holding an unlit cigar and a beer, laughing with the sort of incontinent sloppiness people have when they're bombed. "You're all going to wait out on the lawn? Hahahahaha!", he guffawed, pointing at all of us.

We'll wait on the punch line.

The American Left - or at least the part of it represented in the media and show business - are a lot like ol' Grasshopper, except less likely to show up with a twelve-pack on a Friday night.

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There seems to be this attitude among a lot of people on the left, especially the "opinion-making" set; without your society's approval, much less existance, you are nothing.

One of the worst - and best - examples ever was a lousy 1983 movie, The Survivors, with Walter Matthau and Robin Williams. In the movie, the two characters witness a robbery, and have reason to believe the robbers are going to try to rub out any witnesses.

Williams goes to Vermont and joins a survivalist group - a group portrayed, in the days before "militia" became a self-contained stereotype to the left, the way one would expect a blue-stater to portray something like that; stupid, aggressively ignorant, rabidly fundamentalist, over-the-top caricature of "gun culture" long before Sarah Brady made it an industry - basically every Blue State slur of flyover-land, 17 years before it became a cottage industry.

Matthau, playing a crusty Manhattanite, reacts the way a crusty Manhattanite always does, in Hollywood; by being crustily rude and rudely crusty; by acting like a New Yorker always acts in such broad caricatures.

Naturally, when the robbers come to cover their tracks, Williams' guns and dubious back-country skills end in comic embarassment; a whack from Matthau's briefcase does more damage than hundreds of rounds of ammunition. The lesson? That Manhattanites that toe the stereotypical line are the real survivors (never mind the fact that the lifestyle could never exist without one of the greatest human-support infrastructures in the history of the world to prop it up), and that only the depraved and ignorant step outside of (Manhattan) societal norms to solve problems, including the sometimes-gnarly problem of self-preservation.

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The movie was, of course, an extension of an attitude that a lot of people - people I maintain hew closely to the Red/Blue, Serious/Silly, Faith/Fantasy-based lines that currently define our Two Americas - seem to have: That self-preservation is deviant.

During the fifties and early sixties, hundreds of thousands of people built fallout shelters (and a few thousand even built blast shelters) against the possibility of a nuclear attack. During the seventies and eighties, other people - Hollywood, comedians, whatever - made fun of them. And of the notion of trying to survive a nuclear war. No, they didn't make fun of the science involved - indeed, in reading and watching the artifacts of the era, few to none of them understood any of the physics of fallout radiation. No, the ridcule was reserved for the notion that anyone would try, or even entertain the notion of trying, to survive a nuclear attack. "Without society", the ultimate conclusion seemed to be, "...really, what are you worth?" And for millions of people, the debate ended then and there.

At times, it seems like a segment of our society revels in its impending victimhood, the potential for its own extinction - and, worse, denigrates those who don't in the crudest, broadest possible terms. Nowhere is that more apparent, and indicative of the Blue/Red, Silly/Serious divide, than in the gun control debate.

I've known many a New Yorker, District-of-Columbian and Bostonite who's not only made what strike my Western conscience as absurd attempts to appease and conform to street violence (carrying money in their running shorts, carrying a "Dummy" wallet with a few bucks and a cancelled credit card to give to muggers in the hope of sating them). All of which strikes me as madness - putting your life in the hands of the dubious sensibilities of someone who is out robbing people in the streets, but that'is fine, and a personal choice they can certainly make, assuming they allow me to make my own choice, too...

...but there's where things break down. The adaptations seem to be invariably accompanied by a contempt for those who choose to be less passive in meeting crime. You've heard the slurs - the morally retarded ones ("gun owners are compensating from something, giggle giggle"), the empirically-ludicrous ones ("you're more likely to have your gun used against you"), and the just plain stupid ones ("Gun owners are giving in to fear!").

Leave aside the fact - and it is a fact - that resisting violent crime with a handgun is statistically vastly more successful than without; it's not about facts.

Ditto the flap from 2002 when the Department of Homeland Security released a set of suggestions for building a "safe room" in the home out of duct tape and plastic sheeting, against the possibility of a chemical or radiological attack.

Would the idea work? Well, it's what the state of Israel, for whom WMDs are not a comical, abstract threat, recommends to its people; one presumes they take the notion seriously.

At the most, the idea is supposed to provide a last-ditch protection from the immediate effects of a chemical or radiological attack, assuming one doesn't have the ability to get out of the way (which, in densely-populated urban areas, is a very fair assumption).

Naturally, the response was giggly incredulity - not so much at the empirical assumptions behind the initiative. Indeed, I heard no scientific criticism that, in context, was remotely valid. But let's ignore for a moment the empirical debate (Why not? The other side already does!). The big kvetch seems to be at the idea that anyone would try - as if the notion of self-preservation loses validity if society itself is endangered.

If you'd gotten on an airplane in 1993 and made a point of checking over your cabin-mates, warning the pilot to lock his doors, and confiding that you wanted to make sure nobody hijacked the plane and rammed it into a skyscraper, and if anyone tried you were going to fight back, people - especially the people who chortle at the notion of self-defense or "safe rooms" - would have rolled their eyes and called you paranoid. I might have even joined them. I mean, how uncool would that have been?

The fact that that person was right, and the eye-rollers were wrong, doesn't alter the invinicble smugness of those who giggle at the efforts of those who take self-preservation seriously today. The ones that were giggling at the cautions traveller in 1993 are the ones who are demanding to know why the government didn't anticipate exactly what happened on 9/11 today.

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Grasshopper lit his cigar as he giggled at us, standing across the street. "Paranoid, I tell ya..."

FOOOOM went the house, as the gas ignited and exploded.

When the dust cleared, Grasshopper stood in the middle of what had been the living room. The walls and roof were gone, and Grasshopper stood holding a blackened match, clutching a splay-ended cigar in his teeth, his hair on end and singed, wide-eyed, looking a bit like Wile E. Coyote.

"Guys?" he whined as the blackened match fell to the floor, "Why didn't you guys tell me this could happen?"

Posted by Mitch at January 24, 2005 07:20 AM | TrackBack