Stand Your Ground

I feel like before I get into this, I need to give some background that normal people don't know, so here it is: for several years, the National Geographic Channel has aired a reality show called Doomsday Preppers, on which survivalists who are planning for various different flavours of apocalypse (terrorist attack, Peak Oil, collapse of the financial system, what-have-you) take the viewer through their specific preparations. Even though the notion of surviving an apocalypse is one of my greatest fears (seriously), I watch the show because I find it comforting: the more outlandish the participant's preps, the more absurd it seems that any of this business will actually work, in addition to which each segment ends with experts saying how likely the doomsday scenarios actually are to occur (generally: not). Last year, the show profiled a man named Brent, who showed us around the castle he was building and planned to live in when an EMP attack destroys society and put his many children through a series of challenges to determine which among them was best qualified to be his heir. Naturally, NatGeo made him and his family the subject of their own Preppers spinoff, and Doomsday Castle premieres tonight. I'll watch, but I don't feel great about it.

Of course, I have a professional interest in keeping tabs on all of TV's crackpots and weirdos, and though I obviously relish judging them, I generally have to grant that none of them is hurting anyone but him- or herself and maybe his or her immediate family. But the prepping ethos that the Doomsday shows celebrate is literally antisocial -- or anti-society, anyway. In all my viewing of the show, I can think of one instance where the subjects' plan involved fortifying their property in order to accommodate their neighbours in the event of a catastrophe. For the rest of them, a deep mistrust not just of the government's ability to respond to a disaster (which, given recent evidence unfortunately supplied by some hurricanes I could mention, may be somewhat sensible) but an isolationist suspicion of their fellow citizens is their starting point.

Maybe when the revolution comes and I'm the first up against the wall, I'll look back on this post with regret at my naïveté. In fact, I won't even go so far as to say that we should assume the best of our neighbours when the shit goes down. But should NatGeo be airing shows that don't just normalize but celebrate miniature militias?

Anyway: as if all that isn't bad enough (it is), there's also the fact that Castle is trying to act like Brent's Preppers episode never happened, even though NatGeo re-aired it last week. Here's Brent on Preppers, introducing his ten (10) children to the castle in an episode from seven months ago:

And here's a "new" clip of Brent walking a select handful of his brood through the property on Castle, with everyone acting like he's supplying new information:

Phony reality-show BS aside, I guess I can justify watching this to keep tabs on what my ideological foes are doing. But I'll also put my money where my mouth is in terms of my fundamental belief in human altruism by making a donation to Occupy Sandy, and think of it as a carbon offset for my soul.