As much as we strive to be rational beings, as much as the dawn of our modern, technological world has nurtured in us the virtues of reason and patience, fear yet rules us all. With every twist of fate, with every consequential choice, with every random act from a chaotic world, fear hounds us, lurking in the darkness at the edge of our intellectual campfire, just waiting for panic to give it a path through our defenses where it will paralyze us, cripple us and deprive us of the joys of a bold life. Worse yet, fear is a subtle foe, sneaking so stealthily into our hearts that it is often influencing our actions long before we are aware of its debilitating presence.
So what do we do with fear? Do we reject it and live loudly, free of its constraints? Or do we welcome it close, allowing its anxiety to influence our actions but only to a limited degree? Is it an enemy to be conquered, or a seduction to be carefully heeded? Mr. Strauss' funny, charming, disturbing and riotous effort is a long and successful rumination on this question.
Though the aughts was a decade of political change and technological promise, it was also witness to some dark developments which augur grimly for the years ahead. Islamic terrorism and economic turmoil marred most of the decade, leaving behind deep scars unimaginable to the optimistic multitudes who, way back in the halcyon days of the 1990s, imagined clear skies to an unfathomably bright future. But more than wound the decade's reputation and the political parties that ruled during its zenith, this toxic brew of religious nihilism and monetary greed injured, psychologically and otherwise, the countless millions who lived through it. By eating away at their sense of safety, and by diminishing their trust in the national institutions who promised to nurture that safety, it created the perfect breeding ground for the fearful to indulge their trepidations. It enticed them to view differently the signs around them, finding in them not the promise they had seen before but the herald of the apocalypse conveniently interpreted from their books of faith. It prompted them to turn away from trust and hope and to embrace a new, more cynical view of the days ahead.
Mr. Strauss volunteers himself as a classic case of this conversion. Riding high just prior to the millennium, he finds himself increasingly disenchanted by the political trend of his home country, the United States. He sees an election stolen, a terrorist attack 1r\&
, a war on terror launched and an economic system nearly brought to its knees. And with each successive catastrophe, he becomes increasing convinced that the best has come and gone and that the future holds only the promise of disappointment. Thus, he begins a long and winding quest to prepare himself for the dark days ahead. Over nearly ten years, he solicits advice from billionaires and separatists, EMTs and survivalists, all in an attempt to transform himself from an intelligent but physically incompetent citydweller into a well-prepared and hardened soldier of non-civilization, capable of living without power, off the land, in a world that prides itself on skills, on knowledge and on readiness for anything that comes. This is his journey...
Though it deals with the decidedly grim subject matter of the potentially final act of human civilization, Emergency is, shockingly, both funny and warm. Characterized by its author's unequivocal commitment to the subject, and blended with his rank incompetence at anything remotely rural, it serves up a hilarious stew of missteps and mishaps that impact on the bumbling Mr. Strauss. However, despite the severity and humorousness of these largely self-inflicted wounds, the author continuously manages to pick himself up off the ground, dust himself off, learn from his obstinacy and progress to the next challenge, the next achievement, knowing all the while that he is that much closer to realizing an independence the rest of us can only dream about.
There can be little doubt that some of the more extreme behaviors depicted here are influenced by the nature of Mr. Strauss' experiment. He would have known, full well, that theatrics would serve his book far better than blandness. Thus, some of the stunts and the scenarios must be taken with a healthy measure of salt. However, the author's efforts here also reflect the many millions of people who, like him, are, to varying degrees, traumatized by instability. In their fear, they turn away from dependency in order to nurture in themselves a self-sufficiency that will carry them through the imagined dark times ahead. There's wisdom here. After all, these individuals are bound to be better off if civilization does stumble. But they seem to overlook two key points that trouble their argument, firstly, that preparing for the apocalypse, in many cases, seems to lead them down a road to wishing that it would come so that they might get to use their new-found skills and, secondly, that the world they imagine would be so grim, would have lost so much of its light, that surviving the transition into it would not be worthwhile. After all, having gloried in the light of civilization, what would be the point of grubbing out a difficult, daily existence in the darkness and the dirt?
This is a wonderful and amusing journey through the strange and the macabre that is made eminently livable by Mr. Strauss' self-deprecating humor. Surprisingly uplifting for all the anxiety bedded down in its pages... (4/5 Stars)
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