Preppers

Preppers are about as American as apple pie is commonly asserted to be (albeit falsely). Like Tea-Baggers, Mormons, the Amish and the National Rifle Association (NRA), I doubt preppers could have developed - let alone thrived - anywhere but in the self-styled Land of the Free and Home of the Brave.

Fiercely independent, deeply patriotic yet doggedly suspicious of authority in general and government in particular, preppers tend to be politically conservative white Christians from low-income backgrounds. As such, they are like the distillation of the American psyche.

So what are they? Preppers believe that a catastrophic natural disaster or foreign invasion is just around the corner. Or, as they like to put it, "the shit is about to hit the fan" (SHTF). Convinced that the US economy, society and possibly civilisation itself are in imminent danger of destruction and/or collapse, they prepare - hence the name - for their chosen nightmare scenario by

• Hoarding food
• Stockpiling weapons and ammunition
• Training in armed combat
• Learning survival skills
• Building emergency shelters
• Disconnecting from the power grid and
• Buying gold and silver, typically in the form of coins.

Although there may not be the 4 million or more preppers claimed by some of the myriad "survivalist" Web sites, they certainly are far more than a handful of paranoid gun-nuts. In fact there are so many serious preppers in America that Costco (a nationwide chain of wholesale stores open to the public) stocks a large selection of what it terms "emergency kits", ranging from water storage and filtration systems to a year's supply of food for four people, comprising 30,144 servings of freeze-dried and dehydrated meals (yours for only $3,999.99).

Preppers even have their own reality-TV show (sponsored, tellingly enough, by the Wise Food Storage Company and the United States Gold Bureau). Entitled 'Doomsday Preppers', the documentary series charts how various people are getting ready for what they see is inevitable: an all-out assault on the American way of life, be it man-made or environmental. 

Unfortunately, preppers are not simply wacky loners content to play out their apocalyptic or Chinese-invasion fantasies in their own basements or woods in the same way that people used to gather for weekend 'Dungeons and Dragons' sessions. Often enough, their paranoia spills over into violent confrontations with the law.

Only last week, police arrested a 45-year-old survivalist who had spent 5-6 years breaking into cabins in the Utah mountains to steal food and guns. And almost exactly a year ago, police in Washington state hunted a 41-year-old man who had allegedly shot dead his wife and daughter. They eventually tracked him down in a sophisticated fortified underground bunker in the forest, where a SWAT team had to blast its way through the roof. When they got inside, they found the man dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, as well as 13 guns and shelves neatly piled with ammunition, food and other supplies.

Unwitting Imposter

On a visit to Washington, DC, I spotted a cap in a gift shop that I simply couldn't resist buying: on the front it sported the logo of Air Force One, the US president's personal airplane.

Since then, I have been jokingly telling my friends that Barack Obama gave me it for managing to land the 747 on the White House lawn. If you've ever seen the president's official residence, you'll know that this is completely impossible, since there's barely enough room for Marine One (his personal helicopter) to touch down, let alone a 70-metre jumbo jet.

I was wearing this cap when I took my car in for an oil change last week. As I sat in the waiting room steeling myself for the inevitable news that they had found innumerable faults with the vehicle that absolutely had to be repaired immediately, one of the mechanics noticed my cap.

"Air Force?" he asked. "Put it there!" And before I knew it, he had grabbed my hand and was enthusiastically pumping it up and down with a big smile on his face, proud to be congratulating a member of the heroic American armed forces.

Embarrassed by such unwarranted praise, I meekly pointed to the logo. "You mean this?" I said. "Actually, it only means I'm a tourist."

"Oh", the man replied, turning to go into the toilet, where I presume he washed his hands very thoroughly.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell

Within the next few days, President Obama is due to sign a bill that will finally put an end to a policy that has marked the United States out as extremely backward in comparison to most, if not all developed nations.

The policy, known colloquially as "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" (DADT), is a fudge introduced in the Clinton era to get around the fact that the US does not permit homosexuals to serve openly in the military. The armed forces of Canada, the entire EU, Australia, Israel and even Taiwan and South Africa have allowed openly gay service members for many years. The US stands alone with Turkey in forbidding it, ostensibly on the grounds that the presence of gays in the armed forces "would create an unacceptable risk to the high standards of morale, good order and discipline, and unit cohesion that are the essence of military capability".

DADT created a bizarre situation in that the armed forces recognised that there were gays in the military, but sought to prevent them from being discharged (which they were obliged to do) by introducing a kind of "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil": as long as servicemen and -women were not questioned about their sexual orientation or talked about it with fellow soldiers, the fact was ignored. Any that did were discharged immediately, albeit honourably.

Forced to make a decision on the matter by a court order that temporarily lifted DADT, politicians in Washington spent much of this year wrangling over the issue. A subsequent poll found that 72% of servicemen said they wouldn't have any problems serving alongside gays, lesbians and transsexuals. Although mainly Republicans staged repeated filibusters in an attempt to talk the issue to death, the repeal of DADT - and with it the ban on gays in the US military - was finally approved by the Senate this week, and the National Defense Authorization Act has now arrived on President Obama's desk.

Welcome to the 20th century, America.