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The league's 25,000 members are aggressively Christian, patriotic, mad as hell and resolved not to take it any more. The nation is on the Interstate to ruin, they feel. And, well, who doesn't these days, what with Soviet troops off the shores of Key West, the dollar sinking like the Lusitania, drug pushers in the schools, homosexuals in the pulpit, bureaucrats in just about everything, and goodness and patriotism generally on the run. Yet Harrell's Louisville pilgrims have converted these common gripes into obsessions.
America is not just heading down the primrose path to perdition, they fear; it is already there. "We're going to have a full-scale revolution," says Harrell, his voice rising. "We've got half the world's wealth, and the rest of 'em are coming to take it from us. The black man's angry, the yellow man's angry. Everybody's angry but the white man, and he's asleep.
We've had it too good for too long. We're soft and we're weak. We're going to be chastised. We're going to be invaded and lose two-thirds of our territory, half our population. We're going to see blood and guts strewn all over this country. We'll be lucky if we have two more years."
The beginning of the end may start as a Communist invasion, a collapse of the debased dollar, revolt in the inner city, a fuel shortage or a famine. These folks aim to be ready. They are buying country retreats, stocking them with food and ammunition—and elevating the study of survival to a high art. The weekend festival is a kind of Woodstock for the Armageddon set. In "Emergency Tools and Weapons," Charles Kehrberg of Hillsdale, Mich., explains how to fumigate stored food grains (add dry ice). In "Food: Preparation, Production, Preservation," Ruth Anthony of Kansas City, Kans., talks about subsisting on wild plants (eat only the tender inner leaves of dandelions, the leafy tips of purslane). In "Guns and Reloading," Curt Putnam of Kansas City, Mo., demonstrates the best way of refilling shotgun shell casings.
The students take notes and volunteer hints of their own. ("I use distilled water for drinking; it stores longer"; "We plan to evacuate as a group in our mobile homes, and pull them into a circle for a wagon-train effect.") Jim Miller, 33, an auto service department manager from Boles, Ky., came for the food preservation and weapons courses. He now resolves to do more home canning, and to teach his ten-year-old son how to handle a gun. "He likes the idea, but his mother doesn't," says Miller. Charles Harrison, 31, a scholarly-looking accountant, says that the religious and racial rhetoric at the festival left him cold. But he adds that he and eight other families have bought a farm 150 miles from his St. Louis home, and plan to hole up there after the cataclysm. Says he: "One reason I'm here is to make contacts, build a network of people in Missouri who have a particular skill or some tools so we can barter with them when the money system collapses."