Duck and Cower

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/06/fashion/06survival.html?ref=fashion&pagewanted=all
Odd piece in the New York Times about the again-growing survivalist movement.
I misread the headline as "Duck and Cower."
(A few years ago I did a revue called "Six Women With Brain Death" and one of the songs had the lyrics, "duck and cover" and I had to have it explained to me... Himself tells me that yes, indeed, at the height of the Cold War he and his class-mates were taught how to protect themselves from the nuclear holocaust by crouching underneath their little school desks.... ah, good times, good times.)
I am more than a little surprised that the editor of a survivalist blog says that the movement “is experiencing its largest growth since the late 1970s,” -- Y2K didn't have more people het up than ballooning oil prices? color me surprised.
And what of the September 11 attacks?
I would have thought that would have provoked more fear, and more attempts to prepare for the apocalypse than the mortgage debacle.
I recall a breathless, chicken little column from Peggy Noonan at the time, about how we were all going to have to learn to live like the Israelis now, and the famous duct tape and plastic sheeting advice, (to which as i recall she, in anticipation of roughing it with the little people, added fine asparagus, and single malt scotch...)
Himself makes the occasional joke about converting to Mormonism when he surveys the ranks of canned good we sometimes stockpile, although that has more to do with my frugality than anything else ("Ooo, look, I can spend and extra $1.58 in gas by going to THAT grocery store and save 8 cnets a can on green beans, so if we buy 20 cans we break even, and then if tuna's on sale we'll actually see a profit!") (Yes, even I with my laughable accounting skills know it's not really a "profit"....)
And I would naturally stockpile more food, if, for instance, if we were so misfortunate as to have ComEd as our utility...
I suspect nothing very much has changed in survivalism, only in the article's writer's awareness of it. Not very different from the recent "discovery," by young urbanite hipsters of knitting and crocheting.