I hope this show is scripted

"Doomsday Preppers" is one of those shows you really wish are scripted. If not, both we and Houston might have a problem. And I do mean a big one! No, I'm not talking about the end of the world. I'm referring to the staggering amount of plain (or plain crazy) citizens who are "prepping" for the apocalypse...

Yes, folks, "preppers" turns out to be a more homely, apple pie-type pseudonym for what was once known as "survivalists". In plain English, paranoid fascist cracker vigilantes. Judging by this series, shown at the otherwise respectable (?) National Geographic channel, the guy next door to *you* could be a "prepper". Be afraid, upright tax-payer, be very afraid!

OK, I admit it. I was shocked watching these guys. I assumed Jerry Springer showed it all. I was wrong. Now, I don't deny that guns might be a good idea in certain parts of the United States. Nor is storing water or growing your own food necessarily bad. However, I don't think paranoia is a very useful survival skill in a real crisis - and the guys featured on "Doomsday Preppers" have plenty of it. What struck me was the unreal quality of the doomsday scenarios these people are preparing for.

The guy who runs around in a ghillie suite at his front porch, prepping for a nuclear disaster, could spare himself the trouble by simply moving to a state with little or no nuclear power plants. Strange this relatively banal idea never occurred to him? The family prepping for the Yellowstone supervolcano is another classic. The last supereruption of this volcano took place 640,000 years ago! It's also funny that these particular preppers are growing their own food, and want to "bug out" in a small airplane. If the supervolcano really erupts, there will probably be so much volcanic ash in the air and on the ground that airplanes and organic gardens will prove completely useless... Yet another family fears a biological terrorist attack with smallpox virus, a pathogen that's extinct (except for two samples in high-security storage in the United States and Russia).

Then there's Big Al, the fattest guy in Nashville who bought a real bunker complete with tasty "bunker stew", in the event Vladimir Putin decides to push the button and nuke Amerika hard. The experts assigned by National Geographic to asses the "preps" reach the conclusion that Big Al's bunker really works. The man could survive down there for about a year in the event of a real catastrophe. It struck me that Big Al will still be pretty big even a year after World War III, due to all that stew. There's just one problem: it's highly unlikely that Tennessee will be a better place one year after a massive nuclear attack! When our "prepper" emerges, he'll be horse meat - or bunker stew.

Apart from the unrealistic, delusional scenarios, this bad foresight might be the biggest problem of the subculture featured on "Doomsday Preppers". Even if you survive for a couple of months, or a year, so what? What if the cavalry never comes? Few humans can survive as lone wolves, or even lone wolf families. There's a reason why humans band together and form communities, even in times of crisis. Most "preppers" in this series are simply cultivating a strange hobby, pretending to be the Mad Max-Wild West lone heroes they never will be in practice at their boring, middle class jobs...

Of course, I still hope that the paranoid locos featured on National Geographic are scripted, and don't really mean it. Ashtar Command, bugging out.