To hunters

or "A Country Boy Can't Survive"

I live back in the woods, you see
My woman and the kids and the dogs and me
I got a shotgun, a rifle and a 4-wheel drive
And a country boy can survive, country folks can survive

I can plow a field all day long
I can catch catfish from dusk ‘til dawn
We make our own whiskey and our own smoke too
Ain't too many things these old boys can't do
We grow good ol’ tomatoes and homemade wine
And a country boy can survive, country folks can survive

—Hank Williams Jr.

The first thing I remember my Dad teaching us about guns was to never let the barrel drift into the direction of another human being. He even enforced this rule with toy guns. Habits, you see. Born in 1906, he was old, old school. He checked his trap-line before and after elementary school near their farm just outside Midland, Michigan. That kind of old school.

The second thing he taught us about guns was sight alignment and trigger control. It stood me in good stead, in a manner of speaking, because I would eventually run the Battalion Consolidated Sniper Training Program for 2nd Battalion, 3rd Special Forces. Another very long story. This post isn’t about guns and the military, but about hunting . . . sort of.

Daddy was a hunter, and my brother and I, likewise, hunted (and ran traps). We hunted rabbits with bows and guns, and pretty much everything else. We once grilled a dozen pigeons we’d popped out by the county road maintenance sheds as they flew between the pre-GMO corn fields. Rabbits, quail, venison, and squirrel were all on the Goff family menu, and with some frequency (and fresh fish at least twice a week). I can still give you a recipe for squirrel with blue dumplings, and I miss miss miss rabbit (a near perfect meat imho).

From 1955 until 1963, we lived on the edge of a small town, St. James, Missouri, between Highway 66 and vast rolling hills of hardwood forests and vineyards. When I’d get down my Savage 22/410 over-and-under, the dogs would go ape shit. They loved to hunt. Duke, the pointer, and Rinny, the terrier mongrel (squirrel-treer extraordinaire, with a near-human intelligence). Lassie, the toy collie, was up for the bunnies, too, but my half-brother, ill-trained with guns, shot her when he mistook her for a rabbit.

We’d only to walk across the dirt street and the railroad tracks, past the old cemetery, and we were on hunting ground. Landowners were easy about these things. Just clear it with them first.

In 1963, out of economic necessity, my father was being exhausted by the 100-mile commute to his riveting job at McDonnell Aircraft in St. Louis (where he slept through weekdays in a tar-paper shack he rented down near the Missouri River). We left St. James, and moved to a much larger town, St. Charles, within a half-hour drive from McDonnell. My mom got a job there, too—riveter, center fuselage assembly, F-4 Phantoms.

Our neighborhood, like many neighborhoods, was populated by the families of other McDonnell employees, a pre-suburban industrial barracks, at the very edge of town. Now, I had to walk three blocks before I reached the boundary between the development and the farms. Once again, we checked in with the farmers, who gave us permission to harvest the rabbits and quail. People in the neighborhood, many of them former country folks themselves, didn’t bat an eye as my younger brother and I—aged 9 and 12—carried a shotgun and a .22 past their houses (barrels down). I went back to that neighborhood in 2016, when my brother died, to leave some of his ashes (at his request); and it’s now in the middle of a city, a kind of commercial hellscape, the farm fields only a memory.

My father continued to run traps and hunt deer (oftentimes without a license), but now these practices entailed longer and longer trips in a car or truck.

Hunting was increasingly dependent on an industrial, logistical tail. Nature was being “tamed” far more effectively by capitalism than it was by past frontiersmen, a species that went extinct well before the last Mexican grizzly.

Jump forward, now, to 2011, when we had a kind of family reunion at a fishing camp in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. We arrived during bear hunting season, and our camp (in the family for generations) is surrounded by a hunting club, miles of it. As we drove down the fire trails, we saw trucks parked along the road, with ATVs at the ready, and a lot of out-of-shape men, some drinking, hanging around their vehicles to watch electronic monitors. The way to hunt bears now, I was chagrined to learn, is electronically. They simply attached GPS transmitters to their dogs, and when the dogs treed a bear, they’d drive their ATVs out to the dogs, shoot the hapless bear, take lots of man-the-hunter pics with the dead bear, load it onto the ATV, and drive to the local taxidermist. (My father, meanwhile, has rolled over in his grave.)

When I was a pre-adolescent hunter, it wasn’t unusual to log in eight to ten summer walking miles a day. That was part of the attraction, poking around, getting slightly lost, finding one’s way again, looking for duck eggs along the edges of ponds, catching snakes, and so forth. On one occasion with my Dad, when I was grown and we were living in Arkansas, he took me along for a hunt that took us twelve miles, not fast ones; and that was at age 68, after he’d been through two heart attacks and a stroke. I have a life-sized picture of some of those cigarette-sucking, beer-gutted fellas with the robo-dogs walking even three miles overland. Not fat-shaming (or smoker shaming), just sayin’, these seasonal Daniel Boones have absolutely zero capacity to “survive” off of any grid.

It was a stupid fucking fantasy fifty years ago, and it’s even stupider now. No, a country boy can’t survive. Hank Williams Jr. admits he needs his four-wheel-drive, and forgets that this survival tool requires gasoline, and that it owes its existence to mines, mills, factories, and labor from around the world for this ton of metal, plastic, rubber, ceramics, and fibers. Nowadays, its also run by little computers, so . . .

Off-grid, dude! There’s even camouflage to ensure the truck will be mistaken for a tree.

For many hunters now, it’s a performative practice. I know that for some, it’s a break from the hardscapes of modern life, a quiet time (I remember), a re-connection to something vaguely understood as nature. But the resurgence of a particular type of masculine-coding in culture and politics is operating now, in concert with both economic precarity and the descent of modern culture into the accidental abyss of nihilism, of meaninglessness and its reply as either fantasies of patriarchal restoration . . . or unfocused macho aggression.

Performative, because any potential for some actual Hank-Williams-survival scenario, with an insecure and pugnacious male as its star, has been erased. A demon sneaked up on them and swallowed them whole.

I watched this masculinity transformation in compressed time when I was in Vietnam, where, as the war’s meaninglessness dawned on us, boys (we were mere boys) shifted in days and weeks from Gary Cooper and John Wayne fantasizers to being stoned eighteen-year-olds who murdered farmers when there were no witnesses because we wanted “a kill.” (Our mantra: “Don’t mean nuthin.”)

My father read a “heroic” account of my unit’s actions in the Sui Kai mountains in April 1971 and touted us as “elite” (he pronounced it ee-LIGHT) to his friends. He would never be privy to most of what happened on my malaria-shortened tour. I would have been ashamed. He would have been ashamed. Now, I pray every night for forgiveness . . . because I didn’t stop in Vietnam . . . being this new kind of “man” would cost many others for my sins. The virtuous masculinity of the past had given way to something shallower, uglier, more damaging to the soul; and it is this impulse that underwrites, for some, performative hunting, trophy hunters, men who are driven by some subconscious dread to “display” this ever-more-technologically supported mastery, with a gun always as their prop. Real men can deal out death. Real men are bullies (that’s a reversal from my upbringing—it used to be the opposite). Apologies for the digression.

Hunting, for many, is part of a family tradition. I get this. Some of my best conversations with my Dad—which I regrettably forgot or ignored—happened with a canopy of leaves overhead and a carpet of leaves beneath our feet.

In the subtitle, I said, “. . . sort of.” Because this isn’t about hunting, not totally. It’s about hunters—the human beings, mostly men. Not just the performative hunters and the gun-fetishists, but the traditional hunters, the food hunters, the hunters who seek the solace of sticks and mud. Had I not gone off meat a few years back, I might still be up for some venison in the freezer. I’m not here to judge.

I’m here to warn.

People are warning of a danger out there, and I agree. But it’s not the woke, nor is it the anti-woke, nor is it a Honduran refugee. While we played these games, we welcomed the devil in the door with a GPS tracker collar . . . and Amazon where we bought that 16-guage bird gun . . . and online banking . . . and the laptops we’re using right now.

Our very identities—something that once meant something solidly enfleshed—have become digital simulations back-lighted on a screen.

Let me tell you a story. In February 2022, Canadian truckers—rightly in my view—organized a highly effective protest/strike against vaccine mandates that were threatening their livelihoods. Even if some disagree with their goals, most of us would agree that they had a right to protest and strike. The Canadian government then declared a state of emergency (as our current President has threatened from time to time), and used that state of emergency to freeze the bank accounts of protesters.

Imagine that here. If you protest some government action, even peacefully, the government has the power to freeze your bank accounts. How can they do that? Because everything now is run through massive digital platforms. A keystroke and you’re broke. This is our every increasing dependency and vulnerability, but not only to governments. Our dependency, and our vulnerability, is Silicon Valley technology. That devil is in your pocket or purse right now.

It looks innocent, even fun. And it works, if by works we mean vastly increases the speed of information and transaction. Did you think the devil would show up like this?

Demons are slyer motherfuckers by orders of magnitude than that. They look like smart phones and GPS dog-collars to us, by the demonic personae in the background look like this.

Pictured above are Curtis Yarvin, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel. Three of the slyest motherfuckers you’d ever want to meet, and they’re all working together now, under a presidency that Musk bought with more than $400 million in campaign contributions. Each and all have expressed support for the idea of digital dictatorship (and guess who they think should head it).

Thiel, in particular, is a bundle of bullshit, calling himself an anarcho-capitalist, two things that can’t happen together, and a “Christian transhumanist,” likewise two entirely incompatible orientations. He quotes the Christian Tolkien, and yet Tolkien would find him utterly repulsive, and Christian philosopher Rene Girard, who he just obviously does not understand. Let me reiterate, because hunters (my subject today) are mostly Christians, he is a transhumanist. So, what does that mean?

Transhumanism is the idea that we can technologically escape our God-given nature as human beings to become something more and different. Transgender advocates, for example, are one species of transhumanists who believe we can use technology to change sex (though nothing of the kind has ever been changed except appearance through hormone infusions and monstrous surgeries that entail lifelong drug dependency). Other transhumanists are into extreme body modifications.

Still others dream of technological immortality (I can promise you that Yarvin, Musk, and Thiel will all die). More and more of them speak of using technology to “build God.” Yep.

Musk is a transhumanist (whose second space ship just blew the fuck up); and Yarvin is batshit crazy for the idea of “techno-monarchy,” with him as the monarch.

As far as most hunters, and any of the rest of us regular people, they consider us to be livestock (or parasites). Why them, why now?

I know a lot of hunters (and anglers, like me) voted for Donald Trump (no, I did not). I get it. The other side were a bunch of perfidious hypocrites, who lied to us for decades, who look down on us, and who spit on many of our values. But, as a retired Army guy, who went through many commanders, I have a cautionary tale. Most commanders were (forced to be) political animals, and so there were plenty of bad ones. With every bad one, we bitched and moaned and wished ahead to the next commander, because “none could be worse.”

Wrong. Let me tell you something about life in general, and leaders in particular. It can always get worse. With Yarvin as their “philosopher” (and I use that word guardedly), Thiel as the President-whisperer, Musk as the Vandal-in-Chief, and Zuckerberg’s spy-tentacles into your personal desires, worse just got here with cocaine and live music.

Adding worse to worse, the ground’s already been prepared for their demon seed. The tech-oligarchs—filthy rich booger-eaters running secret militias of greasy basement-dwelling incels—are already in control. They control the way your house and car work. They control commerce. They control communications. They control what you see and hear. They control your entertainment. They’re infiltrating your churches. They control the military. They control traffic, energy distribution, water systems, and medicine. They surveil you through your devices. They develop electronic dossiers on you. They control your banking and the supply chains to your grocery stores. They control . . . Every. Fucking. Thing. No coup-planner in the past could have ever dreamed of this level of control.

And we gave them that control, because GPS dog collars “worked.”

So, while some (not all, by a long shot) of you took to the streets with your guns to show out over lockdowns and anarchopunk demonstrations (to “oppose tyranny”), these sly motherfuckers already had you. You’ve been paying them tribute for years now, and they got richer and richer, more and more powerful . . . and now they’ve purchased the US Government. We gave them that power, and now we’re theirs.

The fields and farms, the lakes and rivers, the forests and plains, continue to shrink—AI requires huge energy inputs and lots of mines. We can play at being hunters, until the last pheasant dies and the last fish is washed up on a sterile shore; but we’re livestock already, milked and docile. We’re subjects of the techno-kings.

Go on, try to detach from their proprietary technology. I dare you.

“If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia.”

—Curtis Yarvin

Maybe it’s time to correct your sight alignment (figuratively speaking of course).