What happens

When you mix the real Beach Boys with the fake Beachheaders?

Take one article from the NYT and one set of lyrics from Brian Wilson called “In My Room”.

Mix. Pour into casserole dish and cook for two hours at 300.

Serves millions.

"Manly Men Answer Call of the Wild”
By ALEXANDRA WOLFE
Amherst, Va.

There’s a world where I can go and tell my secrets to…

We've just been overrun!" Reggie Bennett, a burly 41-year-old in full-body camouflage, shouted to the four young men behind him on a sunny day in the middle of March. "Our plane is down. We're going to our hole-up site!" One by one they followed his signal to move forward, crouching behind trees, carefully navigating through the brush, quickening their pace as they heard threats screamed behind them:

In my room, in my room...

"I see you, G.I.! You think you crafty, G.I., but I gonna put you in a cage so you can't get out!" They paused in a dried-up creek bed, Mr. Bennett bringing up the rear. "Keep quiet. There are land mines, B-52's and burnt craters all around us," he warned. "This is what a war zone looks — "

In this world I lock out all my worries and my fears...

He was interrupted by a ringing cellphone. "You're going to my voice mail," he said, as he checked the incoming number. "I'm evading now!" But Mr. Bennett wasn't getting cellphone reception midbattle in Falluja. He was teaching his signature Hidden Pursuit escape and evasion class to college seniors who had forgone the wet T-shirt contests and beer bongs of Cancún, Mexico, and Fort Lauderdale, Fla., for the chance to dodge simulated gunshots and cannon explosions at Mountain Shepherd Wilderness Survival School in Amherst, Va.
...

In my room, in my room...

For fees that range from a few hundred dollars for a two-day class to a few thousand for adventures that can be four weeks long, those willing can pay to be pursued by make-believe assailants, survive hypothetical plane crashes and car accidents, and hunt down guerrillas.

Do my dreaming...

Though it would seem that the desire to dress up in fatigues, cover your face with greasepaint and subsist on Meals Ready to Eat would be the result of some curiosity about or identification with the soldiers in Iraq, those who work in survival schools say the war has little to do with interest in these new classes.
and my scheming

"They want to pretend they're on 'Lost,' " said Mr. Bennett, referring to the hit drama on ABC about a group of plane crash survivors trying to hack it on a remote island. "They watch those shows and think, 'Hey, that looks pretty cool.' "
...

Lie awake and pray

"It's consumer marketing," she said. "People watch TV shows that show extreme adventure racing and extreme survival, and so schools are trying to add that twist to their programming."

Do my crying and my sighing

Huddled under gnarled tree branches in the Virginia backwoods, Mr. Bennett and company had just arrived at a temporary "hole up" location, where they could apply camouflage makeup. "First assess your medical problems — take care of massive bleeding," Mr. Bennett commanded his troops, who nodded earnestly, even though none appeared to have a scratch. "Now we restore fluids and apply camouflage."

"This is awesome!" exclaimed 23-year-old Garrett Foster, an engineering student.

Laugh at yesterday

Soon the men were rubbing green, brown and black stripes over their faces and necks, occasionally pausing so one of them could take a picture with their point-and-shoot cameras.

"This is the funnest part yet," said Justin Hightower, a 23-year-old political science major in Oklahoma, who said he signed up for the class because camping had "become boring."
...

Now it’s dark and I’m alone

This particular nightmare-come-to-life will be offered for the first time this summer by the Boulder Outdoor Survival School, a 38-year-old school in Colorado. Josh Bernstein, 35, the company's president and chief executive, said that the 72-Hour Survival Rescue Course (or the Crash Course) was created "to give an additional X factor" to his traditional offerings. "This class throws a curveball," he said of the "Lost" -like scenario in which students are picked up at an airport and then deposited in the middle of a desert or mountain crash scene.

Mr. Bernstein said his courses, which tend to be populated not by hard-core adventurers but by everyday professionals, compensate for dull lives.

But I won’t be afraid

"It's easy for white collar professionals to feel like they haven't faced their ghosts," he said in Midtown Manhattan, where he also has a home. "You want to be able to prove to yourself at some level that you have the inner mettle to get through challenges."
...

In my room, in my room

Joe Cary, a 36-year-old former bond trader who lives in Los Angeles, took a class at the Tracker School last spring and is enrolled in another this fall. "I had to do it," he said. "It was just male instinct that needed to be fulfilled." What he took away from the class, he said, was "awareness." "I was a bond trader so I thought I knew about awareness; but now you're in the woods and awareness is life or death."

In my room, in my room...

But Mr. Cary said that while he now has "a confidence so I know that I'll probably be O.K. when I walk into a shady place," parts of the class made his stomach turn. "It was a little too carnal," he said. "You learn how to test whether or not you can eat roadkill. If it's fresh you pull on the hair, and if it stays in place it's good enough to eat, but if it comes out it's decayed. That was kind of like, eew."

But if the real world provided the challenges Mr. Cary says he's now ready for, would survival schools even be necessary? Probably not, said Harvey Mansfield, author of the recent book "Manliness," and a professor of government at Harvard. "When manliness has nothing positive to do it goes to experiences that are contrived."

In my room, in my room...

It's odd, [Harvey Mansfield, author of "Manliness”/professor of government at Harvard] said, that "when we need real fighters all we get is pretend fighters." Young men sign up for extreme survival courses, he said, because "they are as embarrassed about patriotism as they are about manliness, and to go into the military may seem too conventional."

In my room, in my room...

The men down in Amherst were certainly taking an unconventional approach to warfare, posing for a few last pictures as they rolled up the camouflage ponchos they had been using as shelters. "Wait, my camo's all smudged," Mr. Hightower said. "I look like a goober!" He fixed his makeup and Mr. Brush clicked a few shots before Mr. Bennett came to give them their final instructions. "Remember, stay off roads, trails and railroads," he warned. "Light is your worst enemy; stay in the shadows."
…

In my room, in my room

"I just want to scare 'em a little," he said, "make sure they're taking it seriously, but these guys have been good so I don't have to do anything to them." What if they weren't? "I would just go in there and surprise them or something, nothing dangerous."

Shit, this is what a whole lot of the people that used to sign up for the National Guard a generation ago went in for. Service to country, but also adventure, bonding, no-risk wargaming.

But that was back in Dubya's salad days, before we started shipping the Guard off to Iraq as cannon fodder.

Sure, in the end this is just guys in the woods playing fort, but in this particular here-and-now, there is something genuinely, pornographically creepy about it.

About a bunch of copier salesmen and real estate developers dressing up and playing hunted soldier while the disastrous war that I would guess many of them vehemently support(ed) grinds endlessly on, pulverizing the military and sending recruiters practically door-to-door begging for just such men as these to sign up.

So in that, Mansfield gets it all almost perfectly wrong here.

There are, in fact, thousands upon thousands of “young men” in Young Republican Bund organizations from coast to coast who wake up in a state of priapistic hyperpatriotism every day.

They lump out of bed every morning screaming themselves hoarse about their rampant love of all things invasional and Iraqi-freedomish and the general Dubyarifficness of everything Murrican, except for the 65% of the country that disagrees with them.

They cower from military service under the President they voted for, in the War they demanded, not because it’s “too conventional", but because they want other people – preferably poor and/or brown people – to go and do their fighting and dying for them.

They duck-and-run because they are cowards and hypocrites and have no intention whatsoever of risking one millimeter of their tender assflesh when they can just gargle up and spit out the armed forces like so much complimentary motel bathroom mouthwash to cover their ethical halitosis.

OTOH, they would probably excel at certain aspects of this “Snakes On a Camping Trip” game.

For example, they seem to have no trouble at “escape and evasion” when it comes to dodging responsibility for the disasters they have wrought.

And using only a bag of Cheetohs, a pile of stroke mags and back issues of “Guns and Ammo”, they seem to be able to soundlessly and seamlessly blend deadly-ninja-style into the wallpaper of their Mommy’s basement whenever the recruiter man comes around.