Also, sorry folks: America's Days Aren't Numbered.
Glenn Reynolds, who also links to Madden;s piece, had some thoughts on the subject a couple of years ago: We're All Soldiers of Fortune Now.
Back in the 1990s, it was the Soldier of Fortune crowd that was preparing for some sort of apocalyptic scenario. Back then, the Democrats were in power, and much of the apocalypticism we heard was from the right. Now, with the Republicans in power over the past six years, the apocalypticism has shifted leftward. A quick perusal of Amazon demonstrates this: Where once people on the right were worried about the shock troops of the socialist New World Order or the breakup of America into racial enclaves, now it seems like it's mostly lefties worrying about self-reliance in the face of collapsing unsustainable technology, and the dangers of suburban extinction in the face of high oil prices. As with some of the righty books from the 1990s, there's a curious push-pull here: Though these are warnings of catastrophes to come, there's a sense that to some extent those catastrophes involve society getting what it deserves for its sinful ways, perhaps coupled with an opportunity for purification in the wake of the crisis -- with the virtuously prepared having the upper hand, of course.
Meaning is intentional. So apocalypse is in the eye of the beholder. I don't see it myself.
I've been taking the temperature of the zeitgeist, and it seems to me like the mid-70s, which in my memory resurfaces as oil shocks, hard winters, political malise and disco, a combination guaranteed to drive you to drink.
ReplyDeleteOf course, we've always had things to worry about. Remember the Parade cover for the article by Carl Sagan that depicted "nuclear winter"?
That's one thing the Internet's given us: more things to worry about that we can't do a tinker's dam about. That, and p0rn.
Well, I certainly did enough drinking in the '70s myself. But I would have that if everything had been hunky dory. I think the pessimism comes from intellectual laziness and ignorance. Most people nowadays are so historically illiterate that they lack any temporal context. There were as many casualties during hours of WWII as have occurred during the entire Iraq war.
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