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Print This Post Apocalyptic Nostalgia Posted 4 months, 6 days ago., on Thursday, April 24th, 2008, at 11:33 am

I guess our country hasn’t had a good panic for awhile, so it’s good to see the impeccable Wall Street Journal stepping up to the plate with "Load Up the Pantry", the ROI column from Brett Arrends.

These kinds of stories always make me feel nostalgic. It seems like only yesterday that we were all going to starve to death because all the bees in the world were vanishing, and the price of honey and everything else was going to skyrocket. And it wasn’t long before that, surely, that we were all going to die from HN51, the apocalyptic avian flu which was going to mutate and become airborne ANY DAY NOW!

Of course, I grew up in the 80s, when the world trembled because the US and the Soviet Union were going to engage in nuclear Armageddon ANY DAY NOW. I remember books like War Day by Whitley Streiber and James Kunetka, one of a veritable river of post-nuclear holocaust stories. And the movies, of course, like Testament and Threads, and, of course, the immortal The Day After.  Red Dawn was also born from this ultimate fear as well. I missed the great Communist invasion scares of the fifties, though, which I truly regret. By the time I came of age, people weren’t building fallout shelters anymore; we all knew that a nuclear war would kill just about everyone and everything on the planet.

There was also the early part of the current millennium, of course. Just after the terrorist attacks on 9/11/2001, I seem to recall everyone being afraid of more imminent terrorist strikes. And who can forget the trippy white powder scare? Heck, a flight I was taking from Seattle to Sacramento was delayed several hours because someone found a little white powder in the galley (turned out to be non-dairy powdered creamer, if I remember correctly). That was a pretty good one, I think, because it got the Post Office sending out notices to everyone on how to properly treat their mail, just in case it had anthrax residue in it, and spurred an explosion in the antibiotics market. Never mind that there were what, a dozen incidents of anthrax attacks? Less? More?

But the imminent apocalypse I really look back on with fond memories is the Y2K scare. That was back in the heady days of the mid- to late-90s, of course, when all the computers in the world were going to reset to 1/1/00 instead of 1/1/2000, thus triggering disasters at all levels: nuclear missiles would go flying out of their silos in the Midwest, cores from nuclear power plants were going to melt straight through to the middle of the earth, and electronic devices everywhere, from automobiles to your toaster oven, were going to fail and possibly explode. Every electronic device carried a "Y2K Compliant" sticker. Heck, I even bought an electric toothbrush that was "Y2K Compliant". Who knows what would have happened if I had bought one that wasn’t? It might have grabbed on to my teeth and yanked them out by the roots.

To be fair, there were thousands of computer programmers and experts who pored over millions of lines of archaic code fixing the Y2K error wherever they found them, and these women and men very likely prevented some might horrific errors from happening. But nuclear missile launches? Exploding toasters? Airplanes falling out of the sky? Not to mention people stockpiling rations because the nation’s infrastructure was going to collapse (freeways and highways not being any more Y2K-compliant than the long-haul trucks that drove on them). I think Y2K just appealed to a lot of people simply because of its resemblance to a relatively common horror movie scenario, that of the old friend who turns out to be a madman. We depend on computers so much, wouldn’t it be exciting to see what would happen if they turned on us? In terms of apocalyptic potential, nothing could beat Y2K.

At the time, I was also interested in conspiracy theories (as in, reading them for entertainment value, not believe in them), and I found a number that involved Y2K and the government planning on establishing martial law. According to one theory that made the rounds, Wal*Mart had been coopted by the US government to deliver signs that read "This area under Martial Law". My favorite of these theories involved George Bush (Sr., not Jr.) using his "New World Order" speech of the early 90s as justification to having the UN disarm every citizen of the US in preparation for an invasion either by the UN or the aliens.

That’s why I think that Y2K was the best apocalypse we’ve ever seen, and while I salute the Wall Street Journal for their efforts to revive that same sense of widespread panic, I don’t think they’re going to come close. And while I pray for the resolution of the food related violence in impoverished nations and I hope that the ethanol industry comes to a screeching halt sooner rather than later, I will take any stories about ordinary Americans starving to death in the streets with a grain of salt.

While there’s still grains of salt available for us, of course.

Personally, I’ve still got my money on a zombie apocalypse. If you were smart, you would too.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 24th, 2008 at 11:33 am and is filed under Cultural Cynicism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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