Notes from an Apocalypse A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back - Mark O'Connell Page 0,8
group. Footage of alt-right gatherings, Twitter avatars of libertarians, images of furious and red-faced men at Trump rallies: in all of these cultural artifacts, I noted the presence of this excessively curved and ovoid style of eyewear; but if there was some inherent connection between the wearing of Oakley-brand shades and the holding of extreme reactionary views—the staunch opposition to the role of the state in the structuring of society, the belief that personal liberty meant freedom from taxation, the conviction that white heterosexual males were in fact the last victims of societally sanctioned discrimination—I could not, for all my efforts, come up with any theory, either serious or frivolous, as to what it might consist of.
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Around this time, I read a handful of practical guidebooks on preparing for the end of the world. The spirit in which I was reading them was never entirely clear to me. I was not completely sure of whether I was reading them out of abstract interest in prepping as a sociocultural phenomenon or out of a genuine desire to access esoteric knowledge of the coming collapse, of how to negotiate it when it eventually arrived. This uncertainty about my relationship to these books, and the fears they represented, was intensified at one point by my coming across a guidebook to post-collapse survival whose author bore the same name as myself.
The near-hysterically search-engine-optimized title of this book was DIY Survival Hacks! Survival Guide for Beginners: How to Survive a Disaster by Using Easy Household DIY Techniques. It seemed subpar even by the fairly lenient standards of the survivalist genre, apparently having been written in extreme haste against the looming deadline of the apocalypse itself. But the fact that its author had exactly the same name as me lent it a frisson of the uncanny, as though it should be received as a warning from the future. (That this other Mark O’Connell had also written a series of guidebooks on the interpretation of signs and symbols only served to intensify my sense that some barely encrypted omen was being retailed to me through Amazon.) Seeing my name on this book’s cover—with its neat arrangement of tins, torches, first aid kits, walkie-talkies, candles, and bottled water—seemed to cause a small but irreparable rupture in the thin membrane of irony that had previously separated this subject from my own nerve endings.
The clearest delineation of the prepper mind-set I came across was a book called How to Survive the End of the World as We Know It: Tactics, Techniques, and Technologies for Uncertain Times. Its cover announced it as an “international bestseller,” and its author, who was apparently a former US Army intelligence officer, went by the intriguingly weird name of James Wesley, Rawles. The comma, I gleaned from a Q and A on his website, was there to denote the distinction between his Christian name, which he felt to be his alone, and his family name, which was “the common property of all those that share the Rawles bloodline, and our wives.” (The grammatical ambiguity of this sentence was such that I had to give Rawles the benefit of the doubt that it was the family name being shared, rather than the wives.) Rawles was a highly visible figure within the prepper movement: he ran a popular survivalist blog, was the author of a series of speculative dystopian novels about postapocalyptic survival—some of which were, not very surprisingly, set against the backdrop of a struggle against a global caliphate—and had founded a movement known as the American Redoubt, which advocated for a migration of like-minded conservative Christians and Jews (but apparently not Muslims) to a sparsely populated region of the northwestern United States in order to prep for the twilight of civilization.
His How to Survive book portrayed an America teetering on the verge of collapse, in which the vast majority of the population was reliant for its food supplies on a tiny number of people and an increasingly complex distribution network. Any kind of major disaster, Rawles insisted—a mass outbreak of contagious disease, a nuclear attack, an economic collapse—could easily lead to people deciding not to go to work in the morning, and the shelves of Walmart consequently not being stacked, the delivery trucks staying off the roads.
“Crops will rot in the fields and orchards,” he wrote, “because there will be nobody to pick them, or transport them, or magically bake them into Pop-Tarts, or stock them on your supermarket shelf. The