Hoarders, Doomsday preppers, and the culture of apocalypse

85 Pages·2014·0.862 MB·English

by  Foster, Gwendolyn Audrey

Hoarders, Doomsday Preppers, and the Culture of
Apocalypse
DOI: 10.1057/9781137468086.0001
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DOI: 10.1057/9781137468086.0001
Hoarders, Doomsday
Preppers, and the
Culture of Apocalypse
Gwendolyn Audrey Foster
Professor of English, University of Nebraska-Lincoln,
USA
DOI: 10.1057/9781137468086.0001
hoarders, doomsday preppers, and the culture of apocalypse
Copyright © Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, 2014.
All rights reserved.
First published in 2014 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
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ISBN: 978–1–137–46806–2 EPUB
ISBN: 978–1–137–46808–6 PDF
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from
the Library of Congress.
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
First edition: 2014
www.palgrave.com/pivot
doi: 10.1057/9781137468086
For Tilikum
DOI: 10.1057/9781137468086.0001
Contents
1 Disposable Bodies 1
2 Bunker Mentality 20
3 Buy Before You Die 32
4 Embracing the Apocalypse 44
5 The End of the Future 60
Works Cited 70
Index 74
vi DOI: 10.1057/9781137468086.0001
1
Disposable Bodies
Abstract: Th e culture of apocalypse—in all forms—as
entertainment. Reality television shows that deal in death
and dismemberment: I Was Impaled, 1000 Ways to
Die, and Th e ABCs of Death. Sociopathic behavior and
“collective narcissism.” America as a perpetual theater of
war. Doomsday “preppers” and the fear of the unknown. Th e
rise of “apocotainment”—the end of civilization as television
programming. Th e culture of guns and violence. Th e crisis
of masculinity in the 21st century. Fear of the “Other.” Th e
military-industrial complex.
Foster, Gwendolyn Audrey. Hoarders, Doomsday Preppers,
and the Culture of Apocalypse. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137468086.0002.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137468086.0002. 
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2 Hoarders, Doomsday Preppers, and the Culture of Apocalypse
There’s no escaping it; in the 21st century, we live in a world that cele-
brates death, “prepping” for the end, and wasteful consumption as the
supposed “norms” of society. As Rosalind Williams puts it, “the end of
history dwells in the present as a rolling apocalypse . . . We do not have to
wait for the last fish in the ocean to die, nor the last tree in the forest to be
felled, to see the end coming. It is here and now and all around . . . Human
empire appears invincible in the short run and unsustainable in the long
run” (2013: 344–345). This brief book explores some of the themes that
circulate around our apocalyptic obsessed culture, which has grown to
the point that it both permeates and informs our daily lives. Death itself
is the product most consistently sold to us, or the hope of escape from
death. Apocalyptic gloom sells. But in the end, our culture of narcissistic
doom wants more than anything to create a climate of fear and isolation,
in which we are forced to endlessly consume and die emotionally, as
willing participants in late-stage capitalism. Indeed, we really have little
choice in the matter; as society becomes increasingly stratified into the
very rich and the very poor, human misfortune and visions of apocalyp-
tic doom have become our principal source of entertainment. I’m calling
it “apocotainment”—the apocalypse as entertainment for the masses.
Television shows such as I Was Impaled (2012) and 1000 Ways to Die
(2008–12) appropriate tropes from horror film and re-narrate them into
digestible bite-size “safe” forms that temporarily distract us from the
horrors of ecological destruction of the Earth and the collapse of capital-
ism. I’d argue that apocotainment has voyeuristic pleasures similar to
the traditional horror film, but they are increasingly shorn of narrative
and any sense of morality. In 1000 Ways to Die, “hilarious” stories of
death, loosely based on actual stories, are stripped of any humanism,
and edited together as a series of graphic and repetitive meta-narratives
of sadistic slaughter. It’s all for sick kicks; set to quirky music, sutured
together by a wisecracking voiceover narrator. Here, the casual and
routine destruction of the body acts as the postmodern destruction of
humanity, with a snuff-like lack of ethos; presented much in the same
manner as the “funny” clips from America’s Funniest Home Videos, which
themselves often rely on the humor in watching, for example, people
injuring themselves. Sentiment and sympathy are antiquated notions,
but pain is hilarious, gallows humor for an apocalyptic mindset. This is
the mindset in which the arts and humanities are viewed as hopelessly
dated antiquities; sentiment, romance, and humanity lose all value when
they are merely reduced to a commodity. We are alienated from others,
DOI: 10.1057/9781137468086.0002
Disposable Bodies 3
even as we virally “like” and “friend” others, we are now both product
and consumer but we pay a dear price for allowing this alienation and
taking part in our own surveillance.
Our culture is dominated not by Eros, but by Thanatos. We live in
an era of what I call “family friendly torture porn”: amoral grotesque
snack-size tales that display our collective dismissal of empathy for
others surround us and reflect our pathologies. Our insatiable appetite
for the display of excessive pain, death and dismemberment reflects our
embrace of an endlessly warring culture. We barely acknowledge our
own ghoulish depravity as cultural imperialists and warmongers as we
continue to support questionable invasions and occupations. We are
told to “support the troops,” but we are rarely allowed to openly question
exactly what acts and policies are we being forced to accept? Our blind
acceptance of a culture of war and death, and the big business economy
of a warring culture is blithely accepted by most.
For example, we have almost completely forgotten the shocking
photographs of our torture in Gitmo and elsewhere, and we ignore at
our moral peril our collective ability to find laughter and hilarity in
depravity and our fascistic impulses. We seem, as a culture, almost bored
by death and pain, and at the same time there is a rise in the fascistic
display of sculpted bodies of perfection, the hypermuscular bodies of
300, for example: these are bodies only sculpted in readiness for war and
death. Morally, we must take note that fascistic anti-human TV is but a
small reflection of our widespread acceptance of the practice of torture
and the wider embrace of a culture of death and self-surveillance in
American popular culture.
I Was Impaled is slightly less snarky than 1000 Ways to Die, but bodily
harm and gruesome depravity are still presented with lip-smacking
relish here, as if the entire affair was some sort of ghastly freak show for
our depraved amusement. Impalements, horrifying despair, and ghoul-
ish bodily dismemberments are edited together for shock value, though
they become numbingly boring as a result of their generic display. We
appear to be lacking in affect as images of pain becomes dull, millions
obediently tune in for Game of Thrones, the Super Bowl of rape and death.
The danger of such a growing lack of empathy is paved over by laughs
and thrills. Significantly, in these television programs (and many similar
ones that I simply don’t have time to discuss here) the victims are so fully
“othered” as objects of morbid fascination and fun that in both shows
the dominant message is that these Darwinian idiots “deserve to die.”
DOI: 10.1057/9781137468086.0002