As many of those in the Advertising trade are also those who contribute larger than life images or articles and commentary to Adbusters, it is fitting that many of us in the Doomster mentality also suck upon that tit of technology.  We both require this medium for our minimum survival in the modern world as we disparage it as a way of life and call upon others to reject this trap.  Is this contradiction a symptom of the human condition?  That deep hole in our soul upon which not one but hundreds of Russian writers reflected upon or so many piles of dead and still quick Germans pondered privately or, if one considers certain angst-driven wars, all too much upon the body of the world, a condition that changed the world.  Don’t do as I do, do as I say, or – that which sustains me is also my poison.  The addicts among us perhaps understand this best, while their personal troubles are not so expansive as to apply outside of such-and-such a substance/behavior.  We all know lawyers who say don’t be lawyers, doctors who extol the youth to avoid the medical field, and more than one current teacher who pleads with young women not to go down that traditionally pink ghetto and to reject such punishing and degrading work and to become sex workers or PALs.

So, it is that we Doomers are a set of contradictions?  And enigma wrapped in an enema?  Are we just in love with technology and ashamed to tell out parents?  Certain Doomers fly in airplanes, others take to various combustion engines that drive their carriages about a landscape they critique aesthetically as well as prophetically yelling out their rolled down window, “you’re all going to have to adjust to a redefining of society!”  To wit, the majority of PeopleofWalmart ignore them.  Without the complex system Doomers decry, few would be known outside of Friendship Booklets (google it or ask your older sister).  Marketing Doom necessitates the employ of the intertubes, computers, and suck electrics up from wires and coils drawn from the combustion of ancient stones and compressed microbes whereupon had we not had such microbes give their lives so many aeons ago, we would be but unknowns in the wilds.  We Doomers add to the e-pile with our posts, comments, our fwds and relinks, spidered images, malapropos, phrases, and portmanteaus such as fucktard, fuckwit, and obfuckticate (obstruct + fuck +  icate, as in ‘there could have been a clear answer, but the student from Yale could obfuckticate any proof’).

In this digital world, we see across our feeds so many bites of infotainment, so many bits of Powerknowledge™, so many up-to-the-minute developments that we think we ride a wave that can only crash.  At the same time, are the signs there that the professional tea readers are missing?  Are Doomers on to something, or is this just a cultural phenomena, a passing fad of thought whereupon some graduate student not yet born will cull our literature, dig up our remaining e-posts and ephemera and sort this out into a narrative that reads thus:

At the end of the millennium certain individuals, primarily white males, were stressed about the changes to the nation and the loss of White Privilege™ and the transformation of the economy from one of industrial strength to a service-based economy and then one that was knowledge-based and focused on technology and disposable skills.  As this economy became more disposable the community became more disposable.  Community became less about personal interactions in “real-time” and shifted to social networks replacing the traditional Baby Boomer networks that replaced the networks of actual traditional networks of nation, clan, and family.  Somewhere after Obama’s second term, this trend declined as popular entertainment ramped up the movement in sensational shows such as Doomsday Preppers and Lifetime Network’s Doomer Moms and Safety Dads that ran three seasons before being canceled and replaced with a revival of Alf.

So perhaps this whole EOTWAWKI is only a fancy.  A passing fad, held on to the devoted few, but nevertheless no more than Moonies, Scientologists, Communes, Hippies, Three Days of Peace, Love and Music (no Oxford comma on that one), and Furbies.  The ejaculation of popular culture, yet again.  We had our day, culminated during the end of BusObamash’s term and then sunk into the mire with only a few Trolls keeping the meme alive.

Dracula690a – your dumbasshole idea that hising is fucking dumass.,  Your supplkies are going to be solden and everything you worked for taken by those minoritys that gay Obamna supprotes and u r guna b dead fuck you flkadjflkajdf;lkjdasklfjasdlkjflkasdmnflkasdmlfkj.

BillD708 – Dracula690, u no, you r right.  Except that u r a asshole bcs u ideas make no cents.

However, and this is no small matter, things seem to be changing.  And faster than a graduate student can extend his due date on his thesis.  Things are falling apart, but only slightly.  This is perhaps just a sign that the Doomers are wrong.  That they are just whipping the… uh… whipping post…. And are just repeating the same tirade, the rant that they have been repeating since their grandchild accidently showed them how to use a computer, and nothing said matters much because this tirade of clever analogies and cunning metaphors and just stupid associations can actually come true only as anything over long enough of an arrow can come true…. Say the world is ending for long enough, like a billion billion years, and finally one day, you are correct.  The whole timeline argument so made in certain films about dudes fighting….

Christians believed the world would end.  And it continued.  They thought that for a thousand years.   And, it continued.  They thought that in 1848.  Again and again they thought it.  But, Doomers are not saying that the world will end.  Like,…. Poof!  Gone.  Into the ether.  Vanished into the God space what He created so long ago (or 7000 years).  And yes, you can say the empire will end now…. I mean… now…. Now….. now…. I mean, now…..  Church did.  Dude who wrote that empire of Rome thing during the Cold War with the SOVIET UNION said as much….. We’re still here chugging cold frappe beverages and warm turbo dogs…. But, it does seem like something is indeed coming.  Perhaps not what we expect.  Perhaps a small thing.  One small thing at a time.  A seed here dies.  An idea there vanishes.  A language dies.  A community of “real time” individuals ends.

As I had examined the years of newspapers of the interwar period (1919 – 1940) I noticed that the stories did not warn of Hitler.  Did not warn of the Nazis leading the world to war.  They started with banking issues.  Small problems that impacted some small area of the world.  They continued to grow, and even with the beginnings of the war, this wasn’t something we would recognize since today we can select the images and stories that were foreshadowing  the Total Warfare that would ensue.  This was an interesting exercise not so much because I found the material I thought I would find for my senior thesis, but with several decades of experience, I have seen that our news cycle has again entered that period of stories.  Are there warnings?   Does history repeat itself?  Perhaps not, but it does seem that our antecedents have the materials they need, those in front of our faces, in order to condemn those who today are not acting and those who think they know the outcome of current events but are mistaken or downright wrong.

JP Morgan.  Will end in nothing.  The election.  End in nothing (the ruling class has already selected Obama).  The economy.  Continue in this year in our wages remaining the same, life being slowly cheapened, but not dramatically so and leading many of us to waste our time reading newspapers, blogs, and sundry other material for clues where there are none.  The end of the year will look to the casual observer as the same as the beginning.  The Holiday decorations will go up.  The War On Christmas will continue in our fake Multiculti nation.

But, to those who dig into the stories of Europe, who look to the demolition of Buffalo and other cities of the FUSA, the seed failure of Monsanto, of the vanishing of middle class jobs, of the loss of educational options, or of our civil rights…. We may know that there is a change coming, but it may not be what we think, nor the Road Warrior adventure the more puerile of us not so secretly wish for.

It will be that of the Central Americans.  That of the Philippines.  A vaguely brown guy leading a nation of international cleptocrats and the peasant masses distracted by myths (Celebrities, Sports, Sneakers, TeeVee) will continue to support their masters because they know, if they work hard enough, they too can become Masters of other peasants.

This weekend I cleaned my guns.  I checked on the arrival of certain heirloom seeds.  I paid my bills and attempted to collect money that was owed me.  My life has not changed since Bush took office or Obama too office and won’t change when Obabushma takes office again nor for the ensuing four years.  However, today, I am more prepared than even six months ago.  And tomorrow?  More prepared still.  A sign of social stress amongst mostly white males who angst over the loss of White Privilege™?  Perhaps.   But those who left Europe before the war broke out, like my grandfather at 14.  Who excelled in school and was promised a career in the military at the highest ranks but rejected it because at that age he thought “Europe stunk and I don’t like the smell.”  Those who read closely perhaps can’t tell what that smell indicates, but I think we are on to something and that Nat Geo aside, those preparations are not lost and my fellow Doomers and I may never meet, but our antecedents will because they will be the ones who survived and thrived.