Declinists Not-So-Anonymous: Join the Club

I have a confession to make and it seems appropriate to make it just now because it has suddenly become deja-vu all over again in the matter of TEOTWAWKI. For those of you who have been sitting it out in La-La Land for the last decade or so, or rip-van-winkling it, as one LRC writer has put it, TEOTWAWKI stands for The End Of The World As We Know It. It follows hard upon the moment WTSHTF (When The S— Hits The Fan).

My confession is this: I bought into Y2K as a big disaster we were not going to be able to miss. I had one article printed in a (small) national magazine and so had to offer an apology in a post-01/01/00 issue, and wrote that I realized post-Y2K that I had been a sort of lifelong "declinist" and thus was ready and willing to believe the Big One was at hand. I said in a sort of defense that I was unable to see that as a result of my article and other strenuous proselytizing I had done, that a single person had converted to my view or been willing to pull up stakes and move to a safer area, as I and my wife had. (We moved to Colorado for close to three years.) But still I had tried hard to convince a great many.

I never felt inclined to blame anybody for my mistake. What for? It was an entirely rational theory, and it certainly fit the conviction that I have had ever since reading Spengler's Decline of the West way back in the early 40s, that this civilizational show is not going to have a perpetual run. It is no "South Pacific" or "My Fair Lady." The moral foundations are sapped, and the "system of systems" of our infrastructure is terribly vulnerable, as Roberto Vacca said in his 1973 book, The Coming Dark Age.

Since those college days I have mourned for the declining arts (I was E.A. Robinson's Miniver Cheevy to the life, pining for "Romance, now on the town, and Art, a vagrant . . . ); I mourned our devilish money system (I got onto it via Ezra Pound back in the early 50s); and most recently and in an overall sense I mourned for our frightful betrayal of the wonderful Constitutional Republic the Founders tried to give us ("if you can keep it," as Ben Franklin is reported to have said).

So I have not wanted for grist for my declinist mill. And now fresh grist appears. It seems that, in addition to the present Permanent War called the War on Terrorism, we are also back in the Doomsday business. NewsMax has reported that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has been given instructions . . . well, let me quote from a NewsMax "Insiders Report"; it's pithy:

FEMA Preparing for Mass Destruction Attacks on Cities

FEMA, the federal agency charged with disaster preparedness, is engaged in a crash effort to prepare for multiple mass destruction attacks on U.S. cities, NewsMax has learned.

FEMA is already preparing for nuclear, biological and chemical attacks against U.S. cities, including the possibility of multiple attacks with mass destruction weapons.

The agency has already notified vendors, contractors and consultants that it needs to be prepared to handle the logistics of aiding millions of displaced Americans from urban areas that may be attacked.

The agency plans to create emergency, makeshift cities that could house hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Americans who may have to flee their urban homes if their cities are attacked.

Ominously, FEMA has been given a deadline of having the cities ready to go by January 2003 – in about six months.

A source familiar with the deadline believes the effort is related to making the U.S. prepared for counterattacks if the U.S. invades Iraq sometime next year.

Could a declinist ask for anything more in the way of evidence that bad days lie ahead? Is FEMA mad? No, I'd say FEMA's actions are quite rational as a response to a threat that we all know is now in the air and indeed even in the planning stages. But why has not the government been open with the citizens about it? Why do we get this kind of desperate news in such a roundabout way?

Or are we declinists at our usual business of overstating our case? I don't think so. When government is coolly taking into consideration the apparently imminent possibility of disaster here at home while at the same time resolutely refusing to review, reconsider, and change what we are doing abroad, we have to ask, Are the loonies in charge of the federal show? Don't answer that question. The Very Walls Have Ears.

I mourn the fact that this great nation, a virtual Titanic among history's major political constellations, nears an iceberg; the Captain is dancing in the salon; the passengers are all watching Sunday football, and the crew is shooting dice in the engine room.

What in the name of heaven are we to do? Well, go on complaining for one thing and talking against the "present system."

You say that isn't much? It's a lot more than the Sunday footballers and the engine room gamblers are doing. Beyond that I suggest prayer, and I am not kidding. It seems to me that bad. And this time I don't have a year's supply of well-stored food or a source of solar energy or a water system rigged up against failure of the local supply. I am unprepared and unable to get prepared again. Once is enough on that undertaking. I live now in an area where you can't grow so much as a tomato without water brought from 100 miles away and where out of a quarter million people I doubt that one family in a hundred has food beyond the week ahead, especially if the power fails and the freezers all melt.

And the people who rule think this is a gamble worth taking? For what purpose?

July 16, 2002