I have some sympathy for the builders of bunkers, the hoarders of freeze-dried foodstuffs. I understand the fear, the desire for it to be assuaged. But more than I want my fear assuaged, I want to resist the urge to climb into a hole, to withdraw from an ailing world, to bolt the door after myself and my family. When I think of Vicino’s project, his product, what comes to mind is the anthropologist Margaret Mead’s judgment of what it means to secure oneself inside a shelter: a withdrawal from any notion that our fate might be communal, that we might live together rather than survive alone.
The bunker, purchased and tricked out by the individual consumer, is a nightmare inversion of the American dream. It’s a subterranean abundance of luxury goods and creature comforts, a little kingdom of reinforced concrete and steel, safeguarding the survival of the individual and his family amid the disintegration of the world.
It was so quiet here I could hear the soft buzzing of electricity in the power lines above me, the brittle snap and hum of technological civilisation itself. I thought about the US’s twin obsessions with a frontier past and an apocalyptic future. What was Vicino offering in this place, after all, other than a return to the life of the old frontier, a new beginning in the wake of the end, one that retained as many consumer-facing luxuries as possible?
Mark O’Connell
Reading this article during the coronavirus outbreak, I was struck by how ridiculous the concept of surviving for years in an isolated bunker felt. There I was, isolating from the community to reduce the spread of a nasty virus, but still I had to go out weekly to buy food, I consumed running water, gas and electricity provided to the utility companies, as well as online entertainment. To keep people alive – and preferably sane – a shelter has to provide all these services independently, in the absence of centralized government, without the global network of food supply, manufacturing and services that exists today. Simply the amount of food required seemed staggering to me. Ironically, the same people constantly preparing for a possible apocalypse are currently protesting across America, demanding to return to their regular lives. Somehow this situation puts apocalyptic sci-fi in a different perspective.
I mean you have to admit it's hilarious that the people who have spent their entire lives stockpiling beans & ammo and publishing newsletters about preparing to shelter in place during a global crisis are the ones having meltdowns because they can't go to the cheesecake factory.
— Bill Marx for Congress (@BillforPA14) April 20, 2020
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