{"id":13520,"date":"2012-03-12T18:19:07","date_gmt":"2012-03-13T01:19:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.survival-spot.com\/survival-blog\/?p=13520"},"modified":"2012-05-15T13:18:28","modified_gmt":"2012-05-15T20:18:28","slug":"doomsday-has-its-day-in-the-sun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.survival-spot.com\/survival-blog\/doomsday-has-its-day-in-the-sun\/","title":{"rendered":"Doomsday Has Its Day in the Sun"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"doomsday

Marc Kroll\/Sharp Entertainment<\/p><\/div>\n

There\u2019s a new modifier on the TV grid, and we should all be afraid.<\/p>\n

Television has long been full of \u201cAmericans\u201d (\u201cAmerican Restoration,\u201d \u201cAmerican Chopper,\u201d \u201cAmerican Hoggers\u201d) and \u201cExtremes\u201d (\u201cExtreme Marksmen,\u201d \u201cExtreme Makeover,\u201d \u201cExtreme Couponing\u201d) and \u201cTops\u201d (\u201cTop Gear,\u201d \u201cTop Chef,\u201d \u201cTop Shot\u201d). In recent weeks, though, an interloper has staked a claim: \u201cDoomsday.\u201d<\/p>\n

Last month the National Geographic Channel introduced \u201cDoomsday Preppers,\u201d a Tuesday-night reality series about people who are stockpiling, arming and otherwise preparing for some kind of apocalypse. Last week it was the Discovery Channel\u2019s turn. Its new \u201cDoomsday Bunkers,\u201d on Wednesday nights, is about Deep Earth Bunker, a company that builds underground getaways for the types of people seen in \u201cDoomsday Preppers.\u201d<\/p>\n

Watch either show for a short while and, unless you\u2019re a prepper yourself, you might be moderately amused at the absurd excess on display and at what an easy target the prepper worldview is for ridicule. Watch a bit longer, though, and amusement may give way to annoyance at how offensively anti-life these shows are, full of contempt for humankind.<\/p>\n

\u201cDoomsday Preppers\u201d introduces an array of end-of-civilization types who at first seem surprisingly varied. These preppers live all over the country, in rural areas, suburbs and cities. Each has a different reason for turning a perfectly adequate home into a canned-food warehouse or building an escape hideaway (or bug-out location, to use the prepper term) in the mountains. One expects the North and South Poles to swap places, one a global economic collapse, one \u201can electromagnetic pulse that will disable the transportation system of the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"doomsday

National Geographic Channels\/Sharp Entertainment<\/p><\/div>\n

But the people on this show and the customers of Deep Earth Bunker are more alike than diverse. Who knows how representative these shows are of the prepper universe, but the people they feature are disproportionately white. They can\u2019t speak for long without employing that clich\u00e9 involving excrement and a fan. And whatever their religious beliefs might be, something \u201cPreppers\u201d doesn\u2019t generally explore, most of them put their real faith in firearms.<\/p>\n

\u201cPreppers\u201d and \u201cBunkers\u201d are both full of footage of people firing or lovingly cradling their weaponry, which in many cases is frighteningly extensive. (You really don\u2019t want the guy in last week\u2019s \u201cPreppers\u201d living next door; in addition to a house full of ammunition, he has stockpiled 50 gallons of gasoline, an unsettling combination.) One notable exception was Kathy Harrison, a New England woman profiled on a recent \u201cPreppers.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s easy to feel a little left out of the prepper community if you live in New England and if you\u2019re not fairly right wing and conservative politically,\u201d she said in the segment. \u201cBut I just don\u2019t spend my time worrying about stockpiling guns and ammunition, because our security comes not from stockpiling weapons but from having a community that respects each other, supports each other, and we have each others\u2019 backs.\u201d<\/p>\n

A noble sentiment. But the unmistakable impression left by these programs is that what these folks want most of all is not to protect their families \u2014 the standard explanation for why they\u2019re doing what they\u2019re doing \u2014 or even the dubious pleasure of being able to say to the rest of us, \u201cSee, I told you the world was going to end.\u201d What they want is a license to open fire.<\/p>\n

The number of bullets sprayed around in these shows, by adults and even their children, might give Rambo pause. Yet \u201cDoomsday Preppers\u201d and \u201cDoomsday Bunkers\u201d might still qualify as decent television if they were less credulous \u2014 if, for instance, they asked a few basic questions:<\/p>\n

Won\u2019t it be hard to find a plumber after civilization collapses? What will happen when that methane-harvesting septic system clogs?<\/p>\n

Have the \u201cDoomsday Bunker\u201d diggers talked to the \u201cDoomsday Prepper\u201d people who think the Big Catastrophe will originate underground, via volcano or earthquake?<\/p>\n

More seriously, what is the attraction of continuing to live in a world that forces people to cower in an underground box and spend all their time fending off those who want their freeze-dried apricots?<\/p>\n

Even more seriously, what is the attraction of continuing to live in a world that will almost certainly not have television or the Internet, depriving doomsday types of the shows and Web sites that fuel their paranoia and sell products exploiting it?<\/p>\n

\u201cDoomsday Preppers\u201d even offers the people it profiles advice on improving their preparations. (National Geographic, though, on a Facebook page, gives commenters a chance to mock the preppers with a photo caption contest. Under a picture of a man neck-deep in a hole in the ground, someone has written, \u201cIt looks like we\u2019ll be alright as long as the end of the world doesn\u2019t involve rain.\u201d)<\/p>\n

At their worst the shows don\u2019t merely give the prepper universe a pass on difficult questions; they reinforce its ugliest undercurrents. The most recent \u201cDoomsday Preppers\u201d included a white family 40 miles from Atlanta that is worried about rioting caused by economic collapse. \u201cCivil unrest will most likely ensue in the metropolitan areas and then spread out to the suburbs,\u201d the patriarch says.<\/p>\n

His defenses include a generous supply of guns and a couple of German shepherds. An expert with a trained attack dog comes by to demonstrate what a properly schooled dog can do. He has a man dress up in protective gear and act menacing, then turns the dog loose. The fake intruder is black, the only black face in the hourlong program.<\/p>\n

A free country, of course, includes the freedom to be a prepper. From a television perspective the real question is: What are these shows, so disdainful of life and human potential, doing on these outlets?<\/p>\n

\"doomsday

Discovery Channel<\/p><\/div>\n

The Discovery Channel has on its r\u00e9sum\u00e9 some of the most beautiful, life-affirming documentaries ever broadcast, among them \u201cLife\u201d (2010) and \u201cPlanet Earth\u201d (2007), with another, \u201cFrozen Planet,\u201d coming up this weekend. And National Geographic plasters this motto on most everything, including the television channel\u2019s Web site: \u201cInspiring people to care about the planet since 1888.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hmm. Apparently \u201cinspiring people to prepare a personal fortress and pray for cataclysm so they can start blasting away at their neighbors\u201d was deemed not to have quite the same ring to it.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[Via NYTimes.com<\/a>]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s a new modifier on the TV grid, and we should all be afraid. Television has long been full of \u201cAmericans\u201d (\u201cAmerican Restoration,\u201d \u201cAmerican Chopper,\u201d \u201cAmerican Hoggers\u201d) and \u201cExtremes\u201d (\u201cExtreme Marksmen,\u201d \u201cExtreme Makeover,\u201d \u201cExtreme Couponing\u201d) and \u201cTops\u201d (\u201cTop Gear,\u201d \u201cTop Chef,\u201d \u201cTop Shot\u201d). In recent weeks, though, an interloper has staked a claim: \u201cDoomsday.\u201d Last […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[195,394],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13520","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","category-survivalism"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.survival-spot.com\/survival-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13520","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.survival-spot.com\/survival-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.survival-spot.com\/survival-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.survival-spot.com\/survival-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.survival-spot.com\/survival-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13520"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.survival-spot.com\/survival-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13520\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.survival-spot.com\/survival-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.survival-spot.com\/survival-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.survival-spot.com\/survival-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}